Memories of wars and war crimes Alexandra Oeser

1
Memories of wars and war crimesAlexandra Oeser

• Introduction
• What is memory?

2
What is memory?

• Before we beginn some definitions
• Linguistic problems English, French, German
• Joel Candau métamémoire, protomémoire, mémoire
  de haut niveau

3
Structure of the introduction

• Halbwachs memory as an object of social science
• History and memory from opposition to
  interaction
• Sociology and memory from politics of memory to
  forms of reappropriations
• The object of this study war and war crimes

4
Psychological definitions of memory

• Heriette Bloch, Roland Chemama, Alain Gallo,
  Pierre Leconte, Jean Francois Le Ny, Jacques
  Postel, Serge Moscovici, Maurice Reuchlin et
  Eliane Vurpillot (dir.) Grand dictionnaire de la
  psychologie, Larousse, 1991, nouvelle édition
  1994
• Memory
• natural or artificial systematic capacity to
  encode and treat information, to stock it in an
  appropriate format, to recuperate and use it.

5
Memory as necessity for social relations

• All human action is linked to the past, and thus
  to memory.
• All knowledge, our capacity to communicate, our
  social relations, our individuality, our capacity
  to act or to operate are based on the cumulative
  effects of memory.

6
Oblivion as part of memory

• Memory includes forgetting
• The two are not contraries but work together
  there is no memory without oblivion
• Without the capacity to forget, we are incapable
  to remember, and thus to lead a social life

7
The computer as the modern methaphor of memory

• a system that receives information from the
  exterior world,
• treats it
• stocks it
• and, according to specific needs, uses it.

8
H. Ebbinghaus, Über das Gedächtnis, 1885

• Experimental psychology on memory
• Scientific model
• Quantitative approach
• Works on learning and remembering (numbers, words
  and phrases without meaning etc.)
• Defines memory as stocking of specific
  characteristics
• Worked on different mnesic effects influencing
  learning processes
• fatigue,
• the moment of the day,
• the length of lists presented to the subject

9
F.C. Bartlett, Remembering, 1932

• Critic of Ebbinghaus
• Definition of memory as handling knowledge (and
  not stocking it) in order to use it
• Shows that subjects remember information by using
  historic schemes which are compatible with their
  culture.
• Explains distortions of memory

10
Opposition stocking ? handling information
Tulving

• Episodic memory
• registers biographic informations
• is subject to
• Oblivion
• Subjectivity
• Context

• Semantic memory
• accumulates implicit knowledge according to
  experience
• orients and organises the information received
  (by episodic memory)
• is NOT subject to oblivion, but rather to
  defaults of accessibility (ex. language).

11
Problems of translation language as a useful
tool to think definitions

• English memory
• French mémoire et souvenir
• German Erinnerung und Gedächtnis

12
Memory

• German
• Gedächtnis describes a mental capacity to stock
  information.
• Erinnerung describes the active process of
  recalling, the functioning and calling to life
  the information stocked in the Gedächtnis.

• French
• Mémoire describes both  the capacity to stock
  and the process of recalling the past
• Se rappeler/ se souvenir describes only the
  process of recalling the past

13
English Memory
Allemand Erinnerung Le processus de rappel
conscient du passé
Français mémoire Capacité et processus de rappel
du passé
 
 
Français Se rappeler (english remember)
Processus de rappel des souvenirs, conscient ou
inconscient
Français Souvenirs individuels (Contenu)
Allemand Gedächtnis Capacité mentale de
rappeler
14
Joel Candau, Mémoire et identité, Paris, PUF, 1998

• Proto-mémoire implicit, low level memory
• all memories which act on the subject without
  his/her knowledge.
• Inherited form of knowledge  which is never
  detached of the body  including
• Habitual memory (Bergson),
• Incorporated social memory (Connterton)
• Habitus (Bourdieu).
• Méta-mémoire  voluntary, reflective memory
• designs an explicit construction of individual
  identity
• representation the individual has of its own
  memory
• conscience he has of what he says about it

15
I Maurice Halbwachs, memory as an object of
social sciences

• Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire, Paris, Albin
  Michel 1925/1994.
• La mémoire collective, (Edition critique établie
  par Gérard Namer), Paris, Albin Michel,
  1950/1994.
• La topographie légendaire des Evangiles, Paris,
  PUF 1941/1971.

