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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