Genre Memories and Memory Genres: A Dialogical Analysis of May 8, 1945 Commemorations in the Federal Republic of Germany

Representing Mass Violence: Conflicting Responses to Human Rights Violations in Darfur

“…Building on a long tradition of ideas from the sociology of knowledge, rooted in the classical works of Emile Durkheim ([1912] 2001), Max Weber (1976), Karl Mannheim (1952), and leading to the work of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966) and Pierre , this volume further contributes to our understanding of how competing fields, at national and global levels, interact to produce collective representations of mass violence that news media communicate selectively. Collective representations then constitute a cultural repertoire (Swidler 1986) on which creators of collective memory of cruelty and suffering (Halbwachs 1992;Olick 1999;Osiel 1997;Savelsberg and King 2011) and cultural trauma (Alexander et al 2004) eventually draw. Making sense of these patterns is a critical precondition for understanding, explaining, and predicting how civil societies and governments respond to mass violence.…”

Reiterated Commemoration: Hiroshima as National Trauma

“…One theoretical point of departure for this article is Jeffrey Olick's (1999a) threefold model of collective memory. Olick considers three key dimensions: the politics, the history, and the memory of commemoration.…”

“…It is now widely accepted that the present interests of social groups cannot dictate reconstruction of collective memory, for collective memory can only be reshaped within limits that are dependent on the past of commemoration (Coser 1992;Olick 1998Olick , 1999aOlick and Levy 1997;Schudson 1989;Schwartz 1982Schwartz , 1991Schwartz , 1996. In fact, invoking path dependence has become standard for sociologists of collective memory; for instance, Barry Schwartz, one of the leading figures in the field, argues "the earliest construction of an historical object limits the range of things subsequent generations can do with it" (1991:232).…”

“…Mnemonic representations are always constructed, circulated, and stored in particular forms, such as "narratives, pictorial images, textbooks, pamphlets, legal charters, wills, diaries, and statues" (Wagner-Pacifici 1996:302), and different forms structure a range of publics into which particular commemorative practices flow. The third dimension is the "memory of commemoration," that is, "prosaic path-dependence" (Olick 1999a), which creates internal dynamics within the history of collective memory that constrain the present recommemoration. "Once commemoration gets underway," in other words, "it picks up steam; it operates by a logic and force of its own" (Schudson 1989:108).…”

“…It is therefore helpful to introduce a theory of cultural trauma into the study of collective memory and shed light on a sociopsychological dimension of the remembering. In particular, as we shall see, commemoration of a traumatic event is a critical case to test an analytical strategy of "multidimensional rapprochement" between psychological-individualist and sociological-collectivist approaches to collective memory (Olick 1999b). Thus, a theory of collective memory that incorporates reiterated problem solving and cultural trauma can give us new analytical leverage to study how commemorative practices build on one another and how a traumatic event plays out in memory-identity formation of a collectivity.…”