The words here transcribed, spoken by Cassandra in the homonymous narrative by Christa Wolf (1929-2011), claim, even today, for the integration of feminine experience within History, for the right to memory, and for the ethical and even political element of memory acts.[2] Furthermore, this epigraph also reclaims the intergenerational and transgenerational transmission of memory so that the transformative power of the word materialises, just as Christa Wolf anticipates through Cassandra’s voice: “Beyond doubt, he said, certain of my character traits cut me out for priesthood. Which traits? Well, my desire to exercise influence over people; how else could a woman hold a position of power?” (26).

Without a doubt, Wolf’s Cassandra denies the condition of object to assert herself as subject from the get-go, by claiming her right to make her own narrative and being on par with the male literary tradition. Hence the urgency of recalling and telling—to rewrite or actualize the myth, not in the male mental and narrative framework, but as a clear expression of a female voice and an alternative insight into the past.

As a matter of fact, for the doomed prophetess recalling and telling are both the expression or creation of the subjective experience and an act of construction of individual memory requiring immediate transmission for the testimony to materialise as a future project. For memory is not only a testimony of lived experience but also a possibility of future which Cassandra wants to keep safe for upcoming generations. In this context, oral and written transmissions have a crucial function as externalisation and communication of experience, as Cassandra’s words make clear, and are the essential condition for the production and passing on of cultural memory.[3] For, as it is well known, mediation, remediation, and performance of mnemonic contents are essential to the consolidation of identity and cultural memory, and to the building or rebuilding of past narratives and representations (Erll and Rigney 2012, 5).

Literature, probably one of the most relevant media of cultural memory, is also the place for the staging and production of gender identities. As a mode of memory, literature has been calling upon itself the ability to fixate, mediate, and remediate (mythical) narratives taken as founding narratives (Erll and Nünning 2006). In fact, such narratives play a vital role in forming and changing cultural memory, in their ability to create new identity models, new values and norms, or even a new memory of “opposition” or “counter-memory.” And by counter-memory, we are not only thinking, of course, about female memory, but any act of remembrance and building of individual memory that expresses itself as a challenge or alternative to Historiography.

It is precisely this memory of opposition, or feminine counter-memory, which Christa Wolf’s Cassandra actualizes, connecting it to an already dense and secular palimpsest.[4] Revisiting the mythical character allowed Wolf to reassess the past (and “see” the present[5]), constituting one of the first manifestations of what we might nowadays call “memory genderization,” in a preceding or originating moment of the mnemonic turn of the last decades of the twentieth century (Erll 2011). As the author argues, in her defence of gender’s particularity in remembering, for historical and biological reasons, women live in a different reality that has kept them away from the power and cultural memory which Cassandra now claims (Wolf 1984, 259).

Wolf’s narrative was first taken as a political, social, and cultural metaphor in (East) Germany, a few years prior to the Fall of the Berlin Wall, as a condemnation of a repressed malaise that Cassandra’s body, as a repository of memory, condenses and materialises. But the work also offers a transnational and a transcultural reading: Cassandra, the heroine in a pacifist and feminist quest, opposing the invisibility and silencing of the feminine experience, and demanding the introduction of feminine memory in culture, cries: “I will continue a witness even if there is no longer one single human being left to demand my testimony” (Wolf 1984, 22). The use of a retrospective narrative allows Wolf to give the female character an indisputable authority, not only in the expression of her subjectivity and personal experience but mostly through her perspective on Troy’s destruction—and on Europe living under the threat of nuclear war in the beginning of the 1980s—establishing itself as an alternative to Historiography. In this respect, recall Aleida Assmann’s statement: “The Historian has lost his monopoly over defining and presenting the past” (Assmann 2010, 38). The memory boom, claims Assmann, is the direct consequence of the loss of authority of Historiography, eminently male.

