Abstract
Do you remember Dominique Strauss-Kahn? In 2010, at the height of his career, Strauss-Kahn earned the distinction of being the sixth most influential Jewish person in the world. In a ranking list assembled by The Jerusalem Post, Strauss-Kahn outperformed Jewish luminaries such as Shimon Peres, Alan Dershowitz, and Michael Bloomberg. At the time, The Jerusalem Post announced that it would forthwith publish the list each year although we are still waiting for a sequel. Most likely, the editors at the Post realized that they were inadvertently feeding “the anti-Semitic stereotype that Jews control the world” (Linde, 2010). If The Jerusalem Post had continued its ranking efforts, Strauss-Kahn would have dropped off the list like a stone in 2011 when he resigned from his post as director of the International Monetary Fund after having been indicted in New York City (NYC) for sexually assaulting a hotel maid. In a dramatic turn of events, NYC authorities arrested Strauss-Kahn at John F. Kennedy (JFK) International Airport moments before he was boarding a Europe-bound plane and held him without bail at Riker’s Island for several days. However, in the course of a lengthy investigation, NYC authorities developed serious doubts about the accuser’s credibility. The criminal case collapsed while the media frenzy continued. The drama in NYC prompted other women to come forward with rape allegations against or passionate defenses of Strauss-Kahn. And the story continued in Europe. Strauss-Kahn appears to have been involved in a prostitution ring in France and has been standing trial for the alleged crime of aggravated pimping in Lille. As a result of these multiple scandals, Strauss-Kahn’s career lies in shambles. The erstwhile leading contender for the Socialist candidacy for the French Presidency has been forced to peddle his financial expertise to such dubious employers as Russia, Serbia, and Sudan.
The lurid mix of sex, politics, and money, further spiced up with great conspiracy theory potential and an action movie airport chase, turned the Strauss-Kahn affair into an instant media event. Strauss-Kahn, who has yet to be convicted of any crime, set a new record as he found himself prominently displayed on the front pages of over 150,000 newspapers around the world (Marlowe, 2011). Inevitably, the affair has been addressed in a Law & Order episode and been turned into a movie featuring embattled and scandal-prone French actor Gerard Depardieu in the role of Strauss-Kahn (Scorched Earth 2011; Welcome to New York 2014). The film in question, Welcome to New York, received severe criticism as well as some stellar reviews but never made it into theatrical distribution, thus triggering censorship accusations and more conspiracy theories. With considerable delay, the German television crime time flagship Tatort followed suit. In May 2015, Tatort transposed the Strauss-Kahn affair into a fictitious German setting and entertained its viewers with a sanitized version of events containing little of the original drama and painting a fairly generous picture of Strauss-Kahn (Roomservice 2015).
Despite unprecedented media attention, the affair appears to have left behind rather ambivalent memory traces. In some French circles, Strauss-Kahn might well remain a persistent site of shameful or gleeful recollection. The affair has clearly helped transform the French public sphere which is now more likely than before to explore, remember, and judge the sexual mores of male members of the French elites. In most other settings, Strauss-Kahn appears to be all but forgotten. Like the cultural fall-out of so many contemporary media events, the images and stories about Strauss-Kahn, which flooded airwaves, print media, and Internet news outlets for weeks, do not seem to have had a lasting impact on media consumers’ sense of collective self. Popular appreciation of the entertainment options offered by Strauss-Kahn does not translate into persisting social memory. Consumers remember the genre rather than the specific narrative twist and turns and visual details of the scandalous flavor of the month.
The Strauss-Kahn affair can serve as a useful opportunity for exploring the interesting relationship between different academic strategies of studying and criticizing social memory. After all, the questions of what to remember and what best to forget, of how to remember responsibly and for what purpose, should be of great interest to all of us. On the level of popular media, the Strauss-Kahn media event appears to have set into motion fairly predictable and uniform memory dynamics consisting of short-term obsession and long-term oblivion and featuring little memory dissent. On the level of academic culture, scholars have a range of options when it comes to making ethical and strategic decisions about remembering and forgetting the Strauss-Kahns of this world.
