The Loss of Memory (PDF)

Essay from the year 2006 in the subject Didactics - English - Literature, Works, grade: 2,5, University of Freiburg (Englisches Seminar), course: Proseminar: Texts as Memory, language: English, abstract: 1. Essay

The topics memory and recollection occupied philosophers, scientists and historians for centuries, however also in the last years the public found interest in it.
Culture-scientific aspects connected themselves with socio-political developments, this led to a changed understanding to the presence in relation to the past. New achievements and developments within the range of the media and medicine made a renewed reflection inevitable on the question about time and history, about individual and cultural identity.
It did not concern to smolder in memories in order to satisfy the longing of one lost paradise of the absolute knowledge, but rather to see therein a critical argument with history and presence in the view of an open future, cause future needs origin.
Many historical writers and autobiographs have noted public or private events around the time to keep memory, so that future generations have their use from it. However memory and historiography have changed in the course of the time, that he who notes past events has been subject to different attitudes, because social and political conditions change.
An event, which is to remain as recollection in the memory of humans, is firmly connected with the time in that it occurred. However are those, which will write an event down and have written down, in the change of time and the associated change of society and thinking.
This is intended to clarify that memory always lies in the eye of the viewer.
Recollection and memory are nothing else than a product of social groups. Also memories of personal kinds result only from communication and interaction in the framework to such a group. Therefore holding events, in memory or on paper, is always subject to the group, in which each belongs.
Memory stands therefore not only in connection with space and time, but also in the special measure with the identity - "Need for Identity".