Yet, that turn to memory (mnemonic turn) at the end of the twentieth century did not initially question the universalist and masculinist view of History and memory. In fact, the theories and perspectives that form the basis of Memory Studies (in the likes of Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, Aleida and Jan Assmann, Andreas Huyssen, among others) were, from the beginning, completely neutral about this subject, having disregarded gender specificity or the possibility of other voices and perspectives: “Memory Studies have perpetuated a national, male, white history discourse” (Paletschek and Schraut 2008, 268). In effect, the female gender is almost always absent from this inscription of memory into culture as it has been made invisible in the seminal theoretical texts.

It is precisely as a feminine counter-narrative and as an act of resistance to hegemonic memory that I want to address Cassandra’s re-creation by Wolf. As Erll and Nünning claim, in the staging of memory in Literature (or “mimesis of memory ”), narrative (non-referential) texts reveal connections with the process of remembering and can even advance new models of memory by offering new perspectives on the past. The creative imagination plays a relevant, perhaps subversive, role here as it deals with cultural memory and is able to question models and stereotypes which have been approved by Historiography. And women in Literature have been asserting their own voices —and they have done so very clearly since the 1970s — as authors/creators and not merely as objects of the male imagination. I shall return to this later.

The introduction of the category gender in Memory Studies has discreetly taken place at the peak of the so-called “memory boom” (Huyssen, 2003), in the 1980s and 1990s, when the female counter-narrative was already leaving an inescapable trail in the hegemonic cultural discourse. From then on, the idea that there can be gender specificity in memory acts and in the giving of sense to those memories became increasingly widespread in the field of Memory Studies (Leydesdorff, Passerini, Thompson 1996; Haaken 1998; Reading 2002; Hirsch and Smith 2002; Nünning and Nünning 2004; Assmann 2006; Reading 2016). The first voices defending gender specificity pointed to differences in experiencing reality—and oral history was crucial in this context—as well as in the strategies for representing that same reality, since, to borrow Lídia Jorge’s words, “real lives mark the stories that are told” (Ferreira and Hutchinson 2009, 337). Given that both gender and memory are products of discourse and performative acts written in culture, mutual interconnectedness and influence between the two seemed inevitable and, in a certain way, organic (memory being understood, in this context, as both the construction of the archive and the process of recalling or remembering). In the late 1980s, the first theoretical intersections between Memory Studies and Gender Studies took as their starting point a common premise: the constructiveness and performativity of both gender and memory and, consequently, the possibility of their rewriting and deconstruction. In the contemporary theoretical and critical landscape, it is undeniable that “memory politics”—that is, what a given culture remembers or decides to forget—are intrinsically connected with power and hegemony, and consequently with gender, among other identity categories (Hirsch and Smith, 2002).

The intersection of memory and gender had already been announced within feminist criticism—albeit in a different epistemological framework—as it opposed the male and heteronormative canon and consequently posited the need to reinterpret the past and redefine culture from other angles. This rewriting of the canon was to be realised through the search for a “female writing,” of a feminine language and aesthetic, and lastly, by the recovery and inclusion of works by women in cultural memory.[6] Indeed, this process of inclusion was not to be carried out only in relation to the canon—the memory that had been actively disseminated—but also at the level of the archive—the memory that is passively collected, that preserves the past and is ready to be activated at any moment (Assmann 2008, 98). In this sense, according to Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith, feminist criticism is also a work of memory since it has recovered from oblivion feminine voices, and it has offered different ways of knowing the past: “Theorizing cultural memory through the lens of feminism does not merely foreground the dynamics of gender and power. It also applies modes of questioning to the analysis of cultural recall and forgetting” (Hirsch and Smith 2002, 11). Today, according to Aleida Assmann, the feminist project does not merely consist in securing a place for women in the literary canon, but also in claiming the integration of feminine experience in History (Assmann 2006, 41), as Wolf’s Cassandra did in the early 1980s.

