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Interview with Andreas Huyssen

Text Sergi Doria It isn't easy to draw the line separating the legendary past from the real past
Andreas Huyssen (born Dsseldorf, 1942) is a lecturer at the University of Columbia and the founder of the New German Critique, and has travelled from literary comparitivism to urban cultural globalisation. In After the great divide, Present pasts: urban palimpsests and the politics of memory and Twilight

Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (Granica) he analyses a modern consciousness that is unable to assume the present, and is blinded by a nostalgia for ruins. Huyssen shies away from black and white simplifications and the elitism of historians who disdain popular culture, and deconstructs a world that has been "museumised" into theme parks. Few analysts have considered the mass media aspect of the Holocaust and the politicisation of memory with any intellectual honesty: The fault line between mythic past and real past is not always easy to draw - which is one of the conundrums of any politics of memory anywhere. The real can be mythologized, just as the mythic may engender strong reality effects. In sum, memory has become a cultural obsession of monumental proportions across the globe.

Photo: Pere Virgili

As a scholar of cultural movements in of the present day, does it make sense to continue to talk about a twenty-first century avant-garde? Yes and no: we have a twofold answer. The historic avant-garde of the Dada movement, futurism and surrealism was based on a radical futuristic utopia which was aligned with hope for radical political changes, both on the right and on the left. This combination of aesthetics and politics does not exist today. The avant-garde as a concept is history. However, there are some innovative artists. William Kentridge from South Africa, for example, works with avant-garde materials, as does the Argentinean painter Guillermo Kuitca. But if there is an avant-garde today, it won't emerge in the same way as it did in the early twentieth century. Those avant-gardes were produced by groups of artists who published manifestos. They were therefore collective phenomena, and today they are individual and fragmented projects.

Museums have become aesthetic vices. Their packaging seems to be more important than the content on display The proliferation of museums is another manifestation of the Memory boom. Of

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the ones specialising in contemporary art, the MACBA particularly appeals to me because I admire Richard Meier. Another interesting centre is the Jewish museum in Berlin, although its inner space is not ideal for exhibitions. I believe that small museums are more practical in terms of achieving their objective. We have architects that build museums but unfortunately, public architecture is not as important as it was in the twenties and thirties. The construction of new buildings has not compensated for the heritage we have lost.

An architecture that constructs imaginary urban landscapes Berlin after the fall of the Wall. Spaces that were inaccessible on both sides became accessible. It was as if the city's history had blown up in our faces. Christo wrapped the Reichstag, and for Berliners that building meant much more than a remnant of the fire during the Nazi period. And in Foster's construction, with its famous dome, the Reichstag assumed the role of parliamentary democracy. There are other examples in Berlin that have been built recently, but they are mediocre, like the Potsdamer Platz. The urban imagination is not synonymous with fantasy, but rather with the way people live in the city: as permanent residents, immigrants or simply as tourists. Pamuks reflections on the international dimension of urban culture have been important to me since I taught classes with him at Columbia University. In Istanbul: Memories and the City, he describes the urban imagination through its writers and foreign visitors. It is a cosmopolitan city in ruins that evokes the bygone glories of the Ottoman Empire. Melancholy is as palpable as a tangible reality. Urban and literary imagination in the texts of Nerval, Gautier, Flaubert, Gide western perspectives which the Turkish author includes in his memories of the city. Present and past, global and local. It is a creative tension between western and Turkish culture which makes Pamuk a cosmopolitan writer: what makes Istanbul special is not its topography, monuments or buildings but the memories of its people, those hidden coincidences that keep everything together. Photo: Pere Virgili

You've talked about a "memory boom. If the government enacts a Historical Memory Law, it runs the risk of creating an ideological script as occurs in Spain with Civil War The politics of memory, which are increasingly fragmented into specific social and ethnic groups in conflict, lead one to ask whether perhaps consensus-based forms of collective memory are still possible. I think that there will be always a battle around historical memory. We cannot have a collective memory because it does not work. And what there is in Spain and in other countries in the world are memories in conflict, because a hierarchical arrangement of these memories has imposed itself in the public discourse. And establishing hierarchies of memory is a very bad idea. If a law says in its preamble that memory is private and it is promoted by the State, that's a contradiction, it's absurd. In North America, the Jewish memory of the Holocaust is juxtaposed with the memory of slavery. In Spain, the debate on historical memory has taken years to reach the public domain. And that is not because Franco's dictatorship and the Civil War have not been covered extensively in books. But in the 1980s, with the threat of a military coup, nobody thought in terms of taking the debate beyond historical studies. In any event, the discourse on traumatic historical memory cannot be limited to one country and its frontiers. As in the discourse of trauma itself, it has essentially been made into something that can be wiped clean and rewritten, to the point where the various discourses on historical memory have become intermingled and overlap all over the world, crossing frontiers and rebounding against each other, sometimes hiding and forgetting historical memory and at other times reinforcing it.

