The past that never passes and the future that never comes

Over the last decades, memory studies have played an important role in the reflection on historical continuity and the reconsideration of historical experience. Significantly, memory is always affiliated with individual experience and subjectivity. An individual’s private narratives are located within the historical narrative of a certain group, which may form the core of a national culture. Such groups may be defined as sub-cultures. According to Ken Greider: ‘subcultures are groups of people that have something in common with each other (i.e. they share a problem, an interest, a practice) which distinguishes them in a significant way from the members of other social groups’. ¹ The authors of The Subcultures Reader also make a distinction between the terms ‘community’ and ‘subcultures’, stating that the latter has a meaning of ‘states of a relative transience’. ² The state of transience is a specific feature of sub-cultures as their position is unstable in the perspective of the dominant culture. They are deeply rooted in the past and, at the same time, have projections into the future.