The term ‘culture of remembrance’ appears to be a neologism that has only come into use in the wake of the intensification of research into the science of memory since the 1990s. Even if one might, in a sense, regard medieval monasticism and its complex, systematised form of commemorating the deceased as the archetype of ‘culture of remembrance’ in substance^[1] and, with its intellectual forefathers Friedrich Nietzsche, Aby Warburg and Maurice Halbwachs, the concept has in fact been in the making for some time,^[2] the term itself has only come into use recently. It remains somewhat undefined, as can be seen from the varying contexts in which it is used. Hockerts believes the term is capable of serving merely ‘as a loose umbrella term for the entirety of the non-specifically scholarly use of history in the public sphere’.^[3] Even its use in the singular or plural does not follow any fixed pattern and is by no means always justified by its content.

A distinction between ‘culture(s) of remembrance’ and‘place(s) ofremembrance’ is not always maintained in research, particularly as the cultural studies basis is the same in both cases: The point is that, alongside the individual’s own memory, there also exists a ‘collective memory’ (mémoire collective in the sense used by Halbwachs, 1925), which is socially and culturally determined and spans generations. The greater explanatory potential of ‘culture(s) of remembrance’ compared with ‘place(s) of remembrance’ relates, on the one hand, to the scale of the entities involved (states, nations, religious communities) and, on the other, to the connection between interpretative authority and the development of specific techniques of remembrance.^[4] This also identifies a central field of political action, which extends as far as a distinct ‘politics of the past’^[5] .

Although the culture and history of Eastern Europe did not play any discernible role in the genesis of the term, they nevertheless provide a solid foundation for the term’s further development, in that the shaping of cultures of remembrance in this region—due to multi-ethnic and multi-confessional contexts—has been influenced by ‘political changes’ and ‘state-led historical policy’^[6] was in many ways far more complex and intense than elsewhere.

In Erll’s definition (2008), ‘cultures of remembrance’ are described as the ‘historically and culturally variable manifestations of collective memory’. The use of the plural form also suggests that “we are never, not even in the most homogeneous cultures, dealing with just a single community of remembrance”. The emphasis on ‘remembrance’ (rather than ‘memory’), in turn, indicates that ‘the academic construct of “collective memory” only becomes actually observable and analysable from a cultural studies perspective when it is actualised through individual acts of collective remembrance’.^[7]

Despite the clarity of this definition, problems arise when applying the term: on the one hand, the active aspect of remembrance does not seem to fit entirely with the metaphor of ‘storage (memory)’ frequently used in (cultural studies) memory research. Here, one should take seriously the critique of the ‘storage’ model of memory from a sociological perspective put forward by Hejl in 1991, which contrasts the passive and static image of storage with an active category of process. This leads to the fundamental assumption—one that is also well substantiated in media studies—that societies remember through events, which in turn refer to specific pre-existing contexts. This process is not (entirely) controllable, which is why social memory and the ‘culture of memory’ arising from it are best described as a self-organising process (Hejl speaks of ‘heterarchical self-regulation’^[8]). On the other hand, great caution is required when defining the term, particularly with regard to the use of the concept of culture: a semiotically grounded definition, for example, which defines culture as ‘the non-hereditarily transmitted memory of a human collective’^[9] (Lotman, Uspensky), runs the risk of resulting in a pleonasm when the term is coupled with ‘memory’.

On the positive side, there is a threefold insight associated with the plural term ‘cultures of remembrance’: firstly, the ability to capture the multitude of acts of remembrance within societies or large groups; secondly, to be able to assign a place to the discipline of history itself (‘as part of a specific subculture of memory’); and thirdly, to be able to designate the actually existing communities or milieus of memory as concrete social groups.^[10] The recurrence, in historical work, of the need to trace the connection between (collective) memory and the individual draws attention to the malleability, functionality and hybridity of memory processes in general and cultures of memory in particular. This very mutability reveals the fundamental communicative nature of ‘memory’, in which individual and social levels interact. At both levels, we are dealing with selective and reconstructive processes,^[11] which compels every new piece of research to formulate its own definition of the term.

