Witnessing the Past in a Post-traumatic Age: Cultural Memory and Monuments to Trauma after WWII Since the 1980s, there has been a resurgence of interest in the scholarship of cultural memory, primarily motivated by the remembrance of the Holocaust in Germany and Austria. The idea of cultural memory, or Gedächtniskultur in the original German, is the intersection between history and cultural identity. Cultural memory is structured around collective narratives of victimhood and genocide in our current “posttraumatic age.”1 Both World Wars and the Holocaust have become prevalent among historians of cultural memory in European nations. As with any cultural movement, collective memory is not created in a vacuum, but is “created, established, communicated, continued, reconstructed, and appropriated” throughout time.2 Memory on the cultural or national scale is cultivated in hegemonic narratives, artwork, monuments, and museums, to name a few. It is enacted through public representations of loss or victory. As a cultural construction, the idea of public remembrance becomes subject to the following questions: what is important or unimportant? How is the important preserved against forgetting? Decades removed from the Second World War, the emotional dissonance created by such widespread violence cannot be ignored: we live in “the shadow of a past that continues to affect the present in many different ways and haunts those born after it.”3 As we cope with this trauma, cultural memory becomes an institution, anchored in monuments and places that promote remembrance or forgetting. Place-based memory can be demonstrated in a variety of ways, most popularly in public monuments and museums. Several tensions emerge from cultural memory: opposing memories of the time, identity politics, consequences of these interactions at the national and international levels, and the “‘languages’ and cultures through which disputes about memory and identity” occur.4 Memory involves every level of culture and nationhood.
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How do we witness the past? Global injury inflicted during the Second World War and the Holocaust has left physical places marked with both visible and invisible scars. People and places were obliterated, some never recovered. What is required now is “a superhuman effort to preserve the gaps and wounds that are left by destruction.”5 Mnemonic devices such as museums and memorials to the Holocaust and the Second World War have become “public venues for negotiating interpretations of the past,”6 places in which a narrative is formed around the events of history. Memorial places often elicit conflicting emotions by intensifying the past; they are very public ways of breaking a cultural silence and replacing it with cultural memory. Monuments or memorials are essential forms of cultural memory because they “not only proclaim and embody history, [they have] repeatedly become the scene of history, again in traumatic and triumphal moments.”7 Remembering the Holocaust in Vienna Cultural memory is constructed around the narrative that is culturally and politically perpetuated. Vienna provides an interesting case study for researchers of cultural memory because of its annexation by Nazi Germany (Anschluss). Until the last thirty years, the
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