Media Frameworks of Remembering

Abstract

Media provide the framework and set the limits in which we experience the world and communicate our memories to others. The media and technologies in which experiences assume expression and are preserved not only provide changing metaphors for memory, but also shape memories in ways that could not be foreseen at the time. While modern media such as Facebook and Twitter increasingly blur the distinctions between public and private memories (Hoskins 2009: 101), memory scholars try to hold on to clear distinctions in their categories or registers of memory (for example, Assmann 2004). Memories of a childhood spent in the 1970s glow with what we now recognize as the typical orange-pink colours of the Agfa colour film stock available at the time. The specific look that these technologies create is an integral part of the emotional associations and the nostalgia this time evokes. Memories take on the qualities of the media in which they are preserved and passed on. These qualities often only become visible in hindsight, when the technology is outdated and has been replaced. In Wolfgang Becker’s movie Good Bye, Lenin! (Germany 2003) the protagonist’s memories of a happy childhood in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) are presented in the form of clips of super 8 home movies of typical GDR summer weekends spent in a ‘Datsche’ (summer cabin) and photographs of ‘Neptune parties’ on the beach, manipulated to look as if they were taken and filmed in the 1970s. The emotional investment in these images is certainly activated by what they depict, but it is triggered even more by their media-specific quality which is associated with the 1970s. This goes some way to explain the film’s nostalgic appeal to West German and international cinemagoers who had no personal memories or attachments to life in the GDR. Although the home movie clips are presented as indexical recordings, the fact that these idyllic images double as Alex’s memories suggests that they conceal more than they reveal in this coming-of-age story set around the time of the ‘Wende’ (the fall of the wall between the GDR and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG)). It suggests that what Alex remembers of his childhood and his mother is just as rose-tinted as the amateur films and photographs taken at the time.