Identity and Trauma: Two Forms of the Will to Memory

The sense of a crisis of memory, and the diagnosis of too much or too little memory, are generated not by the universal nature of human memory but by a historically specific will to memory. Eyal compares the discourses and rituals of collective memory in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia in order to show that there are actually two different types of "will to memory" now operative in Eastern Europe, each of which specifies the goal of collective memory quite differently.