ABSTRACT
In the last chapter, I argued that the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been pervaded by a sense that there is an excess of memory. I traced the development of the discourse of trauma, which is characterized by an emphasis on the overwhelming or possessive power of the past, from its nineteenth-century origins to the present. This final chapter aims to explore an alternative strand of twentieth-century memory discourse, namely the notion of ‘collective memory’. ‘Collective memory’ emerged as an object of scholarly study in the early twentieth century. Maurice Halbwachs’ two books The Social Frameworks of Memory (1925; translated as On Collective Memory, 1992) and The Collective Memory (published posthumously in 1950) argued that memory was a specifically social phenomenon. The first translation of Halbwachs’ The Collective Memory into English in 1980 precipitated a scholarly boom. This was marked in particular by the publication of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982) and Pierre Nora’s influential edited anthology Les Lieux de mémoire [Realms of Memory] (1984-92). Other key works followed in the early 1990s, including James Young’s The Texture of Memory (1993) and Jay Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (1995).
