Abstract
Elie Wiesel died in July 2016. The obituary in the New York Times relates that he “had been liberated from Buchenwald as a 16-year-old with the indelible tattoo A-7713 on his arm, [and he had] gradually exhumed the Holocaust from the burial ground of the history books.” Wiesel wrote in his account, Night, Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp, which has turned my life into one long night, […] Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live.
The Times reminds us, “it was this speaking out against forgetfulness and violence that the Nobel committee recognized when it awarded him the peace prize in 1986.”
David Rieff’s In Praise of Forgetting presents a sophisticated reflection on the construction of collective memory and the crucial dilemma on whether it is better, in terms of expediency and sometimes morality, to remember or to forget. The conventional wisdom frequently repeats Santayana’s dictum that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to its repetition. Yet, Rieff demonstrates that remembrance does not necessarily avoid catastrophe. Despite the exhumation of the Holocaust, many other genocides occurred in Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda; the war in Syria continues, despite the promise of “never again.” Collective memory is as likely to pave the road to war through reconstituted narratives of revenge “rather than commit to the hard work of forgiveness” (p. 39). Rieff sensitively engages both the “ethics of memory” and the abuses associated with the “memory of wounds and other safe harbors” (pp. 94–110). Despite the continued injunctions to remember, Rieff counters, “what we know all too well is the damage collective memory can do” (p. 102). Witness the invocation of distant memories in the Kosovo crisis of 1998–1999.
Yet, it is also the case that amnesia can stimulate a more martial spirit. The US collective memory of the Vietnam War certainly inhibited US military intervention after 1975. The Pentagon codified principles institutionally to limit US intervention by invoking memories and “lessons” of the war. President George H W Bush argued in his inaugural address in 1989 that no great nation could be sundered by a memory. The war had to be left behind, forgotten to some extent. Yet, George W Bush, led by those yearning to forget, took the country into the atrocity that became the Iraq War.
Rieff questions whether the past can or does indeed prevent us from repetition or provide “inoculation” against crimes. Do we learn from history or memory? Dredging up the past in certain contexts contributes neither to enhancing justice nor to reconciliation. In a sequence reflecting on Irish history, he recounts the story of Edna Longley’s suggestion that for the next commemoration, a monument to amnesia might be raised, yet it would be best if its location was forgotten. The book raises fundamental questions on our responsibility to the past tempered by the popular and cultural demands to configure it in certain ways. Yet, Rieff is also aware that too much critical history prevents the cohesion of community and nation, necessarily built on “invented traditions,” myths, and national narratives.
In April 1993, Elie Wiesel attended the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, with President Bill Clinton as part of the dedication ceremonies. As awareness of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia grew in US political culture, he said to Clinton, “we must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country” (Gourevitch, 2012). But Clinton stuck to the script and avoided the connection between their location in Washington, the museum, and the atrocities in Bosnia. US interests were limited, and US memories of Vietnam haunted the administration. Rieff reported on the violence that continued for two more years. He tackles these issues with a gravity of experience.
Wiesel returned to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2012, this time with Obama. Again, he spoke first, Philip Gourevitch recounts, wondering whether they had learnt anything. And if so, “… how is it that Assad is still in power?” (Gourevitch, 2012). Obama, unlike Clinton, did not dodge the remark and declared, “preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national-security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States.” Yet, he was also clear the US could not control all events and what they did would have to be effective. Still, Wiesel’s questions to both presidents, delivered in that location, were centered on whether they had learned from the past.
Rieff’s meditation moves us through the processes of memory, identity creation, narratives and nations, the purpose of collective memory and its formation, the relationship between memory and history before moving to questions on forgiveness and forgetting, culminating with a chapter titled “Against Remembrance.” Typically, having proposed such a bold admonition, he confronts a difficult issue first: 11 September 2001. He reflects on the architectural landscape of the site and the work of Peter Walker and Michael Arad’s eight acre memorial Reflecting Absence. Yet, he also questions the inscription, especially the sequence on the need to “strengthen our resolve to preserve freedom,” which not only echoed George W Bush’s post 9/11 speeches but is a theme built in US collective memory which speaks to the nation’s identity. The sequence on freedom had little to do with the process of “remembering the fallen” and “… is anything but an innocent piety” (pp. 127–128). Yet, it could be (depending on historical interpretation) quite unrelated to 9/11, let alone the decades of US policy in the Middle East. Rieff observes that the commemoration is hardly likely to harm the US society into the future, yet in other places, Ireland, Kosovo, and Bosnia, “such deference to collective grief and trauma, not just humanely understandable but honorable as it generally is, can cost nations and societies dearly, at a price that may be exacted for generations” (p. 129). There is a necessary work in mourning, but eventually, Rieff writes, life must go on.
