Barcelona Metropolis | Sergi Doria | Interview With Andreas Huyssen

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Photo: Pere Virgili

Interview with Andreas HuyssenText Sergi Doria

It isn't easy to draw the line separating the legendary past fromthe real past

Andreas Huyssen (born Düsseldorf, 1942) is a lecturer at the University ofColumbia and the founder of the New German Critique, and has travelled fromliterary comparitivism to urban cultural globalisation. In After the great divide,Present pasts: urban palimpsests and the politics of memory and TwilightMemories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (Granica) he analyses amodern consciousness that is unable to assume the present, and is blinded by anostalgia for ruins. Huyssen shies away from black and white simplificationsand the elitism of historians who disdain popular culture, and deconstructs aworld that has been "museumised" into theme parks. Few analysts haveconsidered the mass media aspect of the Holocaust and the politicisation ofmemory with any intellectual honesty: “The fault line between mythic past andreal past is not always easy to draw - which is one of the conundrums of anypolitics of memory anywhere. The real can be mythologized, just as the mythicmay engender strong reality effects. In sum, memory has become a culturalobsession of monumental proportions across the globe”.

As a scholar of cultural movements in of the present day, does it makesense 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 Dadamovement, futurism and surrealism was based on a radical futuristic utopiawhich was aligned with hope for radical political changes, both on the right andon the left. This combination of aesthetics and politics does not exist today. Theavant-garde as a concept is history. However, there are some innovative artists.William Kentridge from South Africa, for example, works with avant-gardematerials, as does the Argentinean painter Guillermo Kuitca. But if there is anavant-garde today, it won't emerge in the same way as it did in the earlytwentieth century. Those avant-gardes were produced by groups of artists whopublished manifestos. They were therefore collective phenomena, and todaythey are individual and fragmented projects.

Museums have become aesthetic vices. Their packaging seems to bemore 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 mebecause I admire Richard Meier. Another interesting centre is the Jewishmuseum in Berlin, although its inner space is not ideal for exhibitions. I believethat small museums are more practical in terms of achieving their objective. Wehave architects that build museums but unfortunately, public architecture is notas important as it was in the twenties and thirties. The construction of newbuildings 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 sidesbecame 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 muchmore than a remnant of the fire during the Nazi period. And in Foster'sconstruction, with its famous dome, the Reichstag assumed the role ofparliamentary democracy. There are other examples in Berlin that have beenbuilt recently, but they are mediocre, like the Potsdamer Platz. The urbanimagination is not synonymous with fantasy, but rather with the way people livein the city: as permanent residents, immigrants or simply as tourists. Pamuk’sreflections on the international dimension of urban culture have been importantto me since I taught classes with him at Columbia University. In Istanbul:Memories and the City, he describes the urban imagination through its writersand foreign visitors. It is a cosmopolitan city in ruins that evokes the bygoneglories 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 thecity. Present and past, global and local. It is a creative tension between westernand Turkish culture which makes Pamuk a cosmopolitan writer: what makesIstanbul special is not its topography, monuments or buildings but thememories of its people, those hidden coincidences that keep everythingtogether.