To explore these options, I focus on the closely related fields of Memory Studies and Public History by way of a closer look at the introductions to The Collective Memory Reader and The Public History Reader (Olick et al., 2011; Kean, 2013). Like heritage studies and history didactics, Public History has profited from the memory boom but has also often been overshadowed by the extraordinary dynamics of academic memory studies. One might even wonder whether these different fields should not be more effectively integrated. After all, a lot of the empirical research undertaken under the rubric of Public History could just as easily be pursued in the name of Memory Studies—and vice versa. The museums, memorials, and rituals that attract the attention of public historians are often also studied by memory experts. And the texts in which public historians analyze uses of history in the public sphere could be featured in memory journals after only a modicum of conceptual retooling. At the same time, it is questionable what purpose further integration would serve. Public historians appear to enjoy their own company and seem little inclined to join the larger and more interdisciplinarily structured terrain of memory studies. In fact, despite significant thematic overlap between the two fields, one might argue that Public History and Memory Studies represent distinct invented traditions and imagined communities featuring different canonical texts, intellectual heroes, and strategic objectives—and Strauss-Kahn might help us appreciate these different academic thought styles.
In The Public History Reader, Public History presents itself as an attractive intellectual option. Hilda Kean elegantly anchors the field in its own distinct site of memory: Ruskin College in Oxford (Kean, 2013: xiv; Kean and Ashton, 2012: 1). Ruskin, an institution with a long track record of offering second chances to educationally disadvantaged adults, is the former academic home of Public History founding father Raphael Samuel. The College has its own history as an economic underdog having recently been re-located from the center to the periphery of Oxford in a real estate deal that might have safeguarded the college’s survival but robbed it of its traditional geographical center. For the field of Public History, this turn of events should enhance Ruskin College’s legitimacy as the symbolic birthplace of Public History in the United Kingdom.
In addition to identifying an appropriate site of memory, the editors of the Public History Reader provide the field with a similarly compelling narrative identity. In a vivid and programmatic vignette, Kean invokes the display of live rats at the heritage site of the Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney, Australia, as a particularly suitable strategy of engaging visitors with public history (Kean, 2013: xiv–xv). The rats impress upon the visitors the tough conditions under which convicts and inmates survived in Sydney. The rats are acknowledged as pests but not vilified—quite the contrary. They are recognized as accidental public history archivists since the objects they stole from the immigrants and amassed in their hiding places have allowed twentieth-century historians to reconstruct the everyday lives of immigrants in much greater detail than would have been otherwise possible. In this way, the rats helped save people from oblivion who, in the universe of Public History, are particularly deserving of historical attention. Moreover, the balanced assessment of the rats’ role in history nicely illustrates another guiding principle of Public History: the economically and symbolically downtrodden of this earth, (wo)men as well as beast, should be treated respectfully and not pitched against one another.
Kean effectively links the Public History Reader-project to prominent publications in the field, thus defining Public History as a social form of knowledge grounded in contemporary life (Samuel, 1994) and concerned with illuminating the ways in which normal people engage with the past on a personal, group, and family level (De Groot, 2009). In this context, she also declares that “history is owned by those described in the narrative” (Kean, 2013: xv; also Archibald, 1999: 155–156). Most likely, many professional historians would take issue with this statement, and Kean thus inadvertently highlights an important fault line that repeatedly appears in her introduction. Public History as conceived of by Kean seems to have a conflicted relationship to academic history. On the one hand, academic historians are criticized for their insufficient appreciation of popular forms of historical knowledge. On the other hand, the field of Public History subscribes to the methods of professional academic history including its principles of source criticism and its strategies of historical narration. As a result, Public History displays some anxieties about its status as a professional discipline. Vigorous advocacy for non-professional appropriations of the past and respect for the discipline of history form an unstable intellectual mixture. Despite or perhaps because of these instabilities, Kean sketches out a very attractive intellectual community. Public History follows in the progressive footsteps of history from below and the history workshop movement and embodies a clear ethos demanding for the victims and underdogs of history the respect they deserve but rarely receive.
