Against Remembrance

Contents

Preface

I II

Vll

Footprints in the Sands of Time, and All That

I

What Is Collective Memory Actually Good For? 33

III

Forgiveness and Forgetting

59

IV

Amor Fati

93

v

e ofthe heart. Too long a sacrifice can make a ston

Preface

W. B. Yeats

This is a short book, long in the making. Like any reason­ ably historically literate person, I had always assumed that I understood the difference between the critical history of

historians and the psychological authenticity but dubious historicity of the collective memories of peoples and nations. But I had not thought this worth worrying about until the early 1990s, when I worked as a journalist covering the Bosnian war. That slaughter (calling it a war when the Serbs had the guns and the know-how, and, for most of the period, the UN and the great powers did all they could to prevent the Bosnians from even trying to gain access to the weapons they needed is the rankest misnomer) poisoned forever the idea of remembrance for me. There is no sense in pretending to an objectivity that I do not in fact possess. Caveat Lector.

vii

PREFACE

PREFACE

People, certainly Americans and, I suspect, Australians,

work on the memory of the Great Famine. They are of

of my class and interests, tend to spend far too much time

course not responsible for the uses to which I have put

bemoaning the indifferent ignorance that has become the

their learning. I

default position of so many of their fellow citizens, above

attempts to explain to me the Catholic understanding of the

all the young, toward the past. We should be more careful

relation between history and memory (he will judge if I

what we wish for. The wars of the Yugoslav Succession

have succeeded, and of course my errors are mine alone).

were inflamed by remembrance-above all the Serb

Since the days when I was his student almost forty years ago

remembrance of the defeat at Kosovo Polje in 1389. In

at Amherst College, I have benefited from the learning and

the hills of Bosnia, I learned to hate but above all to fear

friendship of Norman Birnbaum. If I have gotten Li.iwith,

collective historical memory. In its appropriation of history,

Halbwachs, Renan and other thinkers on whom I have

which had been my abiding passion and refuge since

relied even partly right, that is as much Norman's doing as

childhood, collective memory made history itself seem like

mine, even if, all these years later, Ti.innies still defeats me.

nothing so much as an arsenal full of the weapons needed

Last but certainly not least, I want to thank Louise Adler,

to keep wars going or peace tenuous and cold. What I saw

Elisa Berg and their colleagues at Melbourne University

after Bosnia, in Rwanda, in Kosovo, in Israel-Palestine,

Publishing for giving me the opportunity to write this little

and in Iraq, gave me no basis for changing my mind. This

book, and their forbearance, unpardonably taxed by me,

book is the product of that alarm.

I'm afraid, as it took me about four times as long as I had

am

equally indebted to R. R. Reno for his

promised it would to finally deliver a finished text. On some matters, notably Judaism and Irish history, I am frankly out of my depth and could not have written on these vexed subjects without the tutoring of Leon Wieseltier and Tom Arnold, and without the benefit of Cormac 6 Gnida's

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ix

I Footprints in the Sands ofTime, and All That

L

aurence Binyon's poem, 'For the Fallen', was first published in the London Times on 2 1 September 1914,

six weeks after the Great War had begun. It is sometimes suggested that Binyon, who was a distinguished art historian as well as a poet (he was the British Museum's Keeper of Oriental Prints and Drawings when the war began), wrote the poem in despair over how many had already died and were being condemned to die. But there is no basis for such a reading. Binyon simply could not have known this, if for no other reason than it was not until the First Battle of Ypres, then still a month in the future, that people at home began to realise how terrible the toll in lives of British and Commonwealth soldiers the war promised to exact. In reality, 'For the Fallen' is a classic patriotic poem, far closer in spirit

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DAVID RIEFF

to Horace's 'dulce et decorum est pro patria mori' ('it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country'}--the line actually was b Qfaven into the wall of the chapel of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 1913-than to the work of the great British soldier-poets like Wilfred Owen, who would himself appropriate the motto for one of his greatest poems, but only in order to call dulce et decorum est 'the old lie'. That such Promethean knowledge was unavailable to Binyon weeks into the war hardly dishonours him. Too

AGAINST REMEMBRANCE

In Australia, 'For the Fallen' is now known as 'The Ode of Remembrance'. At many Anzac Day ceremonies, after the fourth stanza is declaimed, it is customary for those present to respond with the words 'Lest we forget', as if to an invocation in church, which, in a sense, of course it is. In doing so, the participants meld the Binyon poem with Rudyard Kipling's far greater poem, 'Recessional', from which 'Lest we forget' derives, with every stanza ending with two repetitions of the phrase:

old to serve in the trenches, in 1916 he nonetheless would volunteer to serve as a hospital orderly on the Western Front-no mean commitment. And his poem has endured. To this day, 'For the Fallen' has remained the quasi-official poem of remembrance, read at ceremonies honouring the memory of the dead of both World War I and World War II throughout Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Far-called, our navies melt away: On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget-lest we forget!

Its fourth and best-known stanza reads: As was so often the case, Kipling had a far more com­ They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.

plicated and pessimistic view of the world than the memory of him either among his critics or his (sadly diminished number of ) admirers would lead one to believe. Though advanced in inverted terms, since the poet is in effect

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DAVID RIEFF

AGAINST REMEMBRANCE

appealing to God for a deferral of what he knows to be

conserve a moral conscience in such a society. To care

the foreordained outcome, 'Lest we forget' is a mournful

about the present would be challenge enough, let alone

reminder that this forgetting is inevitable-both on our

having something left for either the past or the future. The

own parts and with regard to us after we are gone. In this,

Buddhist sage, Trungpa Rinpoche, once said that 'The

'Recessional' echoes the chilling words of Ecclesiastes

ultimate truth is fearless'. Perhaps. But in thinking about

1:11: 'There is no remembrance of former things; neither

history, the truth is at least as likely to inspire fear. As the

shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come

German philosopher Karl Lowith put it in his now largely

with those that shall come after'. And, more proximately,

forgotten masterpiece, The Meaning of History (1947):

Kipling's poem is a gloss--explicitly so, at one point--on

'To ask earnestly the question of the ultimate meaning

Shelley's 'Ozymandias' and its unflinching meditation

of history takes our breath away. It transports us into a

on the ephemeral nature of even the most monumental

vacuum which only hope and faith can fill'.

creations and martial accomplishments of human beings.

If we must live as if Ecclesiastes were wrong, we should

Deep down, we all know this to be true, however

still at least muster the courage to look at that ultimate

much all of our public engagements are grounded in our

meaninglessness of history from time to time, and recog­

acting as if we believed otherwise. But fully to make of

nise that, to paraphrase Trotsky's quip about the dialectic,

Ecclesiastes 1:11 our true north would be to live as if we

'You may not be interested in the geological record , but the

were already dead. And we neither can do this-'No man

geological record is interested in you'. Even if we narrow

can stare for long at death or the sun', as La Rochefoucauld

the frame from evolutionary or geological time to historical

famously said-nor does there seem to me to be any moral

time-the time of human consciousness-and then narrow

or ethical imperative for doing so. A society based on such

it still further to only the most recent tranche of historical

a focus might, in some ultimate sense, be more 'truthful'.

time, there is still no reprieve on offer. The modern United

But it would also be completely impossible to foster or

States from its beginnings as a colony to the presen t day is

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DAVID RIEFF

AGAINST REMEMBRANCE

a little over 400 years old. The First Fleet sailed into Botany

sense, mean imagining that the political organisation of

Bay at the beginning of 1788, meaning that modem Australia has existed for a little more than half that time. Even France,

our own era, which, globalisation notwithstanding is still' ' broadly speaking, one of nation-states, is not just destine d

which has resembled a modern state for longer than any

to be long lived, which it very well may be, but permanent.

other in the so-called Old Europe, at the very earliest can

And that is clearly absurd. This is not to say that there are

only be said to have begun to coalesce in a form we would

not good and sufficient human reasons to live inside the

recognise to any extent about 600 years ago and, even in

illusion, or, with apologies to Freud, that this illusion does

France, as Theodore Zeldin has shown, this sense of national

have a future. If truth and morality can be incommensurable '

unity was far more the creed of the ruling than the popular

which, whatever tales the Kantians console themselves with '

classes until at least the French Revolution and probably

they often are, the same can and must be said about reality

well into the nineteenth century. Although China and India

and necessity. For to live overshadowed by the certain

obviously are far, far older as civilisations, one cannot talk

knowledge that all nations and civilisations are as mortal

of a unified Indian state until at least the Mughal Empire in

and as surely condemned to extinction as individuals are

the sixteenth century, and even China, which is of course

would be paralysing. It is one thing to say that history has

much the oldest state in the world, only became a unified

no intrinsic meaning but that, instead, its meaning derives

country with the Soong dynasty in the tenth century of the

from the way in which we human beings order it and infuse

Common Era. In historical terms, this is a very long time; in

it with significance. It is quite another to assign a lifespan

geological terms it is the blink of an eye. Even if we restrict

even to those constructed meanings, and really to take on

our gaze to historical time, do any of us seriously imagine

board the fact that, in the very long

that these states will be around in anything like the same

and everything we are is destined to be forgotten.

run,

everything we do

form in another thousand years, or two, or three? In reality,

Kipling is saying just that in 'Recessional'. He under­

nobody really thinks this. To do so would, in the deepest

' stood perfectly well that the question of 'Lest we forget ,

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AGAINST REMEMBRANCE DAVID R!EFF

we

(in its denotative meaning: 'lasting for a markedly brief

s n, in Liiwith's words, one find forget'. But what to do whe em rope? One answer is that oneself at the end of the mod

time') and human meaning itself. Whether one accepts the

ifying statement, implicitly contained the terr

'When

r e to shift the centre of thei just as it is possible for som to personal fate in non-being perceptions from their own

y ich also may well be the onl an 'other-centred' focus (wh on prospect of our own extincti way those of us who find the

of not being driven mad by unbearable can find some way on wh y the same should not its prospect), there is no reas ve fate . If this is right, then be possible with our collecti need not be regarded only as the mortality of civilisations contrary, a wor ld in whi ch crushingly bad new s. To the

recognisable to tho se of us everything endured in a form anity's lifespan as a species living now through all of hum

of able--even if the fantasy is what is in fact unimagin just such an outcome. personal immortality posits hean and transformative In any case, however Promet appear, it is not actually of this knowledge may at first tionally or intellectually. A any great use to us either emo thing, what is more likely is Freudian would say that, if any

s nection between the brute fact that there is an essential con y ve transience, our ephemeralit of our individual and collecti

10

linkage or not, to remain productive, and probably even to stay sane, we can only really engage with the era in which we are fated to live and die, and with the relatively short period of time past and time future to which we can feel connected. Even science fiction writing, some of which reaches very far forward in time, generally deals with the consequences of events taking place today, whether the extrapolation is from our own accomplishments (what we could call the Star Trek model) or our own follies (the Planet

of the Apes

model). The only major exception I can think

of is the British science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon' who' in his novels Last

Far Future ( 1930)

and First Men: A Story of the Near and and its sequel,

Star Maker (1937),

tried

to encompass the evolution of the human species-this brief music that is man, as he described it at the conclusion of the first book-from the twentieth century two billion years into the future. Few writers in any genre have conceived their project as demanding a 'detachment from all private, all social, all racial ends', and with it 'a kind of piety toward fate'.

