In our study we took as our point of departure that we have to deal with up-rooted memory communities, or communities without the continuity of space;
that the city carries the memory of “foreign” cultures. Th e object of our research included: knowledge of the past, attitudes to history and commemoration, per-ception of urban space, the role of space in the city, and the preferred practices of commemoration. Th e population of the city is the subject of policies towards historical memory in education, and through the mass media. Th e results of such diff erent stimuli are that they leave traces in collective memory. Th ere is also a specifi c impact on policy in the city: life in the urban space, the creation of signifi cant patterns or practices associated with a specifi c memory space (e.g. the voluntary commemoration of Independence Day in Wrocław through marches to the monument of Boleslaw Chrobry (who was the fi rst crowned king of Poland and is considered the creator of the autonomy of the state from the Holy Roman Empire; for this reason his fi gure is used by nationalists as the symbol of Polish-ness and the Polish state). Th e memory of the city is embedded in urban space, in specifi c places and in the knowledge of the local community.
Th e collective memory of the city consists of 1. a narrative about the history of the city, and 2. memory of places in the city. Only some events from history are
“selected” and “worth remembering”. Th ere are some specifi c features of collect-ive memory (and collectcollect-ive memory of the city). First, it is unstable and changes over time. Th us, what Wrocław’s population remembers from the past changes over time. One of the reasons for this is that memory is a generation knowledge (Mannheim 1952; Schuman and Scott 1989). As was also shown by Szacka’s re-search, the cross-generational comparison of collective memory reveals that each generation has its peculiar form of collective memory, and this distinctiveness is at the same time a form of generational identity. Each generation has its own events which constitute its memory (Szacka 2006). It means that collective mem-ory is always formed in a given social and historical context. Such cross-genera-tional diff erences also appear in our research.
Th e second general tendency, also confi rmed in the presented research, is that people tend to remember more recent events compared with those which seem distant from their personal experiences (oral memory). It is related to generational memory because oral memory refers to the common but personal experience of people living in a given period. Moreover, people remember re-cent history and do not remember older history. Th e memory of history is not prevalent, especially if there were no specifi c events which are “worth” being remembered. Besides the location in time the type of events are crucial for mem-ory formation. Histmem-ory in collective memmem-ory is residual, erratic and incorrect.
I accept here the assumption that the form and durability of collective memory depends on the type of social situation in which it was formed. Memory can be formed either as a result of deliberate social actions, or as a result of random events. It depends on two factors: either it is a result of institutionalized social action to support social memory (education, art works etc.) or/and the emer-gence of specifi c social facts that apply to an entire population, that can unite the community and evoke strong emotional experiences, strengthening social ties.
Let me call them social threshold events. Th is type of events, for example trau-matic experiences, are better remembered. Th ey are remembered longer and by a larger segment of society, and because they are existential experiences, events by defi nition they are considered to be essential, which is why they constitute social memory. Sometimes threshold events became the basis for the creation of myths or mythological narratives. In contemporary Poland the Smoleńsk myth is a relevant example of such a threshold event which was able to not only stimulate mass national mourning but produce a myth which fi tted into Po-land’s historical narrative of martyrdom.
Th e empirical fi ndings of our study prove that people tend to remember most recent history better and they do not have extensive historical knowledge (see Table 5). Memory of the past is erratic and based on mythological thinking. As has been mentioned before, the state of memory of the pre-war Wrocław period can be called, aft er Zerubavel, “collective amnesia” (Zerubavel 1997), or rather:
the pre-war period is not the subject of memory, because people tend to focus on the history of the place with which they identify in any way, they are in some way related to it, and it is important for them. Th ey treat the story of a foreign place as something distant. For this reason, most nations nowadays focus on the history of their own nation and state, and know less about the history of other nations. Moreover, the focus on their own nations makes them interpret the his-tory of other nations from their own perspective. For Wrocław’s community this period is foreign, that is: German history. Th e most remembered events are from the post-war period. We ask people to name places in a city, events and people which they have in mind and think are worth remembering. Th e results are as follows: 68% of respondents declare they remember some events from the post-war period, whereas only a minority can indicate such events from the pre-post-war period (19%) (out of which 51% and respectively 16.5% were accurate answers).
Th us, memory of the pre-war period is very poor (see Tables 5, 6).
It has already been mentioned earlier that people declare that history is im-portant for them but this emotional declaration is not necessarily followed by deeper historical knowledge. Sites of memory are poorly present in collective knowledge, 91% of our sample could not point out any monument that would represent the past. On the basis of these data we can distinguish the “passive and active” types of memory. Th e active one is typical for the elite, or a minority who are more interested in history and commemoration activity, whereas the passive one is typical for the majority of society who have fragmented memory.
