In the intricate dance between memory and history, each partner influences and reshapes the other. This essay discusses the complexities of this relationship in dialogue with two partners: the historiography of memory and a poignant case study: the misremembered death of Catherine ‘Kitty’ Genovese. This essay will trace the evolution of her death into a symbol of moral decline, deeply embedded in both popular imagination and scholarly debate. This essay aims to demonstrate that memory and history are not just interconnected; they are mutually unreliable. The essay concludes by making the case that history can distort memory just as memory can distort history, inviting a re-evaluation of how we approach understanding the past.
It is only fitting that our discussion on memory begins with a statement of facts. We know that on 13 March 1964 at 3:20 am, the weather was freezing in Kew Gardens, Queens, New York. We also know that the 1.8 million inhabitants of the borough of Queens would not see a warm day until 18 April, when the temperature would finally climb above 75°F between the hours of 10 am and 6 pm. We consider these meteorological and demographic statements to be facts by virtue of our trust in the records of Newark Liberty International Airport and the United States government.[1] For more than half a century, many held an equally firm belief in the statement that Catherine “Kitty” Genovese was raped and stabbed by Winston Moseley on 13 March 1964 between 3:20 am - 3:52 am while 38 ‘respectable, law-abiding citizens’ observed inactively, leaving her to die alone in the stairwell of her own apartment building. They were led to this belief because Martin Gansberg, a journalist working for the New York Times, wrote about what transpired based on eyewitness and first responder reports.[2] Gansberg’s article would do more than reconstruct the events of that early morning; he incepted a picture of uncaring inner-city neighbours, indifferent to the murder and rape of Kitty at their own doorstep, into our collective memories. Although he was not a historian, his narrative would turn into a virulent form of mimesis, spreading a morally defunct view of humanity far and wide.[3] ‘Kitty’s nightmare has become a symbol for all of us,’ Harold Takooshian explained in an open forum four decades after the incident, before noting ‘how dramatically my field of psychology has been changed by her experience.’[4] Although the open forum did not include historians, we can hear traces of Alessandro Portelli’s argument that monumental memories are the foundation for our identities in Takooshian’s statement.[5] Gansberg’s rendition of Winston Moseley wounded more than his victim. With each slash, Moseley tore as deep into Kitty as he did into our perceptions of ourselves and of humanity as fundamentally good. Who are we if not Kitty’s neighbours, separated only by time and space. In the decades following Kitty’s death, sociologists and psychologists developed numerous behavioural theories, such as the ‘bystander effect,’ to explain the passivity of the witnesses.[6] But the taint of Gansberg’s mimesis would not be washed with explanation, just like the trauma of remembering Auschwitz cannot be healed simply by knowing why it happened.[7] Unexpectedly, in late 2016, The New York Times did something remarkable in an unremarkable manner. It appended a new Editors’ Note to Gansberg’s article, more than half a century after the publication, as follows:
Editors’ Note:
Oct. 12, 2016
Later reporting by The Times and others has called into question significant elements of this account. […]
We now know that much of Gansberg’s retelling of the events of 13 March 1964 was inaccurate. For example, Rachel Manning, Mark Levine and Alan Collins found that an extensive review of trial records did not support Gansberg’s claims about the number of witnesses and their purported inaction.[8] Several others would follow their lead, with numerous journalists, psychologists and historians rushing to correct our collective recollection of the historical facts.[9] Not only had several neighbors intervened directly, breaking up the assault, but Kitty had died in the arms of someone who cared. “I only hope that she knew it was me, that she wasn’t alone,” Sophia Farrar remembered thinking as she held Kitty in her last moments.[10] After Sophia’s passing, her daughter explained that her family had “tried to do what we could to set the record straight,” but their efforts were ignored.[11] It would not surprise Luisa Passerini that our collective memories of Kitty’s last moments were dictated by a man with a tape-recorder instead of the woman who lived through them. Who tells the story, and how, is of critical importance not least because the narratives we create from memories shape our relationship with history. Conversely, history influences how we remember the past and ourselves, often leading to reciprocal distortions between these twin concepts.[12] That memories can be distorted, wrongly recalled, or false in their entirety is becoming a starting point for many psychologists and neuroscientists.