Nations, Borders, Identities

Joint International and Interdisciplinary Conference

Experience, Memory and Media

Transmitting the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in 19th and 20th Century Europe

October, Thursday 11 – Saturday 13, 2007

University of Mannheim, Schloss, Senatssaal

Sponsored by the University of Mannheim, the German Research Foundation,
the Center for French Studies at the Free University of Berlin,
the Foundation of the Landesbank Baden-Württemberg, and
the Heinrich-Vetter-Stiftung, Mannheim

Program (pdf)

Paper Abstracts (pdf)

Bios (pdf)

Conference Report (pdf)

Aims and Agenda

“In the beginning was Napoleon” – this famous sentence from Thomas Nipperdey's History of Germany applies also to large parts of Europe. Notwithstanding Nipperdey's strong focus on the person of Napoleon it seems unquestionable that the Napoleonic Empire and the French Revolution, which preceded it constituted a crucial turning point in European history. The military expansion of France ensured that hardly any part of Europe remained untouched by these revolutionary transformations. Both the wider population and the soldiers directly involved in the fighting were drawn into the vortex of the wars, which raged across Europe between 1792 and 1815. Influenced by the experiences and memories of these wars, the self-perceptions and the perceptions of the other held by the inhabitants of European states and regions changed fundamentally. Unlike any other era, the period of 1792–1815 created ideas of ethnic, religious and national identity.

The experience and memory of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had an enduring influence on the collective memory of all European nations and regions and have given them an international dimension. Since summer 2005 the Anglo-German project Nations, Borders and Identities has been analysing the experience and memory of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars within a comparative European perspective, while paying particular attention to issues of national transfer. The project concentrates on France, England and Ireland, Austria and Prussia, Poland, and Russia. The aim of this conference is to discuss this research in a broader European context. The main focus will be the transmission of experience and memory through the various media, which constitute their material dimension. While the proponents of different theoretical approaches – Aby Warburg, Pierre Nora, Aleida and Jan Assmann – emphasise the importance of the media in constructing collective experience and memory, this has so far rarely been analysed in a comparative and trans-national perspective or across different disciplines.

Aleida Assman with her research on forms and transformation of cultural memory is one of the few scholars to have worked intensively on the relationship between media and memory. She assumes that individuals, collectives and cultures construct their memory interactively, through communication in language, images, and cultural practices. It is only through codification in cultural objects – texts, pictures, items, symbols and rituals, etc. – that the content of communicative memory can be detached from the communicative discourse of limited and transient social groups, saved over time and finally reworked into a part of cultural memory. Individuals, collectives and cultures equally organise their memory with the aid of external storage media and cultural practices. Without these the construction of generational and epoch-bridging memory is impossible. This also means that the type, character and development of the media affect the transmission of memory and therefore change the formation of collective and cultural memory. As experiences and communicative memories are so closely related and both are to an important extent formed by the media that transmit them, the NBI project intends to relate in this conference the analysis of experience, memory and media.

Each medium offers us a specific insight into experience and communicative and cultural memory. Writing, following language, encodes differently from visual images. These are independent of language and can encode non-verbal experiences and impressions. This is also the case with the new medium of film. Objects, monuments and places can become media of memory and commemoration. They encode memory in a further way. All material media of memory share the ability to confirm and save for posterity, even beyond periods of collective and cultural oblivion, individual or collective experiences which were at one time regarded as important and memorable and were encoded in some way. The process of remembering is then a dynamic one: the medium revives (but also transforms) latent experience and memory, while experience and memory interpret the medium.

Central to this conference are the most important media for the transmission of experience and memory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that helped to form the perception and commemoration of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in different regions of Europe. In the course of the conference a range of media will be examined in an interdisciplinary, long-term perspective. These include autobiographies, historical novels, plays, poems and songs, visual images (especially paintings and prints), historical films. It is the aim of the conference to explore the specific ways in which these media "work"- how they encode and release information and their different effects on the shaping of experience and memory. Central questions include:

▪ Which specific theoretical and methodological approaches regarding the analysis of media of experience and memory have been developed, and which have proved most fruitful?

▪ In what ways have different media shaped experiences and memories of the period of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars?

▪ What is the potential impact of the respective media? What are their limits? What can they encode? Who uses them? Whom could they reach?

▪ How far are convergences and divergences (with regard to the images and narratives) encouraged by the respective media of memory? To what extent is it the medium itself that dictates these divergences?

▪ How have technological innovations and changing markets in literature, culture and art affected the shaping of experiences and memories?

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Program

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Welcome and Introduction

9:00 – 9:30 a.m.

▪ HANS-WOLFGANG ARNDT (PRESIDENT, University of Mannheim)

▪ ERICH PELZER (University of Mannheim, Department of History)

▪ KAREN HAGEMANN (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of History)

I. Comparisons and Transfer of War Experiences and Memories- Theoretical and Methodological Reflections

9:30 – 10:30 a.m.

Chair: ERICH PELZER (University of Mannheim, Department of History)

▪ ALAN FORREST (University of York, Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies)

▪ ETIENNE FRANÇOIS (Free University of Berlin, Centre for French Studies)

II. Experiences and Memories in Personal Writings

10:45 – 1:15 p.m.

Chair: KAREN HAGEMANN (UNC at Chapel Hill, Department of History)

▪ MARIE-CECILE THORAL (University of York, Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies):

War Writings: French Soldiers' Diaries as a Source for the History of War Memory