We have to forget to be able to remember. Forgetting in this general sense is such a basic mental process that it normally must remain unnoticed (Esposito, 2002). It becomes very visible though, at least in retrospect, when the society as a whole had forgotten something specific that we now believe to be of crucial importance. Consequentially, the academic debates about the phenomenon of forgetting a problematic past have until now by and large focused on the concepts of ‘trauma’ and ‘repression’. The study of forgetting was therefore generally approached from a morally informed perspective: forgetting had to be overcome, and thus the scholarly interest concentrated rather on the difficult attempts to overcome it.

While acknowledging the value of this approach, we propose to shift the perspective in order to put the social and cultural processes of forgetting a specifically problematic past at the centre. While Ernest Renan already observed that forgetting is an essential element in nation building this is especially true of periods during or after political transitions when the past is a dangerous source of frictions and thus a problem for the stability of society. In recent years a growing number of scholars have started to pay more attention to the ways in which these societies avoided dealing with the most controversial aspects of the past. If social forgetting can indeed be regarded as a defining characteristic of the modern period (Ankersmit, 2001), it becomes all the more important to better understand its social mechanisms, its ways of “commingling silence and forgetting” (Confino, 2000) as well as its historical evolution.

Combining a theoretical session with panels on both the (long) nineteenth and the twentieth century, the conference addresses the following research questions: What types of social forgetting can be discerned? In how far does their appearance change over time? How important was the role of the state and the government in the process of forgetting? What were the other key actors? In how far was the forgetting implicit or explicit (for instance written in law)? What effect did the implicit or explicit character of forgetting have on the success of forgetting? How can we study implicit forgetting? Which relationship existed between forgetting and memory as well as silence and memory? What patterns of selective forgetting and remembering can be detected? To what extent was the social forgetting contested? Were there competing practices of forgetting?