How can we explain this apparent paradox of an unchecked emergence of memory that is also an expression of and a response to the rise of the present? One of the possible answers came a certain time ago from Pierre Nora, the French historian of the ‘realms of memory’, when he stated that memory is no longer what should be preserved from the past to serve as guidance for the future, but rather what turns the present into its own and only horizon. He wrote this in a great collective work, Les Lieux de mémoire, which he edited for publication in several volumes between 1984 and 1993. The expression ‘realms of memory’ was thus coined and widely disseminated beyond the historical field. This indelibly marked the passage from the historical model to the remembrance model, as if Clio had been dethroned by Mnemosyne, the mother of the muses. But this was not the only case: many contemporary historians embarked on the task of ‘explaining the present to the present’, in Hartog’s words, i.e. the question of the identity of the present (a present that is characterised by its extent) as a territory of memory. The dichotomy memory-present is no longer what it used to be when in the 1980s we saw the first signs of this memory turn, when historiography started to incorporate the testimonies of memory, and when a previously well-delineated opposition between history and memory, between the historical discipline and the subjective mechanisms (individual or collective) for reconstructing and evoking the past started to fade. If history used to wield absolute authority, now memory prevails on all sides, so much so that it has become the name of a new civil religion, a central notion of the new public culture, in expansion for the last four decades. As, in his second ‘Untimely Meditation’, entitled On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Nietzsche denounced the historicism – ‘historical illness’ – that was predominant in his time, today some – such as the North-American historian Charles Maier – consider that the current corresponding pathology is the hypertrophy of memory, equally capable of sterilising and annihilating creative forces. But if we want to understand the surge of remembrance discourses in the Western world (whether they come from politics, art, literature, or the human and social sciences), we must not forget that they cannot be dissociated from decolonisation and the new social movements. Post-colonial discourse is, in itself, a way of calling on memory and claiming a new policy on memory.

The testimonies of Holocaust survivors were decisive in making memory enter and greatly impact the public sphere. That is why Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, from 1985, is generally considered a fundamental manifestation of the wave of remembrance, with important consequences. In the wake of testimonial literature there were many films and books of every genre, TV shows, etc. Very rapidly we went from a silence that was symptomatic of trauma (and the psychological notion of trauma also became part of the lexicon and concepts of remembrance culture) to an overabundance of talk in the name of memory and the ‘duty of memory’ – another new notion, with origins in France, which gradually gained ground as the Holocaust acquired a greater public dimension and spread around the world. The prosecution of the ss officer Klaus Barbie in 1987 was a historic event, not only because it was the first trial in France for ‘a crime against humanity’, but also because it led to the omnipresence of the ‘duty of memory’, often with futile uses (consequently, as a reaction it was necessary to create the notion of ‘abuses of memory’). Let us remember that in 1997 a small book that transcribed a Primo Levi interview came out in France precisely with the title Devoir de mémoire, which was not the title of the original Italian edition in 1983.

The expansion of the culture of memory linked to the extermination of the Jews by the Nazi regime can be confirmed by the proliferation, from the 1990s onwards, of museums and ‘memorials’, as the generation that had survived and witnessed the event gradually disappeared. The Holocaust Museum in Washington; the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, in Berlin, designed by the architect Peter Eisenman; the Jewish Museum, also in Berlin, by the architect Daniel Libeskind – these may be the most emblematic examples of this memory/memorial wave, which also included 9/11, with a project by Michael Arad and Peter Walker in New York.

The emergence of the memorial phenomenon in public space is amply visible in public discourse, art and the social sciences. But it reaches a paroxysm in the generalised musealisation and obsession with heritage that characterise our time – the result of a properly diagnosed obsession with the past. There has been a frenetic construction of museums, as if there were no tomorrow, only the past – but a past that is submitted to the totalitarian regime of the present. The modern notion of heritage, which owes a lot to Alois Riegl (1858–1905), an art historian from the Vienna School and the author of the Modern Cult of Monuments, has acquired a plasticity that allows multiples uses and various iterations. ‘Intangible heritage’ is one of them. We may be familiar with it today but it would have been considered extremely strange in the past. Here, too, it is possible to find a paradox that the German philosopher Hermann Lübbe formulated in the following way: it is the indisputable erosion of tradition in modernity that in turn generates forms of memory, such as heritage conservation and museums. Another, similar, phenomenon is celebrations. Today the calendar and rhythm of public life are marked by great celebrations, where memory goes hand in hand with pedagogy, political messages and identitarian rituals. In 1984 Pierre Nora began the first volume of his Lieux de mémoire, with a text entitled ‘Entre histoire et mémoire’, and in 1993 he closed that great enterprise with another text entitled ‘L’ère de la commémoration’. Celebrations and anniversaries punctuate public life and provide endless fodder for the media, which has taken on the mission of not only following the present but also producing the past. It is fair to say that no other age has produced so much past – or as fast – as our own. Everything becomes a matter of memory very rapidly (this is proven by the generalised popularity of end-of-year reviews, and lists of names and events that elapse as soon as we turn the calendar page). The corollary of this is a phenomenon of entropy and acceleration that affects the space of the present, reducing it and generating exactly the opposite of memorial and museum culture: amnesia.

