Maurice Halbwachs was the first to study individual memory in its social context. His book La mémoire collective was published in 1950, posthumously after the death of Halbwachs in the Buchenwald concentration camp. At the time of writing, mainly during the years 1935 to 1938, it was not even customary to speak, even metaphorically, of the memory of a group. Frederick Bartlett – the Cambridge psychologist and a contemporary of Halbwachs - wrote about memory in the group, instead of memory of the group. According to Halbwachs each individual memory is a viewpoint on the collective memory. In his earlier book Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925) Halbwachs had developed the thesis that every memory is socially framed: “no memory is possible outside frameworks used by people living in society to determine and retrieve their recollections”. Individual memory, he wrote, is
a part or an aspect of group memory, since each impression and each fact, even if its apparently concerns a particular person exclusively, leaves a lasting memory only to the extent that one has thought it over – to the extent that it is connected with the thoughts that come from us from the social milieu.
Pursuing Halbwachs’ reasoning, I want to investigate the possibility of mapping a “memory continuum” onto the records continuum, in which memories of the individual, the family, the organisation, the community, and society function, not in isolation, but in a flow of continuous interaction.