MARIAL CENTER COLLOQUIUM
Harald Welzer
(director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Memory Research at Essen and research professor of social psychology at the University of Witten/Herdecke in Germany)
How “auto” is autobiographical memory? On social, communicative, and autobiographical memory
Wednesday, April 11, 4:00 p.m.-6:00 p.m
What is memory made of? Its texture seems hopelessly complex and ephemeral. The contents of autobiographical memory compose our unique self, and we are definitely sure our memories belong to us, but autobiographical memory develops as part of a social network, and only after years of development changes from a social to an individual memory system. This system is composed not only of authentic experiences, but of all sorts of false and imported memories. Our memories are stored not only in the neural engrams of our individual brain, but also in social and cultural exograms outside the brain. Aspects of the past determine present interpretations and decisions, and a traumatic experience of a grandparent may reach into the biochemical pathways of neuronal processing in a grandchild’s brain. Memory systems do not function as storages, but as associative processors, overwriting contents due to present needs and perceptions. This talk presents new findings of memory research and asks how “auto” our autobiographical memory is.
Harald Welzer is director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Memory Research at Essen and research professor of social psychology at the University of Witten/Herdecke in Germany. He recently became an affiliated fellow of the MARIAL Center. His research, called “Transmitting Historical Awareness,” focuses on how families talk about the Nazi period in Germany. He interviewed forty Western and Eastern German families. The whole family was interviewed together, and then separate interviews were done with at least one member each of the eyewitness, children, and grandchildren generations in the family. Welzer said there are “huge gaps between public and private memories” of the Nazi era in Germany. His research shows that each generation makes its own sense of the stories passed down in their families, but “nobody is willing to tell the truth” about what happened during the Third Reich. In many cases, he found that families denied that their relatives committed atrocities, even though historical records indicated otherwise.
DIRECTIONS TO THE MARIAL CENTER
The MARIAL Center is located on the 4th floor of the main building of Emory's Briarcliff Campus, 1256 Briarcliff Road. There is ample parking close to the building. Alternatively, you may take the Emory shuttle (Route B). The Emory shuttle (Route B) provides transportation from the main campus to the MARIAL Center at approximately 15-minute intervals (a 5-15 minute ride). For the shortest travel time, board the shuttle on Clifton (@ Emory University Hospital), Clifton (@ Fishborne) or North Dekatur Road (@ Fishburne Deck/Schwartz Ctr.). A complete schedule is available on the web at http://www.epcs.emory.edu/AltTransp/route_b.html
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