Tzvetan Todorov. Mr Todorov, who was born in Bulgaria and has lived in France since 1963, is a director of studies at the French National Scientific Research Institute (CNRS). His books translated into English include Morals of History (University of Minnesota Press, 1995), French Tragedy: Scenes of Civil War, Summer 1944 (Dartmouth College Press, 1996) and Convergences: Inventories of the Present (Harvard University Press, 1993).
Portraits of people who disappeared under the Pinochet regime look out from a wall in Santiago de Chile’s Humachuco Renca neighbourhood.
|
It seems unjust to ask victims to protect those who tormented them yesterday, and yet this is the responsibility they must now shoulder. Bernard
Kouchner, |
|
Remember to forget! Immanuel
Kant, German philosopher |
The collective
memory must be free to come to terms with grief and shape a better future
‘We must
draw a veil over all the horrors of the past,” said Winston Churchill not long after
the end of the Second World War. Around the same time, the American philosopher George
Santayana issued a warning, often repeated since, to the effect that “those who forget
the past are condemned to repeat it.” For those of us who have experienced the painful
history of the 20th century, which of these two injunctions is the most useful? What
should we do–forget or remember?
The two operations are contradictory in appearance only. Remembering is always, by
definition, an interaction between forgetting (erasure) and complete preservation
of the past–something that is virtually impossible. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis
Borges creates a character in his short story Funes el memorioso (Funes the Memorious)
who remembers every detail of his life. It is a terrifying experience.
Memory selects from the past what seems important for the individual or for the community.
It organizes this selection and imprints its values on it. Peoples prefer to remember
the glorious pages of their history rather than shameful episodes, and individuals
often try unsuccessfully to free themselves from the memory of a traumatic event.
How
to live with painful memories
Why do we need to remember?
Because the past is the very core of our individual or collective identity. If we
do not have a sense of our own identity and the confirmation of our existence that
it provides, we feel threatened and paralyzed. The need for an identity is thus quite
legitimate. We have to know who we are and what group we belong to. But people, like
groups, live among other people and other groups. And so it is not enough simply
to say that everyone has the right to exist. We also have to consider how our exercise
of this right affects the existence of others. In the public arena, not all reminders
of the past are worthy ones, and those that encourage revenge are always suspect.
The victims of evil may, in their personal lives, be tempted to try to forget the
experience completely, blotting out painful or humiliating memories. To a woman who
has been raped, for example, or a child who has been the victim of incest, might
it not be better to act as if these traumatic events never happened? We know from
people’s reactions that this is unwise, because such a blanket refusal to remember
is dangerous. Repressed memories remain more alive than ever and give rise to severe
neuroses. It is better to accept a distressing past than to deny or repress it. The
important thing is not to go to the other extreme and endlessly brood over it, but
to gradually distance oneself from it and neutralize it–in a sense to tame it.
This is how mourning functions in our lives. First we refuse to accept the loss we
have experienced and we suffer terribly from the sudden absence of a loved one. Later,
while never ceasing to love them, we give them a special status–they are neither
absent nor present as they were before. A distancing process develops, and eases
the pain.
An act
of faith in the future
Communities are rarely
tempted to try to forget completely evil events that have befallen them. Afro-Americans
today do not seek to forget the trauma of slavery their ancestors suffered. The descendants
of the people who were shot and burned to death in Oradour-sur-Glane1
in 1944, do not want the crime to be forgotten. In fact they want to preserve the
ruins of the village left by the event.
Here too, as in the case of individuals, it might be hoped that the barren alternatives
of totally erasing the past or endlessly poring over it could be avoided. The suffering
should be inscribed in the collective memory, but only so that it can increase our
capacity to face the future. This is what pardons and amnesties are for. They are
justified when crimes have been publicly admitted, not to make sure they are forgotten
but to let bygones be bygones and give the present a new chance. Were Israelis and
Palestinians not right when they met in Brussels in March 1998 and noted that “just
to start talking to each other, we have to leave the past in the past”?
When Churchill called for for a veil to be drawn over past horrors, he was right
in a sense, but his injunction must be qualified by all kinds of conditions. No one
should prevent memory from being regained. Before we turn the page, said future Bulgarian
president Jeliu Jelev after the fall of communism, we should first read it. And forgetting
means very different things to evil-doers and to their victims. For the latter, it
is an act of generosity and faith in the future; for the former it results from cowardice
and refusal to accept responsibility.
Yet is remembering the past enough to prevent it from repeating itself, as Santayana
seems to say? Far from it. In fact, the opposite usually happens. Today’s aggressor
finds justification for his actions in a past in which he was a victim. Serb nationalists
have sought justification by looking very far back–to their military defeat by the
Turks in Kosovo in the 14th century.
The French justified their belligerence in 1914 by referring to the injustice they
had suffered in 1871. Hitler found reasons in the humiliating Treaty of Versailles
at the end of the First World War to convince Germans to embark on the Second. And
after the Second World War, the fact that the French had been victims of Nazi brutality
did not prevent them–in many cases the same people who had joined the army after
fighting in the resistance–from attacking and torturing civilians in Indochina and
Algeria. Those who do not forget the past also run the risk of repeating it by reversing
their role: there is nothing to stop a victim from later becoming an aggressor. The
memory of the genocide which the Jews suffered is vivid in Israel, yet the Palestinians
have in turn been victims of injustice.
A person or a community may need to appropriate the memory of a past hero or–more
surprisingly–a victim as a way of asserting their right to exist. This serves their
interests, but does not make them any more virtuous. It can in fact blind them to
injustices they are responsible for in the present.
The limits of this kind of remembering, which emphasizes the roles of the hero and
the victim, were illustrated during the ceremonies held in 1995 to mark the 50th
anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the United States, people
were only interested in recalling the heroic role of the U.S. in defeating Japanese
militarism. In Japan, attention focused on the victims of the atomic bombs.
But there is a lot to be said for rising above one’s own suffering and that of one’s
relatives and opening up to the suffering of others, and not claiming an exclusive
right to the status of former victim. By the same token, accepting the wrongs we
have done ourselves–even if they were not as serious as the wrongs done to us–can
change us for the better.
The past has no rights of its own. It must serve the present, just as the duty to
remember must serve the cause of justice.
1. A French village where the SS massacred 642 persons as a reprisal for attacks by the Resistance.
