Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

240 reMeMBerING the SpaCe aGe
her story. Nineteen of these are exclusively instrumental, and the majority
of those are electronica in the tradition of the “space music” popularized for
the last 20 years or so by Stephen hill in his syndicated program “hearts of
Space.” Laika also has served as muse for classically trained musicians, including
Max richter (“Laika’s Journey,” 2002) and Ulrike haage, whose “requiem
for Laika” (2005) interweaves vintage Soviet radio broadcasts and narration in
German with sung portions of the Mass for the dead (with the sacrifcial agnus
dei recast as a wolf).
Given this prominence, one might expect Laika to provide an important
bridge to the popular memory of the space race, the Cold War, and the Soviet
past. But while Laika’s initial celebrity depended heavily on the politically
charged and highly publicized circumstances under which she was sent into
space, her ongoing resonance derives more from her appeal as a symbol of
the timeless human concerns of sacrifce, experimentation, alienation, and
loss. Indeed, an analysis of the recent musical tributes to her suggests that the
contemporary popular memory of the frst space dog has become somewhat
uncoupled from the history of Sputnik II.
to explain this paradox, we must note that while the realms of “memory”
and “history” partially overlap, they also difer in important ways. historians
use many diferent kinds of evidence—including qualitative sources such as
memoirs, diaries, and oral histories—to gain insight on the events of the past.
But like other scholars in the behavioral sciences and the humanities, they
distinguish between the act of remembering and the historical events being
remembered. recent research in this area reminds us that for individuals and
societies as a whole, memory is an active, iterative process. Our recollection
of events is not a literal recall of a fxed or imprinted image or experience,
but rather a construction or reconfguration of what happened. 11 that the
democratizing impulses fuelling the “unofcial knowledge” of popular memory
often run counter to the empirical and sometimes arcane preoccupations of the
professional historian has been well-documented, even as recent scholarship
has focused on understanding the current obsession with “memory” among
scholars and laypeople. 12
Intended as a satirical observation on the perversity of Czech communism,
Milan Kundera’s assertion that “nowadays, history moves at a brisk clip,” while
events themselves are “soon forgotten,” ofers a telling comment on how time
11. David Gross, Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture (amherst, Ma:
University of Massachusetts press, 2000), p. 4.
12. On the signifcance of amateur collectors and preservationists to the construction and perpetuation
of popular memory. see raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory. Past and Present in Contemporary
Culture (London:Verso, 1994). For a recent attempt to historicize discourses of memory and
modernity, see alon Confno and peter Fritzsche, The Work of Memory. New Directions in the Study
of German Society and Culture (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois press, 2002).