ABSTRACT
So much of modern memory springs from the images and absences of the Great War that it is easy to forget the setting, this included both the interest in memory that had developed before 1915 and the work of the key intellectual precursors. Yet theirs are notable and distinctive paths to memory work, and have each been equally associated with creating the context for the emergence of a cultural ‘modernism’. In 1900 the whole concept of the past, time, memory and the construction of history was at the heart of cultural and philosophical reflection. A discussion on remembrance and the nature of recalled experience was embedded in a context of both historical reappraisals and a questioning of the future and of our myth-making about the past. These are all issues that preoccupied the forerunners of modern remembering. The process owes much to the inspirational work of these modern European memory-makers. I refer to just five here: each influenced the emergence of an idea that there is a social or cultured memory, not necessarily a ‘national’ one. Even in the academy, these individuals did not collectively create a ‘genre’, as did later groups such as the ‘Annales’ group or the Frankfurt School. Nevertheless together their work acts as a clear reference point for the understanding of a crisis in personal remembering in an accelerating and often increasingly frenetic ‘present’, and, although less apparent at the time, an increasingly postnational world.