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DAVID RIEFF

AGAINST REMEMBRANCE

But Stapledon is an outlier. As a general rule, the historical

those people had all died, as the events of September II, say, are to us today.

reach of the imagination, whether backwards or forwards, even in science fiction, is limited. As with imaginative literature, so too with the 'shelf life' of historical memory. In 2010, it still makes not just historical but ethical sense to most people in Australia and New Zealand for them to honour the memory of the dead of Gallipoli, and in doing so (particularly since there are now so many recently arrived immigrants in both countries) to honour their own national sense of belonging. But even the most historically minded do not claim that there is either moral impera­ tive or civic utility to holding services today in honour of the Norman and Anglo-Saxon dead of the Battle of

Of course, we can still study the Battl e of Salamis; indeed, one can argue plausibly that, beca use the past half-century has been something of a Gold en Age for historical writing, we certainly know more today about the war between Greece and Persia that culminated with the Athenian victory at Salamis than we did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when , culturally, Hellenism provided so central a model for poets and philosophers from Schelling and Goethe to Byron and at some level even Matthew Arnold, that in 1935 , the British scholar Eliza Butler could write a book calle d quite simply

Hastings of I066 or the battles of Sekigahara in 1600

The Tyranny ofGreece Over Germany. It was also

and Osaka Castle in 1615 that led to the establishment of

the self-conception of the British Empire, and

the Tokugawa shogunate in Japan, let alone the Battle of

its last gasp, to the belief, in a Britain shorn of its colonies, that its global role now depended on playi ng Greece to

Salamis between the Athenians and the Persians (480 BCE) or the battles of the Chu-Han war in China (206-202 BCE)

.

central to

eventually, in

America's new Rome. This was almost certainly the

Indeed, it would be morally absurd to do so. And yet these

last convincing contemporary appropriation of classical

battles were just as critical in their time, just as firmly

Greek and Roman history (the American Empire has other

entrenched in the minds and hearts of people who lived

myths-above all, that it is not an empire; the Chinese

through them, and for many generations who came after

Empire will have still others, though as yet these are

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DAVID RIEFF

AGAINST REMEMBRANCE

still on the drawing board). It lasted far longer than most

the (at least imagined) cultural continuity between Greece

collective memories of the past, but the 2500 intervening

and Rome and the West through to World War I that made

years between ourselves and Salamis at last have come to

the past legible. Picasso was interested in Velazquez, who

represent too long a distance for us to make myths about

died 220 years before he was born; today, young painters

it that have any authority over our moral or political

are unlikely to be interested in their predecessors of half-a­

imaginations. We can still admire The Iliad and Cicero, the

century earlier. Today, in Australia, Sidney Nolan's histori­

Pantheon and the Acropolis, and be inspired by them, but

cal paintings from the late 1940s and early 1950s, such as

as vehicles for our myth-making about ourselves, they are

Death of Captain Fraser, still seem relevant to the Australian

finally lost to us, just as the fate of Gallipoli will sooner or

debate over multiculturalism, history and memory. But for

later be lost.

how long will they be intelligible, let alone relevant, in

But what a run! Most civilisations, and the art and thought they give rise to, disappear far more quickly.

other than purely aesthetic terms, as classical Greek statuary is today?

Think of Rubens' portraits of the English nobility: in their

Wringing one's hands over this is about as useful as

own time, these were clearly understood as glorifications

complaining about the heat in New Delhi or the rain in

of both the Stuart dynasty and the doctrine of the divine

Paris. What is worth paying heed to is just how easy it turns

right of kings. Today, the beliefs and understandings that

out to be for nations to 'revise' and 'rewrite' their collective

informed his way of seeing make no sense to us precisely

memories. That alone should signal to us how much closer

because Rubens was a man of his time-in many ways,

historical memory is to myth on one side and contemporary

its biographer. In contrast, Turner, whom John Berger once

politics and ideology on the other than it is to history. This

described as 'a man alone, surrounded by implacable and

is hardly news in an age of literary 'deconstructionism'

indifferent forces', is still accessible to us precisely because

but in fact our understanding of the social construction

the logic of his work put him outside his own time. It was

of memory goes back to the 1920s and the pioneering

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DAVID RIEFF

AGAINST REMEMBRANCE

work of the great French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs

of these 'reconstructions', these 'rewritings', have proven

(he was arrested in Paris by the Gestapo in 1944, and

to be so much riskier than others at a given point in history

was murdered in the Buchenwald concentration camp

only to evolve or be transformed (the mechanisms that make

in

1945*). Halbwachs would almost certainly have

it possible for this to happen are rarely straightforward) into

found the late modern claim that everything from our

something that poses little or no danger. The 'constructed'

sexuality to our understanding of our historical traditions

collective memory that may anger and excite a community

is socially constructed. He was far more interested in the

in one historical era may endure in a form not only harmless

reconstruction than in the deconstruction of collective

but actively anodyne to the culture of grievance and grudge

memory. Halbwachs derived much of his theory about

of a couple of generations later.

how collective memory is formed from the work of British

The history of Ireland from the late nineteenth century

neurologist Henry Head's studies of veterans of World

through the 1916 Easter Rising all the way to the economic

War I who had suffered head wounds. 'What [someone

boom of the early twenty-first century, followed by the

with aphasia]lacks', Halbwachs wrote, 'is less memories

banking crash and the collapse of the housing bubble in

themselves but the framework in which to situate them'.

2008, provides a particularly illuminating example of the

Halbwachs understood that while, as he put it, 'societies

phenomenon. It is commonplace both among the Irish

and groups are capable at each moment of reconstructing

themselves and among the descendants of the Irish diaspora,

their past', at the same time that 'they reconstruct it, they

as well as among those with 'central casting' Ireland in their

deform it'. But for all its insights, his work does not do

heads, to speak as if this bathetic mixture of the cliches of

enough to explain why, both politically and morally, some

Republicanism and the cliches of the Irish National Tourist Board were at least an approximation of the country's history

*

Jorge Semprlln, who was a fellow prisoner \Vith him in Buchenwald,

wrote an extraordinary accc;mnt of Halb\vachs' death in his memoir,

and spirit. But that mythical Ireland never existed (any more than the mythical France, or China, or United States

L 'ecriture ou Ia vie.

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DAVID RIEFF

existed). Irish historians generally agree that the shift of the centre of gravity of Irish nationalism from parliamentary politics to Romantic cultural nationalism occurred in large measure because of the failure of that more prosaic constitutional nationalism. Had Charles Parnell, the Irish leader in Westminster and the great champion of Irish Home Rule, not been brought down by sexual scandal, the cultural memories that now seem so 'organic' to Ireland might have remained at the fringe, and the symbiotic relationship between the Easter Rising and the Irish literary revival might never have occurred. Instead, that symbiosis became central to Irish nationalism to the point where, in Ulysses, Joyce can invent a nationalist conversation in Barney Kiernan's pub whose politics are overwhelmingly cultural and revolve around 'Irish sports and shoneen games the like of lawn tennis and about hurley and putting the stone and racy the soil and building up a nation once again'. Obviously, this is not 'historical'. No-one in the milieu Joyce was portraying imagined that they could re-create the clan-based Irish nation that had existed before the Cromwellian slaughter or, going further back, before Henry VIII's unseating of the Fitzgerald dynasty, or even

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AGAll'iST REMEMBRANCE

wanted to, for that matter. What was of concern to them, as has generally been the case for cultural natio nalists whether in Ireland or anywhere else, was the trauma of the Irish nation's destruction and the heady prospect of breathing life back into it. At first glance, the rhetoric that accompanies this appears to be highly specific, as, return ing to Joyce's archetypal rendering, when 'Irish' sport s like hurley are opposed to shoneen ones (the word is a derogatory des­ cription of Irish people who prefer Engl ish attitudes and styles). But in historical terms, these mem ories of the past are as hazy as they are impassioned. That is exactly what the essence of histo rical remem­ brance boils down to: identification and psychological proximity, rather than historical accuracy let alone political depth. The question of whether historical remembrance is constructed, imagined, manufactured out of whole cloth or willed is, quite correctly, of profound importance to professional historians but, as the best of them realise full well, it is also beside the point. National ism is an emotion but the love in question is self-love. The great nineteenth­ century French (nationalist) historian Ernest Renan is remembered for having said that natio ns were founded

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DAVID RIEFF

AGAINST REMEMBRANCE

on 'a rich legacy of memories'. Although he himself was

rather morality, ideology and, more often than not, cultural

a very good historian, Renan explicitly did not call for

and political organising principles. Ideology is not always

such memories to be based on the best available historical

compelling even in countries where nationalism historically

research. To the contrary, he was adamantly opposed to

has run deep. For example, writing of his own childhood in

letting the historical chips fall where they may. 'Forgetting,'

the 1930s and the early to mid-1940s, the Irish writer John

he wrote in What Is a Nation? ( 1882), 'and I would even

McGahern could affirm that 'The 1916 Rising was not

say historical error, are an essential factor in the creation

considered to be of any great importance in the country I

of a nation'. Far from welcoming them, Renan insisted

grew up in'. Because Easter 1916 was not that far away, he

that 'the progress of historical studies is often a danger to

explained, 'it was probably too close in time for the comfort

[the sense of] nationhood'. He said this while conceding

of mythmaking'.

the obvious. 'Nations are not something eternal', he wrote.

But at other times, the need for the security that such

'They had their beginnings and they will end.' (Presciently,

myth-making affords can seem desperately important. If,

he foresaw their eventual replacement by a 'European

in the United States today, large numbers of people care

confederation'.) Another way of putting this is that the

passionately

nation always chooses myth-codified in remembrance­

should continue to be taught that Columbus was the heroic

over history.

discoverer of America, as they have been for generations,

about

whether American

schoolchildren

Renan's claim that a nation is, as he put it, 'a large-scale

or instead that he was in reality a servant of the Spanish

solidarity', also may help to explain why attempts to debunk

Empire intent on despoiling a continent whose location he

or modify collective national myths almost invariably pro­

could not even correctly identify, as at least some American

voke such alarm. We are far removed from scholarly debate

schoolchildren are now being taught. The controversy

here. Not only are we not talking about history, we are not

does not reflect some new-found interest in getting the

even really talking about memory in any proper sense, but

past right but rather the worry that, if the old myth is

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DAVID RIEFF

AGAINST REMEMBRANCE

repudiated, Americans will no longer really know on what

be dwarfed by the social discord they would engender

the devotion to nation that is the essence of patriotism is

and the national disunity they would sow. Certainly, some

to be based. In a nation where the overwhelming majority

Australian multiculturalists have left themselves open both

of whose citizens are immigrants or the descendents of

to that charge and to essentially not caring about historical

immigrants, that is bound to be of particular concern. And,

realities. A case in point is the University of Melbourne

increasingly, the United States is simply the world writ

academic Chris Healy, who has called for new histories of

smalL In an era of global mass migration, it should come

the story of Eliza Fraser�a European woman shipwrecked

as no surprise that similar 'education wars' are going on all

in 1836 along the Queensland coast who then lived with

over the world.

