Lecture: In Place of Healing: The Dangers of Therapeutic Models of Remembrance

  • Date: Jun 13, 2018
  • Time: 06:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Jay M. Winter
  • Location: Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin
  • Room: Large Conference Room
  • Host: Center for the History of Emotions
  • Contact: rockmann@mpib-berlin.mpg.de

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially invites all interested to attend following lecture:

Jay M. Winter, Yale University

In Place of Healing: The Dangers of Therapeutic Models of Remembrance

Remembrance does not heal. This is the central assertion of Jay Winter`s lecture. The ‘memory boom’ of the past generation has incorporated into it a semi-sacred dimension. The sacred element comes from the fact that there has been a massive decline in participation in the traditional churches since the 1960s. In museums, battlefield sites, at memorials all over the world, people by the million ask questions posed in the past in churches. They ask why do the just suffer and die; why is there evil in the world; what is sacrifice, and where is redemption? Museums and other such sites of memory are the Cathedrals of the twenty-first century.

That should make us pause for a number of reasons. One is that the sacred questions posed in semi-sacred space form part of a search for a redemptive pattern in history. The democratization of suffering in the First World War and after meant that in many parts of the European world, virtually all families have been damaged by war. Some of this damage is irreparable, but the notion that the wounds of our violent century are capable of being cauterized and ultimately healed by acts of remembrance is a widely-shared cliché. And at times, a dangerous one. Remembrance can open wounds just as well as providing balm for them.

Those who see memory as one of the arts of healing are in danger of substituting recollection for penance, and tourism for pilgrimage. What makes the spiritualization of memory so dangerous is the way politicians of all persuasions use it for their own purposes. For individuals, recalling the past can put personal nightmares to rest, or multiply them. Personal memory is a neutral activity, neither healing nor harming in and of itself.

In contrast, political memory is always about legitimation, and about a pathway to the future built by those in power. Orchestrating a semi-sacred form of remembrance is something all politicians try to do. By affirming that remembrance is a neutral activity—neither healing nor septic—we can resist this cooptation of remembrance for political purposes and the sacralization of the past it entails.

These questions form a prelude to a deeper conundrum, related to the epigenetic approach. Are memories of war heritable? If the answer is no, as he believes it is, then the generational model of the transmission of experience, itself embodied in memory regimes, is in need of critical attention.

Jay M. Winter, the Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale, and Research Professor at Monash University, is a specialist on the First World War and its impact on the 20th century. Winter is the author of Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1995) and War beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present (2017). He was a founder of the Historial de la grande guerre, a museum of the Great War, which opened in 1992, and is still a member of the board of directors of its research centre in Péronne, Somme, France. In 1997, he received an Emmy award, a Peabody award, and a Producers’ Guild of America Award as producer and chief historian of the BBC/PBS eight-hour television series, ‘The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century’, which was shown in 28 countries.

The lecture is part of the conference "Epigenetics: Innovation of Memory? Life Science Paradigms as Challenge and Opportunity for Historians", which takes place from June 13th to June 15th at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. See also the public lecture "Do Epigenetics Matter? A Historian’s Issues with Memories, Narratives and Intergenerational Transfer" by Dorothee Wierling.

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