The Struggle for the Past: How We Construct Social Memories

By Elizabeth Jelin

In all societies—but especially those that have endured political violence—the past is a shifting and contested terrain, never fixed and always intertwined with present-day cultural and political circumstances. Organized around the Argentine experience since the 1970s within the broader context of the Southern Cone and international developments, The Struggle for the Past undertakes an innovative exploration of memory’s dynamic social character. In addition to its analysis of how human rights movements have inflected public memory and democratization, it gives an illuminating account of the emergence and development of Memory Studies as a field of inquiry, lucidly recounting the author’s own intellectual and personal journey during these decades.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Mar 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781789207835

Elizabeth Jelin

Elizabeth Jelin es doctora en Sociología e investigadora superior del Conicet, con sede en el Centro de Investigaciones Sociales, Conicet-IDES. Fue distinguida con el Doctorado Honoris Causa en la Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre La Défense (Francia), en la Universidad de la República (Uruguay), en la Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata y en la Universidad Nacional de San Luis (Argentina). Sus temas de investigación son los derechos humanos y ciudadanía, familia y género, memorias de la represión política y movimientos sociales. Es miembro de directorios de instituciones académicas internacionales y nacionales, profesora invitada en diversas universidades en Europa y América, y autora de numerosos libros y artículos, entre ellos Las tramas del tiempo. Familia, género, memorias, derechos y movimientos sociales (Clacso, 2020). Recibió el Premio Houssay a la Trayectoria en Investigación en Ciencias Sociales y el Premio Clacso.

Book preview

Chapter 1

PERSPECTIVES ON THE PAST

Conflictive and Never-Ending

My initial encounters with social memories happened in the 1980s, and they were deeply intertwined with my civic involvement and my research on the human rights movement in Argentina. In a way, I bumped into memory because this was a key demand of the movement. As a researcher, I found myself wanting to better understand the subject matter. That initial connection soon turned into a wider regional concern and a drive that eventually led to the development of a research and training program in the late 1990s. Thus, at the turn of the century I was in charge of this newly created Memory Program, a regional research and training initiative sponsored by the Social Science Research Council, engaged in comparative research and the training of young researchers from various countries in the Southern Cone. I will come back to this program in chapter 2.

The opening seminars and training workshops took place in 1998 and 1999. I was involved in developing the conceptual framework for the program, which came to fruition in the book on the labors of memory—originally in Spanish (Jelin 2002b) and translated into English a short time later (Jelin 2003). At the same time, on the empirical side, the collective discussions held in those seminars with colleagues from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay and the United States soon made us realize that a comparative perspective was not enough. Comparisons assume that cases are independent of each other and therefore disregard a fundamental fact: the countries we were dealing with were not isolated units that could be analyzed separately. Each case was part of something broader, a region in a stronger sense of the word, with interdependencies and links both among them and with the rest of the world.

This relational reality posed a new and distinct challenge that went beyond the issues inherent to comparisons: we had to consider and try to understand the connections between political and social processes in the various countries, the links among the actors, and the diffusion of ideas and policies.

The first of the books that conveyed the results of the research program was published in 2002, in what ultimately became a twelve-volume series (Colección Memorias de la Represión). The first question that emerged was whether to prepare country-specific books, combining research papers on various themes, or craft thematic books, in which the research results of each case would be put in dialogue with the others. The resulting series was mostly organized thematically, dealing with the struggles for memory in commemorations, territorial markings, archives, educational institutions, the armed forces, the youth movements, and so on.

A number of challenges also emerged for me due to the magnitude of the program and international interest in it. Besides my role in directing the series—programming the contents of each book, reviewing texts, writing introductions, etc.—I also had to play a public role, namely that of presenting and publicizing the perspective on memories that the program was generating, and conveying the overall results of the research program beyond the specific research projects by each of the participants.

