ABSTRACT
Memory, commemoration, and historical reenactment are closely related to one another. In a theoretical sense, all three terms refer to ways of representing the past in the present, both on an individual as well as a collective level. The contemporary discipline of memory studies has been largely inspired by the rediscovery and rereading of the works of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. Cultural memory refers to events of a pre-biographical past, which cannot be experienced by living individuals and thus has to be mediated by culture. Aleida Assmann further elaborates on Jan Assmann’s theory of cultural memory and distinguishes between three dimensions of memory: neuronal, social, and cultural memory. Reenactment is then strongly connected to individual and collective forms of memory. As a commemorative act, reenactments revive past events in the present and thus (re)shape the memory of these events. Commemorations as a distinctive form of collective memory contain the most similarities to reenactment as a social practice.