16
Halbwachs

• Individual memory
• Autobiographic limited in space and time to the
  life of the individual
• What we have seen, felt, thought
• Memory of others reinforce individual memory, but
  are NOT its only source
• Represents past in a dense, continuous way
• Collective memory
• Represents events (national, world...)
• Only source memory of others (witness, press)
•  Borrowed  memory
• Larger than individual memory, represents past in
  a more schematic and resumed way
• Historical memory
• Written, fixed on paper

17
Individual and collective memory interact

•  Les groupes dont je fais partie aux diverses
  époques ne sont pas les mêmes. Or, cest de leur
  point de vue que je considère le passé. Il faut
  donc, bien quà mesure que je suis plus engagé
  dans ces groupes et que je participe plus
  étroitement á leur mémoire mes souvenirs se
  renouvellent et se complètent. 
• Maurice Halbwachs, La mémoire collective, Paris,
  Albin Michel, 1997, p. 123.

18
Two conditions needed for interaction to work

• ) 1) Individual memories are not entirely fixed
  before entry into a group
• 2) Collective memory of the group has some link
  with the individual experiences

19
Collective memory and historical memory according
to Halbwachs

• Collective memory
• alive, shared, communicated, lived.
• A living frame of thought
• Seen from inside a group
• As many collective memories as there are groups
• Everyone participates
• Historical memory or history
• written, fixed on paper, read
• Exterior, outside any group, objective,
  independent
• Institutionalised, taught in schools
• Only one history
• Exists when there is no more groups to remember
• Reserved for specialists (professionals)

20
Some problems with Halbwachs theory

• What about societies that do not have a written
  culture? Do they have no history?
• Debate between anthropologists and historians.
• Historians are human beings, they are part of
  society, thus have a point of view, are inscribed
  in the present.
• What about historiography? Evolution of history?

21
II History and memory

• From opposition to interaction

22
Pierre Nora (dir.), Les lieux de mémoire, 7 vol.,
Paris, Gallimard, 1981-1983

• Memory
• Emotional, magic, sacred
• Relative, partial
• ?basis of identity, based on experience

• History
• Intellectual, analytical, critical
• Abstract, universal
• ?basis of knowledge, based on professional work

23
Problems with Noras distinction

• Used to legitimise certain works and delegitimise
  others
• History is supposed to be outside society,
  impartial, the historian is considered to be
  objective and neutral.
• Does not take into account two fundamental
  questions, which make the distinction
  problematic
• How does memory influence history?
• And how does the writing of history influence
  memories?

24
Interpenetration of history and memory

•  Les historiens produisent des versions plus
  ou moins autorisées du passé et il leur arrive de
  le faire pour dautres destinataires que leurs
  collègues. Ils font circuler des
  représentations, des argumentaires (explicites ou
  non), un répertoire de signes et de formes qui, à
  travers les apprentissages scolaires, ont été
  profondément incorporés dans la culture commune
  depuis le XIXe siècle 
• (François Hartog et Jacques Revel, Les usages
  politiques du passé, Paris, Editions de lécole
  des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2001, p.
  16)

25
Professional fields and writing of the past

• History as a profession
• Professional rules of the game
• Changing spaces journalism and education
• Influence on writing habits of historians
  intervening in other fields
• Influence of writing habits of historians as
  professionals of history

26
Political uses of historians prose

• Pierre Nora as an example
• Les Lieux de mémoire histoire de type
  contre-commémoratif
• Have become themselves commemorative due to
  multiple readings, especially political ones
• The political uses are particularly effective
  since they benefit from an international and
  scientific recognition of the author.
• The same project applied to different countries
  does not produce the same  commemorative
  effects  in a changing political context.

27
History and memory a power-relationship
28
Krzysztof Pomian  De lhistoire, partie de la
mémoire, à la mémoire, objet dhistoire , Revue
de métaphysique et de morale, n 1, 1998, p.
63-110.

• XVth century A new occidental way of writing
  history
• Studying traces, documents (invention of the
  archive)
• Mediate knowledge through documents
• Separation between history (science) ?
• literature (poetry, art) memory (immediate
  knowledge)
• Foundation of history as a university discipline
• Inversion of relationship between memory and
  history
•  Cest le temps même de la supériorité de la
  mémoire sur lhistoire qui se termine, avec celui
  de la supériorité de loral sur lécrit  (p.
  321)
• Suspicion towards all narrative sources,
  particularly those of participants and witnesses,
  who impose their point of view and judgements.