the Ngulungbara people before being found by a European

In Australia, John Howard's Coalition government made

search. That seems reasonable enough. But Healy goes on

a concerted effort to blunt what it viewed as the inroads

to insist that these histories would need to 'eschew a desire

of a Left and multicultural view of the country's history,

to rescue an authentic Eliza Fraser'.

which the conservatives believed wildly over-emphasised

One should not exaggerate, as so many conservatives,

Australia's mistreatment of its Indigenous peoples, while

and by no means only in Australia, tend to do. Bitter as

perpetuating other forms of injustice and inequality at the

they are, the experience of the past century in the United

expense of the traditional positive linear account that alone

States, Canada, Australia and western Europe shows that

could integrate new immigrants from outside of Europe,

all such cultural wars end sooner or later, usually in some

and their children, into the Australian national 'family'.

form of negotiated settlement in which elements of the

The multiculturalists, Howard claimed, had espoused a

older and newer conceptions are joined together. While

'black armband' view of history and their putative accom­

such collective historical myths never stand still for more

plishments (above all in recognising the sufferings and

than a few generations, and viewed from a very long

accomplishments of the marginalised) inevitably would

perspective eventually mutate out of all recognition with

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DAVID RIEFF

AGAINST REMEMBRANCE

what they were when they were first constructed, during

in the early nineteenth century. And Benedict Anderson has

the period in which they hold sway it is as if they have

given us the valuable template of the nation as an 'imagined

always and will always exist. That is why their accuracy

community'. It has been clear at least since Renan's day

or inaccuracy is largely irrelevant. When Lytton Strachey

(and probably much earlier) that history and memory are

published his famous series of debunking portraits of four

two different things. By now, it is a commonplace. But what

of the great iconic figures of Victorian England-General

the study of the engineering of traditions and the template

Gordon, Florence Nightingale, Cardinal Manning and

of the nation as an imagined community make clear is that

Thomas Arnold-the history he uncovered was not all that

collective historical memory is neither one nor the other.

new or his arguments all that authoritative from a scholarly

Always constructed by human beings for human purposes,

perspective: 'what was true wasn't new, and what was

whether good or ill, it requires, as Renan understood, that

new wasn't true', as the old Oxbridge joke would have

we not inquire too closely into its factualness and instead

it. The book (published in 1918) could find a receptive

allow ourselves to be swept away by a strong feeling

audience because, in the last days of World War I, the

dressed up as historical fact, whether that feeling is one

Victorian myths and collective memories were themselves

of solidarity, of grief, of love of one's own nation or hate

so damaged by revulsion at the slaughter on the Western

for another's. Where remembrance is concerned, it would

Front, and at Gallipoli and Kut, that they were 'ready' for

seem that it is Nietzsche who has the last word: 'there are

revision or replacement.

no facts, only interpretations'.

Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger have written

Too often, the consequences of the suspension of

as about 'the invention of tradition', using such examples

disbelief required in order to keep faith with such collective

n the Scottish kilt, which, apparently, was largely the creatio

self-conceptions have proved far more costly humanly and

ion of Sir Walter Scott's Romantic imagination and pro-un

politically than is commonly assumed. At times, it can be

ers with England views, and the industry of Lowlands millin

like the proverbial yelling of 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre.

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DAVID RIEFF

AGAI:--JST REMEMBRANCE

But even at its best, the historical record (the verifiable one,

today there are vestiges of it), circulating like a poison in

I mean, not the mythopoeic one) does not justify the moral

Southern society.

free pass that remembrance is usually accorded. I will

The example of the American South is anyth ing but unique. I remember going to Belgrade in 1993 to visit

return to this. For now, let me simply reiterate what I hope is the commonsense observation that collective historical memory, and the forms of remembrance that accompany it, are neither factual nor proportional nor stable. There are immediate political implications of this. Were those implications overwhelmingly positive, or, failing that, at least largely neutral, arguing against remembrance would not only be disrespectful but unnecessary. What, for example, could be wrong with wearing a poppy in your lapel on Anzac Day or Remembrance Day? But it is a decent thing to do in considerable measure because people in Australia do not wear poppies in their lapels the other 363 days of the year. Would the significance not be very different if the poppies were worn year-round? White people in the American South did not wear paper flowers in their lapels after the American Civil War, but the cen­ trality in their collective memory of the slave-holding Confederacy that their ancestors had fought for endured in a virulent form for more than a century and a half (even

26

Vuk Draskovic, the Yugoslav nationalist politi cian and writer who was then leading the mass opposition against the Milosevic regime and in doing so had drawn liberal, as well as ultra-nationalist, support in Serbi a. As I was leaving, my head still ringing with Draskovic' s romantic paeans of praise for the Chetnik leader Draza Mihajlovic, one of his young aides pressed a folded bit of paper into my hand. It was blank except for a date: ' 1453 '-that is, the year Orthodox Constantinople fell to the Muslim Ottomans. Friends of mine who worked in the former Yugoslavia during the Croatian and Bosnian wars had similar experiences in Zagreb and in Sarajevo. It seemed that the 'sores of history', as the great Irish write r Hubert Butler once called them, remained unhealed more than half a millennium later-at least in the desperate, degraded atmosphere of that time and place. Far too often, collective historical memory as under stood and deployed by communities, peoples and natio ns-which

27

DAVID R!EFF

to repeat the essential point, is always selective, usually self-serving and historically anything but unimpeachable­ has led to war rather than peace, rancour rather than reconciliation and the determination to get revenge rather than commit to the hard work of forgiveness. It happened in the American South between 1865 and at least the mid1980s; it happened in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Today, it is happening in Israel-Palestine, among the Hindu nationalists in India (whose distortions of the historical character of their faith are even more egregious than their largely fraudulent reading of Indian history) and of course among the Islamists, whether Sunni or Shiah. Obviously, there is no easy resolution, since it is quite likely that our need for community is compelling in times of peace and plenty, as in modern Australia or the modern United States, and overwhelming in times of trouble. But even assuming that it is so, let there at least be no mistake about the high price we have frequently had to pay for the solace of remembrance. History is not a menu. You can't have the solidarity that a national myth helps to form and sustain but not the self­ absorption, or the pnde but not the fear. Nor, despite all the

28

AGAINST REMEMBRANCE

talk of globalisation, is the universal ethical

community that

the Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit-echoing Kant's vision of a civil society administering unive rsal rights-has called for anything more than a pipe-dream , at least for now. Margalit is right to conclude that if we could somehow create what he calls a shared moral memory based on some generally accepted moral minima then there could be a globalisation of conscience on a part with the globalisation of capitalism and of migration. To his great credit, Margalit himself goes to some pains to show how difficult it would be to go about creating such a memory. But then he in effect falls back on the old German idealist view that if somethina b should be done, if it is a moral imperativ e, then it must be done (the world as 'cosmological idea', in another Kantian formulation)--an injunction that can also be summarised as 'ought implies can'. With the spirit of our own time, in which universal values are everywhere unde r assault, this seems less likely than ever, and in any case there is a whiff of eschatology about it: Alle Menschen werd en Briider (all men become brothers)--The End. Mostly, though, it is like the old fantasy of world governmenta kind of moral Esperanto that is beautiful, noble even, but, when all is said

29

DAVID R!EFF

AGAINST REMEMBRANCE

and done, a waste of hope. As Leszek Kolakowski once

victor. In such circumstances, often what is needed most is

remarked, 'We can imagine the universal brotherhood of

appeasement in its denotative sense of ' soothing', 'bringing

wolves but not of humans, since the needs of wolves are

peace', though another term would probably have to be

limited and definable and therefore conceivably satisfied,

used since appeasement may simply be too identified with

whereas human needs have no boundaries we could

Chamberlain and Daladier's caving in to Hitler in 1938

delineate'.

over the fate of Czechoslovakia to be useable. To achieve

human need for For better or worse, how we weigh the t take place in the remembrance against its dangers mus who we actually context of the way we actually live and time in which we are as human beings. 'In the terrifying rian of Judaism, live and create', wrote the great histo

this, I believe that we will need some version of what John Gray has called modus vivendi between civilisations

,

cultures, religions and nations. If this is right, then far from being always a moral imperative, remembrance is what is going to stand in the way.

ediate concern'. Yosef Yerushalmi, 'eternity is not our imm it to become Nor do we live in a world that, even were y), ever will be less terrifying (which hardly seems likel something that converted to Kantian absolutist idealismthing! Instead, our actually seem s to me to be a very good worl d whe re, too challenge is to keep our bearings in a have proven to be often for it to be a limiting case, values is the inimical incompatible. An obvious example of this -truth, justice relationship between three virtuous goals wars, especially and peace-in the aftermath of savage there is no clear in the increasing number of cases where

30

31

II What Is Collective Memory Actually Good For?

O

ld men forget, as Shakespeare has the king say in

Henry

V. But, left to their own devices, societies

forget too, and not just inevitably, over the very long run, but often surprisingly quickly. This is truer now than it has ever been in the past. The French historian Daniel Halevy foresaw as much in his Essay on the Acceleration

of History, published in 1948. He argued that we were witnessing the dawn of an era in which change, sometimes very rapid change, was becoming the norm. This was an epochal event in world history-a decisive break with the essential continuity that had marked almost all societies throughout history. It is not that things never change in traditional cultures (by which one generally means peasant culture); they do, but slowly, and most of the time in ways

35

DAVID RIEFF

AGAINST REMEMBRANCE

that are imperceptible to any given generation, except in

millions have moved from country to city and tens of

moments of calamity, which has usually meant in times

millions from country to country, and where, for all the

of famine. This is because such societies are governed

cheap self-flattering and faux insurgent attitudinising of

by custom and precedent, which are exceedingly slow

the multiculturalists, homogenisation is everywhere the

to change-rather than the myths of collective historical

order of the day. Not a year goes by without at least ten

memory, real or invented, in which, as in all myth, the

small languages dying out. Small cultures are disappearing

stories are fixed and immovable-but that are far, far less

everywhere, subsumed into a few dominant ones articulated

enduring. What Halevy saw-and that he could do so at

in a few world languages-English, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi,

all is in itself a tremendous achievement since the process

Arabic and, still, to some extent, French and Portuguese.

was anything but self-evident at the end of the l 940s-was

For Halevy, the acceleration of history had shattered the

not just that these stable arrangements were coming apart

traditional continuity between our societies' past, present

but that, once they had eroded past a certain point, as they

and future. And if history and collective memory have never

were sure to do, they could never again be reconstituted.

been one and the same, Halevy argued that never before had

The past sixty years have more than borne out Halevy's intuitions. Today, one would probably want to add that this

either the latter or the former come under the kind of stress that history's acceleration was producing.

acceleration has been particularly extreme in the hard

Halevy was writing in the immediate aftermath of

sciences and in the arts. But in every domain except our

World War II, well before the full implications of the

identities as biological beings (and there are nanotechnolo­

decolonisation process that was only just beginning began

gists working on that at this moment), the world of the early

to be understood in Europe. As a result, he was less attentive

part of the twenty-first century has been transformed. For

to global political change than he would have been had he

the first time in human history a majority of people live

written the book a decade later, which is why his argument

in cities instead of in the countryside, when hundreds of

is with Spengler, rather than with Gandhi or Fanon. But his

36

37

DAVID RIEFF

AGAINST REMEMBRANCE

argument has turned out to be particularly relevant to those

history wars and all over western Europe, though there it is

moments when empires fall and new polities rise (or are

usually the Islamic faith rather than race that is at the heart

revived) in their place, or when the demography of a given

of the matter.

