The original author | Jay Winter
Excerpts | Liu Yaguang
Jay Winter, a prominent American expert on war history, discussed the question: How do you evoke the collective memory of what stands behind a monument? Moreover, his thinking went further. The question of the field of memory is not only about the viewer, but also about its design itself. How should Jews commemorate human tragedies such as the Holocaust of World War II that are "meaningless"? These questions are not only about the design of monuments, but also about a gesture towards history. He also believes that only by embedding private memories belonging to the family can the monuments that carry the grand collective memory be constantly revitalized. The following is an excerpt from the Guide to the Study of Cultural Memory, with deletions and changes, and the subtitle is added by the editor.
A Guide to the Study of Cultural Memory, edited by Astrit Eyre / [de] Ansgar Nyunin, translated by Li Gongzhong and Li Xia, Nanjing University Press, February 2021
Commemoration and political power
The "field of memory" is a place where people participate in public activities, thus expressing "a collective shared knowledge about the past ... This knowledge is the basis of a sense of unity and individuality of a group." The crowds who visit such places inherit the inherent meaning of the event itself and add new meaning to it. Their activities are crucial to the expression and preservation of places of remembrance. After this group dissipates or disappears, the field of memory loses its original vitality and is even completely abandoned.
The connotations of the term introduced by Nora have been extended to many different texts, from legends to stories and concepts. This essay defines the "field of memory" more specifically, referring only to tangible places where commemorative acts are staged. In the 20th century, the vast majority of such sites bear in mind the lives lost in war.
This field of memory often has its own life course. The first is the initiation and creation phase, which is constructed or transformed for certain specific commemorative purposes. Then there is a phase of institutionalization, and their use tends to be normalized. Associated signs, such as a calendar indicating what kind of commemoration should be held at a certain time and place, may persist for decades or may be abruptly suspended. In most cases, the importance of the field of memory will fade with the disappearance of the social group that initiated the act.
In modern times, most memory fields are embedded in events that are very different from religious agendas. Of course, there is some overlap. In some countries, visiting the sites of remembrance on Armistice Day (November 11) is reminiscent of the end of World War I, a day very close to the Catholic Halloween (November 2); in some countries with a large Number of Catholics, both dates occupy a near-sacred public memorial space. First visit the Memorial Cemetery, followed by a visit to the War Memorial or other sites. The Armistice Day of World War II in Europe, 8 May, is also the anniversary of Joan of Arc. Those who attended the commemoration on that day may use either secular or Catholic rites, and some use both. Usually, the choice of venue means a different date.
Commemoration at the field of memory is an act born of faith and shared by a large community. The moment being commemorated is both significant and contains a moral message. The field of memory presents this information in material form. Moments of national shame are rarely commemorated or marked in a tangible way, although there are some exceptions, namely motivational commemorations. On Israel's Anniversary for the Victims of Nazi Anti-Semitism, the hallmark slogan of public commemoration is "Never Repeat Itself." The shells of Hiroshima's public buildings remind everyone of the moment the city was destroyed by the first atomic bomb attack. If moral questions about a war or a public policy persist, places of remembrance are either difficult to pin down or controversial. Because of this, the French tried to commemorate the end of the Algerian War, and the Americans tried to commemorate the end of the Vietnam War, but neither formed a clear date or place. There is no moral consensus on the nature of conflict, so there is no moral consensus on what should be remembered by the masses, when and where it should be remembered.
The Japanese Prime Minister's visit to the Yasukuni Shrine is both a tribute to ordinary soldiers and a reverence for war criminals. The same is true of a visit to the German Soldiers' Cemetery in U.S. President Ronald Reagan's Bitburg, which houses both people who are not involved in war crimes and former SS members. However, both places are a kind of memory field, whether it is a controversial memory or a resentful memory, it is a memory after all.
The Space of Remembrance: The Forms and Changes of Cultural Memory, by Aleda Asman, translated by Pan Lu, Peking University Press, March 2016
The essence of the memory field is that they are not only a reference point for survivors of a catastrophic event, but also a reference point for those who were born long after the event. When the person who directly experienced it died, the recounting of the past became popular, and "memory" became a metaphor, and the field of memory inevitably became a place of second-hand memory, that is, people here remembered the memories of others, the memories of survivors of the events marked here.
