Memory Wars

The term memory war refers to a public debate about what constitutes the appropriate or valid “memory” of a national or transnational society or of a social subgroup such as a particular gender, region, ethnicity, culture, or religious identity. Often the controversy is about the adequate representation of “memories” within a memorial culture, such as disputes over commemorations, memorials, street names, museums, exhibitions, or archives, and within the historical sciences, the educational system, or the manifold aesthetic representations of the past, such as novels or movies.

In a world organized as a system of nation-states, most of the memory wars are in a referential frame of national history. In general, they can be assigned to three main varieties: memory as a conflict (a) within the same (national) historical culture, (b) between two or more (nation) states through different versions of remembering a common past, and (c) between the claims of interpretive predominance of groups with a certain memory concern, and the academic world, which, according to Pierre Nora, lost its traditional monopoly on interpretation about 25 years ago.

In a simplified differentiation of “history” and memory,” Marc Ferro and Nora assign the following characteristics to the concept “history”: academic discipline, analytic access, commitment to scientific rationality as well as habitual distance to one's own personal historical identity. “Memory,” on the contrary, is conceptualized as a relation to the past, which is connected with personal identification, loyalty toward a collective memory, and often an ardent emotion as well. The current popularity of the category “memory” is related to the strong reception that has found the concept “collective memory,” introduced by Maurice Halbwachs, within the academic world and beyond since the 1980s.

A characteristic feature of memory wars is that the mass media pick up the argument; produce it in a very controversial way by launching huge debates on TV, newspapers, or the Internet; and generate a (supposedly) political emotionalization of the general public, sometimes even resulting in political protests, or agenda setting by election campaigns. That is why the production of a mass-medially functioning memory war can be a very effective, and occasionally the only available, strategy to direct the public attention toward those historical experiences that are ignored, suppressed, denied, deformed, or destroyed by a predominant master narrative. This applies to the historical role and specific experiences of, for example, women, ethnic, and other minorities; victims of slavery, colonial exploitation, or racist discrimination; as well as victims of dictatorships, wars of aggression, and genocides. The representatives of those people fight, via preservation of their collective memory, for their historical identity as a basis for the claim of public recognition of their historic achievements or suffering, rehabilitation, and moral or financial compensation.

Moreover, there are memory wars in the sense of conservative protests against a—supposed or actual—weakening of the traditional national history and its binding guiding values. Worldwide reforms in the educational sector, like the introduction of new syllabuses and school books, consistently form the respective cause for this. Ultimately, even extremist groups with, for example, fundamentalist-religious ideology use the memory wars as an instrument for their revisionist “culture wars” against modern society. They [Page 1148]thereby can benefit from the paradoxical effect that ideological provocations have to be repeated during the argumentative rejection and, in the course of this, will be spread again.

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