Collective Memory and Cultural Identity

Collective Memory and Cultural IdentityJan Assmann and John Czaplicka
New German Critique
No. 65, Cultural History/Cultural Studies (Spring - Summer, 1995) (pp. 125-133)

Once we removed ourselves from the area of everyday communication and enter into the area of objectivised culture, almost everything changes. The transition is so fundamental that one must ask whether the metaphor of memory remains in any way applicable.  P.128

cultural memory is characterized by its distance from the everyday. P129

our theory of cultural memory attemps to relate all three poles —memory (the contemporized past), culture, and the group (society) — to each other. P129

it’s capacity to reconstruct. No memory can preserve the past. What remins is only that ‘which society in each era can reconstuct within its contemporary frame of reference’

the concept of cultural memory comprises that body of reusable texts, images, and rituals specific to each society in each epoch, whose ‘cultivation’ serves to stabilize and convey that society’s self image. P132

through its cultural heritage a society becomes visible to itself and to others. Which past becomes evident in that heritage and which values emerge in its identicatory appropration tells us much about the constitution and tendencies of a society

P133