society is altered so drastically that the emphasis on a past

In a brilliant short memoir called 'Wbere Statues Go

no longer shared by most people no longer seems to make

to Die', David Cannadine, historian of the British Empire,

sense. Historically, this has been especially relevant to

illustrated the fragility and contingency of even the most

settler societies like the United States and Australia. When

grandiose emblems of bygone empires by narrating how

most Americans were of European origin, an emphasis

during a visit to India he had come face to face with the

in primary school world history classes on the history

inglorious fate of colonial monuments. He told of being

of Europe made human sense (there were other issues,

taken to a large open space on the edge of New Delhi

of course, notably the brute fact of European colonial

where, during colonial times, British viceroys held their

domination that only ended in the 1960s, and the implicit

great 'durbars '-their imperial assemblages and reviews. In

American self-conception of itself as the successor state

2003, what Cannadine found was a 'neglected, overgrown,

to those empires). But in the increasingly de-Europeanised

obscure piece of ground' that conveyed the message that

United States of today, it does not. Moreover, in a world

'earthly power is transient, and that imperial dominion is

in which all but the poorest societies, not just rich

ephemeral'. In the remotest corner of the site, he was led to

countries like the United States, Canada, Australia and the

'a most astonishing scene: a dozen immense statues, rising

countries of the European Union, are being transformed by

up from the bushes and the brambles, like the chessmen

migration, the distinction between settler and non-settler

arrayed for that terrifYing contest towards the end of the first

societies is harder and harder to draw. As a result, conflicts

Harry Potter film'. In fact, the statues portrayed not only a

over curricula of this American type are cropping up both

number of British viceroys, but also George V, Emperor of

in Australia in what Stuart Macintyre has described as the

India. As Cannadine observed, 'the statues I encountered on

38

39

DAVID RIEFF

AGAINST REMEMBRANCE

that hot and dusty Indian afternoon had been placed by the

doubt. There could be no appeal. It was in the nature of

British in New Delhi to be permanent monuments to men

empire, shown over and over again throughout the ages, to

whose lives and deeds they deemed worthy of everlasting

end in failure. As it says in Isaiah 40:24, 'Yea, they shall

commemoration'. But India had moved on, as Indonesia

not be planted; yea, they shall not be sown; yea, their stock

moved on (there is a brilliant Cartier-Bresson photograph of

shall not take root in the earth; and He shall also blow upon

official paintings of colonial officials being removed like so

them, and they shall wither, and the whirlwind shall them

much rubbish from the governor's mansion in Jakarta after

away as stubble'. That through all of this-'action and sufferina power '"

independence in 1949), and as, sooner or later, suddenly or gradually, all our societies will move on as well.

and pride, sin and death', as Lowith put it---God endured

We are back again with Kipling. He did not live to

could be no mitigation for Kipling, since God is mainly

see the end of this empire whose bard he was, nor did he

outside of history, really intervening only at its beginning

experience the high, iconoclastic moment when all those

with the act of love that is the Creation and at its end, the

grand symbols of imperial rule reverted to being not

Apocalypse, 'the oncoming Apocalypse [that is] the never­

very different from what they had been when they were

fading framework of Jesus' preaching', to use Leszek

still being cast at the foundry-bits of fashioned stone

Kolakowski's words. That is the significance of eschatology,

representing something barely intelligible. But then, he

which is why some of the best known of the early Christian

really had no need to. For Kipling, the mortality of empire

martyrs were committed to giving up their property and of

was as certain as our own individual mortality-perhaps

two minds even about having children-that is, the essential

even more so, since, at the end of his life, the poet had

elements necessary for a family future in this world-and

the uneasy consolation of believing in spirits as well as in

instead, as in the stories of Thecla (who vows to remain

Jesus Christ. He might implore God to extend the Raj's

a

lifespan, but about its days being numbered he was in no

the Gospel until her death at ninety-one), and Maximilla

40

41

virgin and flees to the mountains where she preaches

DAVID R!EFF

AGAINST REMEMBRANCE

(whose love of God made her pray to be able to stop having

the sacrifices and the sufferings of those who came before.

sex with her husband, Aegeates), pledged themselves to the

If those who died in battle or for their beliefs are not

world to come.

remembered, how can their sacrifices have any meaning?

For the rest, game, set and match to Shelley:

And for their sacrifices, read all sacrifice. While it is incon­ trovertibly true, at least in the context of evolutionary time,

'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

acknowledging it simply undermines too much that we

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

bore under at our peril. In Dryden's great phrase, that truly

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

would be the 'untuning of the sky'.

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.

'Imagine . . . a world without memories' runs the tag line on the website of the Australian Government-backed 'Australian Memory of the World Register', which is part

Although he, too, despaired, Kipling still chose to write

of a global project on memory organised by UNESCO.

in the conditional: 'Lest we forget'. He was right. Had he

The reality of the effort is actually far less doom-laden

done anything else, no matter how transient he knew it to

than these words might lead you to believe, and it largely

be, Kipling's appeal for remembrance would have been

involves the preservation of historical documents and the

rendered all but meaningless. And it is emphatically not

recording of oral histories. But that does not make the words

meaningless except within the cognitively (and probably

on the home page any less nonsensical. The world doesn't

morally) useless framework of eternity. Human beings are

have memories nor do peoples or nations. Individuals

drawn to ceremony and, whether they are believers or not,

remember-something that, in life, nothing this side of

to piety as well. This is why, without falling fully into a

a brain injury can ever change. Yet in this culture, at this

subspecies of ancestor worship, surely there is something

moment in history, many people do speak of collective

impious or at least ethically impoverished about forgetting

memory as if it were on a par with individual, that is to say,

42

43

DAVID RIEFF

AGAI:-<ST RHlEMBRA:"CE

real memory, if indeed it does not morally outrank it at times.

Margalit is interested in global ethical minima that should

That individuals forget may be the result of the sad fact of

command not just one people's or even one civilisation's

ageing or, conversely, of some happy fact of private life

allegiance but humanity's as a whole. He believes there

(such as love affairs from which one recovers). None of this

are certain 'moral nightmares', as he calls them, the Shoah

is thought to pose a threat to society as a whole. In contrast,

first and foremost among them, that must remain in our

a collective failure of remembrance is often presented as

collective memories because they are 'striking examples of

if it were an invitation to moral or political disaster. The

radical evil and crimes against humanity, such as enslave­

paradigmatic contemporary expression of this is the assertion

ment, deportations of civilian populations, and mass exter­

that shirking our moral obligation to remember the Shoah is

minations'. In effect, Margalit is saying that the need to

to effectively exile oneself from the civilised world.

be alert to radical evil (he borrowed the term from Kant

This is what underpins the views of Avishai Margalit

but imbued it with a somewhat different meaning) imposes

that I discussed earlier. For him, it is not a matter of Jewish

the prudential requirement of constructing a shared moral

particularism, though because the Jews are a religion that

memory for humanity as a whole. To do anything less is to

became a people rather than a people who became a religion

leave humanity and even morality itself vulnerable. In this,

(the formulation is Harold Bloom's), the question of that par­

as in his argument for forgiveness but against forgetting,

ticularism, and, more broadly of a Jewish approach to history

Margalit followed Paul Ricoeur, who wrote that, 'We must

that is in many ways unparalleled must be addressed. Lowith,

remember because remembering is a moral duty. We owe a

for example, thought that, while it was impossible to apply

debt to the victims . . . By remembering and telling, we

a purely Christian interpretation to the historical destiny

prevent forgetfulness from killing the victims twice'.

of Christian peoples, the destiny of the Jews was indeed a

But what if this is wrong, however counter-intuitive

possible subject for Jewish interpretation. Presumably, this

that may seem, and however much one may sympathise

would have to include the Shoah.

with the moral seriousness of Ricoeur's and Margalit's

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45

DAVID RIEFF

AGA!?\ST REMEMBRANCE

projects? What if the memory of an instance of radical

part of the conventional wisdom of the age, even though

evil--even if it is the Shoah itself-does nothing to protect

Santayana wrote as if Freud's insight into human beings'

society from future instances of radical evil? And what if

'unconsciousness chain of repetition' did not need to be

collective national memory of a nation, which Margalit

taken into account. Pitched lower, it has always effortlessly

himself concedes has been defined as a society that nour­

found its way into popular doggerel from the Guy Fawkes

ishes a common delusion about its ancestry, is not just

Day injunction in Britain to 'Remember, remember, the

wildly overrated as a measure of that society's coherence,

fifth of November' to our own day. But pitched high or

not just quixotic (the message at the heart of Kipling's

low, the conviction that memory is a species of morality

'Recessional', no matter how martial the terms in which

is one of the more unassailable pieties of the age. The

it is delivered) but often actively dangerous? And what if,

conventional wisdom is straightforward: to remember is to

instead of being the herald of meaninglessness, it is a decent

be responsible-whether to truth, to history, to the traditions

measure of communal forgetting that is the sine qua non of

of one's own people (though usually what is meant by this

a peaceful and decent society, while it is remembering that is

is its sufferings) or to one's personal itinerary. Anything

the politically and morally risky pursuit?

less, on this account, is at the very least irresponsible­

Of course, almost no-one believes this: the citations

again both to self and community-and, more often than

I have taken from authorities like Ricoeur and Margalit

not, is the emblem of a fall into moral cowardice and civic

illustrate how lopsided the consensus is in the opposite

nihilism, and individually or collectively self-destructive

direction. They take the intellectual high road and their

into the bargain.

account is highly nuanced. But think of the extent to which

This establishment of memory as a species of public

George Santayana's far too celebrated, and, to my mind,

good, and as one of the essential bona fides of the health of a

often demonstrably false injunction that 'those who cannot

society or an individual, actually transcends politics and

remember the past are condemned to repeat it' has become

even an interest in politics. As a result, it is as persuasive

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47

DAVID RIEFF

AGA!l'iST REMEMBRAl'iCE

to those whose understanding is fundamentally social

a virtual monopoly by the state (above those elements of

and historical as it is to those whose understanding is

the state concerned with education and with war), it is

fundamentally private and psychological. Fascists and

now contested ground, with ethnic, religious and sexual

multiculturalists alike pay homage to 'The Duty of

minorities challenging the traditional mainstream account.

Memory'-the name a well-known French activist group

What both sides would almost certainly agree about-no

on the Left assumed (though it used the plural 'duties') when

matter how bitterly what should be remembered and how

it began its efforts to pressure the French state to acknowl­

that remembrance should be marked would be debated-is

edge fully both the historical contribution of non-white

that not to remember at all would make matters far worse

peoples to the country and France's past involvement in the

constituting what Vladimir Jankelevitch called a 'shameful

slave trade. The great French historian Pierre Nora, who

amnesia', and therefore be completely unacceptable.

