It emerged as a new and different way for scholars to think about past events at the end of the 20th century.
Untold recent and not so recent pasts impinge upon the present through modern media of reproduction like photography, film, recorded music and the Internet, as well as through the explosion of historical scholarship and an ever more voracious museal culture.
The past has become part of the present in ways simply unimaginable in earlier centuries.
[3] Memory involves much work and is therefore a “verb” or “action” word and not just the description of a practice.
[3] The individual as well as the collective memory and relations to the past can exist without one being more important than the other.
[3] With this kind of multiplicity of memories, cross cutting themes can be focused on and brought to the fore.
Instead, “multidirectional memory considers a series of interventions through which social actions bring multiple traumatic pasts into a heterogeneous and changing post – World War II present”.
Rather, the borders of memory and identity are jagged…”[3] “Pursuing memory’s multidirectionality encourages us to think of the public sphere as a malleable discursive space in which groups do not simply articulate established positions but actually come into being through their dialogical interactions with others; both the subjects and spaces of the public are open to continual reconstruction”.