The 1970s, on the other hand, had been a moment of booming literary and cultural feminine production in many different locations, and so a moment for their slow inscription into twentieth-century cultural memory.[7] Many of those works, frequently carried out in an autobiographical or memorialist mode, were implicitly or explicitly acts of individual and cultural memory, which have been taken as counter-narratives or counter-stories. Such is the case of narratives about colonisation, emigration, or violence written by women who have signalled gender specificity in narrating memory and the theoretical and methodological need to combine research in memory studies and on gender issues. Indeed, by rebuilding and mediating the past, cultural memory also secures the intergenerational transmission of gender conceptions, thus assuming a  similar role to gender, not only in the destabilisation or deconstruction of individual and collective identities, but also in fixating, maintaining, or subverting political and social relationships of power (Hirsch and Smith 2022, 2).

The topic of gender specificity in the construction of the mnemonic archive or in memory acts and their respective aesthetic representation has gradually become a research subject in its own right. Indeed, the end of the twentieth century promised new perspectives for Memory Studies, as new markers of collective memory such as gender, ethnic, and religious categories were integrated, allowing for the examination of collective memory in specific contexts instead of broad and general categories.[8] The inclusion of these works in academic feminist discourse puts an end to a universalist conception of the acts of individual and collective memory and the mediation or remediation of those acts. A 1987 special edition of the Michigan Quarterly Review, titled “Women and Memory,” made room for a reflection on gender significance in cultural memory. The redefinition of Women’s Studies as a field thus established a subversive “counter-memory” and set out to correct the hegemonic memory and its disregard for women’s stories.

In 1997, the International Congress of Comparative Literature, which was organised around the theme “Literature as Cultural Memory,” held a session on “Gendered Memories,” organised by John Neubauer and Helga Geyer-Ryan, which set out to discuss possible gender differences in the construction of memory, and to reflect on the role played by literature in the construction of cultural memory. In that context, an observation by Odile Jansen stood out inasmuch as it summarised the core issues marking the debate: “Women are ‘storekeepers of memory,’ not because of their genetic structure or some other innate quality, but as a result of lifelong, transgenerational training in caring for and nurturing others and a lifetime of unequal power status” (Jansen 2000, 35). It is in the acts of social and cultural communication, as well as in the processes of socialisation, that we define women’s role in cultural memory, by opposition to any biological determinism, Jansen argues, espousing the constructivist understanding of both gender and memory, as well as the relevance of historical, social, and cultural context in that construction.

A 2002 issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, titled “Gender and Cultural Memory,” reiterated the relevance of analyses of gender dynamics in cultural memory and the theoretical and methodological coherence that characterised this emerging field.[9] This collection of essays puts forward the idea that cultural memory is not definable by monolithic and essentialist categories, thus legitimating the need for and productivity of the theoretical intersection between gender issues and cultural memory theories in areas as diverse as literary, visual, film, or law studies. The interdisciplinary research on Memory and Gender allows us to determine, from a historical perspective, that because memory acts are shaped by subjectivity and socialisation, they reflect and strengthen gender identities, and may even account for the manifest fluidity or the ever-changing and nomadic nature of gender and sexuality categories (Weigel 1994; Stephan 2000; Öhlschläger 2005). Furthermore, cultural discourses and codes through which a culture represents its past can be defined by gender, ethnicity, and class (Hirsch and Smith, 2002, 6). The process of identity construction, actualized by the intersection of these markers, is a process that projects itself from the past to the present and into the future and is done in a particular social and cultural context, under the influence and colonisation of that very context. In this manner, the cultural memory that is built and transmitted by Literature, Cinema, or the Arts reproduces or sanctions certain memory cultures that have only gradually been confronted or deconstructed.

Taking as her starting point texts originating in Literature, Philosophy, and Cinema, in different periods of History, Aleida Assmann summarises the inter-relationship between Gender and Memory by concluding that acts of rememorating and forgetting, along with the significance we attribute them, have been highly constrained by each epoch’s structures, although woman has generally been the “subject of memory” while man most often assumes the position of the “object of memory,” i.e., the one whose deeds are remembered (Assmann 2006, 30 ff.). For that reason, it isn’t enough to ask “who remembers?,” but we should also question “who is remembered?” It is necessary to ask about the perspective and the context from which the narrative is built, since, as Assmann argues, memory does not develop in isolation—it is a porous archive, permeable to the present, to cultural and gender politics, and, furthermore, to technological innovation.

