Just as the Art of Memory has finally died, we are obsessed as never before by remembrance. The cult of memory?maybe we should say "memorialism"?has been a striking characteristic of the 20th century.
By the Art of Memory, I mean the way in which, form the earliest days of human society, men committed vast realms to memory. Epics such as the Iliad or the Kalevala were passed down through oral tradition; quantities of music were memorised; people could describe in detail (as Lord Holland did when his nephew Charles James Fox was on the Grand Tour) paintings in Italy which they had only seen once.
It may well be that the art of memory has been in decline since the invention of printing. Certainly its demise has been speeded by the mechanical reproduction of images and music, the electronic mass media of radio, cinema and television, and most recently, the computer and the internet, which mean that we shall never have to remember anything again. Even now, musicians who can play from memory seem old fashioned, and ordinary people who can quote much poetry by heart seem like quaint relics.
Instead we have "memorialism." Much of the history of the 20th century has become the object of obsessive commemoration. This should be a form of Vergangensheitbew?ltigung: that notion of coming to terms with the past which so absorbs the Germans, but I am not sure that this is so. We are obsessed with the past, but our coming to terms with it is selective. The meaning of many of the events of the past century has been distorted. It has been said that misunderstanding one?s own past is part of becoming a nation: we could add that misunderstanding our age seems to be part of its experience.
Our obsessive memories are of three things: of war, and especially "the Great War"; of national socialism and its most enormous act, the annihilation of the European Jews; and of communism. All these are invoked, used and misused, remembered rightly and wrongly, in what can sometimes look like the collective equivalent of "recovered memory syndrome"?not to say "false memory syndrome."
To begin with, there is the belief, which unites numerous historians and savants, that we are coming to the end of "mankind?s worst century." The theme of Mark Mazower?s Dark Continent is that 20th-century Europe was not the natural home of liberalism and peace, but a continent to which war, tyranny and mass murder have come naturally. "The most terrible century in western history," sighs Isaiah Berlin. "The most violent century in human history," echoes William Golding. "I see it only as a century of massacres and wars," adds Ren? Dumont.
All this is not merely arguable, but not far from demonstrably false. A man who can call it only a century of killing is historically blind, or maybe blinded by passion. Part of the trouble is that, as Montherlant said (and Philip Larkin used to quote), "Happiness writes white." It is so much easier to remember terrible suffering than mundane contentment.
It is much easier to present the 20th century as an age of slaughter and tyranny rather than an age in which infectious disease was conquered, infant mortality plummeted, life expectancy soared, and which witnessed, in the past 50 years, an economic miracle which Marx and all his contemporaries, whatever their politics, would have thought incredible. For most Europeans and North Americans this has quite obviously been mankind?s best century, an age of peace and security, breathtaking prosperity and material comfort. Many (if sadly not all) other parts of the world have known some share of this prosperity.
But all these write white. There are no monuments to the defeat of typhoid alongside war memorials, no "prosperity museums" next to Holocaust museums. Instead we are haunted by the memories of the defeats which civilisation suffered.
Of course there have been wars and mass murder. And yet even the way in which memory has dealt with those horrors has certain common features. Memory plays tricks and one of the tricks of memory is delayed reaction. Consciousness of an event, or its enormity, may be suppressed until it wells up years later. The most striking case is discussed by Peter Novick in his new book The Holocaust in American Life?the strange way in which memories of that event were subdued for years, and the almost stranger way in which "the Holocaust has come to loom so large in our culture? 50 years after the fact and thousands of miles from its site." He contrasts this with memories of the Great War: "It was in the 1920s and 1930s, not the 1950s and 1960s, that novels, films and collective consciousness were obsessed with the carnage of the Somme."
Actually, this is not quite right. There was, at least in Britain, a similarity between the aftershock of those two tragedies. Before 1914, the British had never fought a war on a continental scale before. Then in four years, many more British soldiers were killed than had died in battle over the previous 1,000 years. After November 1918, Britain was numb, at once overwhelmed by the horror and unable to come to terms with it?almost "in denial."
