The Temporal Articulations of Memory and of History: An Interpretation of Collective Memory in Debate with the Work of Reinhart Koselleck

In his later word, notably in the posthumously published essays in his book Vom Sinn und Unsinn der Geschichte (On the Sense and Non-Sense of History, 2010), the historian Reinhart Koselleck firmly rejected the concept of “collective memory.” Memory, as he stated, belongs to individuals and not to collectivities. This article, while recognizing the originary status of personal memory and the fact that groups as such do not remember, no more than they have an autonomous, substantial existence, interprets the nebulous concept of collective memory that Koselleck so harshly criticized. Through close examination of the grounds of Koselleck’s critique of this concept, and of the theory of historical time he elaborated, I aim to delineate, through interpretation of the symbol and of the public scope of symbolic interaction, the specific domain in which collective memory comes to expression. I undertake this task by referring to the work of Maurice Halbwachs who initially introduced the term and the concept of “collective memory” in his writings in the 1920s and in his posthumously published book, Collective Memory. As I note, Koselleck subjected this work to harsh criticism in his later essays, for he doubted that the concept of collective memory Halbwachs introduced was anything more than an artificial construction. The response I provide to Koselleck’s objections extrapolates from the interpretation of collective memory I present in my recently published work Collective Memory and the Historical Past (2016). According to my argument, while Halbwachs was concerned with collective memory above all as it is retained by small groups and families, a modified theory of collective memory that focuses on shared memory retained by large groups in the public sphere provides us with the key for responding to Koselleck’s critique. In the framework of my interpretation, symbols are grasped not as isolated signs, but in the broadest sense, as ways of configuring the spatiotemporal and conceptual meaning through language, styles, and gestures that make possible the communication of experience in the public sphere. Symbols in this broad sense underlie experience and memory that lend publicly identifiable significance to political, religious, aesthetic, and other facets of our everyday world. If we apply this conception of collective memory to the work of Koselleck himself, I argue that it closely corresponds to a view of iconographical symbols, and of the changes they undergo among different generations over time, which Koselleck himself advanced in his pioneering writings on monuments and war memorials.

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