MEDIA AND MEMORY

Abstract

The culture of memory is always the result of conflicting political and social negotiations. What does this even mean? In essence, this is a term that has penetrated into scientific and common language only since the 1990s, which increasingly replaces the older, relatively pathetic formulation of “managing the past”. As defined by Munich historian Hans-Gunther Hockert, “culture of memory” is “a soft collective term for all of history’s nonspecific scientific utility to the general public”. However, in order to be consistent with the dynamics of memory cultures, it should be added that the culture of memory is the result of public negotiations that arise from the tension between individual experience and memory, politically normal and socially desired memory and scientific objective history. One important point of tension is that publicly sanctioned memory practices do not have to always or even permanently conform to private forms of memory. On the contrary, the traditions of the past about the family, thanks to their own emotional sides, regularly achieve clearly higher efficiency than public holidays of memory or the education of history. Questions of the traditions of history and the construction of images of the past have always played an important role in the self-determination of individuals, social groups, institutions of government, states and nations. This is especially noticeable in times of turning points, when the ruling claims and mechanisms for stabilizing power are based on new or newly “invented traditions” and provided with a newly formed history. Currently, two seemingly opposite, but interdependent and defining trends can be observed firstly, the revision and rethinking of national histories, and secondly, the opening of national history in a transnational or globalized perspective.