Societies do not remember; people do. There is no such thing as group memory prior to or above the individual's precarious retention of the past. This is the reason why cultural memory is transmitted from mind to mind. Social memory is nothing but this exchange. Certainly, material culture contains clues to the past, as do documents of foregone eras; but artifacts no more remember than they speak. Even recorded voice, disembodied and detached from its origin, does not speak; it merely produces sound. Without consciousness there is no language. This trivial though frequently forgotten observation accounts for the seeming paradox that modern society forgets in direct proportion to its accumulation of objects from previous ages. Alienating the past in artistic and technical re-enactments, commodifying the experience of time, staging “history,” or museumizing its otherness is the clearest sign of a society's estrangement from its memory. It shows that society not only has forgotten the past but the present also.

Thus, when we speak of collective memory, we refer to the intersubjective constitution of our experience. Personal memory taps into a social fund of memories and modulates itself through them. But even as it does so, it remains anchored in consciousness. Outside of consciousness time does not exist, and memory cannot arise. The collective or “public” dimension means that social memory is not concerned with isolated anecdotes of private life but with events and experiences affecting everyone. As a common denominator of the myriad instances of remembered past, the collective memory cannot but be a convention.

To be compelling, memoirs must be located at the intersection of the personal and the collective. Jorge Semprún's books are for the most part autobiographical recollections whose interest arises from a self-conscious osmosis between the private and the public.