At the application-oriented stage of the history of the concept, there is an above-average presence of research on Eastern Europe – though by no means limited to the academic disciplines of Slavic studies and the history of Eastern Europe. When the English scholar Aleida Assmann, in 2007, discussed the ‘long[n] shadows of the past’, she does so not least by citing the example of the ‘expulsion of Germans from Eastern European territories’.^[12] The fact that this very topic – which, not least due to government-commissioned works such as the ‘Documentation of the Expulsion of Germans from Eastern and Central Europe’ (1953–1962) – was never ‘forgotten’ in the true sense of the word, has enjoyed an astonishing renaissance in recent years; Assmann describes this as a ‘transfer of memory’ (192). This is explained by increased media attention, the potential for emotional engagement, and the impending passing of the last eyewitnesses to the actual events of ‘expulsion’. ‘Culture of remembrance’ thus comes very close to ‘politics of history’, as the subtitle of Assmann’s book suggests.

More recent case-based studies on German and Polish sites of remembrance – understood here as places dedicated to the preservation of the past, such as museums or memorials – build on this. ‘Politics of history’ is thereby linked to state action, whilst ‘culture of remembrance’ becomes a concern of civil society (Museum of the Warsaw Uprising, 2011). Apart from the differentiation of the ‘state’ parameter that still needs to be made it is becoming apparent that, whilst the culture of remembrance may be self-organised (and in this respect follows the bottom-up principle), it nevertheless can scarcely manage without opinion leaders, trendsetters and targeted initiatives by individuals or peer groups. A comparison of media-driven cultures of remembrance, such as that undertaken in the context of the debates on expulsion taking place in Germany and Poland,^[13] confirms this. Similarly, the politics of history, which appears to function unambiguously in a ‘top-down’ manner, is hardly conceivable without a connection to incentives and resonance from the population. It is possible that the terms ‘politics of history’ and ‘culture of remembrance’, understood in this way, constitute merely two facets of the same overarching ‘culture of remembrance’, thereby revealing both a particular and a universal understanding of the concept. A pragmatic solution is to understand ‘culture of remembrance’ ‘as a community’s specific way of dealing with the past’ (Hahn, Hein-Kircher, Kochanowska-Nieborak 2008, 4).

This approach is not immune to irrationalism and pretentiousness, which leads the same authors to warn against the danger of ‘reconciliation kitsch’, particularly in the case of Germany’s neighbourhood policy—which is geared towards reconciliation—towards the states harmed by the Third Reich. That this warning is justified stems from the social dimension of what is commonly referred to as ‘culture of remembrance’: The protagonists are always larger groups, nations or entire societies, and the substance of what is commemorated in current manifestations serves to forge identity (cf. ibid., 11). Even if (collective) identity is to be understood not as something homogeneous and immutable, but as a composite subject to change over time, this nevertheless reflects the particular formative power of ‘culture(s) of remembrance’ for the respective communities.

Put in radical terms, history as a whole could be written as the history of the culture(s) of remembrance of a state or a nation. Approaches to this already exist; significantly, they also stem from the context of the history of the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe: Kittel (2007) clarifies – using a rather pragmatic understanding of the term ‘culture of remembrance’, synonymous with Halbwachs’s concept of ‘collective memory’ – the ‘historical German East in the culture of remembrance of the Federal Republic’, which amounts to a close and reciprocal relationship between memory and politics. The discourse on expulsion thus remains not merely a matter for a specific, clearly defined group (the displaced persons or the officials of the relevant associations) or an abstract-intellectual debate between the various camps interpreting the events, but becomes a barometer of a state’s internal constitution. Domestic policy and (to a limited extent, primarily in relation to neighbouring states) foreign policy come to serve as a means of deriving collective memory – regardless of whether this is consciously promoted or sought to be avoided.

Yet the presence of a ‘culture of remembrance’ in current discourses and controversies is not confined to recent history – even if, given the ‘experiences of war, terror and violence’, particularly in Eastern Europe, such an intensification might seem obvious.^[14] It can also be explained by the fact that the German policy of expansion and its ‘racial’ and extermination war in Eastern Europe during the Third Reich, as well as the hegemonic interpretation of history in the socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe, have influenced the memory of events ante quem.^[15] However, it is equally legitimate to take into account periods predating the living eyewitnesses, as demonstrated by studies such as those on the German-Polish contact zone in Bromberg/Bydgoszcz and the Province of Posen at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.^[16] Overall, it is precisely the flexible nature of the term ‘culture of remembrance’ that could prove to be an advantage: by enabling, under its auspices, an examination of the collective shaping of societies that is not predetermined by specific political, religious or other entities.

