Monuments and collective memory

Why do we need monuments to the past in a now-society?

I visited the 9/11 Memorial in New York this week (link). The design of the memorial is beautiful, in my opinion — the cascading pools marking the footprint of the two towers, the living tree, the beautiful presentation of the names of the victims, the museum (still under construction).

It was a powerful experience, both for the young people who have only a dim memory of the day and the older people whose memories of that day remain very sharply in the mind. It was also striking how many foreign visitors there were. This was truly an international tragedy, and it left its imprint on people all over the world.

Why does a society need to have monuments in recognition of significant moments in its history?

One aspect is obvious — the impulse all of us have to honor the sacrifices made by our fellow citizens and visitors at important moments in our history. Attention must be paid.

But it seems that there is a more general reason as well. Monuments and historical celebrations play a role in creating a sense of public memory, a shared narrative of “our” history, a framework of meaning that becomes a source of public identity. And this in turn plays into a sense of collective identity, a willingness to sacrifice for a larger cause, and a sense of commonality with one’s fellow citizens. Monuments express and advocate for public values.

But this role is more complicated, because memory, social values, and meanings are not neutral factors. These are contested issues. There are political consequences of one way of telling the story against another. And so monuments are often points of contention. (Just think of the ugly controversy that flared up about the “mosque” at ground zero.)

American historian Michael Kammen explores these topics in Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. His particular topic is the role of Civil War memorials and monuments that were erected in the decades following 1865.His book does a spectacular job of probing the role that monuments and memorials play in shaping consciousness — and in being shaped by politics.Here he comments about the social and political influences that affect the concretization of “culture”:

A second attribute of tradition about which agreement exists is that it is, inevitably, a political phenomenon. Meyer Fortes, a British anthropologist, expressed the connection less ideologically than Everett and others: “the political and social structure, including the principal political values of a people, directly shapes the notion of time and of history that prevail among them”. (5)

And he notes that monuments and memorials serve many different purposes.

We arouse and arrange our memories to suit our psychic needs. Historians on the left are surely correct in referring to “the social production of memory,” and in positing the existence of dominant memories (or a mainstream collective consciousness) along with alternative (usually subordinate) memories. Such historians are equally sensible to differentiate between official and more spontaneous or populistic memories.(9)

It may be that part of the power of the 9/11 Memorial is precisely the fact that it is not divisive. All Americans can share the sorrow and indignation of the attacks on the World Trade Center. So this moment in history is in one sense untypical of the context of other monuments and memorials: there is no aggrieved group to whom the presentation is an ugly reminder of felt past injustice. This is one of the key points that Kammen makes about the Civil War monuments of the 1870s and 1880s: inevitably the form and setting of monuments derived from one narrative out of several about what really happened, and Northerners and Southerners continued to disagree about the terms of these events.

Perhaps the hardest challenge for civic groups and designers who want to memorialize a piece of history that is important to them is to do so honestly; to confront the unhappy truths that may have been involved in the circumstances of the time and place to be remembered.