“What’s war like?” I asked my grandfather once, when I was in middle school.
He sat on the sofa in his living room, a rich Persian rug on the floor, dark wood furniture around him—a safe storytelling setting. He had a mellow Transylvanian accent and not a tooth left in his mouth. I don’t remember how he started to tell me about his four years on the battlefields of World War II, but I remember how animated he became when he described how his friend’s head was cut off by shrapnel and how it rolled on the ground with its tongue flicking in and out, collecting dirt. My grandfather mimicked the scene, his tongue flicking in and out of his toothless mouth, and then he stopped and didn’t speak for a long time. He just stared at the red-brown-black rug under his feet.
After that, I never asked him again about that war of his. Faded memories of those long years in the trenches, from the USSR to Czechoslovakia and back to Romania, reached me later in life through my parents, after my grandfather had died. But his firsthand experience of war is lost to me…and maybe that’s a good thing. Or is it?
In praise of forgetting
In his book, In Praise of Forgetting, journalist David Rieff explores one of our most cherished beliefs about historical memory.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
wrote philosopher George Santayana in 1905 in Reason in Common Sense. And common sense says he’s right—that is, until Rieff asks us to give it some thought.
“These matters are delicate, as they should be, and if we take such questions on we have a moral obligation to proceed with great caution.” (p. 83)
What Rieff argues for is letting history be forgotten with each subsequent generation, in a natural progression that prioritizes peace over justice. Right away, I thought of the Holocaust, and of course, Rieff dedicates a few chapters to the subject.
“…we never repeat the past, at least not in the way [Santayana] was suggesting we did. To imagine otherwise is to leach both the past and the present of their specific gravity. Auschwitz did not inoculate us against East Pakistan in 1971, or East Pakistan against Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, or Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge against Hutu Power in Rwanda in 1994.” (pp. 83-84)
I’m a writer who draws from history for my historical fantasy novels, my sci-fi worldbuilding, and my short stories and essays. History has a special place in my heart, as my native Europe is steeped in it. I care deeply about how our past is reflected in our current times. So Rieff’s proposal surprised and intrigued me, and I needed to learn more.
The fallacy of collective memory
Rieff defines collective memory as a society’s “common delusion about its ancestry” (p. 57), a living image of the past, fraught with distortions as firsthand memories fade away, witnesses die, and rumors and anecdotes become historical record.
A journalist who spent 15 years writing about humanitarian emergencies, Rieff combs through recent history for examples of politicians using their nation’s collective memory to spark violence, maintain instability, pose as saviors, climb and cling to power in the name of a holy past that only they can truly represent. He remembers an encounter with a Serb nationalist during the war in Yugoslavia, a man who justified the killing of Bosnians by…the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Those Muslims had to pay through their descendants—500 years later—for taking over Christian Orthodox Constantinople. The rancor between Sunnis and Shias goes back to the seventh century CE. The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians goes back even further. And now we have in the United States a president promising to make America great again, as in…taking us to a fabled past that never was.
“Whatever its purposes, the authority of collective memory depends (…) on our not inquiring too insistently about its factuality and not worrying overmuch about its contingency, but instead allowing ourselves to be swept away by a strong emotion dressed up in the motley historical fact.” (p. 35).
His argument here reminded me of Catherine the Great of Russia. Most people have heard of the “naked queen crushed under the stallion” episode that never happened, but they know little else about an enlightened woman who was the first monarch in 18th-century Europe to declare that people should not be tortured while under investigation and that girls should get the same education as boys.
So, if collective memory is inexact, biased, politicized, mythicized, if history is written by victors and embraced by their descendants (who are also guided by their cognitive biases), what’s there to be done?
“But for many of us, who, whether as aid workers or journalists, had seen the horror of the Balkan wars at firsthand, almost any peace, no matter how unfair, was infinitely preferable to the seemingly endless infliction of death, suffering, and humiliation.” (pp. 89-90)
Rieff makes a powerful argument for prioritizing peace over justice. He’s in favor of negotiating with the bad guys if that could bring about a peace treaty, or the release of prisoners, or a planet-wide initiative that benefits all nations. So it is better to forget the crimes of the past and move forward, yes?
“if a practical possibility exists not only of establishing an honest record of what was done but also of bringing the perpetrators to justice, in principle it should be done.” (p. 65).
“There are certainly also times when relations between states can be improved and much bitterness removed when a state that has committed a crime against another state acknowledges its culpability.” (p. 88).
To forget or not to forget? It depends on whether not forgetting can lead to healing, and whether forgetting can stop the hurting.
“Eventually, there comes a time when the need to get to the truth should no longer be assumed to trump all other considerations.” (p. 89).
David Rieff’s book is unsettling in more than one way. Not only does it destroy one of the quotes that pops up everywhere on political blogs, it even questions history itself. What’s history after all? Things that don’t exist anymore and are impossible to reconstruct? What’s memory? Something that changes with each mind it inhabits? What does justice mean? Reparation for victims or preventing the crime? What does peace? Whose peace? Whose truth?
An outsider to history
In Praise of Forgetting made me feel again like an outsider to history. As much as I study history, I have no direct path to the primary source of historical events. Everything comes to me filtered through time, scribes, and agendas. The only history I can access is my own.
I wish I had asked my grandfather more about his time in the war, but as a middle-school kid back then, I couldn’t comprehend the trauma those veterans had to carry with them for the rest of their lives. I had to become an adult to understand how much I had missed by not having my grandfather tell me his story. I’ve missed my own history.
Oh, but there was this one time when I was in high school and my grandmother (a talented chef running a factory cafeteria in my hometown) told me what she remembered about World War II.
“We knew the Nazis were the bad guys,” she said, “but they gave me chocolate wrapped in silver foil when they rolled through our village on motorcycles and tanks. I was maybe seven years old, and I loved chocolate.”
I remember her smiling at her distant memory of chocolate, and I remember the sweet smell of vanilla pastry baking in the oven in my grandparents’ small kitchen.
She then turned to her rolling pin and dough. “And we knew the Soviets were the good guys, but my parents had to hide me in a cellar together with other girls from our village to keep us from being raped by the Russian soldiers…”
She didn’t smile anymore.
***
I know that’s not much, but I’m grateful for that morsel of history my grandmother gave me decades ago. And now, as I share their story, I see the irony in how I’m plucking my grandparents’ names and pictures from the forgettable past and pinning them and those tiny bits of their lives to our digital everlasting present.
