Concept

The Collaborative Research Centre Memory Cultures (Sonderforschungsbereich, SFB 434, Erinnerungskulturen) at the University of Giessen, established in 1997 and funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), is concerned with the study of both the form and the content of cultural memories, with a specific interest in the plurality of memory and its constructed and dynamic nature. The goal is to analyse forms and functions of memory and remembering from Antiquity to the 21st century, and to thereby increase awareness of the historicity of constellations of memory. No fewer than 20 professors and 50 doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers are involved in the "SFB", representing twelve different humanities departments, including history, English studies, Romance studies, German studies, classical philology (Latin and Greek), art history, the history of medicine, Turkish studies, Oriental studies, philosophy, political science and sociology. This interdisciplinary memory research allows members of the "SFB" to examine frameworks of historical memory and the formation of specific memory cultures as well as different forms of memory and remembering.

The concept of memory cultures – in the plural – emphasizes the variety that results from competing processes of memory and remembering. Our understanding of memory cultures interprets the dynamic nature of memory as a result of the plurality of contemporaneous fields of memory which compete for the power to interpret the past in a particular society. Deciding factors in this competition are not only cultural relationships of power, which themselves are stabilised through memory, but also the particular starting point. Every cultural process of memory is preceded by a historically specific selection of media of memory, a selection which bears far-reaching consequences for the possibilities and the limitations of memory and remembering.

The "SFB Memory Cultures" combines the methodology of the social and historical sciences with the approach of the humanities and the arts, thus including both a more empirical and a more form-oriented perspective. Through this fruitful combination of both empiricism and theory, both attention to specific practices and to mediality, and awareness of both the historical dimension and the timeliness of the topic, memory becomes an important integrative concept within cultural studies.