[DOWNLOAD] "Postmodernism and European Memory." by Modern Age * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Postmodernism and European Memory.
- Author : Modern Age
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 184 KB
Description
Events do not happen; events are produced. An occurrence becomes an event only when certain groups in society pay attention to it, consider it important, speak and write about it, react to it, and remember it. Thus events are socially constructed. This does not mean, however, that they are pure constructs. At their starting point, they have acts and occurrences that are very real indeed. (1) This postmodern statement was made by the German Historical Institute's Research Fellow, Carola Dietze, in November 2006 at a conference/workshop partly dedicated to European memory and sponsored by the Institute in Washington, DC. It was not incongruent with the views of other participants on historical subjects and memory. The key participants included Aleida Assmann, Professor of English at the University of Konstanz and acclaimed author of numerous books on memory, and Peter Novick, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Chicago and author of The Holocaust in American Life. (2) I submit that this statement represents a widely accepted postmodern view of the study of history in Germany and the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It promotes the view that might makes right and suggests that certain communities and groups of people produce only "occurrences" not worth remembering, occurrences that may be mentioned wholesale but then quickly dismissed. Not only did this conference fail to move the European discussion on memory forward, it made accord among the EU nations more difficult by adopting and proclaiming the faulty postmodern ways of approaching history.