Memory and History

Understanding Memory as Source and Subject

Joan Tumblety, Joan Tumblety

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135905439
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

How does the historian approach memory and how do historians use different sources to analyze how history and memory interact and impact on each other?

Memory and History explores the different aspects of the study of this field. Taking examples from Europe, Australia, the USA and Japan and treating periods beyond living memory as well as the recent past, the volume highlights the contours of the current vogue for memory among historians while demonstrating the diversity and imagination of the field.

Each chapter looks at a set of key historical and historiographical questions through research-based case studies:

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• How does engaging with memory as either source or subject help to illuminate the past?
• What are the theoretical, ethical and/or methodological challenges that are encountered by historians engaging with memory in this way, and how might they be managed?
• How can the reading of a particular set of sources illuminate both of these questions?

The chapters cover a diverse range of approaches and subjects including oral history, memorialization and commemoration, visual cultures and photography, autobiographical fiction, material culture, ethnic relations, the individual and collective memories of war veterans. The chapters collectively address a wide range of primary source material beyond oral testimony – photography, monuments, memoir and autobiographical writing, fiction, art and woodcuttings, 'everyday' and 'exotic' cultural artefacts, journalism, political polemic, the law and witness testimony.

This book will be essential reading for students of history and memory, providing an accessible guide to the historical study of memory through a focus on varied source materials.

Part I Working with oral testimony

The chapters in the first part of the book all deal with oral testimony as source material, whether generated through interviews with the historian or in a judicial context. The first two of them – by Michal Bosworth and Lindsey Dodd – describe in practical detail the experience of interviewing people, especially women, about their past lives. Both authors put themselves in the frame, acknowledging how their presence and approach to questioning – whether they use a tape recorder, how familiar they are with the language of the respondents, the questions they choose to ask – might shape the autobiographical stories they hear. Both also recognize the importance of using other sources to prepare for the interview and to contextualize the lives of their interviewees afterwards, even as they recognize the singularity of oral testimony for giving access to otherwise unrecoverable pasts. Dodd talks the reader through how she learned to listen differently to the testimony generated in what she had at first written off as a failed interview: it spoke to autobiographical and historical truths that she had not initially expected to hear. In this, she develops the idea of ‘cultural scripts’, drawing on the work of oral historian Alessandro Portelli to push at the links between individual and social memory. Both she and Bosworth conceive of oral history, at least in part, as fostering ‘memory work’ among communities whose stories have not yet become part of the mainstream historical record – French children who experienced Allied bombing in the Second World War and immigrant women in Australia respectively. The interview tapes created through Dodd’s wider doctoral research are lodged in municipal archives in France, and Bosworth herself played an important role in facilitating the community cultural activities – museum exhibitions, a play and the publication of several memoirs and recipe books – undertaken by her immigrant interviewees. One might say that this oral history research has provided vehicles for the development of popular memory, in other words for incorporating into the collective record stories told by under-represented groups.

Rosanne Kennedy’s chapter on the status of oral testimony in a judicial setting is at first glance concerned with entirely different issues, not least because she has not generated these oral sources herself. The witness statements examined in her chapter were produced under the exigencies of the courtroom, where evidence is subject to notions of proof and objectivity that tug in a different direction from the concerns of contemporary historians. For judges and lawyers the subjectivity of the witness is generally suspect; and these figures pursue judicial rather than historical truth, where there is little room for ambiguity. But despite the real differences in Kennedy’s subject matter, questions about the subjectivity and reliability of testimony, and its affective power, remain central; as does the question of how witness testimony relates to the stories about the past in wider circulation. She explains how the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in the early 1960s brought a new status to oral testimony in general – as autobiographical truth rather than as factual evidence. It also suggested that oral testimony has the power to influence wider ‘cultural scripts’ about the past however much it is also shaped by them. Although the ‘testimonial’ model established by the Eichmann trial (in which witnesses were given latitude to narrate their own stories) has become widespread in the quasi-legal context of truth commissions, the fundamental tensions between subjective and objective truth that it poses have not been overcome. Kennedy thus concludes on a rather pessimistic note – that the hurts of the past, this time in relation to the so-called ‘Stolen Generations’ trials in contemporary Australia, may be reproduced in the present when the aggrieved witness takes the stand in court.

1 ‘Let me tell you …’

Memory and the practice of oral history

Michal Bosworth

DOI: 10.4324/9780203552490-2

Talking, listening, recalling and recording are pleasurable activities for the historian more usually constrained at a desk in front of a winking screen. But, as with all techniques for gathering information, these particular skills need to be refined. It may be easy to listen as someone else relates important moments in their life, but how do you, as a historian, use the information so gathered? Are you collecting a lot of undigested detail that requires considerable work to understand, or are you creating a primary document? Two things should be clear from the start. There is the question of technique – how you interview, what you do with the tapes you gather, how you find your subjects. These technical questions keep bobbing up because you must decide whether your funding will allow you to transcribe the tapes, whether you will always give copies of them to your interviewees, whether you will be able to deposit them in a library. Then there is the historian’s eternal problem – how you think about the material, how you manage raising the questions you would like answered, how you approach the friendships you may make, how far empathy is necessary for successful interviews. Through a consideration of both sets of issues, I explore in this chapter how oral testimony can be used as a source for writing history.

