Memory work is a process of engaging with the past which has both an ethical and historical dimension.

History and memory

The premise for memory work or travail de memoire is that history is not memory. We try to represent the past in the present through memory, history and the archives. As Paul Ricoeur

Paul Ricoeur

Paul Ricœur was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation...

 argued, memory alone is fallible. Historical accounts are always partial and potentially misrepresent since historians do not work with bare, uninterpreted facts. Historian

Historian

A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

s construct and use archives that contain traces of the past. However, historians and librarian

Librarian

A librarian is an information professional trained in library and information science, which is the organization and management of information services or materials for those with information needs...

s determine which traces are preserved and stored. This is an interpretive activity. Historians pose questions to which the archives responds leading them to “facts that can be asserted in singular, discrete propositions that usually include dates, places, proper names, and verbs of action or condition”. Individuals remember events and experiences some of which they share with a collective. Through mutual reconstruction and recounting collective memory is reconstructed. Individuals are born into familial discourse which already provides a backdrop of communal memories against which individual memories are shaped. A group's communal memory becomes its common knowledge which creates a social bond, a sense of belonging and identity. Professional historians attempt to corroborate, correct, or refute collective memory. Memory work then entails adding an ethical component which acknowledges the responsibility towards revisiting distorted histories thereby decreasing the risk of social exclusion and increasing the possibility of social cohesion of at-risk groups.

The concept of memory-work as distinguished from history-as-memory finds a textbook case in the Vichy Syndrome as described by Russo. His title uses medical lexicon to refer to history-memory as dependent on working consciously with unconscious memories to revise accounts of history. This calls for an expanded archive that includes the "oral and popular tradition" as well as the written traditions normally associated with the archives.

Pierre Nora on memory work

Pierre Nora

Pierre Nora

Pierre Nora is a French historian of Jewish descent. Elected to the French Academy on June 7, 2001, he is known for his work on French identity and memory. His name is associated with the study of new history...

, introduced 'lieu de mémoire' about 25 years ago, he traced the surge in memory work at the level of the nation-state to the revisiting of distorted histories of the anti-Semitic Vichy France (1940-1944) following the death of Charles de Gaulle

Charles de Gaulle

Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle was a French general and statesman who led the Free French Forces during World War II. He later founded the French Fifth Republic in 1958 and served as its first President from 1959 to 1969....

 in 1970. Structural changes resulted from the end of the peasantry and the dramatic economic slump as oil prices worldwide rose in 1974. Added to this was the intellectual collapse of Marxism precipitated in part by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was aRussian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of...

’s Gulag Archipelago which forced the French to rethink attitudes towards the past. 'Lieu de mémoire' closed down perspectives to better understand cultural memory, instead of opening up perspectives. He associated memory with place, and location.

During memory work, the process of producing an image or what we refer to as the production of the imaginary, is central. Therefore, the key in the analysis of remembered history are contradictions.

Barbara Gabriel on memory work

Barbara Gabriel provided a model for reading the complexities of memory and forgetting by situating unheimlich within the heimlich, in a Freudian 'one within the other structure'. As point of departure Gabriel examined Edgar Reitz

Edgar Reitz

Edgar Reitz is a German filmmaker and Professor of Film at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe.- Early life and education :...

's eleven-part West German television series entitled Heimat. Reitz' work was in response to a larger movement in Germany national memory work provoked in part by an American television series entitled the Holocaust followed viewed by millions. As European art in general and German art in particular resurged in the 1960s, artists like Gunther Grass and Edgar Reitz captured international attention as they grappled with issues of identity in a divided, post-Holocaust Germany. Gabriel developed the concept of an impulse towards national memory work in Germany that stemmed from a haunted subject yearning for a lost, far away, nostalgic place, a utopic homeland. "How do we confront that which we have excluded in order to be, whether it is the return of the repressed or the return of the strangers?" In other words, that which we fear as 'other' is within ourselves through our shared humanity. Repressed memories haunt all of us.

Post-colonial views

The concept of memory work is part of a sociological imagination from a post-national point of view. Expanding on Norbert Loeffler: The idea of one national history is only acceptable as a question, not as an answer.

Memory work is related to identity work often associated with displaced persons. Some of the most provocative research on memory work has been authored by the Pied-noir

Pied-noir

Pied-Noir , plural Pieds-Noirs, pronounced , is a term referring to French citizens of various origins who lived in French Algeria before independence....

, or French colonials in Algeria, who returned to France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 following the Algerian War. Examples of such thinkers include Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...

 and Hélène Cixous

Hélène Cixous

Hélène Cixous is a professor, French feminist writer, poet, playwright, philosopher, literary critic and rhetorician. She holds honorary degrees from Queen's University and the University of Alberta in Canada; University College Dublin in Ireland; the University of York and University College...

. Another major writer in this field, Julia Kristeva

Julia Kristeva

Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, sociologist, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She is now a Professor at the University Paris Diderot...

, also moved away from the country of her birth, having emigrated to France from Bulgaria when she was 24.

See also

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