Dangerous Memories and the Force of Subversive Experiences (with Zvi Bekerman)

Abstract

Historical events—such as the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, World Wars I and II—unavoidably affect the social and cultural sphere of the communities and nations involved. In the past three decades, there have been several attempts to deal with past historical traumas through people’s memories. Memory is a central issue in contemporary understandings of what it means to do history. Recently, the term collective memory (Halbwachs, 1950/1992), written at the beginning of the twentieth century, has been rediscovered and reinterpreted by historians (Santos, 2001). Halbwachs used the term to represent the past within social imagination; in other words, collective memories are understood as collectively shared representations of the past. However, many historians criticized Halbwachs’s structural (Durkheimian) analysis and determined anti-individualism (Kansteiner, 2002).¹ Although the alternative terms proposed—such as social memory (Fentress & Wickham, 1992) and collective remembrance (Winter & Sivan, 1999), along with other terms such as national memory, public memory and personal memory (see Bodnar, 1992)—attempt to overcome the dichotomies between past and present, on the one hand, and individual and social, on the other, it is extremely hard to do so. It is not surprising, then, as Santos (2001) asserts, that memory has become a major issue that is deeply associated with social identity, nation building, ideology, and citizenship.

All memory is individual, unreproducible—it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. (Sontag, 2003, pp. 76–77, original emphasis)

The duty to remember is a duty to teach, whereas the duty to forget is a duty to go beyond anger and hatred. (Ricoeur, 1999, p. 11)

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. (Faulkner, 1951, p. 80)