communicating social knowledge, memory, and a sense of shared identity through repeated – or, as Richard Schechner calls it – “twice-behaved behavior”. Repertoire is an embodied collective store of knowledge that indi viduals in a group can access. One can participate in it actively by singing a song with all its verses, for exam ple, or passively by humming along to the melody.
BRIDGES, CONNECTIONS, AND NEW ISSUES The dichotomy of archive and repertoire lends itself well to politicisation and to confrontation between the colo nisers and the colonised. But this does not mean that it has exhausted its significance. Taylor has written against the expulsion of the body from Western culture and argued for the recognition and restoration of an expres sive embodied culture. In doing so, however, she has also retrieved the body-oriented side of Western culture from oblivion. The gulf runs between the written and the spo ken word and between the archive or museum as a sta ble sign carrier for texts, documents, monuments, and artefacts, on the one hand, and the ephemeral repertoire, such as spoken language, dance, sport, ritual, on the other. This gulf not only separates the cultures that use writing from those that do not, but also marks a tech nical turning point in recording practice in all cultures. Before the invention of the recording of music and moving images, all performance was also excluded from Wes tern cultural memory. Clara Schumann, for example, was a world-class pianist who travelled from performance to performance, delighting her audience on stage for sixty years of her life – but nothing of this art has been han ded down to us. Today, the gulf between excarnated and incarnated culture is no longer so deep. The term per formance leaves room for body and writing, for perfor mance and recording. Certainly, a video recording is not a performance in the narrower sense; it is a document of such a performance. But it is only with the help of these documents that we can write a history of perfor mance. On the basis of these new sources a new acade mic discipline emerges that can build a history and theory of the ephemeral arts. It is important that this history is not limited to professional knowledge but also becomes part of the general consciousness, interest, and cultu ral memory.
SAFEGUARDING THE ENDURING AND THE REPEATED In fact, cultural memory encompasses both: forms of safeguarding for the enduring and the repeated. The Russian cultural semioticians Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspensky have defined cultures as “the non-hereditary memory of a collective”. This is why they are a long-term project, a continuum of performing, learning, storing, and passing on. This cultural memory must not be confused with the storehouse of fixed documents (files, images, books, artefacts), for it comes into being and exists only in continual exchange and renewal. The distinction between the forms of safeguarding for the enduring and those for the repeated is already implicit in my distinc tion between archive and canon: canon is the narrow selection of what is performed and must always be repeated; archive is the stable framework of a tradition
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that is collected and preserved and survives through time even without retrieval and repetition. I am not talk ing here about political archives that are secret and are intended to stabilise power, but about historical archives that have three characteristics: materiality, preserva tion, and accessibility. I wish to distinguish here between memory stores and recollective media. An archive is a memory store, while monuments or books are recollective media. What is chiselled in granite promises to endure, and what you have in black and white you can confidently take home with you. But this is only one side of the coin, because repetition, re-reading, updating, and renewal – this is where the dimension of Performanz comes in – are no less important for recollection. Cultural memory, like individual memory, is therefore dependent on external stimuli or “triggers”. What is permanently stored in muse ums, archives, and libraries must be triggered on certain occasions; in other words: read, exhibited, performed, staged or, in short, reactivated. Just as there are mon uments in space, there are therefore also “monuments in time”, as I call anniversaries and other commemora tive events. These periodically recall something of what is permanently stored and receding into an ever more distant past, thereby bringing it back to the conscious ness of the general public. Playing these two modes off against each other is therefore futile, for they are com plementary. Acts of repetition are simultaneously ways of refreshing and renewing memory, which is as true for the individual as it is for culture. A lively cultural memory needs the interweaving of excarnation and incarnation. What is only conserved and does not include active or passive participation exists in storage, but not yet in memory. Our storage systems have become larger and larger – Merlin Donald calls the knowledge stored on the Internet the “ESS” (External Storage System). We as humans can rely on external storage to a large extent, but we cannot outsource our memory to it. In a lecture on his monument art, Jochen Gerz stressed this emphatically: “Today we cannot let ourselves be represented by anything, and certainly not by a monument. Because, in the long run, nothing can take our place in rising up against injustice!”12
that placed this oral-physical variant of the trans mission of cultural heritage on an equal footing with Western media of cultural memory such as libraries, museums, and archives. Cf. also Andrea Rehling, “‘Kulturen unter Artenschutz’? Vom Schutz der Kulturschätze als Gemeinsames Erbe der Menschh eit zur Erhaltung kultureller Vielfalt”, Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte, 15 (2014), pp. 109–37. 9 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 10 I distinguish performance as an art of physical expression from Performanz, the currently practised unit of such behaviour in terms of time and space. 11 A. Hampâté Bâ, “The Living Tradition”, in Joseph Ki-Zerbo, ed., Methodology and African Prehistory, General History of Africa, vol. 1 (California: James Currey, UNESCO, 1981), p. 166. 12 A lecture by Jochen Gerz given at the conference “Dy namiken des Erinnerns und Vergessens” at the Historisches Museum Frankfurt, 23–24 May 2019.
ALEIDA ASSMANN is an Anglicist, Egyptologist, and cultural theorist. The focus of her research is cultural and communicative memory. Together with Jan Assmann, she was awarded the 2018 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. Her recent publications in English include Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (2011) and Shadows of Trauma: Memory and the Politics of Postwar Identity (2015). Is Time Out of Joint? On the Rise and Fall of the Modern Time Regime will be published in 2020.
1 G ünter Grass, in Martin Wälde, ed., Die Zukunft der Erinnerung (Göttingen: Steidl, 2001), pp. 27–34. 2 Ibid. p. 28. 3 “processes of remembering, forgetting and reinvent ing”. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead, quoted from Colin Counsell and Roberta Mock, eds, Performance, Embodiment and Cultural Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), p. 7. 4 Helen Epstein, Children of the Holocaust: Conversa tions with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (New York: Penguin, 1988); and the programmatic text by Sonia Pilcer, “2G” (1987), https://www.soniapilcer .com/writingsBeta.html; and Sonia Pilcer, Holocaust Kid (New York: Persea Books, 2001). 5 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 22. 6 Ibid.; emphasis added. 7 Ibid. 8 Claudia Klaffke, “Mit jedem Greis, der stirbt verbrennt eine Bibliothek”, in Aleida Assmann, Jan A ssmann, and Christoph Hardmeier, eds, Schrift und Gedächtnis (Munich: Fink, 1979), pp. 222–30. In 2003, this embodied form of tradition was revalued and protected with a new legal con cept as “intangible cultural heritage”. It thus took almost half a century for UNESCO to find criteria
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