Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of ...

20 Jan-Werner Müller
instrumentalisation of the past. All too often, collective memory is simply
collapsed into myth, and important conceptual distinctions are lost.
Finally, the more collectivist strands in Maurice Halbwachs’s work, especially
his contention, or, rather, overstatement, that all memory is social
and constitutes a Durkheimian social fact, has led to an unwarranted suspicion
of the concept altogether by more narrowly empiricist scholars. 75
The latter have a tendency to identify collective memory with some kind
of Volksgeist or Jungian collective unconscious, because they take what
is essentially a metaphor of ‘collective memory’ literally – when serious
students of collective memory are in fact ready to concede that ultimately
only individuals can remember. These suspicions have been nourished
further by the fact that the study of collective memory has been divided
into macro-sociological theory, where seemingly anything goes theoretically,
and case studies which fail to offer any general insights into the
politics of memory.
Jeffrey Olick has offered a detailed genealogy of the notion of collective
memory and the Durkheimian conceptual baggage which it still carries
with it. 76 Suffice it to say for now that in order to avoid the numerous
pitfalls – or as Olick, following Charles Tilly, has put it, the ‘pernicious
postulates’ – associated with the study of the political effects of memory,
the contributors to this volume all draw a fundamental distinction
between collective, social or national memory on the one hand, and individual
mass personal memory on the other. 77 As Timothy Snyder points
out in his chapter, the former is properly speaking mémoire or Gedächtnis,
the latter souvenir or Erinnerung. It is possible to call it ‘myth’, as Robert
Gildea does, but it is as plausible, and somewhat less normatively charged,
to view it as the ‘social framework’ of memory, or, in Snyder’s words, as
the ‘organisation principle that nationally conscious individuals use to
organise their history’. 78 It allows them to place events into a national
75 See also Marc Bloch’s review of Halbwachs’ work, ‘Mémoire collective, tradition et
coutume’, Revue de Synthèse Historique, 40 (1925), 73–83. For the origins (and a critique)
of the concepts of collective memory and collective identity, see Lutz Niethammer,
Kollektive Identität: Heimliche Quellen einer unheimlichen Konjunktur (Reinbek: Rowohlt,
2000).
76 Jeffrey K. Olick, ‘Collective Memory: The Two Cultures’, Sociological Theory, 17 (1999),
333–48.
77 The memories of particular groups are an intermediate phenomenon between national
and individual memory. They very often are based on living individual memory of members,
which then becomes stylised and even standardised when repeatedly told in communities
of remembrance, to congeal into a collective framework which then in turn
is reinforced through collective rituals. Groups frequently want to have their memories
recognised as part of national memory, and make explicit political and material demands
on the state. The history of the German expellees which Levy and Dierkes analyse in
their chapter is an excellent example of these points.
78 Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 10.