The readers of the Collective Memory Reader are invited to join a very different imagined community. Jeffrey Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy identify a somber and distant site of memory in their introduction as they refer to the Hebrew Bible to illustrate humanity’s long concern with social memory (Olick et al., 2011: 3). In addition, they immediately display a conflicted relationship to narration as they try to enlighten their readers about the invented tradition of memory studies. Rather than providing a straight-forward genealogy like Kean, Olick et al. treat their readers to an ironic performance. They invoke the standard narrative of the memory boom which allegedly began sometime in the 1970s when the crisis of the welfare state and the gradual decline of political utopias prompted Western nations to turn to the past for much needed legitimacy. But the editors immediately and decisively distance themselves from this conventional story line, leaving their audience in a narrative void (Olick et al., 2011: 3–4). Later in the introduction, they offer an alternative narrative of origins arguing that sustained scholarly concerns with collective remembering already began in the nineteenth century and experienced a period of latency in the mid-twentieth century before becoming a central paradigm of academic research so familiar to us. But this story about memory and modernity is never fleshed out in vivid detail and does not serve as a compelling rallying point for the discipline. One senses a lot more de-constructive analytical ambition than re-constructive narrative desire which makes perfect sense considering that the editors “invent” the tradition of Memory Studies from a social science perspective.
The Collective Memory Reader does not feature intriguingly ambivalent rat-stories and nostalgically charged sites of memory. Instead, we are treated to a magisterial space-conquering survey of the large, interdisciplinary terrain of memory studies. By way of an impressive series of citations, one discipline after another, including sociology, psychology, historiography, and anthropology, is integrated into the fold of memory studies. In these cohorts of scholars, only Maurice Halbwachs, fellow sociologist and undisputed founding father of Memory Studies, is singled out for more in-depth analysis. And even with Halbwachs, we are not offered a tangible story about scholarly genius. Instead, Olick et al. provide a compelling analysis of the reception of his work which demonstrates that Halbwachs was “no lone wolf” but an intellectually well-integrated, modern scholar (Olick et al., 2011: 22).
The imagined community of Memory Studies, as outlined in The Collective Memory Reader, is a less comfortable intellectual Heimat than the more intimate environment of Public History. Public History is explicitly ethically and politically grounded; it serves the cause of historical justice. Memory Studies can certainly tolerate that kind of political commitment, but the field is imbued with analytical ambition linked to its poststructuralist roots. For similar reasons, Memory Studies appears far less comfortable with narrative appropriations of the past than its less expansive sibling. Moreover, in distinct contrast to Public History, Memory Studies is driven by interdisciplinary and especially theoretical ambitions. The scholars who join Public History enlist in a cause. The academics who work and network in Memory Studies are provided with a set of robust theoretical tools with which they can explore a sprawling interdisciplinary landscape.
In my perception, the two different imagined communities and invented traditions are also clearly gendered. Public History is a more feminine, affective space concerned with community building and harboring significant doubts about the conventional academic habitus. Memory Studies does not explicitly distance itself from that habitus. It appears to be a more male-structured enterprise designed for taking control of far-flung scholarly landscapes. In short, Memory Studies and Public History might concern themselves with similar subject matter, but they analyze uses of the past with different tools and for different purposes; they represent very different thought styles.
Where does that leave Strauss-Kahn? For public historians, he is a non-topic. Public historians focus on the use of history in the present, but that history is defined in conventional terms. The Strauss-Kahn affair is simply not historical enough; it lacks a traditional historical referent. Moreover, public historians prefer to engage with tangible acts of historical interpretation. They deal with archives, memorials, museums, material culture, family history, oral history, reenactments, and tribunals. The ephemera of electronic and digital communication are not their preferred cup of tea. There is one important exception. While Strauss-Kahn might be a public history anathema, his victims are not. They could become a topic of public history for instance in the context of projects dealing with crime victims’ association as social movements.
The Strauss-Kahn story could more easily play an important role in a collective memory studies project. The field has long abandoned any reliance on academic historiography as purveyor of suitable topics and research methods and stresses the importance of social memory in all forms of personal and mediated communication. In addition, the affair touches upon key concerns of collective memory studies, including the themes of transnational memory, social forgetting, remediation, and cultural trauma. At the same time, the Strauss-Kahn affair does highlight curious lacunae in the expansive field of collective memory research. A brief look at applicable bibliographies and an appreciation of the cultural importance of this type of media coverage suggest, for instance, that we have not yet paid enough attention to the social memory of sexuality.