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Alon Confino (History, University of Virginia) and Peter Fritzsche (History, University of Illinois) would like to assemble a working group of historians and Germanisten to explore the work of memory in modern Germany. We propose a workshop in fall 1998, to be funded by the University of Illinois, followed by a preliminary publication, and finally a larger conference. To this end, we would like to invite not simply papers but also broader agendas from colleagues who would like to join us.
The first step is a workshop or small conference in fall 1998 in Champaign-Urbana, at which we will discuss precirculated papers that focus on key problems of memory and set an agenda for future work. We'd include a key note speaker to two as well. We anticipate acquiring conference funds, but expect that participants would have to defray some expenses themselves. The main point, however, is to assemble a group of interested colleagues who would like to explore the workings of memory. We are particularly interested in including literary scholars as well as historians and younger as well as more established scholars. For this reason, we have put this call on the internet and avoided rounding up "usual suspects."
We hope this will be an intense, fun, and immensely productive collaboration.
To meet certain funding deadlines, we would like to establish 1 December 1997 as the deadline for submissions of proposals which should include (1) the participant's tentative narrative agenda for future work in this field; (2) a one-page abstract of the paper to be submitted; and (3) a cv. We would like to prepare the papers for publication in spring 1999.
Please submit a hard copy of your proposal to either:
Peter Fritzscheor
Alon Confino
Department of History
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22903
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to email us: pfritzsc@uiuc.edu; ac2a@virginia.edu.
What we have in mind is an investigation of the social practices of memory itself, rather than an analysis of the commemorative politics of specific events. It may we be that some papers (on family commemorations, for example) do not address the itinerary of German history at all. Again, what we are interested in is the content, the practice, and "world" of modern memory.
Memory has a history and the presence of the past has a historical context. Rather than a timeless vehicle for the recovery of past events, memory is the product of particular relationships to the past and particular conceptions of history. A number of scholars have referred to a specific "memory of the modern" associated with the rise of literate publics, the unsettlement of those publics by commerce and industry, and their mobilization by mass politics since the end of the eighteenth century. The discontinuities of the last two-hundred years have made the workings of memory complicated and poignant. These assumptions give a rough temporal coherence to the study of memory.
The problem of memory in Germany is particularly urgent because the past plays such an enabling and disabling role in public affairs. The reenchantment of a largely ignored premodern past which occurred at the turn of the nineteenth century was central to the imagination of German nationalism. Key intellectual patriots such as the Grimm Brothers or the Boisseree Brothers consciously recognized and collected the debris of the past. At the same time, the recovery of new or usable pasts and the forgetting of (or absolution from) old or less usable pasts are more familiar gestures of German identity formation in the twentieth century. Thus Germany presents an enormously rich terrain to study the collective practices of memory.
Substantial work has already centered on how Nazism or the Holocaust has been remembered and represented. Vital insights have been achieved and theoretical methodologies honed. Yet the balance of these inquiries have not been centrally interested in the workings of memory and the uses of the past; rather they have focussed on the distortions and discrepancies of the historical record that have followed. We are primarily interested in the social practices of memory. An analysis of commemorative politics after 1945 reveal but hardly exhaust the modern problem of memory and the modern uses of the past in private and public life.
We propose a number of themes that will guide our work and focus on questions of memory rather than on the issue of commemorative politics. What follows is suggestive, not comprehensive list of themes. Since this effort is just beginning, we imagine that this sort of list will undergo considerable alteration. But we are interested in public as well as private memory work and in vernacular uses of the past.
The Presence of the Past: the growth of historical consciousness at the end of the eighteenth century; the sense of loss of remembered lifeways in the wake of the French Revolution and with the onset of industrialization; the enchantment of the past as part of an emerging German cultural tradition; the cultivation of the past in historical preservation.
Memory and Narrative: a central concern of the conference would be to explore the extent to which the work of collective memory requires an overarching historical narrative that gives memories a place and a meaning. Does the sense of "making" history and history "in the making" which Koselleck identifies enable memory, and do notions of the "end of history" disable memory.
Genres of Memory: private displays, photoalbums, scrapbooks, diaries, collecting, antiquing, tourism, museums. The distinctive realms of private and public practices would be of particular importance. This is a potentially huge thematic complex, and one of the most rewarding since there are almost no analyses of vernacular traditions of memory work.
Nostalgia and Commemoration: The sense of loss and the acknowledgement of the discontinuities is a key component of the modern self; at the same time, the cultivation of continuity plays a similarly important role in our lives. These distinctions in the emotional role of the past come out by juxtaposing nostalgia and commemoration (or tradition).
The Debris of the Past: The past cannot be recovered in whole form; it must be collected and reimagined. This relationship to the past is troubled but also enables the imagination and permits journeys and travels to reconstituted pasts by individuals as well as publics.
Trauma: What is the role that trauma plays in the workings of memory? What is relationship between the production of history and the violence of trauma? War, Nazism, and the Holocaust would be obvious points of reference.
War and Memory: War both generates and effaces memory, creates traditions and symbolizes discontinuities. War also enrolls the private individual in public politics and thus gives a narrative frame to recollections, turning them into memory. 1806, 1813, 1914, 1945 are key dates here. At the same time, war is fingered over and over in public and private situations, but in very different ways.
Forgetting and Absolution: Implicit in the work of memory is the principle of selection, but it is worth looking explicitly at what is forgotten.
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