AGNES HELLER Cultural Memory, Identity and Civil Society T he question of collective memory, first raised by Halbwachs, became just recently one of the centerpoints of interest, mainly in the wake of the works of Pierre Nora, Chaim Yerushalmi and Jan Assman. In this article I apply their conceptual tools. When speaking on cultural memory I have not in mind traces of the past stored in a kind of collective consciousness ready for recall or hidden in a collective unconscious buried under the ruins of forgetting which could be retrieved only by systematic work if at all. Cultural memory is rather embodied in objectivations which store meanings in a concentrated manner, meanings shared by a group of people who take them for granted. These can be texts, such as sacred scrolls, historical chronicles, lyric or epic poetry. They can also be monuments, such as buildings or statues, shared material signs, signals, symbols and allegories as storages of experience, memorabilia erected as reminders. Furtheron, cultural memory is embo­died in regularly repeated and repeatable practices, such as festivals, ceremonies, rites. Finally, cultural memory just like individual memory is linked to places. To places where something significant and unique event has taken place, or to places where a significant event is regularly replayed. For ex­ample, in Europe many villages have a Calvary hill, where at every Good Friday Christ’s passion is replayed. Cultural memory is identity constructing and identity maintaining. As long as a group of people maintains and cultivates a common cul­tural memory, this group of people exists. Chaim Yerushalmi analyses how Jewish people were cons­ciously cultivating their identity through remem­brance. The frequency of the injunction»zachor!« remember!, which appears 169 times in the Jewish Bible alone, is a case in point. Whenever cultural memory enters into ob­livion, a group of people disappear, irrespective of the circumstance whether they will or will not be recorded in the books of history. The Chinese communist government was well aware of this when it commanded its troupes after the occupa­tion of Tibet to destroy all the buildings and statues erected at the places of memory of Tibetian Buddhism. Presence or absences, life or decay of a people does not depend on biological survival of an ethnic group, but on the survival of shared cultural memory. Strong and complex cultural buildings have represented the ascending high cultures during the axiological age. It suffices to refer to Homer, whose Iliad and Odyssey remained the basic text and living memory for all Hellens, or to the first versions of the first five books of the Jewish Bible, or to all the holy sites where the festivals of the turn of seasons were fused with myths and histories of cultural memory maintenance. Religi­ons were the greatest cultural identity builders, and so were ethnic groups and city dwelling people together with their political institutions, which were on their part imbued by religious prac­tises. In cultural memory the places of memory must remain, concrete and distinct irrespective of the circumstance, whether they are mythological or historical reminders. Sometimes the distinction is blurred. We know that Caesar was not murdered on the Capitolium, but when we visit the Capi­tolium in Rome we – readers of Plutarch and of Shakespeare – will visit the place were Caesar was murdered. This is certainly cultural memory of the second order. Now I will discuss only cultural memory of the first order, that is the identity con­stituting cultural memory, when in the perfor­mance of ceremonies, rites, at exact date in an exact place the past is constantly becoming pre­sent. At every Passover Jews are liberated from the Egyptian yoke, at every Good Friday Christ is cruci-fied. Every generation experiences the past as their present. The centrality of cultural memory in identity building was known and thus cultural memory has IPG 2/2001 Agnes Heller, Cultural Memory, Identity and Civil Society 139