A dichotomy of memory and forgetting seems to work through Rieff’s argument. For instance, he affirms that the Bosnian War “was in large measure a slaughter fueled by collective memory, or, more precisely, by the inability to forget” (p. 143). He is absolutely clear that memory should not be the “moral imperative,” but rather the “moral option” (p. 143). It is sometimes necessary and at others not. Sometimes collective memory can be poisonous.
The dichotomy of memory and forgetting that runs through the book creates its own tensions, as though the “moral option” had to engage one or the other. The construction of memory relies on forgetting. Unlike the best forms of history, collective memory privileges certain narratives, elides others, and forgets yet more. We are well aware of the constructed nature of memory. In her Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag (2003) argued that there is no such thing as collective memory, that all memory is individual: “What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important” (pp. 85–86). It is an instruction, to read a particular event in a certain way, substantiated by cultural archives of images, “representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings” (Sontag 2003: 85–86). The memories associated with Bosnia and Kosovo were advanced for certain malign purposes in the years before and during the 1990s; the memories of Irish history vitiate contemporary politics. The social process of reconstructing the past also simultaneously deforms it: “Collective historical memory, and the forms of remembrance that are its most common expression, are neither factual, nor proportional, nor stable” (p. 36).
Yet, Susanne Buckley-Zistel’s (2012) work on Rwanda also presents another problem: “the Rwandan memoryscape is not simply informed by recollection, it is also shaped by forgetting” (p. 72). The term she uses, “chosen amnesia,” was deemed essential to facilitate ongoing coexistence and mutual dependency, especially in rural areas, yet she recognizes that it also impedes social transformation. There is a sort of imposed silence and it might be generations before the country is able to move beyond an ethnicity-based politics; “many Rwandans with whom I discussed the reconciliation process argued, the lack of change constitutes a time-bomb” (Buckley-Zistel 2012: 85). Genocide survivors “lament the fact that they are being told they have to forgive” (Buckley-Zistel 2012: 83). They find it difficult, but they obey the governmental instruction, they have to live together, but as one recounted, “it does not come from the heart” (Buckley-Zistel 2012: 83).
It is just as credible to think of a community based on a constructed forgetting rather than on remembrance. Rieff contends that neither is less artificial or less imaginable; morality does not necessarily favor one over the other. The Spanish collectively remained silent on the Civil War during the Franco era, and this “silence” remained until recent years. Now, the Mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, building the International Museum of the Spanish Civil War, insists that they must transcend the “pact of forgetting.” In September 2016, the Smithsonian opened its National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall, 100 years after efforts to advance such a project began in 1915. Across the National Mall in Washington, DC, separated by Jefferson Drive, stands the Holocaust Memorial Museum. There is little redemption in that Museum, descending from the top floor through to the ground, whereas early critics of the African American Museum argue that moving from the basement to the floors above configures the story of the experience in a certain progressive trajectory emerging in the light; there is some redemption in forgetting.
Rieff’s In Praise of Forgetting moves through the relationship of identity politics and memory with a sophisticated and sympathetic concision. At each turn, the book exposes you to another dilemma. The acceleration of history and the invention of tradition in Hobsbawm and Ranger’s formulation or the obliteration of memory associated with Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community” is rife. Paul Connerton (2009) has brilliantly linked this process to levels of temporality in his How Modernity Forgets. History gets abridged increasingly, and these abbreviations form neat narratives that fuel collective memories, providing stability, inspiration, and a good deal of forgetting. Acting against this forgetting, various histories of ethnic groups and identities have emerged in recent decades in the United States and other countries, insisting on the slow recognition of the indigenous histories and the politics of the apology that go with that. These are in part attempts to overcome earlier omissions, earlier forgetting. The national narratives centered on popular interpretations of history produce an intellectual and ceremonial history that elides much, forgets much too. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’O insisted that within such domineering contexts of history and culture, it was necessary to decolonize the mind. In an extraordinary segment of Johannes Fabian’s (2007) Memory against Culture, titled “Forgetting Africa,” he recounts the process of appropriation in colonial times and the denial of recognition and memory. So too, Susan Buck-Morss (2009) traces the forgetting of slavery at the heart of Enlightenment thinking in Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. This kind of forgetfulness, Fabian (2007) argues, “impairs reason and knowledge because it prevents recognition” (p. 68).
Rieff has given us a book, a meditation on the dilemmas associated with the construction of memory, morality, forgetting, and the fraught difficulties that run through these processes. He reaches widely and brings together thinkers on the issue to illustrate how complex these dilemmas are. It will be an important book in the historiography on memory and forgetting, frequently bound together in a ghastly embrace. While the arguments “against remembrance” resonate in certain situations and periods, memory too remains imperative in others. Surely at the heart of the debate is the question of intention. When the social agents of collective memory engage in crude identity politics, outside a pluralistic framework, surely Rieff’s argument is compelling. Yet, as Wiesel’s work and provocations also demonstrate, one could write “in praise of remembering,” above all emphasizing the symbiotic dependence of each on the other.