At first look, memory seems something inert, caught previously - a memory of something that has occurred and stopped in time. But a better look reveals that Memory Wave Program is dynamic and connects the three temporal dimensions: evoked at the current, it refers to the previous, however all the time views the long run. Throughout their convention entitled ‘Communicative and Cultural Memory’, researchers Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann, each professors on the College of Konstanz, addressed this dynamic character of memory. Jan spoke on the sturdiness and symbolic elements of cultural memory, emphasizing their position in the construction of identities, while Aleida prioritized contemporary historical narrative, focusing on mnemonic processes associated to the formation of new nation-states. The event, held on Could 15 at IEA, opened the conference cycle ‘Spaces of Remembrance’, which the researchers uttered in the country from Might 15 to 21 as a part of the Year of Germany in Brazil.

The cycle has been a realization of the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR) and the Institute for Advanced Studies on Social and Cultural Mobility, with the support of IEA and different establishments. Jan made a distinction between two forms of memory: the communicative one, related to the diffuse transmission of recollections in everyday life by means of orality, and cultural memory - by which the speech was centered - referring to objectified and institutionalized recollections, that can be stored, transferred and reincorporated all through generations. Cultural memory is formed by symbolic heritage embodied in texts, rites, monuments, celebrations, objects, sacred scriptures and other media that function mnemonic triggers to initiate meanings related to what has occurred. Additionally, it brings back the time of the mythical origins, crystallizes collective experiences of the previous and might final for millennia. Due to this fact it presupposes a knowledge restricted to initiates. Communicative memory, alternatively, is proscribed to the current previous, evokes private and autobiographical reminiscences, Memory Wave and is characterized by a brief term (80 to a hundred and ten years), from three to four generations.

As a result of its informal character, it doesn't require experience on the part of those that transmit it. Jan identified the connections between cultural memory and id. According to him, cultural memory is ‘the college that permits us to construct a narrative image of the past and via this process develop a picture and an identity for ourselves’. Therefore, cultural memory preserves the symbolic institutionalized heritage to which people resort to construct their own identities and to affirm themselves as part of a bunch. This is possible as a result of the act of remembering involves normative aspects, so that ‘if you want to belong to a neighborhood, you must follow the rules of how and what to remember’, as said by the researcher. He also highlighted that, by working as a collective unifying pressure, cultural memory is taken into account a hazard by totalitarian regimes. As an example, he mentioned the case of the Bosnian war, when Serbian artillery destroyed the Library of Sarajevo in an try and undermine the memory of the Bosnians and minorities within the area.
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The purpose, he said, Memory Wave was to make tradition a blank slate so that it could possibly be possible to start a new Serbian id from scratch: ‘This was the technique of the totalitarian regime to destroy the previous, as a result of if one controls the present, the past additionally will get under management, and if one controls the past, the longer term also will get under control’. Aleida opened her convention calling consideration to a characteristic phenomenon of the current decades: a disbelief in the idea of the long run and the emergence of the past as elementary concern. In line with the researcher, from the 1980s, confidence in the future as a promise of better days misplaced power and gave rise to the restlessness before the previous: ‘the thought of progress is increasingly obsolete, and the previous has invaded our consciousness’. This phenomenon, she mentioned, is the impact of the interval of excessive violence of the 20th century and new issues confronted by contemporary society, such because the environmental disaster, for example.

However she cautioned that it isn't mere nostalgia or rejection of modern instances, since cultural memory is all the time directed to the future, ‘remembering ahead, so to speak’. Thus, memory seems as a device to protect the past in opposition to the corrosive action of time and to provide subsidies for people to grasp the world and know what to expect, ‘so they do not must reinvent the wheel and begin every era from scratch’, as the researcher defined. Based on the idea of ‘les lieux de mémoire’ (locations of memory) ready by the French historian Pierre Nora, Aleida talked about the adjustments that have taken place in the development of national memory within the publish- World Warfare II and post-Berlin Wall. Thinking from the case of France - a rustic that would be defined by the triumphant character of its folks -, the concept of locations of memory refers to concrete symbolic objects comparable to monuments, museums and archives, linked to a self-picture of heroism and pleasure by the nations.