U.S.-Germany Joint Workshop on the Transformation of Memory Across Generations

Co-Principal Investigators:
Mona Weissmark, adjunct professor of Psychology, Northwestern (weissmar@northwestern.edu)
Aleida Assmann, Konstanz University, Germany
Funder: German Research Foundation

Authoritarian countries tend to maintain collectivist values of group interest, whereas democratic countries tend to maintain individualist values of personal interest. Transitioning from an authoritarian regime to democracy, therefore, requires more than implementing new policies or economic reforms. It requires the acceptance of new values that are at odds with cultural values that have been transmitted for centuries.

Although economic and political factors are thought to be crucial for the stability and success of new democracies, cultural factors are also critical to the development of national cohesion and solidarity. Culture embodies the enduring values championed by a country and preserved through memory. Cultural memory is a key factor that plays an important role in the functioning of democratic processes. Therefore, studying how citizens across generations of democratic regimes remember the past is necessary for extending our knowledge on the relations between cultural memory and the transition to democracy.

This workshop will design a long-term study to further our understanding of how countries transitioning from authoritarian to democratic regimes transmit and transform cultural memories across generations. The central questions of the long-term comparative study are: What is the relationship between cultural memory and democratization? How is cultural memory transmitted and transformed across generations? What is the role of memories of injustice in that transmission? How do memories of past injustices influence democratic transitions? To what extent are citizens' individualist or collectivist values related to the transformation of cultural memory across generations? These questions will be investigated through quantitative and qualitative research, including interviews, focus groups, surveys, questionnaires, and narrative analyses.