Much of the academic debate around the field of memory is concerned with the extent to which they have become instruments of a dominant political force in a society. One view emphasizes that public events held in these places help political elites establish the legitimacy of their rule. For some of these events, it's important to look at who is in power — Such as Bastille Day in Paris, Independence Day in Philadelphia, or other anniversaries in the United States. Other events were closely linked to the overthrow of the old order and the establishment of the new order: November 7 marked the establishment of the Bolshevik Revolution and the communist regime in Russia, a day that symbolized a new order and its challenge to enemies all over the world. The military parade outside the Moscow Kremlin was both a moment of commemoration and great pride, demonstrating the place of the Soviet forces in the history of Russia and the world.
This top-down path emphasizes the significance of the field of memory as a tangible vehicle for national, imperial, or political identity. Anzac Army Day, 25 April, is celebrated as the birth of the Australian nation. It commemorates the landing of Australian and New Zealand troops in Turkey in 1915 as part of an expeditionary force led by the British. The fact that the landing failed did not diminish the idol-like nature of the day in the eyes of Australians. It was on this day that they survived and their country came of age. There are many memories that remember this day. First, one can go to war memorials across Australia. This is followed by a social occasion at the national level, the Australian National War Memorial in Canberra, a building modeled after The Hajia Sofia in Istanbul, with the names of all Australian soldiers killed in the war inscribed on the walls. Finally, there is an annual pilgrimage to gallipoli beach, which is still attended by many people into the 21st century. There, the Australians continued to stage the "Gallipoli Landings" on the beaches where they landed that year.
Not all commemorations and memories are linked to war. The birthday of a monarch or late president is commemorated in a similar way. Queen Victoria's birthday, 24 May, was once Britain's Empire Day, and since 1999 it has been celebrated as Commonwealth Day. The creation of such anniversaries is part of a broader movement, for which some scholars have called "traditional inventions." That is, at the end of the 19th century, both the emerging nation-states and the established imperial powers intensified their use of ritual activities. The amplification of the aura of power was immediately confirmed by a deceptive pedigree. The display of specific rituals (which are said to be associated with customs or forms that have existed in distant, obscure ancient history) can effectively disguise political change, instability, or insecurity. It seems interesting to us that there is only a weak connection between this tradition and a place. As a result, for those who wish to invent tradition, their choice is more flexible.
This functionalist interpretation of the commemoration has been challenged. The second school highlights the potential of the field of memory and related commemorations to help their dominant groups openly fight to break free from their subordinate status. Many political leaders or their proxies have tried to devise new commemorative acts, but there is also room for official memorial scripts to be subversive or creatively interpreted. On Armistice Day on 11 November, different groups go to the War Memorial, some to promote military values and some to denigrate military values. Pacifists proclaim their creed of "never repeating" by appearing in this field of memory; soldiers and their supporters use this moment and the atmosphere of such places to glorify their profession and thereby demonstrate the duty of citizens to sacrifice their lives for their country if necessary in possible future wars. The same time, the same space, the expression forms are contradictory, and this problem has never been solved.
This new interpretation of the political significance of the field of memory emphasizes the polysemy nature of the act of remembrance and the potential for new groups to appropriate the field of old memory for new reasons. From this point of view, commemorations are often choruses of multiple voices, some louder than others, but never solo. The historical decentralization of commemoration can make us aware of the regional, local, and heterogeneous characteristics of commemorative behavior. The top-down path of investigation must be complemented by a bottom-up path to examine how various scripts of the past played out in memorial sites in villages, towns, provincial towns, and centers of political power.
By chance, these discordant voices come together, leading to a national moment of memory. In this case, however, the leaders are not grouped in a single memory field. An example of this diffusion of memory can be seen in the two-minute silence at 11:00 a.m. on November 11 every year between 1919 and 1938. The operator pulled down all the call plugs, traffic was interrupted, and normal life was suspended. Then World War II broke out, and a sudden turn to war was not in the interest of the nation. Thereafter, the date of the two-minute silence was changed to Sunday, the closest to November 11. But in the two decades between the two world wars, it became a national moment of reflection, everywhere. Mass Observation, an early social research group, interviewed hundreds of ordinary British people and asked them what they were thinking during the two-minute silence.
They replied that they were not thinking of the state, the victory, or the army, but of those who were not present. This silence is a meditation on the absence of a state. In this way, it slid from a symphony of political nature to the field of family history. Of course, the remembrance of loved ones by family members takes place within a larger social and political framework. However, the richest forms of commemoration always exist in family life. It is the intersection of public and private, grand history and micro history, that gives strength to the commemoration of the 20th century, making it a rich repertoire. However, these commemorative processes are very complex, meaning that the field of memory is not always the focus of commemorative behavior.
