Screen Memory - Department of English

comforting illusion was shattered by The Sorrow and the Pity and
Lacombe Lucien (Golsan 25). Austria’s attempt to cast itself as a
victim of Nazi aggression crumbled as its role in Nazism was
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increasingly acknowledged in public discourse.
Remembering the nation has often taken the ironic form of
simply inverting an accessible, actual history, e.g., the stories
of native American aggression designed to justify the genocidal
slaughter of the tribes or stories that blame the fall of
American business empires on labor unrest and governmental
regulations. In Renato Rosaldo’s essay on “imperialist nostalgia”
agents of a dominant culture conjure up fond recollections of the
old ways that they are in one way or another responsible for
destroying. Algerian pied noirs repressed any memory of racial
tensions, remembering “Algeria as a ‘paradise without colonial
sin,’ a land where everyone, Arabs and Europeans, lived in
harmony and plenty” (Greene 243).
According to Aleida Assmann, monuments are part of a culture
that is stage-managing itself (Holthorf). The practice that most
sustains national memory is commemoration, one of the primary
forms taken by nostalgia, “the ultimate attempt to master the
past and render it innocuous forever” (Ankersmit 166). But
commemoration has a tendency to freeze into permanent forms that
cannot be changed without cries of sacrilege–-although dynastic
changes, like the collapse of the Soviet empire, can radically
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