[13] From their perspective, the discussion in this essay need not continue beyond the statement contained in the title. For a historian, the situation is infinitely more nuanced. On the one hand, only the most radical post-modernists would entirely dismiss the value of seeking Rankean objectivity and an Eltonian version of truth regarding the events of 13 March 1964. On the other hand, one can vividly imagine Foucault launching into a labyrinthine dissection of power dynamics woven into Gansberg’s narrative without troubling his audience with the alethiological state of affairs. Similarly, we can almost hear Edward Said laying bare the stereotypes and self-justifications of Gansberg’s narrative, tearing into how Gansberg’s narrative is nothing but a projection of his views of inner-city residents. Given that Gansberg spent most of his life in the tranquil suburb of Passaic, New Jersey, he would have found it easy to concur with Jane Jacobs’ contemporary views on the moral decay and decrepitude that plagued great American cities.[14] As Michel De Certeau said, ‘history is a product of a place,’ and Gansberg seems to have written his article deep in enemy territory.[15] In reconstructing the events of that early morning, did Gansberg misremember, or did he rely on inaccurate narratives provided by others? Although Portelli hastens to remind us that ‘there are no false oral sources,’ Gansberg was acting as an investigative reporter with an intimate relationship to objectivity.[16] Or perhaps the accidental historian’s biases and perceptions of the immorality of inner-city life influenced his narrative choices, gently guiding him to a story that resonated with his own prejudices? We have reason to believe that the policemen responding to the site may have provided, or at least reinforced, the now disproven notion of 38 witnesses, which they acknowledge was ‘one for the books.’[17] Had they only known how many, and with what impact. Reflecting on Natalia Zemon Davis’ body of work, we see the craft of historians, both professional and accidental, being shaped by their context and intentions.[18] From this perspective, history is more than a collection of objective truths. It is a complex tapestry of stories, narratives, and myths, where each thread is colored by the historian’s perspective. In Gansberg’s 'return' of Kitty Genovese, facts are supplanted by peg-legged pontification about the moral decrepitude of the people of Queens, thinly veiled as investigative reporting for the audience absorb as truth. In his mediations on the tensions between a historian’s aspiration for fidelity and the inherent limitations of memory, Paul Ricoeur reminds us that ‘to memory is tied an ambition, a claim—that of being faithful to the past.’ [19] Whether we do so fairly or not seems immaterial, given how Ricoeur continues to state that ‘we have nothing better than memory to signify that something has taken place.’[20] In the end, it is the memory of Kitty Genovese that remains with us, not the historical facts of her death. Luisa Passerini has productively sourced history from nothing better than memory for decades, building her craft on the recognition that memory is inherently subjective and malleable. For Passerini, memories of lived experiences are perspectives rather than objective facts; a concept which Gansberg both overextended and neglected.[21] Aleida Assmann traced the historiographical relationship between history and memory as it evolved through three stages: identity, polarization, and interaction.[22] It is in this last, decidedly postmodernist stage of evolution, that we find Jan Assmann’s mnemohistory which emphasizes the past as it is remembered. ‘The present is “haunted” by the past,’ Jan Assmann states, implying that our understanding of the past influences much more than just our reconstruction of it.[23] The Gansbergian narrative had decades to weave its tendrils throughout our collective consciousness, creating schemas that define us as much as they delineate us from others. As Siobhan Brownlie has shown, under the right conditions, these schemas, such as the British concept of outsider Normans, can persist for millennia even after the conditions that originated have not existed for generations.[24] Might the Editors’ Note of 12 October 2016 prove powerless in undoing Gansberg’s origin myth of apathy and moral indifference? If so, what would that say about our collective inability to differentiate truth from myths? For some historians, the last question is of little consequence. Raphael Samuel saw history having always been a mixture of knowledge, memory, and myth; a prescient definition of how we see Gansberg’s reporting in hindsight. Brownlie grants Gansberg a modicum of posthumous relief by positing that myths do not need to be accurate conceptions of the past; they only need to serve ‘present purposes.’[25]Psychologists have long since identified the causal relationship between autobiographical memory and the formation of a sense of self.[26] Wielding the tools of a literary historian, Nicola King has corroborated the argument that autobiographical memories and myths are used to form the very foundations of our concept of self.[27] Portelli goes even further and posits that this is ‘what memory is for.’[28] King found that autobiographical authors return obsessively to themes such as the way things ‘really were’ and ‘what really happened,’ parsing through knowledge, memories, and origin myths to construe a consistent identity.[29] Although Kitty Genovese’s death is not an origin myth, it is a beginning much like the one which Connerton saw in the execution of Louis XVI.[30] Where Kitty’s life ended, a new autobiographical perception of ourselves began. History not only creates memories; it creates us.