The danger of using ‘places of memory’ or ‘cultures of memory’ to create new forms of identification in the sense of a (specific) ‘cultural heritage’ (heritage), rather than critically revising old ones, thereby creating new ‘places of silence’^[17] , seems to be averted when the focus is international or transnational. This is particularly beneficial to German history in Eastern Europe. As Weber (2011) argues, the aim is not to encourage a ‘standardisation of the past’ through a ‘European culture of remembrance’^[18] of whatever kind , but rather to accept the pluralism of different historical narratives and to make their comparison the subject of research. Attention to a heritage that is not uniform but shared – for example, in the areas affected by expulsion – in the sense of ‘transculturality’ (W. Welsch) – could thus be heightened, as could an appreciation of different ways of forging identity and processing grief following secular experiences of violence, as marked by the (somewhat misleading) terms ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ memory. Thus, taking the example of the German blockade of Leningrad and the memory of it, one can see how the discourse on memory is being shaped by some actors in a one-dimensional (Soviet) manner, and by others in a pluralistic (‘post-Soviet’) way.^[19]

When applied to the whole of Eastern Europe and within the context of 20th- and 21st-century contemporary history, there emerges, on the one hand, a glaring discrepancy between ‘Western European’ and ‘Eastern European’ cultures of remembrance regarding the same subjects (such as experiences of war or expulsion), which led Assmann in 2011 to speak of a ‘divided memory of Europe’. On the other hand, an internal differentiation within the recent cultures of remembrance of the ‘East’ is striking, which Troebst categorised typologically in 2005. An overarching characteristic of discourses on the politics of remembrance is that set pieces from the more distant past are repeatedly brought to the fore. Examples of this include the media-amplified remembrance of the German Order of the Middle Ages in Russia and Poland in the 20th century, the ‘erased’ memory of the German Charles University in Prague/Praha in the so-called Beneš Decrees, or the German and Polish debate surrounding a ‘Centre against Expulsions’, with its echoes of events dating back as far as the era of medieval German ‘settlement in the East’. If only because of the need for clarification arising from such and similar constructs – whether popular or specialised – one may well describe the research potential of ‘cultures of remembrance’ as particularly fruitful.

• Aleida Assmann: The Long Shadow of the Past. The Culture of Remembrance and the Politics of History. Bonn 2007 (Federal Agency for Civic Education. Publication Series 633).
• Aleida Assmann: Europe’s Divided Memory and the Concept of Dialogical Remembrance. In: Bernd Rill (ed.): National Memory in Germany and Poland. Munich 2011 (Arguments and Materials on Contemporary Issues 73), pp. 17–25.
• Hans Henning Hahn, Heidi Hein-Kircher, Anna Kochanowska-Nieborak (eds.): The Culture of Remembrance and the Kitsch of Reconciliation. Marburg 2008 (Conferences on East Central European Research 26).
• Maurice Halbwachs: *Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire*. Paris 1925 (Travaux de l’Année sociologique) [German edition: Berlin 1966].
• Lars Karl: The Politics of History and the Culture of Remembrance in the New Russia. Göttingen 2009 (Forms of Memory 40).
• Manfred Kittel: The Expulsion of the Expellees? The Historical German East in the Culture of Remembrance of the Federal Republic (1961–1982). Munich 2007 (Series of the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte).
• Museum of the Warsaw Uprising (ed.): The Culture of Remembrance in the 20th Century. Analyses of German and Polish Sites of Remembrance. Frankfurt am Main et al. 2011.
• Stefan Troebst: Post-Communist Cultures of Remembrance in Eastern Europe. An Inventory, Categorisation, Periodisation. Wrocław 2005 (Reports of the Willy Brandt Centre 7).
• Matthias Weber: Sites of Memory in East-Central Europe. Experiences of the Past and Perspectives. In: Ibid., Burkhard Olschowsky, Ivan A. Petranský, Attila Pók, Andrzej Przewoźnik † (eds.): Sites of Memory in East-Central Europe. Experiences of the Past and Perspectives. Munich 2011 (Publications of the Federal Institute for Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe 42), pp. 11–25.

[1] See Joachim Wollasch: Approaches to the Study of the Culture of Memory. Selected Essays. Edited by Mechthild Sandmann and Rudolf Schieffer. Münster 2011 (Contributions to the History of Early Monasticism and the Benedictine Order 47).

[2] Christoph Cornelißen: On the Study of Cultures of Memory in Western and Eastern Europe. Methods and Questions. In: Ibid., Roman Holec, Jiří Pešek (eds.): Dictatorship – War – Expulsion. Cultures of Remembrance in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Germany since 1945. Essen 2005 (Publications of the German-Czech and German-Slovak Historians’ Commission 13), pp. 25–44, here p. 28.