In addition, some buildings can also be informally transformed into a field of memory. Workers organize strikes in cinemas, women create a maternity centre or baby and child care centre in their homes, and homeless people caused by natural disasters find a school as a place of refuge, all of which can become a memory field for those who have spent important moments in their lives in such places. When certain groups act on their own, official certificates are not required.
The Field of Memory: A Cultural and Social History of French National Consciousness, edited by Pierre Nora and translated by Huang Yanhong et al., Nanjing University Press, August 2015
Aesthetics and Redemption: The Transformation of the Image of Monuments
The life course of the field of memory is more than political gestures and material tasks can describe. The field of memory is often also an art form, including the creation, arrangement, and interpretation of some important acts of art. This can be analyzed on two different levels: first, aesthetic, and second semiotic, which are closely related.
Some forms of commemoration belong to only one nation and have unique characteristics; others are shared by populations of multiple countries. In France, as a symbol of the nation-state, the image of Marianne is found in the town halls of thousands of small towns across the country, which cannot be used in Germany or England. In Germany, the iron cross on the medal indicates the place and tradition of its commemoration. The forests or fortresses of the German heroes were also folded up and embedded in the history of the Teutonics.
Sometimes the symbolism of one country coincides with another, even though the two countries may be rivals. After the First World War, the first industrialization war between fully industrialized countries, many forms of commemoration adopted medieval symbols. Throughout Europe, the revolutionary character of war was marked by a backward-looking symbol. Medieval images of heroes and saints revived an era of combat in which battles were fought between individuals rather than in an impersonal, unbalanced duel between weapons and human flesh. The wars in the air followed the form and romance of the knights, and the medieval style was revived on both the winners and the losers, which is evident in the faded glass windows of many churches. In those places, the commemoration of the two world wars is very similar to earlier religious images and goals. In this way, the wars of the 20th century take on a sacred color, because the field of memory is located in a sacred building, in the context of a divine law.
Until very late in the 20th century, war memorials still used human form. Some places have chosen the classical male bodybuilding image to mark the "elite generation that died in battle", while other places have uniformly adopted a more stoic and courageous male image. In most cases, in the face of an overwhelming defeat, victory is either partially or completely eclipsed. Within this aesthetic landscape, traditional Catholic motifs are extremely common. The image of the Grieving Virgin (Stabat Mater) is a metaphor for the collective grief of women at the local and national levels.
In Protestant states, the aesthetic controversy took on a quasi-religious character, and the war monuments in these countries offended the Puritans. They believed that the Reformation of the 16th century rejected such "Catholic" symbols, and that obelisks were the ones they could accept and were relatively inexpensive. In France, war memorials are legally stipulated to have a public character and cannot be built on church grounds, although many local groups have managed to circumvent this requirement. In schools and universities, the location of such monuments touches on this issue. Some are located in the school's chapel, which is a kind of sacred space; some are located around the chapel, which is a quasi-sacred space; and some are located in secular space, as a public space, the main street and train station, which can also provide shelter for the list of war victims. Location indicates meaning.
The wars of the 20th century made bereavement "democratized." Previously, the army consisted of mercenaries, volunteers, and professional soldiers, but after 1914, everyone went to the battlefield, and the social impact of war casualties changed. In Britain, France and Germany, almost every family has lost someone, either a father, a son, a brother, a cousin, or a friend. Because of the stalemate state of the battlefields on the Western Front, many of those who lost their lives — perhaps half of them — simply did not have specific graves at all. As a result, the name of the deceased has become the most important way to commemorate. Names are all that the deceased left behind, engraved in stone or plaques, and become the focus of public commemoration at the local and national levels.
The memorial site preserves the names of those who have died. In rare cases, such as in Australia, war memorials list all the names of all servicemen. This approach often provokes accusations, as it is clear that one's name is not inscribed on the tablet. But for the most part, the names of the deceased are so numerous that they can only be arranged alphabetically rather than socially hierarchically. The vast majority of war memorials list the names of the dead in this way, with a few ranked and some arranged according to the date or year of death. However, the monument was built for the survivors and the families of the survivors, who needed to be able to easily find their own unique signs of instruction – the names of the deceased.
The basic practice of inscribing the name of the monument has become the basic style of commemorative forms after World War II. After 1945, many places simply added names to the World War I memorials. Part of the reason is that there is a recognition that there is some connection between these two major conflicts of the 20th century, and of course out of economy. After the Vietnam War, engraving names is still an important way to commemorate them. At the same time, inspired by the commemorative form of The First World War, a number of war memorials have also been erected, the most famous of which is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial designed by Maya Lin, located in Washington, D.C. Her work is a clear reference to a model of the Monument to the Missing persons of world war I on the Thiepval Somme River, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and begun construction in 1932.
