Memory, Trauma, and Identity Across Four Historical Contexts

Overview of the Four Articles

The four articles under consideration all relate human memory — whether individual or collective — to historical trauma. The historical traumas discussed, however, fall across a broad spectrum. Welzer's article "Re-Narrations" looks at Germany's Nazi past from the perspective of succeeding generations of Germans, from those who had direct involvement with the Nazi period to successive generations born after 1945. Allan's article "The Politics of Witness" looks at a community of Palestinian refugees displaced from their village in 1948 after the establishment of the state of Israel and the clearing of existing Palestinian populations from the territory. Cenarro's article "Memory Beyond the Public Sphere" looks at Spain after the fall of Franco's Fascist government and the way in which Franco maintained his hold on the country by suppressing discussion or commemoration of the atrocities that had occurred during the Spanish Civil War.

In perhaps the most complicated of the historical situations under discussion, Neyzi's article "Remembering to Forget" examines the situation of the Sabbataeans in present-day Turkey — a population that dates from the Messianic Jewish movement of Sabbatai Sevi in the 17th-century Ottoman Empire. The particular complication here is that Sabbatai himself converted to Islam at the behest of the Ottoman Sultan and would eventually die in exile in Albania — but his large following remained in Turkey, occupying a peculiar social niche as Jewish converts to Islam who nevertheless maintained some Jewish practices and a distinct group identity (forbidding intermarriage with Muslim Turks, for example). If Sabbatai's Messianic leadership proved traumatic in one way for his followers, Neyzi demonstrates how Kemal Atatürk's secularization campaign would prove traumatic in another.

Collective Memory and the Distortion of the Past

In all of these cases, several common themes stand out. One is the difficulty faced by survivors of a traumatic historical event in connecting to or establishing a group identity — both with other members of the traumatized group and within the state in which they find themselves, which is often in a position of wishing to deny or erase the memories of what has occurred. The post-Nazi generations studied by Welzer find themselves in a position where they must reckon with actions that, in retrospect, might implicate them in a broader social guilt. Welzer discovers, however, that the transmission of such family stories across generations invariably paints a rosier picture of the past as time goes on. Grandparents' guilt is minimized by the grandchildren of those who actively colluded with the Nazi regime, and Welzer concludes that "every present, every generation, every epoch creates the past that has, in functional terms, the highest value in terms of their focusing on the future" (Welzer 15). In other words, collective memory seems to serve a functional purpose — and when accurate memory cannot serve that purpose, those who carry it either turn inward or find ways of remaining true to what they have witnessed.

The Collapse of Social Memory and Private Ritual

Allan examines an elderly Palestinian man who has finally withdrawn from the collective memory of his lost village. Even though he lives within a refugee community of people in the same position, he has turned away from any group discussion of their shared situation, leading Allan to conclude that "it is as if the collapse of the social context of memory has precipitated the realization that return to his village is extremely unlikely: his response has been to enact remembrance through an intensely private ritual, defiantly" (Allan). This retreat from collective into private memory illustrates how, when the social framework sustaining a shared narrative disintegrates, individuals may preserve their experience through personal, even solitary, acts of remembrance rather than communal testimony.