- Historical policy: The way to interpret historical events and processes according to the political and social aims of the society.
- Individual memories and narratives: The remembering about past events consisting of always subjective and therefore selective reconstructions of the past based on a person’s own experiences and feelings.
- Collective memories: Memories of a group or collective (such as families, villages, nations, etc). Collective remembering also occurs in a very selective way. Some content and topics associated with the past might be considered taboo in a certain social context, while others could be particularly highlighted.
- Communicative memories: Memories linking members of different generations (such as stories told by grandparents about their past experiences and their emotions) — these can become a part of individual memories or collective memories. As a result of being limited to the time of co-existing generations, communicative memory represents the short-term memory of a society.
- Cultural Memory: The collective recollections that can no longer be passed on directly to following generations on account of the fixed time limitations of the recollections that can be communicated in person. This occurs via cultural codifications such as written texts, photographs, films, monuments, rituals, commemoration days, symbols, and so forth.