29
Jacques Revel,  Ressources narratives et
connaissance historique , Enquête n1, 1995, p.
43-70.

• Threefold (but disappointed) hope of history as
  a science during 19th and 20th century
• 1) Render the past in its totality or globality
• 2) Recount it in an absolutely descriptive (and
  not interpretative) manner
• 3) Occupy a neutral and objective position.
• ?This threefold deception has, from the 1970s
  onwards, accompanied the return of a more modest
  way of writing history and a revision of its
  ambitions.
• (Disponible en ligne  http//enquete.revues.org/d
  ocument262.html).

30
1970s new relation of history and memory

• Discovery of new (oral) sources
• Creation of oral history, Alltagsgeschichte,
  micro-history
• Media revolution voices of those absent from
  official (written) documents (women, workers,
  peasants etc.)
• The notion of the archive is enlarged
• Memory can become an  object of history , thus
  proposing a new articulation of the two domains.

31
The definition of history as a fight for
legitimacy

• Different notions of what is authentic, true,
  the past or history
• David William Cohen Example of the Budweiser
  Beer commercial, US, 1985
• Dilemmas of communicating the past and claims for
  authenticity

32
David William Cohen, Further thoughts on the
production of history, 1994, p. 302

• History production masks the legitimation
  practices that give authority to histories. But,
  in the evaluation of productions of history both
  outside and inside the guild, claims to authority
  and priority may be challenged and debated
  through such questions as whose history? or
  who has the right to speak?
• in Gerald Sider, Gavin Smith, Between History and
  Histories, The Making of Silences and
  Commemorations, University of Toronto Press,
  Toronto, Buffalo, London, 1994, p. 300-310.

33
Gerald Sider, Gavin Smith Between History and
Histories, The Making of Silences and
Commemorations, University of Toronto Press,
Toronto, Buffalo, London, 1994.

•  We can neither privilege, nor deny either a
  grand narrative history or multiple specific
  histories. Yet it is not particularly useful
  simply to associate history with large systems
  and large processes and histories with the
  specific and the particular the ethnographic as
  it were. So by invoking plural histories we are
  suggesting that these histories emerge both
  within and against larger social processes
  against history and also, in significant
  ways, against the local and the locally known as
  well.  (p. 12)

34
III Sociology and memory

• From politics of memory to forms of
  reappropriations

35
Memory is much more than not history

•   au mieux, lusage de la notion de mémoire
  valorise, sur le mode de la nostalgie une manière
  dhistoire pré-scientifique définie par les
  contraintes de la narration, plus proche de la
  belle histoire que de la connaissance du passé,
  ou, sur le mode du devoir de mémoire,
  lensemble des souvenirs, trace inaltérable du
  vécu, que conserve une communauté. Au pis, il
  stigmatise, au nom du droit à la mémoire, la
  falsification du passé ou, au nom de la science,
  un rapport affectif au passé quexpriment les
  légendes et les mythes partagés ou supposés
  tels. 
• (Marie-Claire Lavabre, Le Fil Rouge. Sociologie
  de la mémoire communiste, Paris, Presse de la
  Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques,
  1994).

36
The lack of theoretical coherence of memory
studies

• Everything is a memory case, memory is everywhere
• Memory does not offer any true explanatory power,
  but it can be useful in articulating the
  connections between the cultural, the social, the
  political, between representation and social
  experience
• (Alon Confino, Collective memory and Cultural
  History, problems of method, American Historical
  Review, vol. 105, n5, 1997, p. 1386-1403).

37
Back to Halbwachs

• Groups supporting a collective memory
• Family Friends
• Couple Shared activities etc
• Village
• Individual memory
• Depends on position(s) the individual occupies in
  his/her group(s)
• Memories of individuals of a group are
  articulated
•  Chaque individu est un point de vue sur la
  mémoire collective, et ce point de vue change,
  selon la place que jy occupe, et cette place
  elle-même change suivant les relations que
  jentretiens avec dautres milieux  (Halbwachs,
  1950  94-95)

38
Memories at the crossroads of social groups

• Every individual belongs to several groups
• Changing of an ever more complexe society at the
  basis of changing of memories.
• Social frames of memories
• families
• migration
• redefinition of masculine and feminine roles and
  gender relations
• urban contexts
• class and race relations
• political groups and associations
• nations

