Over the last decade, memory has been acknowledged as a ‘leading concept’ of cultural studies. The number of books and essays that have appeared on the subject already fill whole libraries. The memory discourse is quickly expanding. There is a growing number of different approaches to cultural memory which exist side by side without taking much notice of one another, let alone engage in a discussion of their various underlying axioms and goals. What the memory discourse still lacks is theoretical rigour, an integral as well as differentiated view of the enterprise, and a self-critical investigation of its central concepts. In my contribution I will examine one of these leading concepts, namely ‘collective memory’ more closely, before, in a second step, introducing some terminological distinctions and, in a third step, testing them by looking at a concrete case.

Collective memory – a spurious notion?

There is no need to convince anybody that there is such a thing as an individual memory. Memory attaches to people in the singular, but does it attach to them in the plural? Although, in the meantime, a whole new discourse has been built around the term ‘collective memory’ that fills extended library shelves, there are still inveterate sceptics who tenaciously deny that the word has any meaning. It is easy to create a new term, but can we be sure that there is anything in reality to correspond to it? Susan Sontag, for instance, belongs to those who deny the meaning of such a term. ‘Photographs that everyone recognizes’, she writes in her new book Regarding the Pain of Others, ‘are now a constituent part of what a society chooses to think about, or declares that it has chosen to think about. It calls these ideas “memories”, and that is, over the long run, a fiction. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory (…)’. And she insists: ‘All memory is individual, unreproducible – it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings.’