Th us, what is observed here is a “lack of memory”. Is there a diff erence between the lack of memory which is typical as passive memory, and the lack of mem-ory which appears in the case of an uprooted community? Unfortunately, the boundary is not obvious and clear here. I would agree with those who try to dis-tinguish the events specifi c to the site as an indicator of memory and identity, for instance, the Warsaw Uprising. Th e most popular events are the Flood of 1997, the European Football Championship in 2012 and the pilgrimage of John Paul II in 1997, which are not specifi c to the city, and could have happened anywhere.
One cannot exclude the possibility that there are cities without characteristic events in their history. Still, there is the issue of the social interpretation of historical facts.
Table 5. What events constitute memory? Th e content of memory
memory Pre-war events about which present inhabitants of Wrocław should remember?
false and true answers 0 0 91.8 52 9.5 13.9
true 90 16.5 8.2 279 51 74.8
false 8 1.5 100 42 7.7 11.3
total 98 17.9 373 68.2 100
did not know (= missing data) 449 82.1 174 31.8
total 547 100 547 100
% % valid
Persons
false and true answers 12 2.2 16.2
true 46 8.4 62.2
false 16 2.9 21.6
total 74 13.5 100
did not know (= missing data) 473 86.5
total 547 100
lack of knowledge in the whole
sample (= missing data) 446 81.5
547 100
Table 6. Events in collective memory of the pre-war and post-war period. What should be remem-bered? N = 367
Pre-war events worth remembering frequ-ency % Post-1939 events worth
remembering
frequ-ency %
Changes of state belonging 36 40 Flood — 1997 175 47.7
Changes of urban and architectural
structure 15 16.7 European Football Championship
— 2012 115 31.3
Creating of cultural and scientifi c
institutions 14 15.6 Pilgrimage of John Paul II in 1997 69 18.8 Beginning in the Middle Ages 13 14.4 Reconstruction of the city after
the war 43 11.7
Changes of ethnic structure 11 12.2 Martial Law of 1981 41 11.2 Persecution of Poles and Jews 11 12.2 Solidarity strikes of 1980 39 10.6 Development of technical
infrastructure and communication 11 12.2 Other incorrect 38 10.4 Changes of religion structure 2 2.2 Festung Breslau of 1945 26 7.1
Other 6 6.7 Eucharistic congress 19 5.2
First pilgrimage of John Paul II
in 1979 13 3.5
Total 90 100 Other correct 99 27
Total (multiply responses >100%) 367
Figure 9. “Can you indicate any monuments dedicated to important pre-war events, people?”
N = 546
Oral memory is also important to transmit memory across generations. It is commonly observed that oral transmission can transmit content through the centuries. Th e primitive tribes of oral culture transmit patterns of production, art, etc. A good example may be Indian music. Although Indian ragas do not have musical notation they only survived across the centuries through unwrit-ten messages. Th e importance of oral memory for collective memory was shown by Szacka. Her study of memories of WWII proved that the memory of war and the Warsaw Uprising is strong and based on oral transmission. Th e reason for a strong memory of this event was directly related to personal and family histor-ies. It is known that oral memory, though it can be very fl exible and changeable, is important for the construction of collective memory. It involves the personal and thus emotional experience of history which increases interest in the past as well as ability to memorise it. Th us the oral transmission of personal experience can and frequently does create collective memory.
Figure 10. Oral transmission of memory from older generations (concerns only the part of the sample whose ancestors were born in Wrocław). Did your grandparents, parents talk to you about the city’s past, history?
In the case of Wrocław, cross-generational transmission of oral memory is rather rare among those whose predecessors lived in Wrocław, except among the elite group in which the majority were the subject of such a transition. In the gen-eral population it was a minority (about 1/4) (see Figure 10). Weak oral memory may be one of the factors behind the fact that city memory is not well developed.
Finally, collective memory as the image of the past events is related to the con-cept of identity. If memory is empty, identity becomes problematic (as a specifi c association). Th e present fi ndings, as well as the results of other studies (Lewicka and Pluta 2006) suggest that there is no specifi c local city identity in Wrocław, and the identity is quite a problematic phenomenon. Th e notion of identity is problematic in relation to complex phenomenon such as a city which consists of
urban tissue and community, and both these elements have their own complex forms.2? It consists of urban tissue and community, and both these elements have their own complex form, specifi c and unique features which one may call an iden-tity. For instance, Daniel Bell writes about the values the cities express, cities have character:
Cities refl ect as well as shape their inhabitants’ values and outlooks in various ways. Th e design and architecture of their buildings refl ect diff erent social and cultural values. Public monu-ments oft en mark politically signifi cant episodes and diff erent ways of honoring the dead (Bell and Shalit 2011, 2).