As Aleida Assmann remarks, institutions and groups have no such memory as individuals do – they create one for themselves with the help of memorial signs such as symbols, texts, images, rites, ceremonies, places, and monuments. This memory helps groups to construct their own identity. This kind of memory is based on selection and exclusion of relevant and irrelevant memories - therefore, a collective memory is a mediated memory. According to Assmann, the success of a collective memory to take hold of people depends on the efficiency of the political pedagogy and the level of patriotic or ethnic zeal. Memories are differently constructed on the levels of individual, family, society, and nation. These levels may exist in mutual indifference, but they may also produce dissent and friction, and collide in counter-constructions. …show more content…
The individual has to share and adopt the group’s history and participates in the group’s vision of its past by cognitive learning and emotional acts of identification and commemoration. This type of past has to be memorized, not remembered. The collective memory has to be acquired via learning – however, the identity of “we” is created only through internalization and rites of