Against Remembrance

By David Rieff

In Against Remembrance, David Rieff provocatively argues that the business of remembrance, particularly of the great tragedies of the past, are policitised events of highly selective memory. Rather than ending injustices, as we expect it to, collective memory in so many cases dooms us to an endless cycle of vengeance. Humanity, he says, simply cannot cope with the true ambivalence of historical events. And if we remember only partially, how can our memories serve us, or our society, as well as we hope?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Apr 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780522860245

David Rieff

David Rieff is the author of eight previous books, including Swimming in a Sea of Death, At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention; A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis; and Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West. He lives in New York City.

Book preview

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This book is for Rony Brauman.

Contents

Preface

I Footprints in the Sands of Time, and All That

II What Is Collective Memory Actually Good For?

III Forgiveness and Forgetting

IV Amor Fati

Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.

W. B. Yeats

Preface

This is a short book, long in the making. Like any reasonably historically literate person, I had always assumed that I understood the difference between the critical history of historians and the psychological authenticity but dubious historicity of the collective memories of peoples and nations. But I had not thought this worth worrying about until the early 1990s, when I worked as a journalist covering the Bosnian war. That slaughter (calling it a war when the Serbs had the guns and the know-how, and, for most of the period, the UN and the great powers did all they could to prevent the Bosnians from even trying to gain access to the weapons they needed is the rankest misnomer) poisoned forever the idea of remembrance for me. There is no sense in pretending to an objectivity that I do not in fact possess. Caveat Lector.

People, certainly Americans and, I suspect, Australians, of my class and interests, tend to spend far too much time bemoaning the indifferent ignorance that has become the default position of so many of their fellow citizens, above all the young, toward the past. We should be more careful what we wish for. The wars of the Yugoslav Succession were inflamed by remembrance—above all the Serb remembrance of the defeat at Kosovo Polje in 1389. In the hills of Bosnia, I learned to hate but above all to fear collective historical memory. In its appropriation of history, which had been my abiding passion and refuge since childhood, collective memory made history itself seem like nothing so much as an arsenal full of the weapons needed to keep wars going or peace tenuous and cold. What I saw after Bosnia, in Rwanda, in Kosovo, in Israel–Palestine, and in Iraq, gave me no basis for changing my mind. This book is the product of that alarm.

On some matters, notably Judaism and Irish history, I am frankly out of my depth and could not have written on these vexed subjects without the tutoring of Leon Wieseltier and Tom Arnold, and without the benefit of Cormac Ó Gráda’s work on the memory of the Great Famine. They are of course not responsible for the uses to which I have put their learning. I am equally indebted to R. R. Reno for his attempts to explain to me the Catholic understanding of the relation between history and memory (he will judge if I have succeeded, and of course my errors are mine alone). Since the days when I was his student almost forty years ago at Amherst College, I have benefited from the learning and friendship of Norman Birnbaum. If I have gotten Löwith, Halbwachs, Renan and other thinkers on whom I have relied even partly right, that is as much Norman’s doing as mine, even if, all these years later, Tönnies still defeats me. Last but certainly not least, I want to thank Louise Adler, Elisa Berg and their colleagues at Melbourne University Publishing for giving me the opportunity to write this little book, and their forbearance, unpardonably taxed by me, I’m afraid, as it took me about four times as long as I had promised it would to finally deliver a finished text.

I

Footprints in the Sands of Time, and All That

Laurence Binyon’s poem, ‘For the Fallen’, was first published in the London Times on 21 September 1914, six weeks after the Great War had begun. It is sometimes suggested that Binyon, who was a distinguished art historian as well as a poet (he was the British Museum’s Keeper of Oriental Prints and Drawings when the war began), wrote the poem in despair over how many had already died and were being condemned to die. But there is no basis for such a reading. Binyon simply could not have known this, if for no other reason than it was not until the First Battle of Ypres, then still a month in the future, that people at home began to realise how terrible the toll in lives of British and Commonwealth soldiers the war promised to exact. In reality, ‘For the Fallen’ is a classic patriotic poem, far closer in spirit to Horace’s ‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ (‘it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’)—the line actually was graven into the wall of the chapel of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 1913—than to the work of the great British soldier-poets like Wilfred Owen, who would himself appropriate the motto for one of his greatest poems, but only in order to call dulce et decorum est ‘the old lie’.

That such Promethean knowledge was unavailable to Binyon weeks into the war hardly dishonours him. Too old to serve in the trenches, in 1916 he nonetheless would volunteer to serve as a hospital orderly on the Western Front—no mean commitment. And his poem has endured. To this day, ‘For the Fallen’ has remained the quasi-official poem of remembrance, read at ceremonies honouring the memory of the dead of both World War I and World War II throughout Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Its fourth and best-known stanza reads:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

In Australia, ‘For the Fallen’ is now known as ‘The Ode of Remembrance’. At many Anzac Day ceremonies, after the fourth stanza is declaimed, it is customary for those present to respond with the words ‘Lest we forget’, as if to an invocation in church, which, in a sense, of course it is. In doing so, the participants meld the Binyon poem with Rudyard Kipling’s far greater poem, ‘Recessional’, from which ‘Lest we forget’ derives, with every stanza ending with two repetitions of the phrase:

Far-called, our navies melt away:

On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

As was so often the case, Kipling had a far more complicated and pessimistic view of the world than the memory of him either among his critics or his (sadly diminished number of ) admirers would lead one to believe. Though advanced in inverted terms, since the poet is in effect appealing to God for a deferral of what he knows to be the foreordained outcome, ‘Lest we forget’ is a mournful reminder that this forgetting is inevitable—both on our own parts and with regard to us after we are gone. In this, ‘Recessional’ echoes the chilling words of Ecclesiastes 1:11: ‘There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after’. And, more proximately, Kipling’s poem is a gloss—explicitly so, at one point—on Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ and its unflinching meditation on the ephemeral nature of even the most monumental creations and martial accomplishments of human beings.

Deep down, we all know this to be true, however much all of our public engagements are grounded in our acting as