39
Roger Bastide, Memoire collective et sociologie
du Bricolage

•   lindividu nest pas seulement lieu de
  rencontre de groupes, le groupe est aussi lieu
  déchanges entre personnes. Chacun est doué
  dactivité, comme le filet nerveux de Bergson,
  recevant dautrui des stimuli pour les lui rendre
  en réponses, ce qui fait que ces activités
  forment un réseau de complémentarité. Au point
  même que cette communication , quand elle
  existe, nest jamais quune communication
  structurée (avec ses leaders, ses victimes, ses
  rebelles) 
• (Roger Bastide,  Mémoire collective et
  sociologie du bricolage , Lannée sociologique,
  n21, 1970, p. 65-108, ici p. 91)

40
III.1. Politics of memory
41
Politics of memory

• Construction of memory by specific groups
• Organisations
• Institutions
• Political Parties
• Role of entrepreneurs de mémoire within these
  groups
• Fighting for legitimate definition of the past
• Concurrence each other
• Utility of studying a party (M-C. Lavabre)
  possibility to observe interaction between
  politics of memory of an elite and
  appropriations of the base

42
Expressions of politics of memory

• Political discourses
• Museums
• Monuments
• School programs, school books
• Cultural politics
• Films, music, art
• Street names
• Press, Media
• Etc. etc. ...

43
Henry Rousso vectors of memoryLe syndrome de
Vichy, de 1944 à nos jours, Paris, Seuil,1987,
chap. 6

• Official vectors
• Justice
• Commemorations
• Monuments
• Punctual or regular Celebrations
• And we should add
• (Official discourses)
• Associative vectors
• Deported
• Resistant fighters
• Military

• Cultural vectors
• Literature
• Cinema
• Television
• And we should add
• (Music)
• (Theatre)
• (Art)
• Scientific vectors
• History books

44
Some examples for studies of politics of
memory, memory from above

• On France
• Henry Rousso, Le syndrome de Vichy, De 1944 à nos
  jours. Paris, Seuil 1987.
• Robert Gildea, The Past in French History,
  London, New Haven, Yale University Press,1994.
• On the US
• Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life,
  Boston, New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999.
  
• Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry.
  Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish
  Suffering, London, Verso, 2000.  
• On Germany
• Wulf Kansteiner, In pursuit of German memory.
  History, Television and Politics after Auschwitz,
  Athens, Ohio University Press, 2006.
• Jeffery Herf, Divided Memory. The nazi past in
  the two Germanys, Cambridge, London, Harvard
  University Press, 1997.  

45
III.2. Reappropriations of memory
46
Definition of Reappropriations of memory

• Social representations of the past
• According to
• Social background
• Gender
• Class
• Etc.
• Social trajectory
• Context of interaction

47
Reappropriations of memory can be

• Contradictory, complex, sometimes paradoxical
• Never those predicted by the institutions (even
  in totalitarian context)
• Changing according to social context (frame)

48
Aneignung - Reappropriation

•  in the processes of perception and oblivion, of
  articulation and silence, humans do not only
  follow codes of discourses and representations
  they find already in place. Rather, they use
  images, words, grammar and recompose them at each
  new use. In practice, they transform realities of
  things and circumstances which seem apparently
  fixed. at the same time, they vary and
  rewrite manners of perceiving the world and
  history in their heads. 
• (Alf Lüdtke,  Geschichte und Eigensinn , in
  Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt (Hg), Alltagskultur,
  Subjektivität und Geschichte. Zur Theorie und
  Praxis von Alltagsgeschichte, Münster,
  Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1994, p. 139-153, ici p.
  146)

49
Three (four) levels of Reappropriation

• Perception
• Interpretation
• Reappropriation
• (Incorporation/Habitus)

50
Eigen-Sinn, Alf Lüdtke

• The Eigen-Sinn is at the same time a faculty to
  act and a process of appropriation of the social
  space and its hierarchic relations (or
  structures). It is a specific form of social
  exchange, practiced not against, but with others.
  Developed in reference to Max Weber, it
  designates not an intimate space, but a way to
  act within a social space, and also the way in
  which the social is fixed within the intimate.
• (In French Alf Lüdtke,  Ouvriers, Eigensinn et
  politique dans lAllemagne du XXe siècle , Actes
  de la recherche en sciences sociales, 1996,
  n113, p. 91-101 and ibid.  La domination au
  quotidien. Sens de soi et individualité des
  travailleurs en Allemagne avant et après 1933 ,
  Politix, vol. 4, n13, 1991, p. 68-78. ).

