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The Historiography of the Holocaust pp 508–532Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Memory, Memorials and Museums

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Abstract

It seems natural to us that any society would want to commemorate its achievements, its most celebrated public figures and its disasters. Yet the preoccupation with memory that marks our age is, in fact, a relatively novel phenomenon. An obsession with memory as expressed in memorials, museums and public commemorations is one of the characteristic expressions of modernity.2 Modernity is the age — beginning around the time of the French Revolution — in which the distinction between past and present developed, so that, aided by the process of secularization, the experience of time began to seem like an infinite continuum, at each moment of which what had gone before became irrecoverable.3 Modernity is marked by two competing experiences of time: acceleration and loss. The response to these irreconcilable phenomena takes very different shapes: either the development of utopian, future-oriented thinking, such as Marxism, the belief in the unfolding of Reason (Kant) or the development of World Spirit (Hegel), or the development of historicism, a way of understanding the past that suggests that no matter what changes, certain ‘essences’ remain untouched, such as (typically) the nation (Ranke). This latter way of thinking, while it accepts change, also generates resistance to it, thus giving rise to nostalgia, yearnings for a ‘golden age’, the feeling of ‘loss’ (of tradition, authenticity, community), and the need for collective memory as a kind of compensation for that loss and as a marker of stability in uncertain times.4

More than anything else, memorials erected permanently testify to transitoriness.

Reinhart Koselleck1

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Notes

  1. R. Koselleck, ‘War Memorials’, in The l’ractice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 288.

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  2. I am using ‘memory’ to refer to ‘collective memory’ or ‘social memory’, as opposed to the neurological functioning of memory, which is of course part of the make-up of all human beings. See J. Fentress and C. Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); P. Burke, ‘History as Social Memory’, in Memory: History, Culture and the Mind, ed. T. Butler (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 97–113; S. Radstone, ed., Memory and Methodology (Oxford: Berg, 2000).

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  11. One can distinguish between ‘monuments’ — celebrating something or someone — and ‘memorials’ — marking a tragic event; but this distinction does not do away with the problem I am discussing. A more meaningful difference is for ‘memorial’ to refer to the broad spectrum of commemorative activities, and ‘monument’ to refer to material objects that provide a focus for these activities. Cf. J.E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 3–4.

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Stone, D. (2004). Memory, Memorials and Museums. In: Stone, D. (eds) The Historiography of the Holocaust. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524507_24

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