Eight months before his election as American President, in the spring of 2008, Barack Obama quoted two sentences from William Faulkner in a much-commented speech on racial relations in his country: "The past isn't dead and buried," he said.

“In fact, it isn't even past.” Obama's speechwriters, however, had not researched carefully.

The quote from “Requiem for a Nun” (1951) is more succinct and harsh: “The past is never dead.

It's not even past. ”Faulkner, the creator of a“ mythical ”literary landscape in the state of Mississippi, found a formula for the persistence of historical memory (and racist resentment) in the old south.

Paul Ingendaay

Europe correspondent for the feature pages in Berlin.

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The past is not dead; it has not even passed: the Berlin Academy of the Arts also quotes the famous sentences correctly, but without attribution, in its exhibition “Work on Memory - Transforming Archives”, and it does so in connection with Christa Wolf's novel “Childhood Pattern” (1976), which is just as much an attempt to describe a childhood as it is a reflex on the problem of the search itself. The past does not speak for itself, it does not speak clearly, and it certainly does not provide unambiguity; it has to be questioned, weighed, perforated. Wolf's notes, which are in the academy's depot, are among the many testimonies from artists, writers and composers who spread the topic of memory, remembrance and archive in an astonishing abundance.

This is where Obama's imprecise Faulkner quote gets its meaning again. It is no coincidence that the candidate added the word “buried” to the sentences of the Nobel Prize winner. Reconstruction of history as “digging”, a matter of course in archeology, is a topos whose modern fascination goes back to Walter Benjamin's 1932 essay “Digging out and remembering”. Benjamin's statements on the method behind the Berlin exhibition are sponsored. It is useful, they say, to work according to plans when digging, but just as essential is “the careful, tentative groundbreaking in the dark ground”. The digger himself with his guesses and errors is part of the undertaking. True memory must therefore not only concern those layers in which the found objects were, "but above all those other layers,which had to be pierced beforehand ”.

Memory of the body, archive of the seas

Let's be clear: this is us, here and now. The Berlin show therefore occupies almost all of the senses. If you let yourself be drawn into it, you can easily stay for three hours. Specially created works by Alexander Kluge, Cemile Sahin, Ulrike Draesner and others demonstrate how remembering and preserving work in different minds. The South African artist Candice Breitz, for example, welded 1001 cases of old VHS film cassettes in black polypropylene, so that only a single word remained from the earlier titles - a digest of locked film material and at the same time a reference to Scheherazade and the compulsion to tell. An installation by the Argentine Eduardo Molinari, a few steps further, traces the traces of the indigenous Mapuche who were erased from the country's history by genocide,while the French Cécile Wajsbrot deals with the exile with Imre Kertész and the German artist Susann Maria Hempel thinks about contaminated seas and swallowed plastic parts in humans: The stomach contents are also a form of the archive.