This book looks at the discourse around memory and how it is interpreted and contested by different social and political groups in the debate around identity politics. Wood considers 'collective memory' as opposed to individual to be 'performative'.
'Collective, national and public memory [ ] only comes into existence at a given time and place through specific kinds of memorial activity'. (Wood, 1999).
These could be through historical TV programmes, film, commemorations, historical narratives or political debates. Wood uses the term 'vectors' to describe these memorial conduits. The proposed narrative is then absorbed into the national psyche and collectively adopted as part of an accepted historical narrative. Furthermore, Wood states that:
public memory testifies to a will or desire on the part of some social group or disposition of power to select and organise representations of the past so that these will be embraced by individuals on their own. If particular representations of the past have permeated the public domain, it is because they embody an intentionality - social, political, institutional and so on - that promotes or authorises their entry. (Wood, 1999).
Throughout the book Wood examines a number of public debates in the post-modern era that have contested established historical narratives. One of these debates was around two books that recounted the perpetrator testimony of the German Reserve Police Battalion 101 during WWII. This battalion committed atrocities in Poland under orders from the Nazi regime. Although the two books used the same primary sources, different theories were elicited regarding the intent of the perpetrators when rounding up and murdering thousands of Jews in Poland. 'Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust' by Daniel J Goldhagen contends that the officers of Reserve Police Battalion 101 held anti-semitic beliefs that were inculcated into themselves and the general German population as a whole; and that these beliefs were the central causal agent of the Holocaust; that the general population sincerely believed they were carrying out Nazi ideology for the good of the German race and were happy to commit even genocide to achieve Nazi goals. This theory is usually referred to as eliminationist anti-semitism.
Christopher R Browning's book 'Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland' takes a different approach. The emphasis on Browning's account is on the 'capacity of human beings to act in a dehumanised and brutal way when subjected to a specific set of circumstances that induce conformist as a defensive - but all too human - reaction.' This view takes a functionalist approach that regards anti-semitism as just one aspect of the conditions that coalesce into the Holocaust.
'The "German" Holocaust memory thus tends to foreground the circumstances leading to the crime; the "Jewish" memory is concerned with the motives that informed it. Likewise, researchers who lack any direct or indirect affiliation to the collectives involved with the crime tend to universalise its meaning.' (Wood, 1999).
It is clear that LGBTQ hidden histories exist because of the lack of political leverage that a minority group holds in a mostly patriarchal and heteronormative society. All attempts to bring historical accuracy regarding LGBTQ events in history are gradually worn down and disappear. This starts on a fairly innocuous level but over time gay history is regarded less and less until it virtually disappears.
Historians are frequently dismissive that the sexuality of a historical figure has any bearing on their actions. This for a LGBTQ person is patently not true when their very sexuality has been criminalised or oppressed. What historians fail to understand is that to be 'queer' in a heteronormative society is to be fundamentally at odds with 'default' behaviour. For a LGBTQ person it is not just about differences of sexual activity; every aspect of society, be that social, political, or judicial, has to be navigated and interpolated as 'Other'.
This aspect of 'Other' is frequently misunderstood by historians. As part of the power battle for the collective social memory of a society, a minority group will always struggle to make itself heard. I reference this lack of agency in my 'Target Practice' work. I have deliberately placed my installation pieces in an anonymous woodland setting; it stands alone from any attempt to see the work as 'documentary' and placing it as part of the collective social memory of WWII. This approach is a conceptual one that I have chosen and although it may be viewed as problematic this is where I currently am with the work. I do not have any answers to these problems of inclusiveness in the historical narrative; all I can do is note them and try to include some the issues into my thinking and hope that it comes out in the work. Ultimately by foregrounding issues of minority exclusion I am in some small way keeping these histories alive.
References:
Wood, N. (1999). Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe. New York: Berg.
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