'

pioneered the role that collective memory plays in history,

What is less clear is why this is so. Assume for the

has remarked that in contemporary France, "'Memory" has

sake of argument that Jankelevitch is correct and that it is

taken on a meaning so broad and all-inclusive that it tends

indeed both morally shameful to forget the horrors of the

to be used purely and simply as a substitute for "history"

past and morally uplifting to remember, or, even better,

and to put the study of history in the service of memory'.

to recuperate it. That still begs the question of what to do

Renan would have loathed what Nora called the 'dem­

with those memories.

ocratisation' of history that he argued was behind this

While the issue is more or less contemporaneous, for

shift. But it vindicates rather than undermines his view:

example bringing the perpetrators of atrocities to justice,

identity and memory are still being viewed as inseparable,

or piercing a barrier of lies about what actually occurred,

with the former being impossible without the latter, and,

whether during the Irish famine, the Armenian genocide

if anything, more urgent. The difference now is that

or the Shoah, most of us would agree that the morality

where, until comparatively recently memory was held as

of the question is usually (though not always) clear-cut.

48

49

DAVID RIEFF

AGAINST REMEMBRANCE

Of course perpetrators of atrocities should indeed be held

that bygones must not be allowed to be bygones. He was

to account, all other things being equal. In fact, there can

absolutely right to do so, as were others, notably the great

be considerable collateral effects to indicting a tyrant while

French writer Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who spoke of France's

he is still in office (something the International Criminal

'memory wars' and of the so-called revisionist historians

Court now has the power to do) or arresting him after he

who, in denying that the Shoah ever took place, had

has relinquished power. Most people rightly regard the

become the 'assassins of memory' . They had no less an

by the Spanish magistrate

authority than Adolf Hitler's own words to back up their

arrest warrant issued in

1998

1939, Hitler said contemptuously

Baltasar Garzon for former Chilean dictator Augusto

arguments. On 22 August

Pinochet as having been a long overdue blow for justice.

that the Germans could and would exterminate the Poles

But things are more complicated than that. Many Chileans,

'mercilessly and without compassion' and that it would not

including a substantial number of those who welcomed

matter, since, 'Who, after all, speaks today of the annihila­

Garzon's action, believe that had the order been issued in

tion of the Armenians?' In this, he echoed Nietzsche's stark

at the time Pinochet left office, it is by no means

reminder that 'Whichever interpretation prevails at a given

1990,

certain he would have relinquished power at all. Would standing up for the truth have been worth it then?

time is a function of power, and not truth' . It was, I think, the facts that the Holocaust took place in

In fairness, Jankelevitch was referring specifically to

secret and that, when the Nazis realised they were going to

the trial of Klaus Barbie, a French official who served

lose the war, they had done everything possible to cover the

the Nazis-that is to say, a major war criminal who had

traces ofwhat they had done, that seemed to establish beyond

lived in hiding in South America for many years but

question or doubt that to remember was in and of itself a

had been delivered to the French authorities. Appalled

moral act. Judging and imprisoning and executing Nazi

by the suggestion that stirring up the past could only be

officials and camp guards, which, in any case, inevitably

destructive, Jankelevitch was saying as sternly as he could

was going to be incomplete, could not be enough in and

50

51

DAVID RIEFF

AGAI;>;ST REMEMBRA;>;CE

of itself. As Elie Wiesel put it, 'Justice without memory is

of laws criminalising the denial of the reality of the Shoah.

incomplete justice, false and unjust. [For to] forget would

A knock-on effect of this has been an expanded interpreta­

be an absolute injustice in the same way that Auschwitz

tion of the original legislation passed in France in 1990---the

was the absolute crime. To forget would be the enemy's

so-called Loi Gayssot

final triumph'. For though justice at its best can establish

in 2005, of any public denial of the reality of the Armenian

fact, assign guilt and at times provide relatives of those

genocide. This was followed two years later by a proposal

who were murdered with some measure of relief, those are

in the European parliament to punish by a term of imprison­

its limits. For Wiesel, in his melodramatic and somewhat

ment an expansive menu of 'denialism'. This includes

incoherent way, as for the nuanced Ricoeur, memory can

(the explanatory notes in brackets are mine): 'genocides'

confer a kind of afterlife to the dead by refusing to let them

(plural), 'war crimes of a racist character [sic] and crimes

be effaced from memory as they have been effaced from

against humanity', 'gross banalization' (that is, saying these

the world before their time. Thus, to remember is to deny

crimes are not especially important or special-as some

the perpetrators their ultimate victory; and the obligation

French lawyers defending Nazi war criminals had done) and

to remember-'always'.

even 'complicity in that banalization', no matter when these

What Nietzsche said about power and truth is usually understood as a cynical comment on the way the powerful

that eventually led to the prohibition,

-

crimes occurred and what political, administrative or judicial authority has determined them to be established as facts.

misrepresent the truth. But unless you believe that everything

Unsurprisingly, the consensus among professional

states do is invariably malign, there is no reason why this

historians has been to oppose such blanket prohibitions.

power cannot be turned to moral ends as well as immoral

Of course, they know better than anyone that states have

ones. In the case of the Shoah, some states, France above

often tried to cover up shameful episodes in their history;

all, have tried to enlist the law in the service of historical

it is the recourse to law that most consider mistaken. As

truth. What this has meant in practice has been the passage

Pierre Nora put it, when the Loi Gayssot was passed:

52

53

DAVID RIEFF

AGAINST REMEMBRANCE

victims and orphans [of the victims] were before

Protestant minority, who, after schooling at an English public

our eyes, and the authors of these abominations

school and an English university had travelled extensively

very much alive. With [the passage of [the] Loi]

in Egypt, the USSR, the Balkans and central Europe in tbe

Taubira [which stated that the slave trade beginning

1930s;

in tbe fifteenth century had been a crime against

group in Vienna helping Jews escape Nazi Austria. In

humanity] we reached back five or six centuries,

he gave a public talk in Dublin about the Balkans, which

and with the Armenians to crimes in which France

was criticised in Ireland for not emphasising the persecution

played no role. What about the Vendee? . . . The

of Catholics by the victorious Tito dictatorship. Butler had

Albigensians, the Cathars, the Crusades?

insisted-unfortunately for him, the Papal Nuncio was in

for a time in

1 938-39,

he worked with a Quaker

1 952,

attendance-that a far greater crime had been the campaign

Loi Gayssot, we

of tbe Nazi-installed Croatian regime of Ante Pavelic to

are creating a system that can only constrain research and

convert the Serbs of Bosnia and Croatia to Catholicism and

paralyse teachers'. I share this view. But, in fairness, it is

to murder those who refused to renounce their faitb, and

anything but clear that it poses an assault on truth on any­

tbe complicity of then Monsignor Stepinac, the Archbishop

thing like the same order as the tendency of governments

of Zagreb, in this genocidal war against the Serbs. Butler

to deny not only their own dirty secrets but also those o f

writes about tbis in an extraordinary essay he called 'The

other states, movements, or institutions with which they

Sub-Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue' .

Nora concluded that 'On the model of the

are in sympathy. When a government is committed to that

In the debate that ensued, Butler-who, as a writer was

course, the consequences for those who do try to bring

very much a localist and who, once he had returned to Ireland

what actually happened to light can be severe.

permanently, spent most of his very long life in the country

The case of the Irish essayist Hubert Butler is illumina­

fastness of his native County Kilkenny-was excoriated

ting in this regard. He was a member of the Republic's

by the Irish clerical and political establishment. A book

54

55

DAVID RIEFF

AGAI?\ST REMEMBRANCE

defending Stepinac was published with a preface by the

was a gross falsification of history. Because of this, Butler

R.

S. Devane, a well-known

was adamant. 'If we agreed', he wrote, 'that history should

Irish Jesuit of the day of whom, early in his career, it was

be falsified in Croatia in the interests of Catholic piety,

said that he 'had been known to confiscate British publica­

how could we protest when our own history was similarly

tions from unwilling newsagents in his native Limerick',

distorted?'

Archbishop of Dublin. Father

insisted that there had been no forcible conversions, while

In the early 1 950s, unlike in our own time, there still was

the Irish Minister ofAgriculture in the de Valera government

a difference between celebrity and notoriety, and Butler paid

advised a group of Irish law students to model themselves

dearly for his effort to set the historical record straight. As an

on figures like Stepinac, Pavelic and Cardinal Mindszenty of

Irishman, he understood better than most what the cost could

Hungary-figures, he said, who had 'so gallantly defended

be of tearing the scabs off historical wounds. Beyond that,

freedom of thought and conscience'. As Butler observed,

Butler was the subtlest of writers, and never confronted the

'Those who knew Yugoslavia were aghast, for Pavelic . . .

question head on. From what he did write, it seems evident

was the Yugoslav counterpart of Rimmler'.

that for Butler any decent politics had to be a politics of truth

From the onset of the controversy, Butler seems to have

in which even inconvenient, unwelcome or, to use a term

understood very well the risks he was running. But he felt he

much favoured by generations of engineers of the human

had no choice, especially because he was an Irish Protestant.

soul whether religious or secular, 'unhelpful' facts needed

The controversy simply fell too close to home. The sores of

to be aired. As he put it, 'If you suppress a fact because it

history, as Butler once called them, were too raw and, in the

is awkward, you will next be asked to contradict it'.

Ireland of the day, people thought in caricatures. But Butler

This is that most old-fashioned of things: a noble

was convinced that for all their mistakes and derelictions,

sentiment. But as Butler himself would certainly have

the demonisation of the Irish Protestant community in the

understood, the question of historical memory is more

de facto clerical state that was Eamon de Valera's Ireland

vexing, and the binary conceptions oftruth versus lie and the

56

57

DAVID RIEFF

concealed versus the revealed only get us so far. To repeat: what do we actually mean when we speak of historical memory? It cannot be what individuals remember. As any police investigator will tell you, the longer the period that elapses between a person being in an accident or being the victim or witness to a crime, the less accurate his or her testimony is likely to be. And the historical memory of an event, by which we usually mean the collective memory of people who did not themselves live through it but have had it passed down to them, whether through family stories or public education and ceremonial commemorations, is not just flawed but impossible. One simply cannot conjugate the verb to remember in the plural unless one is talking about those who lived through what they remember, for we do so as individuals not as collectivities. Thus, it is impossible to speak seriously of a people's collective memory in the same way that we speak of individual memory, just as it is absurd to speak of a people's collective guilt for, say, the Shoah or the Rwandan genocide in the same way that we speak of individual guilt for crimes committed during those horrors.

