Collective Remembering and Forgetting: Affective Narrative Accounts

• In Event: 526 - Regular Session. Narrative, Biography and Culture

Abstract

Research on collective memory has recently begun to expand its attention beyond questions of how people remember the past to focus on how we forget and erase the past. This paper builds on an understanding that collective forgetting is constituted alongside of and often in conjunction with collective remembering, and argues for the importance of analyzing the emotional content of narrative memory accounts to explain each form. Analyzing 63 unpublished memoirs written by German Jewish refugees who fled their homeland during the Nazi regime and resettled in the U.S. before the war’s end, I consider how two particular emotions— resentment and shame are expressed through the content of these Holocaust narratives. I use two prominent examples from these memoirs—one a commonly cited instance of remembrance, the other a notable related set of omissions to demonstrate how these two emotions help explain the narrative accounting of collective memory and forgetting, which is alternately emphasized and erased. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the generalizability of my research for collective memory and narrative accounts of disaster and catastrophe.

Author

• Judith Gerson, State University of New Jersey-Rutgers