Tony Judt

“In this chapter I want to propose some reflections on the price that was paid for this deliberate and sudden unconcern with the immediate Euro- pean past and its replacement by “Euro-cant” in its various forms.” pp. 293

“Another way of putting this is to say that most of occupied Europe either collaborated with the occupying forces (a minority) or accepted with resignation and equanimity the presence and activities of the German forces (a majority).” pp. 295

“Not surprisingly, then, the war left a vicious legacy. In the circumstances of the liberation, everyone sought to identify with the winners—in this case the Allies and those who had sided with them before the final victory.” pp. 295

Jay Winter: Remembering War

“What I would term the first generation of memory in the modern period spanned the years from the 1890s to the 1920s. Its focus was on memory as the key to the formation of identities, in particular national identities, al- though social, cultural, and personal identities were also in mind. Remembering the fallen of the Great War was a very significant part of this movement. The second ‘‘memory boom,’’ which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, was in large part a form of remembrance of the Second World War and the Holocaust.”

“A century ago, the concept of memory was harnessed by a host of men and women as a means to constitute or fortify identities, in particular national identities in an imperial age. That age has gone, and so has its unities and its certainties. In its place memory still stands, but as a source of fractured national, ideological, and cultural forms, forms which are resistant to linear reconstruction; the onward march of progress is a thing of the past”

Pierre Nora (In Introduction to War and Remembrance)

“Memory is constantly on our lips’, he writes, ‘because it no longer exists.’ Or rather it no longer exists in the midst of life” Jay, pp.1

“These sites, and their study by historians, reproduce what literature once did, and now – in Nora’s view – no longer can accomplish” pp. 1

Jay Winter: Introduction to War and Remembrance

“The huge growth of museums at the end of the twentieth century is also a reflection of another facet of the ‘memory business’: the contemporary link between grandparents and grandchildren.” pp. 3

“The terms ‘memory’ and ‘collective memory’ appear with such frequency and ease that readers may be under the impression that there is a scholarly consensus about what these terms mean and how they may be used effectively in historical study.” Pp 1

Aleida Assman

“The dynamics of individual memory consists in a perpetual interaction between remembering and forgetting… in order to remember some things, other things must be forgotten.” pp. 334

“If we concede that forgetting is the normality of personal and cultural life, then remembering is the exception, which-especially in the cultural sphere, requires special and costly precautions. These precautions take the shape of cultural institutions. As forgetting, remember also has an active and a passive side.” pp. 335

“The institutions of passive cultural memory are situated halfway between the canon and forgetting.” pp. 335

“In order… to remember anything one has to forget; but what is forgotten need not necessarily be lost forever. The canon stands for the active working memory of a society that defines and supports the cultural identity of the group” pp. 337

M. Christine Boyer

“Ripping fragments of buildings or artifacts from their original contexts and then collecting and preserving them in nineteenth-century museums is not that distinct an act from attempts to transform our present-day cities into outdoor museums whose architectural streetscapes and spatial starts become privileged landscapes to explore in pleasure or dismay”. pp 378

“Librarians and curators dream of complete collections even while they acknowledge o=that every act of totalization can only be partial…” pp. 379

“Thus within the museum’s  paradox there is as well a fundamental distinction to be made between history and memory that neither the collector, the archaeologist nor the antiquarian appears to address.” pp. 380

Maurice Halbwachs

“The difference between remembrances we evoke at all and remembrances we seem to command no longer is merely a matter of degree of complexity. The former are always at hand because they are preserved in groups that we enter at will and collective thoughts to which we remain closely related.” pp. 141

“While the collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as group members who remember.” Pp. 142

“Situated external to and above groups, history readily introduces into the stream of facts simple demarcations fixed once and for all. In doing so, history not merely obeys a didactic need for schematization.” pp. 143

Walter Benjamin

“One reason for this phenomenon is obvious: experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness. Every glance at a newspaper demonstrates that it has reached a new low, that our picture, not only of the external world but of the moral world as well, overnight has undergone changes which were never thought possible”. pp. 99

“The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new.” Pp. 101

“There is nothing that commends a story to memory more effectively than that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis. And the more natural the process by which the storytelling forgoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the story’s claim to a place in the memory of the listener, the more greater will be his inclination to repeat it to someone else someday, sooner or later.” Pp 102

“Memory creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation.” Pp 102.

Peter Burke

“This traditional account of the relation between memory and written history, in which memory reflects what actually happened and history reflects memory, now rather seems too simple.” Pp 188

“It is because I share this latter, relativist view of the history of history that I chose the title ‘history as social memory’… using the term as a convenient piece of shorthand which sums up the complex process of selection and interpretation in a simple formula and stresses the zoology between the ways in which the past is recorded and remembered.” Pp 188

Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz

“Media events are electronic monuments. They are meant to live in collective memory through association with either there traumas to which they are responses or the exceptional nature of the gratifications they provide.” Pp 363

“Media events endow collective memory not only with a substance but with a frame: they are mnemonics for organizing personal and historical time”. Pp 363

Andreas Huyssen

“One of the most surprising cultural and political phenomena of recent years has been the emergence of memory as a key concern in Western societies, a Turing toward the past that stands in stark contrast to the privileging of the future so characteristic of earlier decades of twentieth century modernity.” Pp 430

“…it seems clear that older sociological approaches to collective memory- approaches such as Maurice Halbwach’s that posit relatively stable formations of social and group memories- are not adequate to grasp the current dynamics of media and temporality, memory, lived time, and forgetting.” Pp 431

“The very structures of public media memory make it quite understandable that our secular culture today, obsessed with memory as it is, is also somehow in the grips of a fear, even a terror, of forgetting”. Pp 431

Reinhard Koselleck

“But it is different with war memorials [compared to other memorials] because they are supposed to recall violent death at the hands of human beings. In addition to remembrance, the question of the justification of this death is also evoked.” Pp 365

“[In the modern era] the bourgeois memorial cult emerges, and within this cult, there originates the independent genre of the war memorial. Since the French Revolution and the Wars of Liberation (1813-1814), the number of memorials dedicated to soldiers killed in action has steadily increased”. Pp 367

“The political cult of the dead, to the extent that it depends on the building of war memorials, remains under the victors’ control- as long as they are in a position to exercise their power.” Pp 368

Michel-Rolph Trouillot

“Indeed, neither the nineteenth for the first three-quarters of the twentieth century- which saw an increase in demands for international reparations- witnessed anything close to the wave of apologies that marks our times”. Pp 460

“Those who propose or request [collective apologies] increasingly scribe to institutions and collectives attributes unique to the subject- such as mood, memory, moral responsibility and feelings, down to the possibility of repentance- rather than the practical liability and communal responsibility through time that has long been an attribute of agents.” Pp 460-461

“The soul of nations- quite a different construct from Montesquieu’s spirit- has become, at once, the site of that memory-memory-consciousness and the engine behind both the recognition of past failures and the will to reach a higher moral plane…”

Martin Jay

“Against consolation: Walter Benjamin and the refusal to mourn” in Winters and Sivan, War and Remembrance (1999)

“What makes the choice of this specific individual especially appropriate is that his thoughts on the modalities of memory were stimulated by the violent trauma of the First World War, the cataclysmic event whose rupturing of the continuity with the world that preceded it brought to a head the ‘memory crisis’ that began in the nineteenth century” pp 221