To be sure, there was a wave of memorialism. The two minutes? silence every year at the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month," the Cenotaph, Lutyens?s other extraordinary, even weird sepulchres. Then there was the vogue for spiritualism?sad but not surprising after a war in which innumerable soldiers had no known graves. And there were war memorials. The Crimea was the first war which had been marked in England by memorials to ordinary soldiers rather than generals, and there had been some memorials after the Boer war. But the war of 1914-18 was different both in degree and in kind. In every town and village, in every school and college, there is a war memorial. These remain deeply touching to the least militaristic spirit, quite apart from their sheer scale: look at the hundreds of names on the memorials at an Oxford college, or the dozens of names?"the lads of the village"?in a country church.
Neal Ascherson has pointed out the difference between different countries? lapidary memorials for that war. In Germany, the tone is aggressive and defiant: bellicose statues and monuments in a style which might be called proto-fascist, sometimes bearing the grim words that "Not one too many died for the Fatherland." In France, the tone is lachrymose and mournful: Marianne grieving for her lost sons. In England the tone is one of obsessive realism, as if every detail of buckle or webbing must never be forgotten. (Look at the gunners? memorial at Hyde Park Corner, or the statue of a western front infantryman on platform one at Paddington station.)
But there was also in the 1920s a mood of forgetfulness, of denial, of bright young people and Brideshead. That in itself didn?t mean that the Great War was forgotten. Memory of it permeated national consciousness and literature?as Christopher Hitchens has observed, Brideshead Revisited is itself partly "about" the memory of the Great War?but only at a remove. The truth of war, and the pity of war (the phrase of Wilfred Owen, a poet unknown in that postwar decade) was a reality mankind could not bear too much.
Then, ten years after the war ended, as if by a kind of literary alarm-clock, within a space of two years, 1928-30, all the books by which the English would subsequently remember the Great War were published: Edmund Blunden?s Undertones of War, RC Sherriff?s play Journey?s End, Richard Alding-ton?s Death of a Hero, Robert Graves?s Goodbye to All That, Siegfried Sassoon?s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Frederic Manning?s Her Privates We. They tell the same story: war is hell, and the war in the trenches had been the most hellish ever, bestial suffering and squalor barely redeemed by heroism and comradeship.
This was the image of the war which the English took with them into the 1930s, and which may have infected them with a mood of pacifism. Certainly that is what people thought at the time?the time of the victorious resolution that "this House will not fight for King and Country" at the Oxford Union, or the East Fulham by-election, both in 1933. Having been sanitised for ten years, the image of the war was presented in horrific light for the next ten years.
something comparable happened with the memory of the Shoah. It might seem difficult to believe, but somehow the event was erased from human consciousness. People were aware that something bad happened to the Jews, but this was part of a broader sense of Nazi wickedness.
From the time he came to power, Hitler had created concentration camps, as he called them in mockery of the British (who during the Boer war had used that name for the camps where they interned or "concentrated" civilians). Anything but secret, those Boer concentration camps were publicised as a deliberate weapon of terror. And although many people died in them, death was not their first purpose.
It was only after two years of war that the Germans created quite different camps, hidden away in the obscurity of the east, to which millions were taken by force to be put to death; something so outside normal comprehension that it was almost literally incredible. As Fritz Stern says: "No one in 1880 could have imagined a Hitler any more than in 1933 people could have imagined an Auschwitz."
Some could scarcely imagine it even after the event. It now seems extraordinary that in September 1945, Attlee could have told Truman he saw no reason to give preference to Jewish "displaced persons," because "there appears to have been very little difference in the amount of torture and treatment they had to undergo." There is a still stranger example in An Intelligent Man?s Guide to the Postwar World, published in 1947 by GDH Cole, an intelligent if humourless historian of the puritanical left. Discussing the political future in Austria, he wrote that the catholic church remained a powerful force, "although Social Democratic Vienna, with its large Jewish population, would not be similarly affected." This clever, tediously well-informed man had simply not grasped that Jewish Vienna, one of the most remarkable communities the modern age had known, had been destroyed without trace.
Popular as well as academic memories of the event were clouded. Even the nomenclature was obscure. The National Socialists had euphemised their mass murder as "the Final Solution of the Jewish Question," or as Nacht und Nebel (a line from one of Wagner?s operas), the night and fog into which the Jews were to disappear. "The Final Solution" was the expression used through the 1950s, when "the Holocaust" was still an esoteric term.