58

III Forgiveness and Forgetting

K

laus Barbie, Gestapo chief of Lyon between 1942 and 1 944 before working briefly for US counter­ intelligence and then fleeing to Arg entina thanks to the

help of one of Ante Pavelic's henchm an, was unquestion­ ably guilty. Even his sinister, charisma tic defence lawyer, Jacques Verges, never claimed otherwis e, arguing instead that the Nazis' crimes had been no worse than those com­

mitted by European colonists. But by 202 5 at the very latest, and probably much sooner, no-o ne like Barbie will still be alive. At that point, the role of historical memory regard to the Nazi occupation in Fran ce, and more :; uncc>mJ'ortabl.y. as was shown by the trial of Maurice Papon, served both the Vichy and the Gaullist state (he was u]:'rete,ct of Police of Paris between 1 958 and 1 967 and 61

DAVID RIEFF

AGAINST REMHIBRANCE

eventually Budget Minister between 1978 and 1 9 8 1 , during

be made of? Official remembrance almost always skates

Giscard d'Estaing's presidency), the considerable continuity

precariously on the edges of kitsch, and to observe that

between Vichy and both the Fourth and Fifth (postwar)

much remembrance of the Holocaust has not just been

republics will have a very different resonance from the one

employed to serve contemporary political agendas (this is

that rightly seemed so central to Vidal-Naquet and other

what critics usually mean when they speak of a Holocaust

like-minded historians and philosophers during the memory

'industry') but, even when largely innocent of such sub­

wars over the Shoah. Collaboration, like the Holocaust

texts, has been smothered in kitsch as Milan Kundera

itself, will then have become what the German historian,

once defined it: all answers being 'given in advance and

Norbert Frei, not without regret, called 'in scholarly terms,

[precluding] any questions'. There is nothing wrong with

"plain" history'.

enjoining people to be moved. Where it becomes kitsch is

We are not quite there yet, if for no other reason than the best available psychological evidence suggests strongly

when people take the fact that they are moved as a reason to think better of themselves.

that what the trauma survivors suffer from is passed along

It is extremely unfortunate that one of the best examples

for two if not three subsequent generations. Nonetheless,

of this kind of kitsch is the best-known memorial to the

sooner or later a new set of difficulties will arise--ones to

Shoah outside the Yad Vashem Memorial Museum and

which the conventional response that to remember remains

Centre in Israel-the Holocaust Museum in Washington,

a moral obligation does not fully respond. We already have

D.

been confronted by the problem: no Turk who killed an

heartbreakingly far from kitsch as it is possible to get. But

Armenian is alive today, nor is any British official with

these exhibits are bracketed by two extraordinarily kitschy

responsibility for the Bengal famine of 1 943, let alone

pieces of set-dressing. As one enters and before one sees a

the Irish famine of 1 84 7. When the same can be said of

single image or artefact of either Nazi atrocity or Jewish

the Shoah, what then will, what then can its remembrance

martyrdom, one has to pass the serried battle flags of the

62

63

C. To be clear, much of what is in the museum is as

D�WID RIEFF

AGAINST REMEMBRANCE

American army divisions that liberated the concentration

and redemption. Still, it seems to me that a Zionist would

camps (there are no British or Russian standards, even

not want to claim that Israel's moral legitimacy depends on

though a great many of the museum's exhibits concern

the Shoah, as the Holocaust Museum's final exhibit would

Bergen-Belsen, liberated by the British, and Auschwitz,

tend to suggest. If that were the case, then a Jewish state

which of course was liberated by the Soviets). As one leaves

could have been created anywhere. But at the heart of the

the last room of the museum, what one sees are images

Zionist claim (both secular and religious) is that the land

of David Ben-Gurion proclaiming the independence of

oflsrael with Jerusalem as its capital is not just the historic

the state of Israel, and what one passes is a column oftan

but the spiritual home of the Jewish people and that in all

sandstone that is identified as coming from Jerusalem.

their wanderings the Jews never relinquished what the

Presumably, this was meant to be uplifting, that is to say,

Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk once called their mystical

to begin and end on a note that would somewhat palliate

deed to it. Presumably, a Zionist would say that collective

the pure horror of what the museum contains. The impulse

memory is what made the creation of the state of Israel

is understandable but it is both a historical and moral

possible and, given this, would be hard-pressed not to view

solecism. I am not a Zionist, which is not the same thing,

the phenomenon of collective memory with more gratitude

I suppose I must add, given the tenor of times, as saying

than scepticism. Yosef Yerushalmi went to the heart of

the state of Israel is illegitimate (in any case, I do not see

the matter when he wrote that 'Jewish historiography can

what saying such a thing accomplishes: the state exists and

never substitute for Jewish memory' .

will not be dissolved, and the very real crimes that accom­

To say this is, of course, not to imply that Zionism i s only

panied its founding are in no way unique, let alone more

about historical continuity (real or imagined); historically,

atrocious than those that were the handmaiden of most

it is at least as about making a break with the Jewish past.

state formations). And it is true that there is a tradition

does not augur well for what the remembrance of Shoah will

within Jewish thought of linking dialectically destruction

become after it has fully passed into history for a museum

64

65

It

DAVID RIEFF

AGAINST RE:\,1Ei\:1BRA.NCE

meant to commemorate it to begin with an ostentatious

same ways that the Nazis did, cover up what traces remain

display of American nationalism and end with a kitsch

when they realise that they will soon lose power.

theodicy.

There need not be a change of regime. The Barbie trial did not unveil anything about what the Nazis had done

But we are not there yet, and justice for the victims

during the Occupation that was not already widely known (though unfortunately it did reveal how resonant Verge s' defence was among certain sections of the tiers-mond isant

who remain alive and for their traumatised children and grandchildren more than vindicates the determination of a Hubert Butler or a Pierre Vidal-Naquet to make uncovering

Left in France). In contrast, the Papon trial had some thing of the same morally emancipatory effect that the truth and reconciliation process in South Africa and Latin America

the truth their priority, and let the chips fall where they may. One does not have to be a cultural relativist to believe that this cannot be the final word. A meticulous investigation

has had where it has been deployed. In post-Worl d War II France, it had taken the path-breaking books ofan Ame rican historian, Robert Paxton, to bring the mainstream rather

like the one the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission carried out is effective precisely because everyone concerned either committed a crime or was the

than renegade nature of the Vichy regime to the fore (if anything, it had been de Gaulle who had been the reneg ade figure and Petain the man of the traditional establishm ent)

victim of a crime (or the relative of a victim). Although catharsis for the victims is important, both personally and in the furtherance of the post-apartheid or post-junta peace

and, in terms of a wider audience, Marcel Ophii ls' docu­ mentary film The Sorrow and the Pity to break the con­ sensual silence about the extent and the enthu siasm of

settlements, such a commission's priority is the amassing of the facts necessary to establish an unimpeachable histo­ rical record. This is needed in large measure because dictatorships like apartheid South Africa or the Chile of Pinochet take such pains to commit their crimes in secret even while they are at the height of their power, and, in the

66

•

French collaboration with the Nazis (Hara Kazu o's The Emperor s Naked Army .Marches On had a some what . similar effect in Japan). On his entry into Paris in 1 944,

67

DAVID RIEFF

AGAI�ST REMPv1BRA�CE

General de Gaulle had pronounced the Vichy regime 'to

capacity for remembering but rather their capacity for

have been a non-event without consequence'. As head

eventually forgetting. I need to be very clear here: I am

of the provisional government and, later, during the Fifth

emphatically not arguing that this forgetting should take

Republic, he governed through a kind of inspired syllogism.

place in the immediate aftermath of a great crime or even

In effect, he said, 'Most of you did little to oppose Vichy

when its perpetrators are still at large. To the contrary,

and the German occupier. But I did resist and I incarnated

there I'm with Butler, Vidal-Naquet, Paxton and Ophtils.

France. Therefore, France resisted' .

Obviously there are times when relations between states

When Marcel Ophtils' film The Sorrow and the Pity

can be improved and much bitterness removed when a state

was released (it was only aired on French television in

that has committed a crime acknowledges its culpability.

1981, years after it had been made), French schoolchildren

For years, there was a bitter joke about Poland that asked:

were still being taught that the main current in German­

'Who does a Pole kill first, a German or Russian?' To

occupied and in Vichy France had been the Resistance.

which the answer is: 'A German, of course; duty before

At first, the airing of the truth was greeted with consterna­

pleasure'. The fact that the Putin government in Russia

tion, anger and denial at such divisive truths having been

acknowledged finally that the Katyn massacre of Polish

allowed to come to light. The Gaullist party called it

officers had taken place almost certainly means that, merci­

unpatriotic. At the time, many French people agreed.

fully, in another generation that joke�so resonant for so

It is now clear that their fears were misplaced. But this

many generations�will make little or no sense to anyone

does not change the fact that historical memory is rarely

in Poland, Germany or Russia. (An awful sidebar to this

as hospitable to peace and reconciliation as it is to grudge­

is that the plane crash that killed the Polish president and

keeping, duelling martyrologies and enduring enmity.

many senior Polish officials in 20 I 0 was in part due to

This is why a strong case can be made that what ensures

Kaczynski's eagerness to get to the joint memorial being

the health of societies and individuals alike is not their

held at the site of the crime.)

68

69

DAVID RIEFF

AGAINST REMEMBR.A.NCE

No-one who lives in the real world should ever under­ estimate the power of an apology or deny that memory

that is lasting. But again. empirically, this is highly debatable. My own view is that the deepest explanation can

can be its catalyst. In Halbwachs' work, there is at least the intimation that memory is inseparable from the hope

be derived from the fact that the human rights movement is first and foremost a movement grounded in law and that,

for progress. But, like it or not, there must come a time when the need to get to the truth should not be assumed

not just as idealists but as lawyers, they have uncritically

to trump all other considerations. Peace and justice do not fit together as easily as so many leading global human

'outranks' all other moral claims. The Dayton Peace Agreement that ended the Bosnian War is a good illustration

ri"hts activists have convinced themselves they do. Just as

of this. From the human rights perspective, Dayton was an

Kant thought that no right action could ever also have a

unjust peace that, in effect, let the principal architect of the

wrongful element, the human rights establishment simply will not seriously entertain the possibility that their calls

death ofYugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, off scot-free. But

"'

assimilated the Kantian view that the imperative ofjustice

for many of us who had seen the horror ofthe war first-hand,

for justice, an end to impunity and so on could have consequences that would have abidingly negative effects,

any peace, any end, no matter how unfair, to the seeming endless infliction of death, suffering and humiliation was

though they do concede in the short run there may well be negative as well as positive consequences of their justice

preferable to a continuation of the slaughter.

'agenda'. At first glance, this is incomprehensible. After all, human rights activists know better than most people

solecism often invest remembrance with the same moral

how terrible wars are, whatever their cause, and how urgent it is to bring them to an end; part of their rationale for insisting that justice and peace must proceed in tandem is their belief that without justice there can be no peace

70

Those who believe forgetting to be the ultimate moral authority. Yosef Yerushalmi asked whether it was 'possible the antonym of "forgetting" is not Hremembering," but ;ju.stic,e?' Even if he were right, this does little to invalidate empirical claim that, on the ground, peace and justice some occasions, at least, can be inimical to each other.

71

DAVID RIEFF

AGAINST REMEMBRANCE

If this is right even some of the time, then surely those of

a measure of justice was indeed delivered when Judo-e

us who neither accept that the Kantian moral hierarchy

Garzon handed down his indictment. Will a Chilean lookino-

of the 'human rightsists' is self-evidently correct nor that

back on these events a hundred years from now really

the philosophical project-it goes back to Plato--of a

believe that the fact that justice had to wait almost a decade

rational reconstruction of ethical life is possible have the

was really such an intolerable price to pay for democracy?