Vietnam Veterans Monument, designed by Maya Ying Lin, niece of the famous Chinese-American architect Andh Lin
By the last decades of the 20th century, artistic perspectives and aesthetic tastes had changed so much that the key language used to express remembrance had become abstract. As a result, sculpture and installation art deviated from the expressive techniques of a particular ethnic group, nor did they focus on the human figure as in the early days. The commemorative art of the former Soviet Union was an exception, and they resolutely followed the path of heroism and romanticism in order to express what they called the meaning of the Great Patriotic War. In Western Europe, in many cases (of course, not all), expressions that suggest absence or nihilism have replaced the classical, religious, and romantic concepts of monumental art.
This shift is evident in the commemoration of the Holocaust. The scenes of Holocaust memory, especially concentration camps, extermination camps, and the places where Jews lived before the Holocaust, cannot be handled by future generations as they do with memorial sites for the fallen victims of the two world wars. The difficulty lies in three areas. First, catholic symbols need to be avoided to represent the catastrophe of the Jews. Second, the strictly conformist Jews were more resentful of Figurative art, which was forbidden or resisted by orthodox Jewish traditions. Third, the death of the victim does not reflect any sense of progress, meaning, or purpose. The holocaust victims may have confirmed their beliefs, but what is the significance of the murder of a million children? In a way, their deaths are meaningless, and therefore the Holocaust is meaningless.
It is a challenge to present "meaninglessness" in a specific way. Some artists offer installation art, which literally disappears through the presence of the visitor. Photographs of vanished worlds were also posted on the exterior of buildings that still stood and were occupied by non-Jews. Others take postmodern forms to suggest disorientation, emptiness, and nothingness. The Jewish Annex of the Berlin History Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, is one such venue. It was once likened to an exploding Jewish star, or a bolt of lightning in stone and glass. No matter how the metaphor is, it is in a disturbing, piercing, non-linear way, showing what cannot be expressed.
Since the 1970s, World War II commemoration has been mixed with Holocaust remembrance. This presents both aesthetic and social and political challenges. The commemorative form of the world war has explored a certain meaning and connotation from the loss of countless victims of the war. Many of these monuments carry the meaning of warning. "Never Repeat" is its ultimate meaning. But "Never" lasted less than twenty years. As a result, the search for meaning became increasingly complex after World War II. The fact that more civilians died than soldiers in World War II made it more difficult to conceive the art of remembrance.
Finally, the extreme nature of World War II also challenged the ability of art—any art—to express a sense of loss, especially when it was associated with genocide or the destruction of the atomic bomb. It has already been mentioned how Auschwitz negated the usual expression of "meaning", although there are still some people who try to find some kind of redemptive factor in it. The same was true of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The field of memory is where people affirm the belief that history has some meaning. When most people don't see any meaning in the events marked in time and space, which place is appropriate? Ignoring Auschwitz or Hiroshima, it is impossible. But to place them within an earlier memorial structure or form is either problematic, absurd, or both.
When rituals are embedded in families, they survive
The act of public commemoration is determined by the gestures and language of the participants, who gather in the field of memory to recall specific aspects of their past history. At such moments, people's behavior is often not limited to recalling a fixed text or to a script rigorously formulated by political leaders to consolidate their positions of power. Commemoration always inevitably overlaps with political conflicts, but in any case, commemoration cannot be reduced to the direct operation of power relations.
The history of the development of public commemorative ceremonies presents at least three stages. The first stage we have discussed is the construction of memorial forms. However, there are two notable stages in the life cycle of the monument. The second stage is the taking root of ritual behavior in the calendar, and the dailyization of this behavior. The third stage is the transformation or disappearance of active monuments.
An example might illustrate this trajectory. 1 July 1916 was not a national holiday in The United Kingdom, but it marked the beginning of the British offensive on the Somme, an offensive that symbolized the terrible nature of the industrialized war. On that day, the total number of casualties of the British army reached the highest in history, and it was also on that day that a volunteer army and the social groups behind it fully understood the horrors of the war of the 20th century. On this day, without the legal authorization of the state, people flocked to the battlefield of the Somme to commemorate the day.