51
Eigen-Sinn

• Critic of Marx and a class consciousness of
  workers
• Escaping the binary solution of revolte or
  obedience, pity or populist interpretations
• The concept of Eigen-Sinn is ambiguous,
  describing the paradoxical and parallel existence
  of a resistance AND a distance to resistance,
   being oneself  and  being with others , but
  also a happy devotion (Hingabe) without
  calculation of the consequences, which is at the
  same time calculated in order to reconstruct
  ones integrity. The Eigen-Sinn is thus, for
  Lüdtke, an example of the simultaneity of the
  anachronistic (Gleichzeitigkeit des
  Ungleichzeitigen), a notion which has been
  borrowed of the philosopher Ernst Bloch (1979)
  and used to describe the coexistence of modernity
  and tradition in workers mentalities of the
  1920s.

52
IV The object of this course

• Why study memories of war and war crimes?

53
Defining war crimes

• The Geneva convention (1864-1949)
• Treatment of the wounded , sick (later also
  shipwrecked) of the armed forces (1864, 1906)
• Treatment of prisoners of war (1929)
• Protection of civilian persons in time of war
  (1949, based on parts of the Hague convention IV)
• The Hague conventions (1899-1907)
• Pacific settlement of international Disputes
• Laws and customs of war
• On the use of certains weapons and conduct of war
• In Science Politics today, war-crime is a
  notion applicated to organised state violence,
  genocide or massacres.

54
Defining war crimes

• The Hague conventions (1899-1907)
• Pacific settlement of international Disputes
• Laws and customs of war
• On the use of certains weapons and conduct of war
• ?In Science Politics today, war-crime is a
  notion applicated to organised state violence,
  genocide or massacres.

55
Defining crimes against humanityOnline
encyclopedia of mass violence, www.massviolence.or
g

• First use 1915 by Allies (GB, F, Russia) to
  condemn a foreign government the Ottoman Empire
  for the Armenian genocide
• Def murder, extermination, enslavement,
  deportation, and any other inhuman act commited
  against any civilian populations, before or
  during the war, or prosecutions on political,
  racial or religious grounds ... weather or not
  in violation of the domestic law of the country
  where perpetrated
• Art. 6 of Nuremberg charter,London, August 1945.
  Instauration of the international military
  tribunal of Nuremberg

56
Memory of war and war crimes as politics of
reconciliation

• 2nd world war and defeat of Germany
• Nuremberg trial
• Creation of international justice system
• TPIY International tribunal of justice for
  ex-Yougoslavia
• TPIR International tribunal of justice for Rwanda
• ? 1st July 2002 International court of justice
• Politics of reconciliation

57
Politics of reconciliation

• After the trials, amnesty
• Example of the RFA after 1949
• Example of France after 1962
• Examples of South Africa, Chili, Urugay and
  Argentina in the 1980s and 1990s

58
France Amnesties for the actors of the Algerian
war

• 1958 Amnesty project for  violences excercées à
  loccasion du maintien de lordre 
• Accords dEvian (18 March 1962)
•  nul ne pouvait être inculpé, recherché,
  poursuivi, condamné ni faire lobjet de décision
  pénale, de sanction disciplinaire ou de
  discrimination quelconque  pour des  faits
  commis dans le cadre des opérations de maintien
  de lordre dirigée contre linsurrection
  algérienne 
• Liberation of politcal prisoners (both sides)
• Décembre 1962 Amnesty for acts committed  en
  réplique à linsurrection 
• 17 Juin 1966 Amnesty for actes dinsoumission
  et désertion 
• 31 Juillet 1968 Amnesty for acts of
   subversion  (OAS)
• 3 décembre 1982 Amnesty for putsch (OAS)

59
Politics of memory or justice?

• Financial help for victims Politics of
  restitution
• Political and/or symbolic acts
• ? Politics of memory

60
Willy Brand, 1970, Warsaw In front of the
monument in honour of the jewish ghetto
61
The paradox of memories of war and war crimes

• Memories of war seem to replace (or coexist with)
  traditional patriotic references
• How do politicians create national cohesion,
  patriotic feelings and belonging by referring to
  horrors committed in the past?
• Memories of war are particularly conflictual
• Reason for their political importance
  reconciliation
• Reason for their presence on the media-Scene
• Reason for the gap between public and private
  memory

62
Structure of lectures

• Part one Institutional frames of memory
• Actors of the political field I defining
  politics of memory
• Actors of the political field II Implementing
  politics of memory
• Actors of the private sphere
• Part two Forms of reappropriation and social
  framing
• Gender and memory
• Class and memory
• Migration and memory
• Memory and social interaction
• Last session DST