Rethinking memory: too much/too little

Judaism, Spring, 1998 by Gabriel Josipovici

But it is not only today, 50 years after the liberation of the camps, that the injunction not to forget appears particularly forceful. It was there in the hearts and on the lips of all those who suffered precisely because one of the imperatives of the Nazis was to eradicate all memory of what they had done. They failed. But their failure only makes us conscious of the fact that they might have succeeded, that the eradication of memory was their aim, and not just in self-protection but as part and parcel of their determination to eradicate a whole people whose survival has, in the past, always depended on memory. The Nazi crime was a crime against countless individuals, but it was also a crime against a people who had, at the center of their affective being, the injunction zakhor, remember - remember what God did to Israel. The question of memory, then, when dealing with this episode in European history, is not peripheral but absolutely central.

And yet, as soon as we pause to ask ourselves exactly what the injunction not to forget actually means, problems overwhelm us. How many of us have personal memories of those events? In 50 years' time the question will not even make sense any more. But how can we ask people not to forget what they have never experienced? Is not the word forget perhaps the wrong one? As I hope to show, this is not a mere semantic quibble.

We can, I think, deal with the revisionist challenge relatively easily. "These things never happened," says the revisionist, or, "It was not nearly as bad as Jewish apologists try to make out." Such views are not just uttered by obvious thugs or dimwits. They are put forward in books which look no different from the books which say such things did indeed happen and that they were in fact far worse than any of us can ever imagine. How are we to distinguish between the two sets of books? Will our choice not depend simply on our upbringing and prior convictions?

I don't think we should worry about such problems in the abstract. Wittgenstein's answer to the skeptic who calls into doubt the fact that this mountain existed a hundred years ago and who greets all attempts to answer him with a smile and the question, "Yes, but how can you be sure?," Wittgenstein's response seems to me to be perfectly adequate to our needs. His point is that factual information does not come to us in discrete fragments but that we learn to live in the world by learning various practices and by coming to understand how things interrelate. I would have to throw away too much in order to accommodate the skeptic, too many of the things I know to be the case and that allow me to function in my daily life. I can never refute him outright, but everything I know about the world persuades me that it was not created yesterday. Of course each of those items of knowledge is also subject to the skeptical argument, but that does not make that argument more persuasive. Of course I may have to revise my views about how mountains came into being, or I may have to live with the awareness that scientists cannot agree about just how they came into being, just as I may have to revise my views of what went on in the camps in the light of new evidence or talking to someone who seems to have more knowledge of them than I do. But that is what human knowledge is like, and to strive for certainty, or to have such faith in certainty that whatever is uncertain is deemed not to exist at all, is a pathological condition, like having to check all the time to make sure I have exactly five fingers on each hand. Unfortunately it is .a condition to which theorists are often driven when they lose their foothold in reality, in the actual ways we learn and act in the world.

Nevertheless, even when we have put aside the pseudo-problem raised by the revisionist, there remain deep and troubling problems connected with the injunction not to forget. In the first place it puts us in company we would probably prefer not to keep, the company of Milosovic and Karadjic, of Paisley and Adams. For it is striking how often, in the past few years, we have heard that cry from the lips of those we regard as dangerous demagogues, people who seem to be locked up in a world of fantasy and delusion. Coming from Serb and Irish leaders the phrase seems to be a way of denying others even the right to argue with them, a fanning of the flames of self-pity, bigotry, and factionalism. "Remember Kosovo!" "Remember Bloody Sunday!" - what is the difference between these calls to memory and our cry, "Remember the camps!"?

Of course one immediate difference would seem to be that the one is a call to action and the other is not. But that is not quite right either. Many of us with an interest in the Middle East and the fate of Israel amongst its Arab neighbors believe Begin and the Israeli right used the injunction not to forget the Holocaust as a way of justifying aggression and warding off the moral indignation of the world at their treatment of the Palestinians. Is there no difference then between the injunction to remember Kosovo and the injunction to remember the camps? In both cases the implicit "Never again!" is used to reinforce what Jewish historians have called a lachrymose version of national history ("Look how we suffered at their hands!"), and to justify actions which are morally and legally reprehensible.