Mnemohistory

Mnemohistory is a relatively new field of inquiry in humanities and social sciences that focuses on the dynamic interplay between memory and history. Simply put, mnemohistory is the historical study of the workings of cultural memory. This means that mnemohistory is interested not so much in the factuality as in the actuality of the past—not in the past for its own sake, but in its later impact and reception. The notion of mnemohistory allows scholars to move beyond the (although still important) question of “what really happened” to questions of how particular ways of construing the past enable later communities to constitute and sustain themselves. This is not to say, however, that mnemohistory cannot adopt a critical attitude toward the ways of remembering that it studies; rather, it is precisely mnemohistorical analysis that allows us best to highlight the conscious and unconscious logic shaping cultural memory and thereby also our historical horizon (Tamm, Afterlife of events: perspectives on mnemohistory. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2015a). The term “mnemohistory” (Gedächtnisgeschichte, in German) was first introduced by German historian Jan Assmann. The term, elaborated in a wider context of cultural memory studies, was coined by Assmann in his 1997 book Moses, the Egyptian, where he defines it as follows: “Unlike history proper, mnemohistory is concerned not with the past as such, but only with the past as it is remembered. It surveys the story-lines of tradition, the webs of intertextuality, the diachronic continuities and discontinuities of reading the past. [...] It concentrates exclusively on those aspects of significance and relevance which are the product of memory—that is, of a recourse to a past—and which appear only in the light of later readings” (Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: the memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA/London, 1997).