Accordingly, it seems that Halbwachs’ statement that ‘no memory is possible outside frameworks used by people living in society to determine and retrieve their recollections’ deserves a corollary; no autobiographical concept of ourselves is possible outside the frameworks people use to determine their relationship with history.[31] What we remember of Kitty Genovese’s death is a function of both what we have been given to remember as well as what society expects us to remember. Jan Assmann sees collective memories being dynamically constituted, mediated, and reshaped by acts of communication within the tight embrace of culture.[32] Here Gansberg’s reporting plays an interesting dual role. It was the first act in a long chain of communicative acts, and it is itself a materially manifest form of cultural memory; an artefact that communicates a collective memory, and culturally mediated meanings, simply by existing. Within the framework of Pierre Nora, Gansberg’s article exists also as lieux de mémoire from which a sense of meaning and heritage emanates to those who behold it.[33] We can go even further by following Dominick LaCapra in noticing that the article is something different than just a site of memory. It is a site of trauma.[34] Where Jan Assmann posits that memories are formed through dialogue, Judith Pollmann’s work implies that we need only ourselves and our internal monologue as discussants.[35] As we acknowledge the introspective depths of trauma and internal dialogues, it is tempting to follow Susan Sontag in diverging from Halbwachs by stating that ‘all memory is individual.’ As Sontag saw it, collective memories are nothing but stipulated ideologies, and the stipulations that arise from the Gansbergian narrative are ones of original sin.[36]According to it, we are all indelibly tainted onlookers, cursed to indifference and apathy; a stipulation that many internalized through Aleida Assmann’s ‘rites of participation even when the facts of the case never justified the judgment.’[37]
Our tour of what Kerwin Lee Klein aptly calls the memory industry illuminated through the microhistory of Kitty Genovese has brought us to a critical understanding.[38] The consequences of misremembering of her tragic death serves as a compelling argument for recognizing history as an unreliable source for memory. How deeply the Gansbergian narrative has shaped our collective perceptions demonstrates how our autobiographical and self-constructive processes can be manipulated by those who control the historical account. What we believe about ourselves is inherently tied to our understanding of the past, urging us to critically assess the reliability of historical sources as foundations for our self-conception. Just as historians have learned to apply critical caveats and considerations when using memory as a source of history, Gansberg’s inaccurate account of the early morning of 13 March 1964 invites us to embark on a similar journey of caution and critical analysis when relying on history to shape our collective memories. The impact of Kitty Genovese's death on psychology, sociology, and our self-conceptions underscores the necessity of this approach, reminding us that both history and memory are susceptible to distortions. In recognizing this, we are better equipped to navigate the intricate interplay between these two realms, fostering a more nuanced and reliable understanding of our past and, consequently, ourselves.
T. Alexander Puutio is currently undertaking an MSt in History at the University of Cambridge (Wolfson College)
Notes:
[1] United States Bureau of the Census, 1960 Census of Population: New York (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1963), p. 3; and NOAA, Daily Summaries Station Details, Newark Liberty International Airport 1893-2024, https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datasets/GHCND/stations/GHCND:USW00014734/detail (accessed 25 May 2024)
[2] Martin Gansberg, ‘37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police; Apathy at Stabbing of Queens Woman Shocks Inspector’, The New York Times, 27 March 1964, https://www.nytimes.com/1964/03/27/archives/37-who-saw-murder-didnt-call-the-police-apathy-at-stabbing-of.html (accessed 25 May 2024)
[3] Hayden White, ‘The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory’, History and Theory, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1984), p. 3.
[4] Harold Takooshian and others, ‘Remembering Catherine “Kitty” Genovese 40 Years Later: A Public Forum’, Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless, No. 14 (2005), p. 68.
[5] Alessandro Portelli, ‘On the Uses of Memory: As Monument, As Reflex, As Disturbance’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 49, No. 30 (2014), p. 43.