This chapter originates with me in this role, responding to requests and demands for presentations at various international and regional conferences and seminars. The challenge was to summarize research in various countries and at the same time place the issues at hand in a broader international perspective. The original ideas were developed in that context (Jelin, 2007a). A further step in this challenge was to place the regional context (Southern Cone, Latin America) within the global perspective on memories and processes of constructing meaning on the past. The ways in which memories are expressed are part of a global world and whose processes and major forces comprise a network of intertwined units. The explicit challenge of placing the Southern Cone in that global context was presented when, at the urge of the organizers, I revised my text to include it in a study on the subject of memories from a global perspective (Jelin 2010b).

There is a further issue, one that pervades this theme and many others: as we study living processes that take place at specific moments and develop and change over time, there is never a closure, a point where something can be considered finished or completed. Sociopolitical actors are constantly updating their narratives and interpretations. The same happened to me while preparing this book and continues to take place as I translate it two years later, a process that has led me to update and change certain details once again. Hence the need to talk about historicizing memories, and also to conceive them as unfinished processes, always open. It was Norbert Lechner who found the right expression and developed the right analytical perspective to address social processes as something never finished.

***

For over half a century, World War II and the atrocities committed under the Nazi regime have been a constant reference when thinking about how different social and political actors work through their past, attribute meaning to it, or sustain its senselessness. In keeping with this perspective, Andreas Huyssen notes the contrast between the focus on the future in modern Western society in the first half of the twentieth century and the surge of memory as a cultural and political phenomenon in the final years of the century (Huyssen 2003). The 1980s marked the turning point, as Europe commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of several major events that occurred during the Third Reich, from Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and the book-burning that occurred that same year, both commemorated in 1983, to the end of World War II, commemorated in 1995.¹ Since then, the Shoah (Holocaust) has served as a template or model for interpreting multiple and recurring situations of political violence, massacres, and genocides worldwide. Within this framework, which Huyssen refers to as the globalization of memory, the Shoah is both a foreboding of modernity’s failure as a project and, paradoxically, also a prism that can be used to scrutinize other multiple times and places where catastrophe has occurred (Huyssen 2003: 13–14).

Toward the end of the twentieth century, this weighty trope has been expanded by new and overlapping layers or levels of history. Among them, the experience of the dictatorial regimes in Latin America during the 1970s and the processes of working through this past in the countries of the Southern Cone have become critical to thinking about how societies confront and work through recent pasts of political violence and state terrorism. There are multiple levels of analysis, and complex interactions: from the personal processes of survivors (testimony, silences) to symbolic and cultural representations and performances, along with the prominent role of state institutional practices—trials, reparations, monuments, official commemorations, new laws and institutions, and archive policies.

The question that I would like to pose here is related to the ways in which a society and its legitimate authorities, as represented in a democratic state, confront a violent past in which all the principles for peaceful coexistence were crushed and violated. What can the state do to bring country and society back into the fold of the normal world? How can a state establish a global presence free from the shameful dregs of the past, when neither amnesty nor amnesia is acceptable in a cultural climate that has given a prominent place to memory worldwide?

In order to think about these topics, I propose to briefly focus on the history of Germany in order to then return to the recent history of the Southern Cone countries, particularly Argentina. In this exercise of historicizing memories, I also intend to show the multidimensional character of this phenomenon.

How Can the Past Be Normalized? The Case of Germany

After the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime, how could Germany present itself to the world as a respectable country that claims to be normal? What does being a normal country mean? As noted above, the Nazi regime became a benchmark for measuring and comparing human atrocities globally. What does this mean for a society that committed atrocities of this kind? How can a historical account be drafted that allows this dreadful past to be, to some degree, integrated into the chronological course of a nation? The question, then, is how the past can be normalized.² Theodor Adorno had formulated a crucial and relevant question during a conference he gave in 1959, a turning point between the economic miracle of the 1950s and the social protests of the 1960s, a period in which the Berlin Wall was built and Eichmann was tried in Jerusalem. Adorno asked, "Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?" (What does coming to terms with the past mean?) Around this time, a new German generation had begun to question the structures and policies related to the memory of the Nazi period during the postwar period. While silence had previously been expounded as a way of reining in the past, evoking the Nazi past became important in the new political-cultural climate, with an emphasis on the continuities—not the ruptures—between the Third Reich and the Federal Republic. In this regard, Adorno surmised that the reluctance to confront the Nazi past was a sign of enduring fascist tendencies within the German democracy as opposed to the persistence of fascist groups opposed to democracy, as many argued.

