The past couple of decades have witnessed the emergence of a new, transdisciplinary, and as yet loosely defined field in the humanities: “memory studies.” The publication of Pierre Nora's multivolume Les Lieux de mémoire (1984–92) revived an interest pioneered by Maurice Halbwachs in the 1920s, converging with new social history to create an increasing concern with memory as an analytic category and organizing paradigm. Following the publication of Nora's landmark study in the United States in 1996, memory has rapidly become established in US academia as a relevant (and marketable) buzzword across a number of scholarly fields.
The outcome of an international conference on The Merits of Memory: Uses and Abuses of a Concept, held at the Leucorea Foundation, Wittenberg, in 2005, this volume, unlike many collections originating from conferences, features long and fully argued essays rather than short occasional papers. The range and solidity of the enterprise is further reinforced by the excellent work of the editors in arranging and presenting the contributions, providing them with a perspicuous layout and a thoughtful introduction. The essays take stock of the ongoing discourses of memory in and across a variety of disciplines and topics, showing how historiography, globalization, immigration, hegemony, identity, religion, nation, civilization, ethnicity, war, film, visual representation, media, entertainment, and tourism variously inflect our understanding of memory and are in turn inflected by it.
Displaying a plurality of methodological frameworks and theoretical approaches, contributions engage the most influential theorizations of memory that have set the stage for later studies, as well as their current developments. Existing models are thus examined, cross-fertilized, and critiqued. Some of the contributions (Klenner, Carrier, Friedman) display a mainly theoretical orientation, testing the potentialities of the paradigm in a variety of relations, and offering examples that range from nineteenth-century Europe to Nigeria, Armenia, Kazakhstan, or post-dictatorship Argentina and Chile. The Holocaust is an almost mandatory reference point, the retrieval of survivors' memories being one of the most powerful impulses behind the contemporary interest in memory. The relationship between memory, history, autobiography, and historiography is a major concern, reflected in critical periodizations and surveys of memory studies (Hutton, Winter) or investigations of their more specific intersections (Depkat). Another concern surfacing in many essays is the impact of communication technologies on the marketing, “visitability,” and perception of sites of memory, as well as the way globalization affects the contemporary creation and circulation of cultural memory, traditionally predicated on the nation-state and the organic community. Of special interest in this sense is Sabine Schindler's cogent critical examination of competing accounts of “cosmopolitan memory.”
A majority of the essays focus directly or indirectly on the United States, assessing the promise of memory for American studies (Hebel) and offering a truly fascinating range of instructive case studies. Glassberg interrogates the specificity of American sites of memory in a comparative framework; others analyze the accrual of different and competing meanings to sites of contested memory, such as celebratory monuments in New Mexico (Schwarz-Bierschenk), the Immigration Museum at Ellis Island (Baur), or the exhibitions recalling the Japanese American internment (Gessner). Immigration, ethnicity, and war are also central to other essays, which investigate the creation of myths of immigration (Daniels) and shared perceptions of ethnicity in migrant communities (Bungert), examine the interplay of individual and collective memory in slave (Boesenberg) or war (Rödder) narratives, or reconnoitre the field of Vietnam war movies (Fluck).
Collectively, by adding to theoretical argument the persuasiveness of accurate case studies, the essays enrich and articulate our perception of the generative potential of memory for scholarship. In spite of their undeniable range and forcefulness, however, one cannot completely repress a sense that at least some of the current work in memory studies is not so much producing new insight through a new lens, as verifying established knowledge from a new angle, or packaging traditional scholarship in currently fashionable terms. To this skeptical mind, the single essay in the volume that is openly critical of the current “memory boom” – Klein's analysis of its affinities with the principles and rhetoric of the New Right – will undoubtedly sound refreshingly heretical.
Given the importance of narrative to any conceptualization of memory, one would perhaps have expected some attention to literature as a specialized way of retrieving, interpreting, and circulating past experience; the question of fictional narrative, however, is only raised by Fluck, and in a discussion of war movies. Equally surprising is the scanty attention devoted to gender – the only exception being Karsten Fitz's examination of visual representations of women in the mid-nineteenth century – especially in view of the role memory has played in feminist as well as in gay and queer studies. However, calling attention to the inevitable lacks of such a collection is only a way of bearing witness to its impressive width and representative sweep.