[6] Joseph W. Critelli and Kathy W. Keith, ‘The Bystander Effect and the Passive Confederate: On the Interaction Between Theory and Method’, The Journal of Mind and Behavior, Vol.24, No. 3/4 (2003), pp. 255–64.
[7] Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), doi:10.7591/9781501727450; Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
[8] Rachel Manning, Mark Levine, and Alan Collins, ‘The Kitty Genovese Murder and the Social Psychology of Helping: The Parable of the 38 Witnesses’, The American Psychologist, Vol. 62, No. 6 (2007), pp. 555–562.
[9] Marcia M. Gallo, ‘No One Helped’: Kitty Genovese, New York City, and the Myth of Urban Apathy, 1st edn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Marcia Gallo, ‘The Parable of Kitty Genovese, the New York Times, and the Erasure of Lesbianism’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 23 (2014), pp. 273–94; Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History, First English-language edition (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 2020); and Kevin Cook, Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America, Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America (New York: W W Norton & Co, 2014) among many others.
[10] Sam Roberts, ‘Sophia Farrar Dies at 92; Belied Indifference to Kitty Genovese Attack’, The New York Times, 2 September 2020 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/02/nyregion/sophia-farrar-dead.html (accessed 25 May 2024)
[11] Michael Gannon, ‘Sophia Farrar Dead; Held Dying Genovese ‘ Queens Chronicle, 11 September 2019, https://www.qchron.com/editions/queenswide/sophia-farrar-dead-held-dying-genovese/article_94c8af6b-52fd-55d4-b60a-b714c731694f.html (accessed 19 May 2024)
[12] Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory (Manchester University Press, 2007). p.27
[13] Joyce W. Lacy and Craig E. L. Stark, ‘The Neuroscience of Memory: Implications for the Courtroom’, Nature Reviews. Neuroscience, Vol. 14, No. 9 (2013), pp. 649–658.
[14] Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1992 edition (London: Vintage Books, Random House, 1961); Search for Martin Gansberg’s records," Ancestry.com, https://www.ancestry.com (accessed 19 May 2024)
[15] Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 64.
[16] Alessandro Portelli, ‘The Peculiarities of Oral History’, History Workshop, Vol. 12, 1981, p. 100.
[17] Kevin Cook, What Really Happened The Night Kitty Genovese Was Murdered?, 2014 https://www.npr.org/2014/03/03/284002294/what-really-happened-the-night-kitty-genovese-was-murdered (accessed 31 May 2024)
[18] Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984)
[19] Luisa Passerini, Memory and Utopia: The Primacy of Intersubjectivity (Oxford: Routledge, 2007).
[20] Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004) p. 39.
[21] Ibid. p. 25.
[22] Aleida Assmann, ‘Transformations between History and Memory’, Social Research, Vol. 75, No. 1 (2008), pp. 49–72.
[23] Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). p.9.
[24] Siobhan Brownlie, ‘Does Memory of the Distant Past Matter? Remediating the Norman Conquest’, Memory Studies, Vol. 5, No. 4 (2012), pp. 360–77.
[25] Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (London: Verso Books, 1994) pp. 443-444; Brownlie, 'Does Memory', p. 375
[26] Stanley B. Klein and Shaun Nichols, ‘Memory and the Sense of Personal Identity’, Mind, Vol. 121, No. 483 (2012), pp. 677–702.
[27] Nicola King, Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp. 61-92.
[28] Portelli, ‘On the Uses of Memory’. p. 47.
[29] King, Memory, pp. 33-118.
[30] Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, Themes in the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). pp. 41-71.
[31] Maurice Halbwachs, La Mémoire Collective. [The Collective Memory] (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France., 1950).Translated by Lewis A. Coser. p. 42.
[32] Jan Assmann, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, New German Critique, Vol. 65, (1995), pp. 125–33.
[33] Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring, 1989), Vol. 26 (1989), pp. 7–24.
[34] LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz. p. 9
[35] Jan Assmann, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’; Judith Pollmann, Scripting the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
[36] Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others., 1st edition. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). pp. 85-86
[37] Aleida Assmann, ‘Transformations between History and Memory’, Social Research, Vol. 75, No. 1 (2008), p. 52.
[38] Kerwin Lee Klein, From History to Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
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