You can forget this

I am reading two books in parallel – Reiff, In Praise of Forgetting and Rosenberg, A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz.

As if I could choose between remembering and forgetting, when both are inevitable and neither any longer a product of my will.

A case can be made for absolutely anything. The question is always for what purpose. For what purpose should we remember or forget, or share our memories? How, if at all, and to what extent, does memory alleviate or prevent suffering?

Do those in power, who repeat the history of human oppression and brutality in ever more legalistic and distant ways, have memory or amnesia on which to rest their weapons or their reason?

Rosenberg’s book is a searing account of the dehumanising consequences of distilling memory from history.

Reiff discusses the role of remembering, independently of historical evidence, in nationalism and nationhood. He quotes 19th-century historian Ernest Renan: “Forgetting, and I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation.”

I find these both distressing reads. For comfort I turn to Theodore Zeldin’s Intimate History of Humanity, which asserts the right of all people to all history.