This leads us to another paradoxical condition characteristic of the memorial wave in which we are submerged: the hypertrophy of memory is also a symptom of forgetfulness, memory culture is at the same time a culture of amnesia. The dialectics of memory and forgetfulness is well-known: there is no memory without forgetfulness and some have tried to produce an ‘art of forgetfulness’, by analogy with an ‘art of memory’. The Art of Memory is a title of a famous book by Frances A. Yates (1899–1981), an English historian of literature and science. In that book, published in 1966, Frances Yates recorded the history of the survival of the ancient ars memoriae, i.e. mnemotechnical processes (associative techniques that assist memorisation) underlying the instrumental notion of memory defended by Aristotle. In 1997, the German philologist Harald Weinrich published a book entitled Lethe: Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens [Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting]. In Greek mythology, Lethe, or Léthê, is the river of forgetfulness. In that book, Weinrich hypothesises an ‘ars oblivionalis’, an art of forgetfulness. But to show that memory and forgetfulness have different statuses: forgetfulness cannot be the object of a decision. That is why we talk about the duty of memory, but never about the duty of forgetfulness. If anything, forgetfulness can be taken into consideration by a policy of memory. A policy of public memory was a central theme for the Germans in the 1960s, for well-known reasons. This policy promoted public forgetfulness for ‘good reasons’. For example, it forgot the traumatic events of the Luftkrieg, aerial warfare, the destruction of German cities by Allied bombing (of which Dresden is the primary example). And when, in his own way, the writer W. G. Sebald wrote the history of that destruction he put an end to this ‘forgetfulness’, which had been determined by the German policy on remembering in the post-war period. The policy of public memory is defined according to superior national interests: some things should be remembered and this remembrance turned into a collective ritual; other things should strategically fall into public oblivion.

But let us go back to the question that we posed earlier: what if the current hypertrophy of memory meant that we were being hassled by forgetfulness? Memory culture would thus be a culture of amnesia. The question invites a reflection on the new information technologies, and on the power and expansion of the new media. At a time when memory is stored in a database that we can access through the Internet whenever we want, active remembrance is the thing from which we are most distant. All the memory in the world (to allude to Alain Resnais’ documentary on the National Library of France) is available virtually; we have at our disposal an entire archive, but through technological mediation, not directly activated by our mental mechanisms. As for our immediate and active memory, it is increasingly weaker. It is an organ that is progressively shrinking and becoming obsolete due to a lack of use. This is one of the reasons why François Hartog asks the following question: now that memory is threatened do we invoke it more? And when he asks the question he remembers that mass media lead to the death of ‘memory societies’, as Pierre Nora calls them – societies governed by an ancient type of memory, where the legacy of the past is transmitted collectively and automatically.

Our current memory wave gave rise to a new lexicon, and web of concepts. In order to understand it in all its complexity we must know the lexicon, since there is a knowledge to which these names give access. Here are some of the names:

This is a concept introduced by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945). Killed in the Nazi camp at Buchenwald, Halbwachs did not have time to revise a set of texts written in the 1930s: they were collected posthumously into a book (edited in 1950), whose title is precisely La Mémoire collective. But the development of this concept began in a book in 1925, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. The power of the concept is shown by the fact that it was disseminated beyond the disciplinary boundaries within which it was created, entering everyday speech. According to Halbwachs, memory, like language, is a social phenomenon. By expanding the concept of memory from an individual and psychic context to a social and cultural one, Halbwachs was not creating a metaphorical use of the notion of memory: he was precisely defending the idea that there is an interaction between individual psychology, on the one hand, and society and culture, on the other. It is not that an entity such as a nation, for example, is endowed with a biological foundation of the same essence as memory, or an anthropological disposition to remember. But entities such as nations resort to signs, symbols, texts, images, rites, places and monuments to create a collective memory that also forms an identity. Collective memory is always a reconstruction: the past as it really was is never preserved in any memory. What endures is what society, in a particular epoch, strives and manages to reconstruct, according to its designs and needs. The German art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) used a similar concept, social memory, when he presented his project for an Atlas of European Memory shown in images. Warburg gave his Bilderatlas [Atlas of Images] the same name that was inscribed at the entrance of his famous Library: Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory and the mother of the muses.