Isn't the term historical memory an oxymoron? I don't agree! That argument is based on the approach of traditional historians, which reduces to memory to just another footnote of history. On that basis, history is objective and memory is subjective, history is collective and memory is individual; history is scientific and memory is emotional But to me, that means everything is reduced to an ideology. The German Egyptologist Jan Assmann coined the term "mnemohistory". He said that cultures do not only have historiography, but also communicative and cultural memories that are articulated in different ways From that perspective, the radical opposition of history versus memory makes no sense. They will always be dependent on each other.

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You acknowledge the historical contributions that others scornfully leave to the masses. In Europe, the distinction between high culture and mass culture is clearer than in the United States. In the seventies, postmodernism turned against the modernist elite that had taken over the European avant-garde, which was in turn at one time a reaction against the High Modernism of high culture.

In the context of globalisation, levels of culture are becoming mixed up... It is becoming obvious that the high/low comparison takes on very different forms at each point in history, and that it can come to an end as a result of various political approaches. It is not just that the frontiers between high and low culture have started to become significantly blurred since western High Modernism, which predominated in the early decades of the Cold War. One cannot even assume that there has been a type of stable literary high culture everywhere in the strictest sense of the term, which is consistent with the model of European nation states like France, England and Germany. And where there has been a traditional indigenous high culture, such as in India, Japan and China, it has inevitably had a different relationship with power and with the State, in both the colonial and post-colonial period. These different pasts have determined the ways in which specific cultures have negotiated the impact of modernisation since the nineteenth century and the subsequent dissemination of the media, technologies and consumerism inherent in globalisation.

When we consider memory, is it not inevitable that there is some degree of romantic mythologizing of the past? The geographic dissemination of the culture of memory is both extensive and varied in terms of its political uses, and mobilises myths from the past. For example, the heroic French myth of the Resistance went through a crisis in the 1980s when the past of president Mitterrand came to light. History had been reinvented, and since this reinvention, public debates on memory have been decisive. There is no historiography that does not have a mythical component. Historiography depends on its narrative, although the differences between historical materials and fiction should be made clear: it is one of the dilemmas that arise in all policies of memory. What is real can be "mythologized," in the same way as what is mythical can create strong effects of reality. In short, memory has become an obsession of monumental proportions in the entire world.

Museums are also something we can grasp in a present that we do not know how to handle, and an uncertain future In the 1980s, the conservative German philosopher Hermann Lbbe defined what he called "museumisation" as a central feature of the modern worlds changing sensitivity to time, and showed that this phenomenon was not linked to the institution of the museum in the strict sense of the word, but in fact had filtered into all areas of everyday life. The present is currently expanding towards the past and a crisis of meaning. Returning to Lbbe's theory, museums compensate for this loss of stability; they provide traditional forms of cultural identity for the destabilised modern subject. Although this is not always the case: each individual recognises this cultural tradition in other media, such as the digital world and commercialised recycling. According to David Harvey, there was a compression of space and time in late nineteenth century Modernism, and this process culminated in fully developed consumer and mass media societies. Our world is shrinking and expanding at the same time. In the nineteenth century, the universal exhibitions expanded the imagination and this expansion is now a source of conflict. Migratory flows lead to the reinvention of spaces and the idea of nationality. What do we call citizenship? In North America and France it is based on right of soil, while in Germany it is still mainly based on right of blood. These differences in political criteria lead to many problems. In North America there are emigrants who do not have American nationality, while their children do have it by virtue of being born on American soil. As for the power of cities, it used to be said that the more global they were, the weaker nation states would be, but that has proven to be an illusion. We are not living through a period of post-nationalism. In these times of crisis, the policies of national governments have become important once again.

