War, Memory and Oral History
A Meditation
As I’m trying to research and write something (hopefully for next week) on the fashion industry and war, this newsletter is more a process piece working through thoughts on war, memory, and oral history.
Since the 1920s there has been an understanding that there are multiple dimensions to memory—individual (autobiographical), collective and historical. First put forward by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in 1925, these three practices organize knowledge of the past in a way that is compatible with the needs of society. Autobiographical memory contains events experienced by the individual; collective memory relates to events that were not experienced by the individual personally but are part of the consciousness of the time; historical memory is the reconstruction of the past through the historian. Collective memories can be understood as ‘borrowed’ memories, those events we remember due to television and newspaper reports—or in our current experience, the invasion of Ukraine through Twitter and Instagram.
These three approaches to memory are not cleanly separated—all individual memories are part of the history of the human race, and all collective memories become personal when filtered through our own remembrances while also becoming historical due to the fixity of an event within the scheme of history. For oral historian Linda Sandino: “The historian’s role is to reconstruct and represent the fabric of the past from its archived remains whereas collective memory works to coalesce individual memories within and for their social contexts.” The continual remembering of certain aspects of WWII and the Cold War within television programs, books, and exhibitions, has contributed to a “shared social, ‘collective’ memory” of those decades for most people in the US and western Europe but which only encompasses a narrow amount of what occurred during that period. Therefore, particular events, songs, and people are understood to represent WWII/Cold War, while others that were equally important at the time have been forgotten. The large scale of this “collective memory” affects even those who lived through that period, coloring their memories and resulting in questions regarding the validity of remembrances.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a war grounded in memory. Putin’s memory and nostalgia for a once-great USSR—for Ukraine once being an indivisible part of that whole. He’s so steeped in the past (a past he’s mythologized and sanitized) that he’s willing to destroy all of our futures. Through propaganda, a long-term foreign policy strategy, and a recent “memory law,” Putin has endeavored to recode the Russian people’s collective memories of WWII. By “rewriting of the history of World War II [Putin] has set the stage for his war in Ukraine.”
In regards to oral history, two types of memories are drawn on during the interview retrieval process—flashbulb and autobiographical. In the words of psychologist Gillian Cohen, flashbulb relates to: “the unusually vivid and detailed recollections people often have of the occasion when they first heard about some very dramatic, surprising, important and emotionally arousing event… Flashbulb memories typically encode what is called the ‘reception’ event rather than the event itself”—for example, remembering where they were when they heard of John F. Kennedy’s shooting. Conversely, for autobiographical memory: “The remembered events are of personal significance and serve as the building blocks from which the self is constructed. Paradoxically, the self is both the experiencer and the product of the experiences.” Autobiographical memories can be further broken down—not only can they include biographical facts, but they can, according to psychologist William Brewer, be copies or reconstructions of the original event. Memories can appear as “copies” due to their vividness and many irrelevant details, but when they incorporate later interpretations they become “reconstructions.” Reconstruction, and the filtration of both collective and individual memory through the present, make the interview into an interpretive event, in which the listener becomes a participant—dissecting the answers to peel apart the truth from later, overlaid ideas.
When studying oral history, many of the case studies and projects discussed are from wars, talking with survivors, soldiers, and refugees. Trauma is palpable throughout. Even the most muddled of stories are invaluable as they provide an insight into how parts of the brain shut down in times of immense stress. Survival becomes so important that there is no energy left to remember details or a chronology of events. I’ve taken advanced oral history workshops alongside historians working on the ground in refugee camps or employed by NGOs—I’m sure I am not the only one thinking about how we will capture the stories of those directly affected by the monstrosity of the attacks in Ukraine and all countries currently affected by war. As the Italian historian Alessandro Portelli wrote, “Oral sources tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did”—it feels vital to record people's stories now, in the heat of war and escape, as well as later after their minds have tried to make sense of it all and made “reconstructions.” Voice notes, Instagram stories, TikToks go somewhere towards the recording of story.
When I was working on my Ph.D. my original plan was to write about the role of memory and nostalgia in the work of four fashion designers raised in Arab nations who later moved to Europe where they found fame. Though they were not all of native stock, the work of these designers (Thea Porter, Barbara Hulanicki, Yves Saint Laurent, and Azzedine Alaïa) was clearly informed by their childhood memories and a nostalgic echo of their common past. Concentrating on the psychological effects of transplantation and memory, I sought to illuminate the processes of fashion design by expat designers as well the complex interplay between history, myth, and memory. For various reasons I quit after two years (mainly I got a book and exhibition deal), but I’ve often come back to thinking about this subject. The influence of the culture of where one was raised (especially if different than one’s heritage) and how it affects all aspects of creativity—and even more so, the nostalgia for a place or country that no longer exists. Colonialism, imperialism, war, national and racial identity, and immigration mark both the childhoods and ancestry of all of these designers—themes that are being vividly played out right now in Ukraine and on our phone screens.
For the philosopher Ralph Harper:
Nostalgia combines bitterness and sweetness, the lost and the found, the far and the near, the new and the familiar, absence and presence. The past which is over and gone, from which we have been or are being removed, by some magic becomes present again for a short while. But its realness seems even more familiar, because renewed, than it ever was, more enchanting and more lovely.
Nostalgia and memory can play both positive and negative roles—trapping one (like Putin) or inspiring creativity (such as with YSL or Thea Porter). The role of oral historians is to record those remembrances—while not therapists, the act of talking to oral historians provides the narrator with the knowledge that their memories are valid and important, that they are valid and important. Putin might try to rewrite history, but oral history has recorded and will continue to record the lived experience of those affected by dictators past and present. The importance of oral history, in the words of the oral historian Paul Thompson, lies in its ability to provide those that are usually forgotten with a voice, thereby shifting the focus of history, and providing: “a more realistic and fair reconstruction of the past, a challenge to the established account. In so doing, oral history has radical implication for the social message of history as a whole.” Already The Pilecki Institute in Warsaw has announced the founding of “The Raphael Lemkin Center for Documenting Russian Crimes in Ukraine” to collect “the accounts of Ukrainian civilians & military personnel to secure evidence of the crimes committed by Russian troops.” They have already begun to record testimonies; I am sure that others will also develop projects to record oral histories from this conflict. These will be vital for ensuring that history is remembered and will fight against any future revisionist dictators.
I worry that my thoughts are too scattered—but if one can’t feel scattered now, when would it possibly be okay to be?
Further reading:
Brewer, W. F. 1986. “What is autobiographical memory?” In: D. Rubin, ed. Autobiographical memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cohen, G. 1996. Memory in the Real World. London: Psychology Press.
Halbwachs, M. 1992. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Harper, R. 1966. Nostalgia: An Existential Exploration of Longing and Fulfillment in the Modern Age. Cleveland: Press of Western Reserve University.
Portelli, A. 1979. “What makes oral history different.” In: R. Perks & A. Thomson, eds. The Oral History Reader. London: Routledge.
Sandino, L. 2000. “Speaking about Things: Oral History as Context.” Working Papers on Design 2.
Thompson, P. 2000. The Voice of the Past: Oral History. New York: Oxford University Press.