The case of Etruscan historiography is perhaps an example of a collective memory so inextricably linked to a dominant social class that the identification of this class with the nation resulted in an absence of memory when the nation disappeared: ‘We only know the Etruscans, in a literary context, through the Greeks and Romans: no historical connection, even if one existed, has been handed down to us. It may be that their historical or parahistorical traditions disappeared with the aristocracy, which appears to have been the repository for the moral, legal and religious heritage of their nation. When this ceased to exist as an autonomous nation, it would seem that the Etruscans lost all consciousness of their past, and therefore of themselves’.fn1

  From TONI MORRISON, Beloved (1987)

  ‘What were you praying for, Ma’am?’

  ‘Not for anything. I don’t pray anymore. I just talk.’

  ‘What were you talking about?’

  ‘You won’t understand, baby.’

  ‘Yes, I will.’

  ‘I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.’

  ‘Can other people see it?’ asked Denver.

  ‘Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away. Even if the whole farm – every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there – you who never was there – if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So, Denver, you can’t never go there. Never. Because even though it’s all over – over and done with – it’s going to always be there waiting for you. That’s how come I had to get all my children out. No matter what.’

  Denver picked at her fingernails. ‘If it’s still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies.’

  Sethe looked right in Denver’s face. ‘Nothing ever does,’ she said.

  From DANIEL ARASSE, Anselm Kiefer (2001), translated by Mary Whittall (2001)

  Constructed in Munich in 1935 by Paul Ludwig Troost, the two ‘temples’ [‘Temples of the Nordic Heroes of the Eternal Guard’] were the setting for the ‘most sacred’ of all Nazi rites: the commemoration of the deaths of twenty-three of Hitler’s companions in the failed putsch of 1923, who became the martyrs of the national renewal ten years later and whose coffins were preserved inside the temples, beneath an open sky. As Hitler declared in 1935: ‘These temples are not vaults but an Eternal Guard. They are there for Germany and watch over our people.’ This context allows us to reconstruct Kiefer’s possible strategy in the Unknown Painter series. First of all, it is very likely that the ‘unknown painter’ designates Hitler. Not only did he believe himself a painter – a very important fact in the regime’s propaganda and ideology – but Nazi terminology also contrived to identify him with the ‘unknown soldier’, raised from the dead of the First World War to usher in the new Germany. To loyal Nazis, he was a painter and a soldier in one. At a deeper level, Hitler is the ‘unknown painter’ because Nazi political theory closely compared the Führer to an artist. In 1936, Ernst Schindler, a professor at Munich University, proclaimed: ‘Art is the leader [Führer], guiding and accompanying our life. In the form of myth, it shows us where we come from and where we are going. It is a symbol of ourselves, it provides the image of the goal of our will. With its songs, it goes everywhere with us until the grave.’

  However repugnant we find them, these words deserve close attention. They lend substance to the statements of Gerdy Troost, wife of the architect of the Temples of the Heroes, who described the Führer’s buildings (those directly supervised by Hitler, who sometimes provided the preliminary sketches) as ‘the self-representation of the most original powers of Kultur’. All these texts also shed light on the meaning of the work of memory to which Kiefer unreservedly devoted himself. By changing the image that the Nazis installed in their most sacred commemorative place, replacing the coffins beneath an open sky with the palette of the ‘unknown painter’, he made manifest, and visually committed to memory, the intimate alliance of the cults of death and art under Nazism, which considered itself the product of ‘two thousand years of German Kultur’.

  This theme was a leitmotiv of Kiefer’s work in the early 1980s. One of the most successful works to come of it was the picture Shulamith (1983), which was also the last in the series focusing on Nazi architecture. Following the usual mnemonic principles, the work has two points of reference which share a particularly incongruous relationship. The name Shulamith refers both to the bride in the Song of Songs (‘Shulamite’, ‘black but comely’ in the King James version) and to Paul Celan’s poem Todesfuge, where the Jewess Shulamith with her ashen hair is the counterpart of the Aryan Margarete with her golden hair. In the picture, Shulamith is designated by her name, in the upper left-hand corner, and represented metaphorically by the image of the seven flames shown at the vanishing point, in the centre of the picture, a clear allusion to the seven-branched candlestick of the temple of Jerusalem. At the same time, however, the architectural place sites the allusion mnemonically, by ‘quoting’ the funerary crypt of the Soldier’s Hall built in Berlin in 1939 by Wilhelm Kreis. In this way, Kiefer’s art of memory transforms a space dedicated to the Nazi cult of the dead into a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, while the strictly constructed perspective reveals even more tellingly, as Andreas Huyssen emphasised, ‘fascism’s genocidal telos in its own celebratory memorial spaces’.

  So, by constructing a memory of German history for himself, by appropriating the past in order to turn this history into ‘an immense archive of memory, whose contents are not arranged once and for all, definitively, but are available for continually new combinations’, and by practising a ‘therapy of memory’ to counter the ‘pathology of history’, Kiefer is adopting a Nietzschean attitude with his own unique stamp. Taking a stand against the ‘costly superfluity’ of history as a branch of learning, which hampers life and its ‘plastic power’, Nietzsche invited the young to use history as a remedy against itself, and, in particular, to approach it critically ‘in the service of life’.