"'

"'

right to ask whether what is conventionally asserted as

Here, it may be useful to invoke Pierre Nora's distinction

occupying the moral high ground is not in reality the height

between the imperatives of memory and the imperatives of

of political irresponsibility, that, if we are to issue fatwas

history. 'Memory is life', he writes, 'borne by living societies

on the subjects, it is those who insist on remembrance,

founded in its name. It remains in perpetual evolution, open

at almost at any cost, who are the nihilists rather than

to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious

those who believe in the moral defensibility of an ethic of

of its successive deformations . . . insofar as it is affective

forgetting? Again, the least that can be said is that peace

and magical, [it] only accommodates those facts that suit

is always urgent. Without peace, the killing goes on and

it'. In contrast, history for Nora 'is the reconstruction,

on. Those who say that there can be no peace without

always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer'.

justice are simply deluding themselves. History is replete

Their relationship, he argues, is dialectical: 'Memory instills

with examples of precisely that outcome. When General

remembrance within the sacred; history, always prosaic,

Pinochet stepped down in 1990, clearing the way for the

releases it again' .

country's return to democracy, no-one believed that justice

In addition to Nora's evocation of the sacred, one should

had been done. But the need for democracy was simply

add that collective memory also functions as an escape and

more pressing for more people (though not for the families

as an idyll, and, above all, as licence for nostalgia. Indeed,

of the dictatorship's victims) than the need for justice.

to remember the historical past is all but inevitably to sail

While it was anything but inevitable, eight years later

into that dangerous narrow channel in which one has to

72

73

AGAINST REMEMBRANCE

DAVID RIEFF

navigate between the Scylla of nostalgia and the Charybdis

Czeslaw Milosz said that 'It is possible that there is no

of grievance, neither of which is 'historical' in any proper sense of the term. The Cuban-American writer Orlando

other memory but the memory of wounds' . If he is even partly right, then it should be obvious that embedding

Ricardo Menes has written that ' idyllic memories are a

those memories in the context of the sacred-to use Nora's

jeweled noose'. It took at least fifty years for the Cuban­ American diaspora to loosen its hold. That exile has gotten

language-is likely to lead to a veneration, not to say to the idolatry, of one's own individual and collective suffering

a bad press. It bears some blame for this but the deeper reason, I think, for why it has received such little sympathy

and of what one has lost, which is another way of saying

is because of the romantic illusions about the Cuban Revolution from which, to this day, the Left throughout

tive future. After all, how could the ordinariness of the present or the uncertainties about what is still to come

the world cannot quite free itself (think of the continued

possibly compete with memory in which the past is almost

obsession with Che Guevara, whose handsome image­ Jesus meets Jim Morrison-is emblazoned on T-shirts from

bound to appear perfumed and gilded? How can one ever

of one's past, at the expense of one's individual and collec­

be at rest, free to get on with things, if one is carrying

Sydney to Paris, and Johannesburg to San Francisco). But its actions in exile are a textbook example of the way nostalgia

the Sisyphean burden of the wrongs one's people have

(and self-absorption, the other cardinal vice of the exiled

To be sure, this veneration of memory is not presented

and scorned) can serve as a prophylactic against political commonsense. About certain hardline Cuban Miamians it

as something limitless. You are thought, and rightly so, to be

used to be said that 'his watch stopped in 1 959'-the year Fidel Castro came to power. But it is not as if the Irish, the

country 's past (whether to glorifY or to vilifY it) or your own childhood (happy or unhappy). But this is more a matter of

Jews, the Armenians or the Tamils are any less trapped in

proportion than one of category. Serious psychologists may

their own particular versions of the same basic typology.

74

suffered?

a fanatic or an egomaniac if you obsess too much about your

( Allest:ion both the accuracy and helpfulness of the supposed

75

DAVID RIEFF

AGA!O:ST REMEMBRAO:CE

revelations of sexual abuse that have been the stock-in-trade

the memory of wounds. To understand everything may be

of the so-called 'recovered memory' movement, and there

to forgive everything, as the old French adage instructs, but

are not many people who witnessed what havoc the Serb

surely to remember everything would be to forgive nothing

nationalists' morbid obsession with the Battle of Kosovo

and be relieved of nothing. Of course, this can be true in

Polje of 1389 wreaked on the former Yugoslavia in the early

the lives of individuals as well. Imagine, for example, that

1990s who would have this version of memorial thinking

one remembered-vividly, accurately-the physical pain

as anything but destructive to everyone concerned, what­

one has suffered. If that were really possible, how many

ever deep psychological needs it satisfied or political and

women would bear a second child? But it is in collective

social unity it succeeded in producing. The recognition that,

remembering that the difficulty of forgetting Milosz's

like anything else, historical remembrance can be taken too

'wounds' truly becomes daunting. We know the cost, too.

far rarely if ever leads to the suggestion that, on balance, it

Again, think of Ireland until very recently, where, as one

has been more of a destructive force than a healing one. The

Ulster poet put it, the country 'got martyrs when it needed

farthest even the most brilliant analysts of historical memory

men'. Might it not have been better for everyone in the six

are generally prepared to go is in calling for a 'good use' of

counties had those wrongs of past centuries-whether real

memory--{)ne that, in Tzvetan Todorov's phrase, 'serves a

and imagined, accurately or inaccurately described-instead

just cause, [and does not] content itself with reproducing the

disappeared from the collective memories of Irish men

past'. Following Ricoeur, Todorov insists that we must not

women? In short, why is memory, above all historical

fall into the 'trap of a duty of memory' but instead commit

memory, viewed as a blessing when, indisputably, precisely

ourselves to the 'work of memory', much as an individual

from an historical perspective, it has so often been a burden

does in the work of psychoanalysis.

it was not a curse?

But eloquent and serious as these arguments are, they

And yet, across the political spectrum, and not only in

fail to respond to Milosz's intuition about memory being

extreme case (possibly even, in philosophical terms,

76

77

DAVID RIEFF

AGAINST REME:YlBRANCE

the limiting case) of the Shoah, it is generally assumed

Examples like Tache's are more the exception than the

to be beyond dispute that this rallying of nations to their

rule, as the history of Quebec after the so-called Quiet

obligations to their collective memories is on balance a

Revolution of 1 960s amply demonstrates, when the mixture

good, even a necessary thing. There are examples of the

of opportunism and clerical conservatism that had marked

appeal to historical memory in the name not just of pride

the politics of the province during the long premiership of

but of reconciliation: 'Je me souviens' (I remember), the

Maurice Duplessis, which in many ways was as close as

official motto of Quebec, is a good example. It was

North America has come to a Francois! or Salazarist cor­

the coinage of the architect Eugene-Etienne Tache, the

poratism, amply demonstrates. It followed the more usual

son of a former prime minister of United Canada and one

pattern in which the invocation of historical memory serves

of the architects of Canada's Confederation of 1 867, which

to accentuate differences rather than bridge them. In the case

is to say of its birth as a modem nation. Tache had been

of Quebec, the irony is that Quebecois nationalism in the

commissioned to design the province's new parliament

I960s emphasised Quebec's distinctness while breaking with

building, and he appears to have thought up completely on

Quebec's actual past. Where Quebec had traditionally been

his own the adding of Je me souviens to the coat of arms

politically conservative, the new nationalist intellectuals

granted to Quebec by the British Crown in 1 868, in the

identified themselves with the Left; where Quebec had been

Confederation's immediate aftermath. Although some mid­

religious, they were non-believers. In other words, the claim

twentieth-century Quebec nationalists would claim Tache

that Quebec had always been a distinct society, and should

had had a separatist meaning in mind, there is no convincing

be an independent country, coexisted with the repudiation

evidence of this, unlike, say, the watchword notre maitre le

of everything, apart from language itself, obviously, that

passe (our master the past), the frankly separatist rallying

historically had made French Canada unique.

cry coined in 1936 by Father Lionel Groulx, one the founders of modem Quebecois nationalism.

78

Whether differences are accentuated or even invented out of whole cloth, the question ofhistorical accuracy rarely

79

DA\'ID RIEFF

AGAINST REMEMBRANCE

seems nearly as important as the solidarity remembrance

well be highly dangerous politically when nations or peoples

engenders. This is politics as radical subjectivity, belonging

act on their collective traumas (nations, after all, are not

more to the mystical than any actual world of facts. But how

treated; to extend the psychotherapeutic metaphor, they self­

could mere facts compete with something so psychically

medicate). Part of the reason for this, I think, is that while

annealing? It is a psychological truism that remembering

individuals' memories are often distorted (and, in extreme

when done properly and seriously in a therapeutic context

cases, partly invented or even false), they are real in the sense

(Freud's

can heal individuals, and, unfor­

that they derive from actual lived experience. In contrast, his­

tunately, this has led to the psychological pop-culture

torical memory is constructed-it is a political and cultural

commonplace that to be able to remember a traumatic

invention or at least re-creation---once the generation that

experience is the necessary first step in coming to terms

experienced the event being remembered has left us. To use

with it. A shrewder and humanly far more sophisticated

two storied examples, Irish men and women today do not

version of this is to argue, as the American psychiatrist

'remember' the Great Famine of

Janet Baird has done, that both individuals' traumatic

'remember' Jerusalem. Obviously, this does not mean that

memories and the historical memories of groups 'retain the

contemporary Irish people have no right to be angry about

quality of "now", rather than receding into the subjective

what happened during the famine or that Jews do not have

past'. Baird added that, where historical memory is con­

the right to believe Jerusalem to be their spiritual home.

durcharbeiten)

1 847

any more than Jews

cerned, social stress seems to awaken and activate 'the

Self-evidently, beliefs are not memories. Even Tzvetan

historical memory in a way that the actors back then

Todorov, who, even while warning against the dangers

become resurrected in the "now"'.

of sacralisation on the one hand and banalisation on the

The problem here is that while what Baird says is

other, has made the most eloquent case for the moral and

undoubtedly true clinically, what may be constructive for

political value of engaging in historical remembrance, has

a therapist treating a patient's individual trauma may very

conceded that, to be valuable, this hard work must lead to

80

81

DAVID RIEFF

AGAINST REMEMBRA.l'\CE

'a (generalisable] principal of justice, a political ideal, or a

prisoners in the Long Kesh prison in 1981 (he was the IRA's

moral rule (that must be] legitimate in and of themselves and

officer commanding). 'They won't break me', he wrote,

not because they derive from a memory that is dear to us'.

'because the desire for freedom, and the freedom of the

On what basis other than hope itself should we think

Irish people, is in my heart. The day will dawn when all

this is where such remembrance likely will lead? Since

the people of Ireland will have the desire for freedom to

collective memory historically has been extraordinarily

show. It is then that we will see the rising of the moon'.

toxic in many parts of the world, why take the risk, no matter

In Sands' diaries, there are also echoes of The King's

how desirable the emancipatory aim? It is not as if we do

Threshold, Yeats' play about a hunger strike in the mythical

not understand very well what these risks are. The Irish

past. It is also of a piece with the belief of Padraig Pearse,

writer and politician Conor Cruise O'Brien once observed

the schoolmaster who was the chief strategist of the Easter

during a particularly dark period of the conflict in Northern

Rising (there is a good book to be written about the

Ireland that there had been times when, just as it seemed

attraction of romantic nationalism for schoolteachers) that

that Republicans and Unionists might be close to coming to

even if the revolt failed, it would be a 'blood sacrifice'

terms, people on one side or another would remember one

that would stir the Irish people to finally win their

of the great militant songs of martyrdom-'The Rising of

independence. In fairness, Sands is a profoundly contro­

the Moon' or 'The Sash My Father Wore'-and any such

versial figure in Ireland. Seamus Heaney, a great writer in

hope would quickly evaporate. Cruise O'Brien was given

a country where the bar for great writing has always been

to embellishment but in the instance not by all that much.

set higher than in almost any other country, wrote that in

'The rising of the moon' were the last words of the prison

1 98 1 , ' I was highly aware of the propaganda aspect of the

diary kept by the Provisional IRA militant Bobby Sands,

hunger strike and cautious about being enlisted. There was

before he starved himself to death on the sixty-sixth day of

realpolitik at work; but, at the same time, you knew you

the hunger strike he had organised among the Republican

were witnessing something like a sacred drama'.

