ABSTRACT
The notion of collective memory distinct from one of history produced by historians was rapidly disseminated, even in the apparent absence of direct influence, such as happened with Walter Benjamin. Benjamin shared the idea of the duality of community memory as he called it, and the so-called social memory, which later he considered the primary agent of contemporary “memory work.” Due to the “radical inversion of the ordinary meaning of the terms history and memory,” history comes to be verified by memory not vice versa as has been the case before. Both history and memory are coming to appear increasingly problematic. All what has been said in terms of the meaning of the changing relationship between collective memory and history makes it easy to integrate the one into the other. The first step taken in revealing the intricate relationship between memory and the scholarly activity demands studying first the historical experience and the memorial work in their close interaction.
