and heterogeneous societies become , it seems , the stronger their need to unify wholly disparate experiences and memories with the common meaning seemingly created in common spaces . But rather than presuming that a common set of ideals underpins its form , the contemporary monument attempts to assign a singular architectonic form to unify disparate and competing memories . In the absence of shared beliefs or common interests , memorial-art in public spaces asks an otherwise fragmented populace to frame diverse pasts and experiences in common spaces . By creating common spaces for memory , monuments propagate the illusion of common memory . Public monuments , national days of commemoration , and shared calendars thus all work to create common loci around which seemingly common national identity is forged .
In an increasingly democratic age , in which the stories of nations are being told in the multiple voices of its everyday historians – i . e ., its individual citizens – monolithic meaning and national narratives are as difficult to pin down as they may be nostalgically longed for . The result has been a shift away from the notion of a national “ collective memory ” to what I would call a nation ’ s “ collected memory .”
Part of our contemporary culture ’ s hunger for the monumental , I believe , is its nostalgia for the universal values and ethos by which it once knew itself as a unified culture . But this reminds us of that quality of monuments that strikes the modern sensibility as so archaic , even somewhat quaint : the imposition of a single cultural icon or symbol onto a host of disparate and competing experiences , as a way to impose common meaning and value on disparate memories – all for the good of a commonwealth . When it was done high-handedly by government regimes , and gigantic monuments were commissioned to represent gigantic selfidealizations , there was often little protest . The masses had , in fact , grown accustomed to being subjugated by governmental monumentality , dwarfed and defeated by a regime ’ s over-weaning sense of itself and its importance , made to feel insignificant by an entire nation ’ s reason for being . But in an increasingly democratic age , in which the stories of nations are being told in the multiple voices of its everyday historians – i . e ., its individual citizens – monolithic meaning and national narratives are as difficult to pin down as they may be nostalgically longed for . The result has been a shift away from the notion of a national “ collective memory ” to what I would call a nation ’ s “ collected memory .” Here we recognize that we never really shared each other ’ s actual memory of past or even recent events , but that in sharing common spaces in which we collect our disparate and competing memories , we find common ( perhaps even a national ) understanding of widely disparate experiences and our very reasons for recalling them .
This relatively newfound sense of public ownership of national memory , that this memory may actually be ours somehow and not on vicarious loan to us for the sake of common identity , has been embraced by a new generation of memorial-makers who also harbor a deep distrust for traditionally static forms of the monument , which in their eyes have been wholly discredited by their consort with the last century ’ s most egregiously dictatorial regimes . Seventy years after the defeat of the Nazi regime ,
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