History, memory, justice

Arno Mayer and Charles Maier are concerned about an “addiction to memory” as well as about the attention devoted to memory by their colleagues. Not too long ago, most academic historians had been dismissive of memory. History's justice is no longer administered only by historians, but by judges and politicians, artists and memorial activists, through tribunals and truth commissions, and via memorials, museums, and commemorations. Twenty years after Mayer and Maier articulated their irritation about the preeminence of memory, the phenomenon that troubled them can be seen much more clearly. They assumed that the memory boom had nothing to do with them as practitioners of history. Historians' claims that their project is universal rather than particular, that it rises above other, culturally and historically specific, forms of remembering and rendering the past, have largely been discredited. Historians could play a key role in attempts to remember historical injustice.