  From TZVETAN TODOROV, The Abuses of Memory (1995), translated by Bridget Patterson

  Twentieth century totalitarian regimes have revealed the existence of a danger undreamt of until now: that of the obliteration of memory. It is not that ignorance has not existed since time immemorial, nor even the systematic destruction of documents and statues: we know, to take an example distant from us in time and space, that at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Aztec emperor Itzcoatl had ordered the destruction of all stela [inscribed stones] and all books in order to be able to reinvent tradition in his own way. A century later, the Spanish conquistadors devoted themselves in their turn to erasing and burning all traces of anything testifying to the former greatness of those they had defeated. But as these were not totalitarian regimes, they only attacked official depositories of memory, allowing many other forms to survive, such as oral recitations or poetry. Having understood that the conquest of land and people is filtered through that of information and communication, twentieth-century tyrannies have systematised their annexation of memory and have been determined to control its most secret recesses. Sometimes these attempts have failed, but there is no doubt that in other cases (which by definition cannot be documented), traces of the past have been successfully eliminated.

  There are countless and well-known examples of a less than perfect appropriation of memory. ‘The entire history of the “millennium Reich” can be re-read as a war against memory’, as Primo Levi rightly wrote; but the same could be said of the USSR or Communist China. The traces of what used to exist have either been thoroughly obliterated, or well-disguised and transformed; lies and inventions take the place of reality; it is forbidden to search for and disseminate the truth: any method is acceptable to gain their objective. Bodies in concentration camps have been disinterred, burned and their ashes scattered; photographs, supposedly showing a true picture, have been cleverly manipulated to avoid awkward reminders; History has been rewritten with each change of leader and readers of the encyclopedia ordered to cut out themselves the pages which have become undesirable; it is said that the seagulls in the Solovki islands were shot so that they could not carry messages from prisoners. The necessary concealment of actions nevertheless deemed essential led to paradoxical situations, like the one encapsulated by Himmler’s famous phrase about the ‘final solution’: ‘It is a glorious page in our history which has never been written and never will be.’

  From MILAN KUNDERA, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978), translated by Aaron Asher (1996)

  In [Kafka’s] novel, Prague is a city without memory. The city has even forgotten its name. No one there remembers or recalls anything, and Josef K. even seems not to know anything about his own life previously. No song can be heard there to evoke for us the moment of its birth and link the present to the past.

  The time of Kafka’s novel is the time of a humanity that has lost its continuity with humanity, of a humanity that no longer knows anything and no longer remembers anything and lives in cities without names where the streets are without names or with names different from those they had yesterday, because a name is continuity with the past and people without a past are people without a name.

  Prague, as Max Brod said, is the city of evil. When the Jesuits, after the defeat of the Czech Reformation in 1621, tried to reeducate the people in the true Catholic faith, they swamped Prague with the splendor of Baroque cathedrals. The thousands of petrified saints gazing at you from all sides and threatening you, spying on you, hypnotizing you, are the frenzied occupation army that invaded Bohemia three hundred fifty years ago to tear the people’s faith and language out of its soul …

  Wandering the streets that do not know their names are the ghosts of monuments torn down. Torn down by the Czech Reformation, torn down by the Austrian Counter-Reformation, torn down by the Czechoslovak Republic, torn down by the Communists; even the statues of Stalin have been torn down. In place of those destroyed monuments, statues of Lenin are nowadays springing up in Bohemia by the thousands, springing up like weeds among ruins, like melancholy flowers of forgetting.

  If Franz Kafka is the prophet of a world without memory, Gustav Husak is its builder. After T.G. Masaryk, who was called the Liberator President (every last one of his monuments has been destroyed), after Benes, Gottwald, Zapotocky, Novotny, and Svoboda, he is the seventh president of my country, and he is called the President of Forgetting.

  The Russians put him in power in 1969. Not since 1621 has the Czech people experienced such a devastation of culture and intellectuals. Everyone everywhere thinks that Husak was merely persecuting his political enemies. But the struggle against the political opposition was instead the perfect opportunity for the Russians to undertake, with their lieutenant as intermediary, something much more basic.

  I consider it very significant from this standpoint that Husak drove one hundred forty-five Czech historians from the universities and research institutes. (It’s said that for each historian, as mysteriously as in a fairy tale, a new Lenin monument sprang up somewhere in Bohemia.) One day in 1971, one of those historians, Milan Hübl, wearing his extraordinarily thick-lensed eyeglasses, came to visit me in my studio apartment on Bartolomejska Street. We looked out the window at the towers of Hradcany Castle and were sad.

  ‘You begin to liquidate a people,’ Hübl said, ‘by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture, its history. And then others write other books for it, give another culture to it, invent another history for it. Then the people slowly begins to forget what it is and what it was. The world at large forgets it still faster.’

  ‘And the language?’

  ‘Why bother taking it away? It will become a mere folklore and sooner or later die a natural death.’

  Was that just hyperbole dictated by excessive gloom?

  Or is it true that the people will be unable to survive crossing the desert of organized forgetting?