The kind of social and cultural changes introduced by emerging technologies is precisely what is at stake in Anna Reading’s Gender and Memory in the Globital Age (2016), where she proposes a new perspective and epistemology for memory studies encompassing digitalisation and globalisation, their projections on gender and memory issues, and the trajectory of mediated memories and mnemonic artefacts. The high mobility, the mass use of information and communication technologies, and the omnipresence and omnipotence of digital archives made the long-settled dichotomies permeable, amplifying the transmission of mnemonic contents and diluting the boundaries between the individual and the collective, the private and the public, the local and the global, the real and the virtual (Reading 2016, 42). Digitalisation and intense communication through mobile devices, the Internet, and access to broadband by a significant part of the world population means that everyday practices and habits, no matter how dramatic or violent, are recorded and shared, broadcasted and re-broadcasted by several channels and media. This new reality has the potential to create a new paradigm in which archives which had formerly been locked and inaccessible are opened to those who are digitally connected; a reality in which public testimony is also the domain of everyone with access to a cell phone. It further means that feminist research has new instruments at its disposal, that is, new memory technologies and perspectives to access, interpret, or reinterpret the mediation of women’s experiences. The possibility of such critical or creative reception of memories, whether lived or imagined, is also in itself a feminist work of memory, of the kind Christa Wolf achieves in Cassandra.

[1] In the original, Kassandra: Voraussetzungen einer Erzählung.

[2] And I say “even today” for it seems that feminism is being “undone” or dismantled (McRobbie 2009, Gill and Scharff 2011) to give way to post-feminism; in the same vein, the collective political activism is being replaced by individualist and neo-liberal discourse (Giddens 1991, Beck 2002). Notwithstanding, these thoughts enticed by Cassandra are the result of the conviction that the “aesthetics of resistance” (Wolf 1983, 236) still matters today.

[3] I recover here Jan and Aleida Assmann’s concept of cultural memory: “The concept of cultural memory compromises that body of reusable texts, images, and rituals specific to each society in each epoch, whose ‘cultivation’ serves to stabilise and covey that society’s self-image” (Assmann 1995, 130); or Astrid Erll, who underlines the relevance of (mythical) narratives as guide models for present and future: “Cultural Memory is founded on myths, stories about the past, which offer orientation in the present and hope for the future” (Erll 2011, 34).

[4] The critical and literary reception of Cassandra’s myth since Aeschylus’ Oresteia, from which Wolf draws her narrative, is now unattainable. I particularly call attention to Isabel Capeloa Gil’s exhaustive study Mitografias. Figurações de Antígona, Cassandra e Medeia no Drama de Expressão Alemã do século XX (2007).

[5] “I see through her” writes Wolf in a diary entry from June 16th 1981 (Wolf, 1984, 265).

[6] In its French original, “écriture feminine” is an expression coined by Hélène Cixous which became a key notion in the French feminism of the 1970s, and has similarly been used by authors such as Luce Irigaray or Julia Kristeva.

[7] The events of May 1968 have also resulted in a very considerable increase of feminine literary production in the following decade. Furthermore, the collapse of the European colonial empires created new systems of representation and new identity processes which allowed other “minority discourses” (Bhabha 1994) or “subalterns” (Spivak 1994) (with respect to gender, class, religion, ethnicity) to be heard.

[8] An example of this sort of approach is  the 2007 anthology Theories of Memory: A Reader, edited by Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead, which included a chapter on identities where gender, race, and religion figure. However, in the 2008 long volume on Memory Studies from a social and cultural perspective, edited  by Artrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, only one of  41 authors, Aleida Assmann, refers to the structural mechanisms of exclusion in the building of the archive, instantiated by the categories of class, race, and gender (2008, 106).

[9] As the editors write, this special number of the journal marks a turning point in the interdisciplinary and international dialogue between feminist theories and social and cultural memory theories (Hirsch and Smith, 2002). 

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