Media and the Closure of the Memory Boom

Abstract

The start of the contemporary memory boom (Huyssen, 2003; Winter, 2006; Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2010) is marked for many by the mass affordabiliiy and the availability of the video cassette recorder, the premiere screening of the Holocaust television miniseries on NBC in 1978 (Shandler, 1999) and the 1980 publication of the English translation of the Godfather of collective memory: Maurice Halbwachs’ On Collective Memory. Since then: boom, boom, boom! By whatever measure, celebrated and derided, the turn to and on the past has been relentless. The contemporary memory boom’s centrifugal force is the anchoring and atomising debate around the nature, form and status of the remembering of conflict, the ‘globalising of Holocaust discourses’ (Huyssen, 2003), the trauma of everything, and the ‘right to remember’. Its driving factors include the increasing obsession with the commemoration and memorialisation of the traumas and triumphs of, particularly, twentieth-century conflicts and catastrophes (Winter, 1995; Sturken, 1997; Simpson, 2006).