  None of us knows what is going to happen. One thing, however, is certain. In moments of clear-sightedness, the Czech people can see the image of its own death near at hand. Neither as a fact nor as an inescapable future, but nonetheless as a quite concrete possibility. Its death is right there with it.

  From EVA HOFFMANN, Shtetl (1998)

  Why remember, to what end, and in what way? In the post-Holocaust era, we have taken the obligation to preserve memory as sacred – as indeed, when rightly understood, it is. But if they are merely recited or needed without active understanding, the injunctions never to forget can become formulaic, an invitation to a ritual rather than to a moral act. How we remember, how much effort and pressure of intelligence and imagination we bring to the process, also matters. On the Polish side, the great pitfalls in relation to the wartime past have been amnesia on the one hand, and the wilfully tendentious uses of memory on the other. But this also needs to be admitted: several decades after the Holocaust, there is a danger, for those of us who did not live through it, of a kind of automatism of Jewish memory; of reiterating narratives of tragedy without any longer bothering to think about them; of identifying with martyrdom without having earned the right to it; of remaining fixated on the most awful moment so that we don’t have to look back to the more ambiguous past – or forward to the troublingly uncertain future.

  At this point, the task is not only to remember but to remember strenuously – to explore, decode, and deepen the terrain of memory. Moreover, what is at stake is not only the past but the present. In Poland, the lacunae in collective consciousness, the blank spots, as Poles themselves call them, have had harmful and disturbing consequences. In the last few years, together with a revival of interest in Jewish history and culture, there has been a resurgence of anti-Semitic rhetoric in Poland, which is particularly insidious in that it is rhetoric without a real object. It is as if, with the lifting of Communist repression, the prewar prejudices have reemerged from their Pandora’s box in an unreconstructed – because unprocessed – form. The contents of the Pandora’s box, the demons and ghosts haunting the Polish psyche, need urgently to be confronted and examined.

  In the United States, where Poles and descendants of Polish Jews come into direct contact, visions of the past have a vital impact on the continuing, still highly charged dialogue between the two groups. In a sense, that dialogue is a particularly painful example of multicultural debate on the whole; and possibly, in its very intensity, it offers a model of both the hazards and the possibilities of cross-ethnic conversations in general.

  In its worst-case version, the Polish-Jewish dialogue has taken the form of a moral war and has proceeded in escalating rounds of accusation and counter-accusation, exaggeration and denial. The Polish participants in such exchanges discern in all Jewish statements an attack on their country and its ideals. The Jewish respondents read the entire past as an agon between oppressors and victims. After a while both positions harden, as each side, in response to rising attacks, pulls up the drawbridge to protect its moral fortress.

  Such forms of cross-cultural encounter are unfortunately all too familiar. But the patterns of suspicion and grievance not only prevent us from looking at the actual object of inquiry; they also perpetuate damaging patterns of thinking about multicultural relationships, even if they are relationships between majority and minority groups. The history of Poles and Jews was hardly a tale of pure good intentions on the Polish side, but neither was it a one-sided struggle between brute Polish power and passive Jewish powerlessness. Nor, starting from the other end, was the past a narrative of Polish martyrdom and Jewish selfishness. The various forms of Jewish attachment to Poland and participation in historical events cannot be reduced to disloyalty or a simple lack of patriotism. In any case, such categories as ‘Poles’ and ‘Jews,’ as we have learned from looking at other groups and areas of the world, are too large to be anything but fictitious and dangerously misleading. If cross-cultural discussions of difficult histories are to be at all fruitful, they need to start with acknowledgement of complexity rather than insistence on reductiveness.

  Ideally, in such encounters, both partners would feel enough equality and strength to supplant accusation with self-examination, and to talk fully and openly about their own histories to each other. It is of course necessary in such a conversation for the majority culture to admit its history of dominance or injustice; but the dialogue cannot proceed if the minority group continues to hold the majority moral hostage in perpetuity, or if the history of powerlessness is taken as proof of moral superiority. And it is unproductive, always, to counter prejudice by denying facts, It does not help to respond to a Jewish interlocutor who claims that ‘all Poles are anti-Semitic’ with the equally absurd statement that ‘there was never any anti-Semitism in Poland.’ Conversely, it is unhelpful, because untrue, to meet the Polish thesis that ‘Jews were harmful to the interests of Poland because they wouldn’t assimilate’ with the retort that Jewish separateness was entirely a function of Polish anti-Semitism. It is tempting, and all too commonplace, to resort to such strategies, if only so as not to give our opponent the satisfaction of exposing our weaknesses. But if we are to come to a better understanding of a shared – if embattled – past, it is necessary to abolish the double standard for ‘internal’ and ‘external’ self-presentation, and to admit even shameful intra-tribal problems, so to speak, into the discussion. It is the better part of dignity to be able to take such risks, but it is also the beginning of perceiving one’s own history and one’s present more three-dimensionally. For a Polish participant in a dialogue to admit irrational prejudices; for a Jewish person to acknowledge that an ethos of separateness has its price; this may be the beginning of a more probing self-exploration. In that sense, how we remember is crucial not only for the sake of those who have perished, but for our own sake as well.