It is doubtful that a society's relation to its past can be sufficiently described in terms of memory. And little is gained by qualifying memory as historical. “Historical memory” is not just a redundant concept but also a flawed one. It is flawed, because, if we accept Pierre Nora's methodological distinction between history and memory, those two terms are mutually exclusive. But also, because, as currently used, their conflation confuses epistemic with ethical issues. In 1992, the same year that the last volume of Nora's Les lieux de mémoire appeared, Jan Assmann introduced a subtler distinction between cultural and communicative memory in his book Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. By “cultural memory,” Assmann means memory that orients itself to fixed points of reference in the past: symbolic figures, legends of origins or of conquest, and myths, which can also turn up in historical narrative, the difference being not so much in the nature of the objects as in the method by which they are enlisted for the practice of social remembrance. Cultural memory is not archival, documented history but history as remembered by people, the trace of the past in the popular imagination. By “communicative memory,” he means a form of remembrance that relates to a recent past, one whose references are broadly shared by contemporaries. This kind of memory depends on witnesses and disappears with them. It constitutes a history from below, objectified in social rituals, dance, myths, clothing, decoration, painting, landscape, architecture, and so on. When a generation disappears, a society's communicative memory is altered, sometimes in dramatic ways. Thus, as the age factor becomes more pressing and post-traumatic societies take stock of the limits of their communicative memories, there is usually a flurry of activity to record the testimonies of the surviving members of the relevant age group. This has been the case in Spain since the turn of the century, when discourse about the historical memory surfaced and became more urgent.

The fact that a great deal of the memory relating to the Civil War and the military dictatorship falls within the bounds of the communicative memory contributes to the confusion between epistemic and ethical approaches to the past. Such confusion is understandable and perhaps inevitable in the context of Spain's Historikerstreit, given the conditions of the country's exit from dictatorship and its inability to steer clear from that legacy in the supervening decades.