Institutskolloquium im Sommersemester 2010

Erinnerung — individuell, familiär, kollektiv

dienstags 18:15–19:45
Großer Übungsraum (Raum 01-715), Becherweg 4, 1. Stock

Leitung: Carola Lentz

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Memory and commemoration: individual, family, collective…
Practices of memory and commemoration involve a wide range of issues. On the one hand, the collective memory, particularly at the nation-state level, is informed by public, official history as it is depicted in history books and museums, represented in national monuments or other ‘lieux de mémoire’, celebrated in national days as well as canonised and preserved in institutions such as national academies and historical commissions. On the other hand, popular, subaltern, and personal or family historical narratives — supported, for instance, through autobiographical writings by (opposition) politicians, or commemorative events organised and attended by ‘non-official’ societal groups such as veterans organisations — create a broader communicative memory that sometimes complements, and often contradicts the official politics of memory. Both aspects of memory politics form part of community making and nation building. More generally, it is only through active collective memory politics, not ‘retrieving’, but (re)constructing and (re)creating the past, that a society imagines itself as a unique nation, united beyond manifold internal differences and, at the same time, set apart from other nation-states or the former colonial powers. This memory making goes hand in hand with often heated debates about what should be remembered or forgotten, that reveal the fault lines of the nation under construction. At the same time, personal and family memories are not autonomous or merely ‘private’, but shaped by public and collective forms of commemoration as well as ‘forgetting’, and the distinction between the various communities or loci of memory remains ambiguous and malleable.
This summer semester’s seminar papers will explore these distinctions, ambiguities and transformations in the making of memory(ies) from a variety of perspectives. While some contributions focus on individual families or smaller communities of commemoration, others address practices of national memory making. The papers present case studies that cover different locations, ranging from various African countries to the US, Russia and Germany, and sometimes follow practices of commemoration along the routes of transnational migration. Investigating the specific characteristics of oral history and oral traditions, family narratives and personal recollections, forms of autobiographic writing, video and television productions, landmarks and festivals, the papers also address the question how different media shape the practices of memory and remembrance, and explore processes of remediatisation. Finally, the contributors have been trained in various disciplines — anthropology, history, sociology, pedagogics, and American and British studies —, and while their research has been shaped by an inter- or transdisciplinary perspective, their specific take on the subject will also enable us to learn more about how the different disciplines have treated phenomena of memory making.