I work in Australia. Most of the interviews I discuss here were recorded in Western Australia in the late 1980s and during the 1990s. They resulted from various projects in which I was employed so they range across a number of historical subjects. When working with individuals and their memories the historian comes face to face with the intractable nature of our discipline. We must remain alert to context and to other information, even when conflicts arise. As I heard one Holocaust survivor indignantly ask another historian, ‘how can you possibly write about this when you were not there?’ But that is what historians do: we write about things we did not directly experience. Oral history techniques are a part of our armoury, although the practice of oral history has changed over time. For one thing, technology is swifter, digitized, more efficient than it was 20 years ago and practitioners are realizing that they must understand how their recorders work before they begin. Once equipped most oral historians set out knowing where to put a microphone, if not always realizing the time it will take to collect the memories of a single person. But the approach is about more than recording techniques.

The development of oral history: problems and possibilities

Oral history has one great virtue over document-based research – its immediacy. Studs Terkel, the great American oral historian, produced a series of books from interviews which emerged from his work as a radio journalist. He began with an idea, for example, that Americans were forgetting the Great Depression,¹ or that they were far less mindful of the Second World War than he had thought,² or even more boldly, that workers had lost the possibility of hope.³ He made lists of people he wanted to interview and others were found for him as each project gathered pace. As a 92-year-old, when interviewed about his aims as a historian, Terkel decried any larger purpose saying that he liked to listen; he was not a scholar.⁴ His statement is a little disingenuous, as earlier in his career Terkel had been more forthright about his motives, the decisions he made when interviewing and the selection of words for publication. He edited interviews and changed the names of those who spoke to him. He organized his material so that various questions were raised and answered by more than one person, although he rarely included his questions in his publications. He was aware that some of his methods appeared a little unorthodox but he fielded questions about his techniques by claiming that they were the result of his ‘respect’ for his interviewees.⁵ Terkel was an activist who was investigated by the Committee for Un-American Activities, although not called before it: he was not interviewing without purpose. He listened, recorded and fashioned his people’s narratives, filling a gap in the historical record that other historians had found difficult to bridge. Along the way he sold a lot of books. Oral history, presented so ably, makes for compelling reading. The Good War won the Pulitzer Prize. For that work more than 120 interviews were recorded, and edited into four ‘books’, which in turn focused on issues such as ‘Reflections on machismo’, ‘High rank’, ‘The bombers and the bombed’, ‘Crime and punishment’ and ‘Remembrance of things past’. Terkel may not have read the entire historiography of the Second World War, but he had some knowledge of it. We historians begin with what we think we know; our curiosity then pushes us to pose relevant questions.

Terkel’s aims were less clearly articulated than E.P. Thompson’s well-known statement of intent (‘I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity’), but both have inspired later social, labour and family historians to resort to the interview to rescue from historiographical oblivion the voiceless, the marginal, the less fortunate; those who do not appear in the state archives except as names in the births, deaths and marriage indexes.⁶ Oral history has been growing in importance to Australian historians since the 1970s, part of an international trend.⁷ There is now a professional organization that holds regular conferences. There are collections of tapes and transcripts held in most large public libraries. There are occasional short courses in technique delivered at universities, although, for most historians, it remains a subsidiary skill.⁸ The exceptions are those researching within a particular community, and who find local memories a crucial element in their work. They may be employed by universities, but they also find local government or museums anxious for their skills. Family historians are among the most assiduous practitioners. Oral history is the art of talking with real people, but this does not mean that the empathy we require for such a task permits us to suspend our critical intelligence.

There are traps for young historians beginning this kind of work, traps I fell into during my first venture into oral history, which I can only describe as a disaster. In Sydney during the 1970s I interviewed a retired politician, Sir William McKell, a man who had been premier of New South Wales and later had become Governor General of Australia. At the time, I was employed by a historian who was writing a biography of Jack Lang, firebrand politician, leader of the Labor party in New South Wales before McKell succeeded him and, as I was to hear, a man thoroughly mistrusted by McKell.⁹ My questions mostly related to the way the two men had worked together. I came away from a two-hour interview knowing that I had been given the official version of Labor history, one that was lacking detail about policy failures and concerned only to leave a good impression of the master at the helm, namely Sir William. I knew I had done badly. My interview technique lacked the necessary rigour, not only because politicians are difficult to interview.¹⁰ I had not done enough research before broaching the topics I wanted to explore.

Approaching immigrant memories

When I returned to interviewing, some 15 years later, I took pains to read as much as I possibly could find about the group of people I had luckily happened upon. Among those who might have claimed until recently that their voices were rarely heard by historians are immigrant groups who have English as a second language. In this, my second venture, I consulted a number of elderly Italian women, who had no idea what a historian did, nor much interest in history, and who presented me with both a linguistic challenge and an urgent need for an entry point into their world. The project was to understand when and why they had migrated to a small port city on the western coast of Australia, Fremantle, as part of a larger study of the Italian immigrant community. Women’s names rarely appeared in rate books, and not always on ships’ passenger lists. They left no letters, they wrote no diaries. Their personal histories were a mystery. Some came between the wars, others arrived immediately after the Second World War as part of the great exodus from Italy; few undertook the journey after 1970. In Fremantle there were women who were proxy brides, girls who married young men from their village who had left years earlier. Such women may not have met their husbands to be, but their families were generally close in some way. There were young girls brought out with mothers to meet fathers whose faces had been forgotten, if ever known, and whose relationships with those newly introduced fathers presented some problems. Before I could talk with them at any length I needed to find a way to meet them, so it was f...