You've talked about a "memory boom”. If the government enacts a Historical Memory Law, it runs the risk of creating anideological 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 perhapsconsensus-based forms of collective memory are still possible. I think that there will be always a battle around historical memory. We cannot havea 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 ahierarchical 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, theJewish memory of the Holocaust is juxtaposed with the memory of slavery. In Spain, the debate on historical memory has taken years to reachthe 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 ontraumatic historical memory cannot be limited to one country and its frontiers. As in the discourse of trauma itself, it has essentially been madeinto something that can be wiped clean and rewritten, to the point where the various discourses on historical memory have become intermingledand overlap all over the world, crossing frontiers and rebounding against each other, sometimes hiding and forgetting historical memory and atother 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. Onthat basis, history is objective and memory is subjective, history is collective and memory is individual; history is scientific and memory isemotional… 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… Fromthat 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 turnedagainst the modernist elite that had taken over the European avant-garde, which was in turn at one time a reaction against the High Modernismof 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 aresult of various political approaches. It is not just that the frontiers between high and low culture have started to become significantly blurredsince western High Modernism, which predominated in the early decades of the Cold War. One cannot even assume that there has been a type ofstable 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 adifferent relationship with power and with the State, in both the colonial and post-colonial period. These different pasts have determined the waysin which specific cultures have negotiated the impact of modernisation since the nineteenth century and the subsequent dissemination of themedia, 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 thepast. For example, the heroic French myth of the Resistance went through a crisis in the 1980s when the past of president Mitterrand came tolight. History had been reinvented, and since this reinvention, public debates on memory have been decisive. There is no historiography that doesnot have a mythical component. Historiography depends on its narrative, although the differences between historical materials and fiction shouldbe 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 ismythical 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 Lübbe defined what he called "museumisation" as a central feature of the modernworld’s changing sensitivity to time, and showed that this phenomenon was not linked to the institution of the museum in the strict sense of theword, but in fact had filtered into all areas of everyday life. The present is currently expanding towards the past and a crisis of meaning. Returningto Lübbe's theory, museums compensate for this loss of stability; they provide traditional forms of cultural identity for the destabilised modernsubject. Although this is not always the case: each individual recognises this cultural tradition in other media, such as the digital world andcommercialised recycling. According to David Harvey, there was a compression of space and time in late nineteenth century Modernism, and thisprocess culminated in fully developed consumer and mass media societies. Our world is shrinking and expanding at the same time. In thenineteenth century, the universal exhibitions expanded the imagination and this expansion is now a source of conflict. Migratory flows lead to thereinvention 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 inGermany it is still mainly based on right of blood. These differences in political criteria lead to many problems. In North America there areemigrants who do not have American nationality, while their children do have it by virtue of being born on American soil. As for the power ofcities, 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 notliving 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 alsoseems feasible to ask whether after the Memory boom is over, there will be anyone left who remembers anything. The positive aspect is thatmemory has become international with the creation of international tribunals and Judge Garzón's warrant for Pinochet’s arrest; it also influencesthe work of NGOs and Truth Commissions in South Africa, Guatemala and Cambodia. All this means that governments know that they can becalled to account for their actions and must be responsible, which is a major shift in international politics if you compare it with what washappening 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'spronounced 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”. Thesedays, 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 wastransferred to the Argentine Commission on the Disappeared (CONADEP). Its collection of evidence in 1984 was entitled Never Again. With thisreference to a phrase from the Holocaust, it provided the symbolic and empirical cornerstones for the subsequent trial of the military junta in1985. 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, butinstead was a paranoid campaign by the generals against left-wing guerrillas. But at that time, the reference was perhaps necessary to highlightthe 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 ruinsarouse nostalgia because they indissolubly combine the temporary and spatial desires of the past. I suspect that this obsession with ruins hides anostalgia 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 wasthe 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 ofpolitical organisation than democracy, but the relationship between the democratic system and the capitalist economy is more difficult after thedisintegration of the Soviet Union. We should remember that the Welfare State of the 1950s was also a response to the rhetoric of Communistrevolution. In 1988, we thought that the Cold War and its bipolar international system would last forever. When the Berlin Wall fell, capitalismseemed to be the only system possible, and it lost all its ability for self-criticism. The entire second half of the twentieth century will beremembered as a utopia of the past when no international wars broke out. Utopias are necessary, but rather than thinking about the past, weshould 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 morelike the precise definition of new geopolitics. If civilisations clash, the space for international exchange and cultural hybridisation disappears. Itwas the heyday of the orientalist and pro-western legions. On both sides of the Atlantic, banal anti-American and anti-European stereotypesbecame common currency and once again the metaphysics of civilisations, cultures and nations imposed itself. The iconoclasm of Bin Laden andhis henchmen stages a deadly event in the international media in order to fire a shot across the bows of the very same modernisation whichcreated Bin Laden … politicised religious fanaticism, whether it is within Islam, Christianity, or any other religion, is not the opposite of modernitybut 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 thatsustainable development takes place regardless of opposition to the globalised world. Globalisation has provided opportunities, and not only in thewestern world. It is an irreversible process, although the economic crisis and the increase in unemployment will revive the rhetoric of protest. InNorth America, the unions criticise immigrants for taking their jobs and the extreme right has a similar approach … To return to the “clash ofcivilisations”, it is nothing more than a theory against globalisation at a time when we cannot avoid being global, but we instead have to negotiatea reasonable globalisation.

Winter (January - March 2010)


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Barcelona Metropolis | Sergi Doria | Interview With Andreas Huyssen