This vision was anchored in the need to permanently evoke the recent past in order to work through it in a struggle against silence. At the end of the 1970s and 1980s, neoconservative administrations turned against this constant recollection and self-flagellation over the past. The political aim was to stop treating the past as exceptional and turn Germany into a normal country. Prior to that, argues Olick (2003), Germany pushed to establish itself in the postwar period as a reliable nation. Between the end of the war and the beginning of the 1960s, the Adenauer administration wanted to show the world that Germany was a reliable country, light years away from the regime that had preceded it and altogether different. That regime, in this rendering, was characterized by the temporary or passing presence of alien elements. In order to establish a new and positive image, the German government introduced major institutional reforms and took steps to align Germany with Western nations, besides paying reparations to the state of Israel and the victims of Nazism.

In the 1960s, this image was replaced by that of a moral nation now ready to confront its past, learn lessons, and assume its responsibilities. The rhetoric surrounding this new image often placed Germany on the cutting edge of progressive morality. Later, toward the middle of the 1970s, the oil crisis and the rise to power of the neoconservatives led German leaders to present the country as a normal nation. According to this argument, its history had high and low points, like that of any other Western country. This strategy unfolded on several fronts.

Over the course of the 1980s, the notion of normalization took on two different meanings in Germany. The first was relativization, revealed, among other instances, in the Historikerstreit (the historians’ dispute) of 1986–87. The idea was to relativize the horrors of Germany’s past, given that similar atrocities had occurred elsewhere as well. German history dated back long before the Nazi period, the historians emphasized, and its vicissitudes had to be treated as such. Germany thus turned out to be a normal country in statistical terms, not different from other places, since one could find periods of violence and barbarianism everywhere. The other meaning attributed to normalization was regularization or ritualization. A well-oiled commemorative apparatus was built, and recognizing Germany’s historic responsibility became a regular part of the political repertoire. This included shows of German guilt (commemorations, visits to concentration camps) as well as references to the suffering and other valued traditions. Germany’s past thus became a normal part of German political rituals. Its past had been tamed.

What has happened since 1989? Political difficulties and the presence of the past were the order of the day. The Berlin Wall fell on 9 November, the same date as Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) in 1938. Wouldn’t the euphoria of that day in 1989 dilute the solemnity of the commemoration of what had occurred in 1938? What dates should be included on the official calendar? Like other nations of Central and Eastern Europe, Germany confronted the issue of how to treat communist leaders, who were considered part of a criminal regime newly surmounted. Germany already had a framework and model for addressing and taming its past, and this new past displaced the previous one both historically and rhetorically. The confrontation with the Nazi past—and the legacy of Nazism—now seemed like ancient history, no longer part of the present, no longer contemporary.

This turn of events had a powerful normalizing effect. Germany was one of many countries emerging from communism—relativization being particularly strong—and its historical problems were now those of communism (Chancellor Helmut Kohl spoke of communist concentration camps, implicitly likening Nazism to communism). Without any doubt, the interpretation of the country’s Nazi past and the meaning attributed to it now permeated all German policies, both domestic and international.

The relativization strategies utilized as part of the neoconservative rhetoric both before and after 1989 blurred differences between types of victims and integrated the Nazi period into a much longer history. They also provided a framework to justify why the German past had no bearing on the responsible exercise of German power in the present. However, in this changing context, normalization through ritualization appeared to be a better strategy: ritually accepting responsibilities in suitable, isolated places. German leaders seemed to have learned that ritualization trumps both silence and the explicit acknowledgment of the challenges that normalization entails. This allowed memory to be removed from the center of political discourse, while an attempt to silence or deny the importance of the past could have had the opposite effect. On isolated occasions and in specific places, suitable interventions would achieve the objective of taming memory and have a calming effect. As Olick concludes, the normalization of memories may imply an ongoing debate, one without any full stops or total silences in which both the actual past and the prior interpretations of that past are constantly