The concept of cultural memory was developed by the German couple Jan and Aleida Assmann, who have authored important studies on the way memory relates to culture, tradition and religion. The social dimension of memory, theorised by Halbwachs, is the foundation of cultural memory, as the Assmanns define it: a heritage of knowledge and culture, which is also artistic and literary, taking shape in works of fiction, theatre, cinema, sculpture, painting and architecture. That heritage is objectified in memory devices, or in symbolic forms and practices that found a group’s identity. What characterises it is a concrete identity shared by a given collectivity (a people, a state, a party, etc.). Therefore, it is not universal and it is always reconstructive, in the sense that it does not appropriate the past in a disinterested way, without assumptions, but from a current need for identity. It is the reconstructive power of cultural memory that transforms a historical fact into a myth; and it is from cultural memory that the faculty to make a narrative construction of the past derives. In a way, the concept of cultural memory corresponds to what Derrida calls ‘archive’.

Aleida and Jan Assmann proposed the notion of communicative memory to designate another form of collective memory, separate from cultural memory. According to them, communicative memory is poorly structured and hierarchised. It is based on oral communication (oral history) and goes back three generations at the most, i.e. a century. Therefore, this is a generational memory, changing with each generation. In an eloquent statement, Aleida Assmann says that communication is to communicative memory what tradition is to cultural memory.

We owe the French historian Pierre Nora the concept of a ‘realm of memory’, which is the focus of a collective work in seven volumes, prepared and edited by him between 1984 and 1993. The conviction that ‘the analysis of collective memories should become a tool of history if we want it to be contemporary’ led Nora to introduce memory (which was starting to be repeatedly invoked, largely as a result of the testimonial literature written by the survivors of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps), turning it into an important instrument of historiography. The realms of memory correspond to a topography that might or might not be monumental, but that is always symbolically important, since this is where society or a group voluntarily deposit the memories that reflect their history. The realms of memory arise precisely from the dissolution of common memories, from the fact that we are increasingly more distant from traditional society, which was a ‘memory society’. In this sense, the lieux de mémoire are a compensation for the loss of the milieux de mémoire.

Public memory policy became a central topic in Germany from the 1960s until the end of the twentieth century. That policy defined what should be remembered and deserved public evocation and discussion. In the name of a policy of memory, museums and memorials were built to remember and pay tribute to Holocaust victims. Some of these memorials did not escape controversy. That was the case of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, in Berlin, designed by the architect Peter Eisenman. In 1998, when it was still a project waiting to get off the ground, the German novelist Martin Walser, in the speech that he gave when he received an important literary prize, said that it was time to put an end to the moral torture that had befallen the youngest German generation, who, despite having no responsibility for the crimes committed by their parents and grandparents, were forced to carry someone else’s guilt, instilled by countless museums and memorials. This speech sparked a violent controversy. If the political management of public memory is easy to identify and characterise, the policy of public forgetfulness must, by definition, be much more discreet – the less you notice it the more effective it is. As we know, forgetfulness has a negative connotation. Nonetheless, there is no policy of memory without a policy of forgetfulness. Once more, post-war Germany provides an eloquent example: the aerial warfare was ‘publicly forgotten’ to mitigate the trauma and keep it from being stirred. A policy of public forgetfulness does not mean repression or denial: it is strategic forgetfulness by design, which can be reversed at any moment, if the desire to remember triumphs over the calculation to forget.

There is a moral commandment from the early 1990s that prescribes the duty to never forget. At its origin, the duty of memory referred to the Holocaust, an event defined as a unicum in history. To never forget it, so that it is never repeated: that is the prescription’s meaning. But since emphatic formulations are seductive, the duty of memory rapidly expanded to other events. Consequently, the expression was trivialised as the current memory complex reached unprecedented proportions.

*Translated by Ana Macedo