As regards the overproduction of historical memory, you say that at this rate, there will soon be little left to remember... These days the past is a stronger selling point than the future. I wonder how long this cultural commercialisation of memory will last. It also seems feasible to ask whether after the Memory boom is over, there will be anyone left who remembers anything. The positive aspect is that memory has become international with the creation of international tribunals and Judge Garzn's warrant for Pinochets arrest; it also influences the work of NGOs and Truth Commissions in South Africa, Guatemala and Cambodia. All this means that governments know that they can be called to account for their actions and must be responsible, which is a major shift in international politics if you compare it with what was happening in the seventies and eighties. Although unfortunately, there are still exceptions like the genocide in Darfur.

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You mentioned the word genocide. Like the word Holocaust, today it denotes different situations and contexts. It's pronounced or used by politicians and social groups. It is not danger of losing its core meaning? Indeed, those words must be used carefully, although the Law of the 1948 Convention was not very precise in its formulation of genocide. These days, those working in international justice don't talk so much about genocide as state crimes.

In your essays, you highlight a globalisation of the Holocaust discourse since the 1980s In the series of anniversaries of the Hitler period, the genocides in Rwanda, Bosnian and Kosovo kept the discourse of Holocaust memory alive, which became a universal trope that was used as a metaphor for other traumatic histories. So for example, the discourse of the Holocaust was transferred to the Argentine Commission on the Disappeared (CONADEP). Its collection of evidence in 1984 was entitled Never Again. With this reference to a phrase from the Holocaust, it provided the symbolic and empirical cornerstones for the subsequent trial of the military junta in 1985. Was the situation in Argentina exactly the same as the Jewish Holocaust? It wasn't, because it had nothing to do with religion or race, but instead was a paranoid campaign by the generals against left-wing guerrillas. But at that time, the reference was perhaps necessary to highlight the state crimes.

In your work, you analyse what you call mass marketing of nostalgia If there is an entire cultural industry based around Holocaust when considering traumatic pasts, there is also a fashion for nostalgia

And a nostalgia for ruins, in your own words The nostalgic desire for the past is always the desire for somewhere else. That's why nostalgia may be a distorted utopia. Architectural ruins arouse nostalgia because they indissolubly combine the temporary and spatial desires of the past. I suspect that this obsession with ruins hides a nostalgia for an early era of modernity, when the possibility of imagining other futures had yet to fade away.

Planning the future was a common feature of totalitarian projects. In the Marxist utopia, the paradise of the working class was the destination, with the dictatorship of the single party being the permanent station The three twentieth century utopias and I mean three: fascism, communism and neoliberalism all ended badly. There is no better means of political organisation than democracy, but the relationship between the democratic system and the capitalist economy is more difficult after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. We should remember that the Welfare State of the 1950s was also a response to the rhetoric of Communist revolution. In 1988, we thought that the Cold War and its bipolar international system would last forever. When the Berlin Wall fell, capitalism seemed to be the only system possible, and it lost all its ability for self-criticism. The entire second half of the twentieth century will be remembered as a utopia of the past when no international wars broke out. Utopias are necessary, but rather than thinking about the past, we should organise the future based on the economic crisis which we are suffering from.

You live in North America. What did you imagine the future would be like after the 9/11 attacks? Had the "clash of civilisations" conjectured by Samuel Huntington come true? If we're going to talk about the future, I prefer to be a historian rather than a prophet. After 9/11, the clash of civilisations started to seem more like the precise definition of new geopolitics. If civilisations clash, the space for international exchange and cultural hybridisation disappears. It was the heyday of the orientalist and pro-western legions. On both sides of the Atlantic, banal anti-American and anti-European stereotypes became common currency and once again the metaphysics of civilisations, cultures and nations imposed itself. The iconoclasm of Bin Laden and his henchmen stages a deadly event in the international media in order to fire a shot across the bows of the very same modernisation which created Bin Laden politicised religious fanaticism, whether it is within Islam, Christianity, or any other religion, is not the opposite of modernity but instead the product of it.

The extreme left and extreme right come together in anti-globalisation movements

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The anti-globalisation movement against international capital may have made some sort of sense in the 1990s, but today the evidence shows that sustainable development takes place regardless of opposition to the globalised world. Globalisation has provided opportunities, and not only in the western world. It is an irreversible process, although the economic crisis and the increase in unemployment will revive the rhetoric of protest. In North America, the unions criticise immigrants for taking their jobs and the extreme right has a similar approach To return to the clash of civilisations, it is nothing more than a theory against globalisation at a time when we cannot avoid being global, but we instead have to negotiate a reasonable globalisation.

Winter (January - March 2010)

Published under a Creative Commons license

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