When I saw this book in
Blackwell’s Oxford shop during a May 2019 visit, I knew I had to buy it even
though I wished I hadn’t seen it. For a number of years, I have been working
off and on around themes of memory and forgetting, beginning in the 1990s with
a critique of moralising theories of individual learning which ignore unlearning (http://www.selectedworks.co.uk/unlearning.html
)
and extending, more recently, into criticism of the emphasis which states place
on collective memory and remembrance - there is a recent example of my writing
here:
I’ve read David Rieff’s
short book twice. It’s excellent, I can’t find anything really to disagree with,
and I have a note of half a dozen books I ought to read as follow-up (it’s a
pity the book has no Bibliography - I had to create one on the inside cover as
I went along).
Rieff is not only very widely read, he has practical experience
as a journalist of conflicts kept alive by so-called collective
memories and he turns this experience to good account. He writes well, though
sometimes in sentences sufficiently long and complex for me to lose track and
have to start again.
Individual memories are
extinguished with the death of their bearer. Before then, they have been subject
to continuous mental processing and re-processing - things are forgotten completely,
details fade, mis-rememberings intrude, sequences are jumbled. These truths
apply both to what psychologists call episodic memories - usually, things which
we can recall visually - and semantic memories, things which are organised into
narratives of events which we believe we experienced first-hand. There is also
a category of procedural memory - remembering how to ride a bike, and so on -
which can be remarkably enduring. See Jonathan K Foster, Memory (2009) for these distinctions.
Collective memories - or
what Rieff calls in his sub-title “historical memory” - are not really memories
at all. In my country, there is a widely shared commitment to keeping alive the
memory of the Wars - the First and the Second - but the “memory” is actually no
more than common knowledge of a very abridged and usually tendentious historical
narrative given emotional life by the ceremonies of remembrance in which it is
embedded and which are very frequently repeated - once a year for Remembrance
Day, and so on, but in reality it's a constant of British political discourse.
David Rieff puts such collective
memories under critical investigation and concludes that from the point of view
of securing peaceful and prosperous futures, they would often be better
forgotten. They are often divisive and they can function to allow avoidance
of the current challenges posed by new historical realities. He gives examples,
discussed in some detail, and his harshest conclusion is that they are formulas
for “unending grievance and vendetta” (page 110). Most of the time, his
discussion is much more subtle and nuanced than those words alone might
suggest, and this is true of his discussion of Holocaust remembrance which is
woven right through the book.
The sublety is most
obvious in those passages where Rieff takes his cue from Josef Yerushalmi’s Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory
(1982) and probes the idea that the antonym of “forgetting” is not “remembering”
but “justice” (page 91) and expands this by introducing the term “peace”. It is
forgetting which often enough enables peace, even without justice, but in
contrast the demand to remember links easily to the demand for justice,
understood in terms of crimes and punishments. Rieff mobilises some significant
examples of historical moments when forgetting has been accepted as a way out from
conflict which yields peace even if it does not deliver justice: he references the
end of white rule in South Africa, Spain at the time of Franco’s death, Chile in 1990 , the 1995 Dayton accords in
Bosnia, and the 1998 Good Friday agreement in Ireland.
I’m writing this on 4
May 2019 when President Trump is in the United Kingdom to boost his re-election chances
by meeting the Queen and going to Portsmouth to remember the 75th anniversary (75th? what kind of anniversary is that) of the D-Day
landings, historical memory in the service of a man who knows no history.