[3] Hans Günter Hockerts: Approaches to Contemporary History: First-hand Experience, Culture of Remembrance, Historical Scholarship. In: Konad H. Jarausch, Martin Sabrow (eds.): Wounded Memory. Culture of Remembrance and Contemporary History in Conflict. Frankfurt am Main 2002, pp. 39–73, here p. 41.

[4] Cf. Marcus Sandl: ‘The Historicity of Memory / The Reflexivity of the Historical. The Challenge to Historical Scholarship from Cultural Studies Research on Memory’. In: Günter Oesterle (ed.): Remembrance, Memory, Knowledge. Studies in Cultural Studies Research on Memory. Göttingen 2005 (Forms of Remembrance 26), pp. 89–119, here p. 100.

[5] For example: Norbert Frei: Politics of the Past. The Beginnings of the Federal Republic and the Nazi Past. Munich 1996.

[6] Cf. Anne Cornelia Kenneweg, Stefan Troebst: The Cult of Mary, Cyrillo-Mathodiana and Antemurale. Religious Sites of Remembrance in East-Central Europe before and after 1989. In: Journal of East Central European Research 57 (2008), pp. 287–291, here p. 287.

[7] Astrid Erll: Collective Memory and Cultures of Remembrance. In: Ansgar Nünning, Vera Nünning (eds.): Introduction to Cultural Studies. Theoretical Foundations – Approaches – Perspectives. Stuttgart 2008, pp. 156–185, here p. 176.

[8] Peter M. Hejl: How Societies Gain Experience, or: What Social Theory Can Contribute to Understanding the Problem of Memory. In: Siegfried J. Schmidt (ed.): Memory. Problems and Perspectives in Interdisciplinary Memory Research. Frankfurt am Main 1991, pp. 293–336, here p. 324.

[9] Lotman, Uspensky (1978), quoted in Astrid Erll: Collective Memory and Cultures of Remembrance. An Introduction. Weimar 2005 (2nd nd ed. 2011), p. 101.

[10] Hartmut Bergenthum: Historical Science and Cultures of Remembrance. Remarks on the Recent Theoretical Debate. In: Günter Oesterle (ed.): Memory, Remembrance, Knowledge. Studies in Cultural Studies of Memory. Göttingen 2005 (Forms of Memory 26), pp. 121–162, here pp. 127–129.

[11] Günther Lottes: Cultures of Remembrance between Psychology and Cultural Studies. In: Günter Oesterle (ed.): Remembrance, Memory, Knowledge. Studies in Cultural Studies of Memory. Göttingen 2005 (Forms of Remembrance 26), pp. 163–184, here p. 181.

[12] Assmann: *The Long Shadow*, p. 184.

[13] Maren Röger: Flight, Expulsion and Resettlement: Media Representations of Memory and Debates in Germany and Poland since 1989. Marburg 2011 (Studies in East Central European Research 23).

[14] Lars Karl, Igor J. Polianski: Introduction. In: Ibid. (eds.): The Politics of History and the Culture of Memory in the New Russia. Göttingen 2009 (Forms of Memory 40), pp. 7–20, here p. 7.

[15] Christoph Cornelißen, Roman Holec, Jiří Pešek: Political and Historical Memories in Central and East-Central Europe since 1945. In: Ibid. (eds.): Dictatorship – War – Expulsion. Cultures of Remembrance in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Germany since 1945. Essen 2005 (Publications of the German-Czech and German-Slovak Historians’ Commission 13), pp. 9–24.

[16] Cf. Stefan Dyroff: Cultures of Remembrance in the German–Polish Border Region. Bromberg and the North-East of the Province of Posen (Poznań Voivodeship) 1871–1939. Osnabrück 2007 (Individual Publications of the German Historical Institute in Warsaw 19).

[17] Heidemarie Uhl: Memory – The Construction of Collective Past in Social Space. In: Andrei Corbea-Hoişie, Alexander Rubel (eds.): ‘Czernowitz near Sadagora’. Identities and Cultural Memory in Central Europe. Iaşi, Konstanz 2006 (Jassyer Contributions to German Studies 10), pp. 15–32, here p. 17.

[18] Weber: Places of Memory, p. 25.

[19] Cf. Jörg Ganzenmüller: ‘Identity Formation and the Work of Mourning: Soviet Continuities in the Russian Memory of the Siege of Leningrad’. In: Lars Karl, Igor J. Polianski (eds.): The Politics of History and the Culture of Remembrance in the New Russia. Göttingen 2009 (Forms of Memory 40), pp. 271–285.

Thomas Wünsch: Culture of Remembrance. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2013. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32831 (accessed 7 March 2013).