Disaster memory and ‘banished memory’. General considerations and case studies from Europe and the United States (19th-21st centuries)

Abstract

In 1981 medievalist and cultural historian Arno Borst presented the thesis that today’s European societies have largely eliminated dealing with natural disasters from everyday life and that they have become a ‘society of banished memory’. This contrasts with premodern societies, which integrated the risk of natural disasters far more into everyday life. By ‘taming’ natural hazards through river straightening and various protective structures, especially since the nineteenth century, small and medium-sized events have generally been avoided, but serious events became even more devastating when hitting the unprepared population. A prolonged absence of extreme events, a ‘disaster gap’ (Christian Pfister), could thus significantly increase the catastrophic nature of a new event. This chapter analyses selected flood, avalanche, storm, and earthquake events from Europe and North America (late 19th c.–present) to show which factors might have contributed to reshaping memory cultures after catastrophic events and encouraged banishing memory against better judgement.