Collective Memory Essay

Collective memory is the cultural memory (? ) or the remembered history of a community: “Anyone who during today fixes his eyes on tomorrow must preserve yesterday from oblivion by grasping it through memory” (Assmann 2011: 17). Collective memory is the way groups form memories out of a shared past to create a common identity. The memory of a group is a construction, or reconstruction, of the past. Through the approach of collective memory we can distinguish a cultural sphere that combines tradition, awareness of history, myth in action, and self-definition. This cultural sphere is constantly subject to a vast range of historically conditioned changes (Assmann 2011: 10). Collective memory is the structures that underlie all myths and histories without any distinction between them. The past that is fixed and internalized is myth, whether it is fact or fiction (Assmann 2011: 59). Collective memory can be expressed through a variety of different medias, e.g. festivals, rituals, liturgy, symbols, flags, memorial places, museums, cultural artifacts, as well as oral and written narratives, like myths, prophecies, law material, biographies and perceived historical accounts (Van Seters 2012: 54). The memories are specifically designed to recall events in the history of the collective.

Maurice Halbwachs defines collective memory by three characteristics: Collective memory has 1) a concrete relationship to a time and a space, 2) a concrete relationship to a group, and 3) an independent capacity for reconstruction. Memory is always related to a time and a space, even if this is not a historical time or a geographical place. The past remembered is not necessarily a historically accurate past, but it is based on stories recognized to be the ...

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...y is a collective phenomenon, but one which only manifests itself through individuals. How can we possibly know that one or a few individuals’ representation of their reality is representative for their community? Only by comparing our sources with historical material of the time contemporary with the source, not with the past the source describes, can we comprehend to what extend the source has been representative. We can conclude that if several sources relay the same ideologies, then at least among a certain range of people existing within a certain time period in a certain place, specific ideologies have been influential. Nevertheless, we have to recognize that collective memory is as much a result of conscious manipulation as it is unconscious absorption, which makes it difficult to talk about an author/s’ intention to convey any specific memory to his audience.