The Ciphered Transits of Collective Memory: Neo-Freudian Impressions

Jeffrey K. Olick The Ciphered Transits of Collective Memory: NeoFreudian Impressions In the group too an im pression of the past is retained in unconscious memory-traces. —Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism S i n c e b e n e d i c t a n d e r s o n f i r s t p u b l i s h e d h i s l a n d m a r k Imagined Communities in 1991, scholars have alm ost ritualistically followed Anderson in quoting the nineteenth-centuiy French philoso­ pher Ernst Renan.* According to Renan’s pithy formula, “the essence of a nation is that all its people have a great deal in common, and also th at they have forgotten a great deal.” Indeed, according to Renan, “Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for nationality.” Less com m only cited, however, is w hat follows in Renan: “historical enquiry brings to light deeds of violence w hich took place at the origin of all political formations, even of those whose consequences have been altogether beneficial. Unity is always effected by means of brutality. . .” (Renan, 1990:11). Like m uch of the social scientific literature on identity th at followed later, Renan did not particularly highlight the complexities that forgetting—or, in another vocabulary, “repressed m em ory”— of such violence m ight cause in the life of a nation. Famously, Renan social research Vol 75 : No 1 : Spring 2008 1 (1990:19) characterized national identities as “a daily plebescite” based on perceptions of common interest and celebration of past achieve­ m ents. To be sure, such a voluntarist account of identity is a salutaiy response to “essentialist” or “prim ordialist” understandings, which see collective identities as features of nature. But has it, and the work that cites it, produced an adequate account of the complex aftereffects of the violence Renan did indeed note at the core of identities? As an exam ple o f identity reforged by violence, and the complex ways in which such brutality can challenge identity, we might consider the case o f Germany in the im m ediate afterm ath of World War II. Given the enorm ity of the crimes under the Nazi regime, one m ight imagine a radical rethinking, even rejection, of German identity, or at least a skeptical reexamination of w hat in German culture m ight have led Germany astray. And to be sure, many did undertake such an examination, w ith results ranging from a more active com m itm ent to a collective European identity to a more thorough recognition of German history’s “dialectical” qualities, in which precisely w hat produced the best from Germany also produced the worst (the most famous example is perhaps Thomas M ann’s essay [Mann, 1963] on “The Two Germanys”). More common, however, was a vigorous defense of German iden­ tity, claiming not that National Socialism was an expression of some­ thing fundam ental in German society, but that it was a distortion of w hat was fundamental. Hence Friedrich Meinecke (1950), doyen of the German historians, argued in 1946 for a return to the German culture represented by Beethoven and Schiller as the road to German recovery. Many argued, furtherm ore, th at German history was one of constant struggle between German culture (pure and high) and the German state (corrupt and low), and that w hat the German state perpetrated under National Socialism thus argued clearly for a renewed flight from power into culture (this was, for example, the solution pursued by the philoso­ pher KarlJaspers, who finally abandoned political Germany for cultural Germany by exiling him self to Switzerland—though only in 1948, in response to w hat he saw as inadequate acknowledgement of Germany’s crimes by his contem poraries [Olick, 2005: 317-319]). 2 social research Even m ore surprising, though perhaps only if one lacks an adequate theoretical apparatus for appreciating the com plexities brutality produces for identities, is the equation...