Memory, Narrative, and Rupture: The Power of the Past as a Resource for Political Change∗

In politics “soft” ideational factors are often dismissed in favor of “hard” quantifiable data. Since the “memory boom,” however, collective memory has become an important variable for explaining persistent grievances and cycles of hatred. Building on the work of Hannah Arendt and the first generation of the Frankfurt School, I seek to counterbalance the literature’s predominantly negative conception of memory by developing a constructive understanding of remembrance as a resource for rethinking politics in the aftermath of breaks in the narrative thread of historical time. My basic thesis is that historical ruptures shared by an entire generation can activate collective memory as a resource for reimagining political life. I show how Arendt and the critical theorists of the early Frankfurt School used the caesura of 1945 to rethink the meaning of the past and endorse new forms of political life in the aftermath of Europe’s age of total war.