Its rituals are subject to local factors. Some men and women from Northumberland placed their bagpipes in a huge crater to commemorate the start of the Battle of the Somme and to ensure that the crater was not ploughed and forgotten. There are also some Northumberlandshire people who travel to the surviving trench system around Beaumont Hamel, where their ancestors were killed on 1 July 1916. There is also a bronze statue of a North American reindeer on the battlefield, linking the place to the landscape of Newfoundland, then a colony of the British Empire, where people once formed a volunteer army to serve the British king and the country. 11 November is an official holiday in France, but not in the UK. The legislature codified acts that originated at the local level and were promoted by the latter.
After 1939, the memorial to the victims of World War I was scheduled for the Sunday immediately following November 11. Most notably, the church became a place for commemorations. The rituals of the Protestant church domesticated war remembrance while also weakening its appeal. As late as 2006, there was a movement dedicated to restoring war remembrance to its original appearance, regardless of which day of November happened to fall.
Jewish Museum, Berlin
Public commemoration flourished within the orbit of civil society, which of course was not the case under dictatorships. In Stalinist Russia, civil society was shattered to the point where it was impossible to hold commemorations independent of the Party and the government (see Merridale). But in other countries, local groups work, as do families. When the commemorative ritual is embedded in the rhythm of community life, especially family life, it can survive. When public commemoration is located where the history of the nation and the history of the family overlaps, it can endure. Many people who take the time to participate in commemorative ceremonies mostly remember the family members touched by these grand events. Because of this, people who were born long after the outbreak of war or revolution will also commemorate these events as an indispensable part of their lives, such as children born after the First World War, and after 70 or 80 years, they will tell their grandchildren the stories of their family education when they were young. The transmission of children's memories between two or three generations gives family stories a certain power, which, when the right time comes, translates into action – commemorative actions.
Sometimes the family itself becomes a field of memory. The famous German sculptor and artist Kthe Kollwitz kept the room of his dead son as a shrine because in 1914 he volunteered for the war. Paris has a public housing project in a working-class neighborhood, and the door of each apartment is marked with the name of a soldier who died in the world war. It is also their home, a metaphorical home, a place for those who have been deprived of opportunities and have no chance to live and die like survivors.
The family transmission framework of historical narratives is an indispensable part of public commemoration, and it also allows us to understand why some forms of commemoration change or simply disappear. When the link between family life and public commemoration is broken, the powerful pillars of this form of remembrance are sucked away. This commemorative form then quickly shrinks and dies out. The reinforcement of publicity may help keep memorial services and memorial practices alive. But when events detach themselves from the multitude of small-scale social units that breathe life into them in the first place, they become hollow.
At the same time, memorial sites and memorial practices can be reactivated or appropriated. Places of remembrance for this purpose may also be used for another purpose. But most of the time, the field of memory will go through its own life cycle, and like those of us who are still alive, it will one day disappear.
This natural process of disintegration put an end to the field of memory and public commemoration. This is exactly the case, because they arose to meet the needs of specific groups, that is, to associate their own lives with silent historical events. When this need subsides, the threads that sustain this social behavior disappear. Collective memory dissipates, the field of memory disintegrates, or becomes a pure landscape. Let's look at two such examples. For decades, the Dublin National War Memorial, designed by Sir Edwin Lecchins, has been overgrown with weeds. No one knows what that is, and it's no accident. 100,000 Irish have given their lives for the King and the Nation of Britain, a problem that is difficult to place in Irish history after 1918.
But as sectarian violence faded in the last decades of the 20th century, weeds were cut off and memorials reappeared as if they had appeared out of thin air. Admittedly, the field of memory is gone, but when people once again decide to mark the moment they commemorate, they can be recalled. There are also times when the resurrection of the field of memory becomes more difficult. For years, I've been asking my students in Cambridge what they saw at the first intersection from the train station to town. Most people's answers are nothing. What they didn't see was the town's war memorial, the image of a triumphant soldier striding home, at the first traffic light that entered the town. They didn't see the monument because it meant nothing to them, just white noise on the stones. For those who see it, someone needs to point it out and someone to organize the relevant commemorations. Without these efforts, the field of memory would simply remain there and disappear out of thin air.
At this point, we reach the don Quixote ending. Public commemoration is both irresistible and unsustainable. The construction of memory fields is a universal social act, but these places are in flux like the people who created and maintained them. From time to time, people come to certain places, gather in the field of certain memories, seek meaning from the grand events of the past, and try to connect them with their own smaller networks of social life. This union is destined to disintegrate, to be replaced by other forms, other needs, and other histories. In this regard, the life trajectory of the field of memory, that is, creation, institutionalization and disintegration, comes to an end.
Introduction Proofreading | Zhao Lin
Source: Beijing News