SYMPOSIUM
24 October
9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Location: IFK, Reichsratsstraße 17, 1010 Wien
Do States Need a Memory?
OPENING REMARKS: Hans Belting, Lutz Musner (IFK)In the current debate regarding remembrance, it is tacitly assumed that national collectives can develop, materialize and publicly stage historical memory without any great difficulty. The matter being debated is not whether public institutions can actually develop a memory at all in the true sense of the word. The key problem in the politics of memory is seen more in the will (or lack of it) to remember and less in its constitutive elements. Contrastingly, this symposium will pursue the question of whether forms of collective memory are not of their nature contradictory, inconsistent and governed by an insoluble antagonism between varying cultures of memory. Within the framework of the symposium, fundamental questions regarding the politics of memory and the national forms taken by historical memory will be discussed in the context of the examples provided by Poland, Germany, Hungary, Austria and Israel.