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AGAINST REMEMBR.A.l'\CE

As Heaney knows better than anyone, sacred drama is

history, and not a particularly long one at that. I want to

the antithesis of any decent politics. In the sacred, there

emphasise again that we are not talking about folklore

is no compromise. But politics without compromise is

here or the enshrined customs of peasant societies, which

invariably totalitarian. Yeats might write in his poem

are often confused with collective memory. Nor are we

'September 1 9 1 3', 'Romantic Ireland's dead and gone; it's

talking about religious memory, whose extra-historical

with O'Leary in the grave' but, in reality, Romantic Ireland

dimension gives it a very different character (though,

survived the Fenian John O'Leary, financial officer of

again, the Jews, those champions of memory-usually to

the Irish Republican Brotherhood and editor of The Irish

their sorrow-may be a special case). Collective memory

People, as it would survive Pearse, and Sands too. It was

is a modern notion; it arises with the nation-state, and is

the deed of another Easter Sunday-the peace agreement

almost invariably political, whether the politics in ques­

in 1 998 that ended the Troubles in Northern Ireland-that

tion are meant to deepen support for the established order

finally put Romantic Ireland in its grave. That Ireland had

(Hobsbawm and Ranger's invented traditions) or an inde­

lived and battled in poetry, whereas, whatever else has

pendence movement (the Ireland of the Rising) to the

gone wrong in Ireland in the twenty-first century, peace

'recovered' memory of the (supposedly suppressed) role

in the north and the loss of credibility of the IRA in the

sexual, religious and ethnic minorities have played in the

Irish Republic have been a demonstration of the wise

powerful Western countries in which immigration has been

observation that a decent government governs in prose (the

so transformative.

words are those of a former governor of New York State,

Would we live in a better world if, instead of believing

Mario Cuomo). To believe the contrary is pathological-a

so strongly in historical remembering as moral imperative,

pathology that is anything but unique to Ireland.

we would instead choose to forget? Politically, it is hard

In any case, the problem goes deeper than that.

to imagine that we would wind up worse off. The contrast

The idea of collective memory has its own particular

is stark. Again, the essence of democratic politics is

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DAVID RIEFF

AGAINST REMEMBRANCE

compromise (the prose bit, you might say}-that most

United States has increasingly become an arena for

effective of prophylactics against fanaticism. As John

competing or, at the very least, synchronous martyrologies.

Kenneth Galbraith admonished, and as anyone with any

This again raises the question of the numerous memorials

direct experience of practical politics knows to be true,

built in the last several decades in the United States to

'Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory'.

various people's national tragedies-most commonly

But poetry, which also happens to be the language of myth

to the Shoah and to the Irish famine. My neighbourhood

in its most heightened form, facilitates long memories,

in lower Manhattan in New York City is exceptional in

sometimes to the point where distant past and recent

that the Irish Hunger Memorial and the Living Memorial

politics seem to fuse, as in the statue of the Irish hero

to the Holocaust are less than a kilometre from each

Cu Cuchulainn that stands by the General Post Office in

other, but monuments and museums commemorating

Dublin as a tribute not to ancient Ireland but to mark the

both catastrophes are familiar sights in many US cities

Easter Rising of 1 9 1 6 of which the General Post Office was

nowadays.

the epicentre. Was this why Samuel Beckett, in Murphy,

In the specific context of the contemporary United

had Neary say that he wanted to 'engage with the arse of

States, what is most remarkable about this is that the most

the statue of Cuchulainn, the ancient Irish hero, patron

mourned events are those for which the country bears no

saint of pure ignorance and crass violence', by banging his

responsibility. This is entirely different from the Australian

head against it?

Government officially apologising for its treatment of

The commonplace condemnation of contemporary

the Stolen Generations (something, which when viewed

life-which is that because of a surfeit of technological

from the other side of the Pacific, that is obviously not

stimulation we have shorter and shorter attention spans­

a subjective historical memory but rather an objective

does not appear to have done anything to shorten our

historical fact), or similar actions by the government of

collective memories of grievance. To the contrary, the

Canada. It is probably a particular American political

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DAVID RIEFF

AGAINST REMEMBRANCE

dynamic that Americans cannot also offer official contrition

catastrophe of a people, never to be experienced again

for the enocide the settlers committed or to African-

by that people, in a place that the ancestors of that people

Americans for the crime that was slavery. But why it is

fled to in the wake of that catastrophe. To the extent that

impossible in the United States of the early twenty-first

it reflects the steadily deepening obsession with roots­

century to at least erect a museum in Washington, which

surely, one of the more melancholy epiphenomena of an

would be as devastating in its portrayal of the Middle

age where in fact global cultural homogenisation means

Passae as the Holocaust Museum has been designed to be

that there are fewer and genuine cultural differences

about the Shoah, is a mystery to me. Even leaving this to

between peoples, at least as compared to a century ago-­

one side, it is difficult to understand what the existence of

then it is probably inescapable. But unless unavoidable has

these monuments is supposed to further. I am well aware

become a synonym for admirable, let the buyer beware.

that this is supposed to be self-evident. In 20 l 0, I am no

In the case of Holocaust memorials, the moral impe ra­ tive is derived from the idea that reminding people of the murder of European Jewry will help them preve nt or

"'

C>

longer convinced that it is. Until fairly recently-probably until the peace agree­ ments that ended the Troubles in Northern Ireland-there would have been an anti-British, Irish nationalist subtext to a memorial to the Great Famine, but this is no longer the case. The justification cannot be preventative, since no-one seriously believes there will be another famine in Ireland; indeed, famine, the incidence of which has

resist the evils of our own time. However well intended there is no real basis for such a claim; instead, it repre sents a reversion, albeit one undertaken, I repeat, since these

'

matters are delicate (as they absolutely should be), out of the best of intentions, to mystical and even to myth ological thinking. There is no historical basis for concludin g any­

great historical curse that humanity may very well be

thing of the sort. I am of course well aware that there is (an admittedly minoritarian) tradition within Jewish thought

conquering. So we an" being invited to remember the

in the aftermath of Auschwitz of viewing the Shoah as

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89

declined dramatically in the past half-century, is the one

DAVID RIEFF

AGAINST REMEMBRANCE

an event outside history. About that, I have no right to an

ment, as if Barack Obama were Neville Chamberlain and

opinion. But assuming that this is wrong, as the majority

Ahmadinejad were Hitler. In this context, where one stands

of contemporary Jewish thinkers have believed, surely the

on the question of a nuclear-anned Iran is irrelevant. The

value of understanding the Shoah as a historical event does

best one can say is that this is a metaphoric statement, not a

not principally reside in the lessons derived from such study

historical one. For an event taking place in

allowing us to better confront the evils of our own time. To

and one occurring in

put the matter starkly, the phrase 'never again' is a noble

comparable. That so few people accept this is not the least

sentiment but it is also a wholly unrealistic one. Unless one

ofthe muddleheadedness of so much contemporary thinking

subscribes to one of the cruder forms ofprogress narratives,

about memory and history.

2010

1 938

in Prague

are incommensurable rather than

whether religious or secular, no increase in the amount of

The fact that we do not remember these events in their

remembering will do any good. To imagine otherwise is to

specificity somehow does not make us any less convinced

leach both the past and the present of their specific gravity.

that we know everything worth knowing about them. In

For Santayana was wrong. The past never repeats itself, at

this we are quite mistaken. Despite what contemporary

least not in the way he meant. Auschwitz does not inoculate

Americans too often seem to imagine, there is no necessary

us against East Pakistan, East Pakistan against Cambodia,

connection to how we feel about the past-the essence of

Cambodia against Rwanda. To believe otherwise is pure

collective memory, constructed or otherwise-and what

sentimental wishful thinking; more to the point it is not just

can be known about it. Locke said reason was a poor light

ahistorical, it is anti-historical. Of course, politicians and

but all we had. The romance that is historical memory is

pundits love to make analogies between the past and our own

at best the candle we light in honour of the dead and, at

time. For example, those who believe the Iranian nuclear

its worst, a kind of cognitive equivalent of an astrophysical

program poses an existential danger to the United States

black hole-a region from which no historical reason and

often compare the failure to confront Tehran as appease-

no political sobriety can escape.

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IV Amor Fati

93

yperthymesia is a rare medical condition that has

H

been defined as 'unusual autobiographical remem­

bering' . The journal

Neurocase

identifies its two main

characteristics as being that a person spends 'an abnormally large amount of time thinking about his or her personal past', and when the person 'has an extraordinary capacity to recall specific events from their personal past'. Hyperthymesia is thought of as being similar to a case documented by the great Russian neurologist Aleksandr R. Luria in his book

The Mind of the Mnemonist,

of a man who could forget

only by an act of will. Luria described this as an inability to engage in what is sometimes called 'ordinary forgetting'. The contemporary elevation of remembrance, that is, of collective historical memory to the status of moral

95

DAVID RIEFF

AGAINST REMEMBR.-\.NCE

European Union, obligation-and in many countries of the

But remembrance is about self-love, and self-recognition,

one as well-too at least in the case of the Shoah, a legal

or it is about nothing.

hyperthymesia writ often appears like nothing so much as

'What is the Ninth Symphony ', Karl Kraus asked,

d by state-builders large. At least remembrance as understoo

'compared to a pop tune played by a hurdy-gurdy and a

of what, from a like Renan intentionally omitted much

memory? ' That is remembrance in a nutsh ell. At best, it is a

remembered. With historical point of view, was there to be

consolation, an ego boost, while at its worst (and it is often

rightly called the the explosion of what Pierre Nora has

at its worst), it is a wallowing, whether in past triumphs or

rd remembrance memory industry, this passion for towa

past injuries. In contrast, history is hard , and the better the

like a cognitive has become so broad as to begin to seem

history, the more demanding and outw ard-looking rather

cs, with

than inward-looking it is. Never mind the Ninth Symphony:

rsed with time. Yet the search for memories ever more dispe

think Berg. Instantly gratifYing (even if the form this grati­

lchildren in virtually all of this occurs at a time when schoo

fication takes is anger or bitterness), the overvaluing of

t contemporary every rich country know less and less abou

memory and the undervaluing of histo ry is a perfect fit with

ry. There is nothing politics and virtually nothing about histo

the spirit of an age that is dominated by instant gratification.

city for retaining wrong with their brains, as their capa

Add the culture ofcomplaint and self-abso rption that is better

uter technology sporting statistics and their mastery of comp

thought of as the society of the spectacle (in Guy Debord's

le often say tq should make clear, but what young peop

sense of 'all that was once directly lived has become mere

to their lives. What pollsters is that the past seems irrelevant

representation') in multicultural drag rather than any even

at all in any prc>per· "i little history they do know is not history

P1Dtei1ti