In 1957, the Yad Vashem Bulletin, devoted to the subject but not widely read, referred to "the Holocaust period." But two years later it was still possible for an American publisher to bring out a book called Holocaust, about a fire in a Boston night-club in 1942. This would have been unimaginable ten years later. As with the Great War, there was a delayed reaction?a lull followed by the rise of "Holocaust consciousness."
By the 1960s the name itself had caught on, however much some people disliked it. The noblest witness of the event was Primo Levi, who always insisted: "I never like this expression Holocaust; it seems to me inappropriate, rhetorical, above all mistaken." Taken from the Greek, the word means a sacrifice consumed by fire; many of the millions of victims had indeed been burned; but as the historian JP Stern asked angrily: "Why the monstrous castachresis of ?the Holocaust?? In what conceivable way was this a ?sacrifice or burnt offering?? Where, above all, was the freedom which is entailed in every meaningful notion of sacrifice?"
We are still stuck for a word. The Hebrew "Shoah" might seem preferable, despite Amos Oz?s strictures: "The word ?Shoah? falsifies the true nature of what happened. A Shoah is a natural event beyond human control." If "Shoah" is problematic by seeming to diminish human responsibility, and "Holocaust" by suggesting a sacrifice with purpose, both words had a psychological appeal for those very reasons.
For Ian Buruma, "too much meaning is being heaped on the victims." But as he also saw, these concepts were a necessary evasion of the truth, itself too painful to bear?that they had died for nothing. "There was no higher meaning attached to their deaths. They were killed because they were denied the right to live. And that was all."
From the 1960s, "Holocaust consciousness" grew rapidly. First came the abduction, trial and execution of Adolf Eichmann in 1960-62. This was watched nightly on American television, covered by nearly 1,000 international correspondents, and followed by the violent controversy over Hannah Arendt?s Eichmann in Jerusalem, with its accusation of Jewish collaboration and its dubious notion of "the banality of evil."
However it might have been with Eichmann?s personality, banality was an all too apt word for the reception of the Shoah into popular culture. The past 30 years have witnessed the banalisation, the vulgarisation, the exploitation, the trivialisation and, not least, the Americanisation of the Shoah. The uses of adversity have rarely been so many and varied, not to say the abuses. Sylvia Plath was in on the act early, comparing her father to the Germans and herself driven off "like a Jew/A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen/I begin to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew."
Long before Holocaust museums were built, there was a rapid growth in Holocaust books, and then television and films. The Diary of Anne Frank, which enjoyed a great success in the early 1950s, looks as if it might have been the first example, but this is not quite so: it was presented as an uplifting human story in which the girl?s Jewishness was a minor detail.
By the 1970s Holocaust awareness (or "Holocaust chic," in one sharp phrase, or "Shoah business" in another) really boomed. In 1978, the television series Holocaust had a huge success in the US and also in Germany, despite Elie Wiesel?s protest at this perversion of memory. He should have protested louder at Schindler?s List in 1993: like all of Steven Spielberg?s movies, it was technically brilliant, historically misleading and morally defective. The best that could be said of it was that it didn?t plumb the depths of Life is Beautiful, or the still lower depths of Jakob the Liar.
Seemingly less offensive is the rash of Holocaust museums which have spread across the western world, especially the US. It is a puzzle to explain why they came to be built in the 1980s and 1990s. On the face of it, it is as odd to have a museum of the Shoah in a mid-western town as a museum of American slavery in Berlin. There have been some misgivings about the kind of museums these are. In Buruma?s words, the Washington Holocaust Museum is not so much a museum as a shrine, and "a rather-too-pretty shrine at that," with cattle trucks arranged almost as "installation art" and piles of shoes as tastefully lit as in any Upper East Side or Mayfair art gallery.
Some people dislike the very idea of these museums. The late Chaim Bermant wrote a brilliant column for the Jewish Chronicle for years. He had grown up in, and escaped from, a Latvian shtetl which had vanished without trace; he lived all his life with the memory of that lost world. When the number of those who had perished in the Shoah was once being discussed, he wrote that, although he couldn?t be sure of the total number, "I could speak with certainty of 22 members of my own family who were done to death."
And yet he was not at all a "Holocaust obsessive" (as Martin Amis once described his brother-in-law, apparently with approval). Bermant deplored the fashion for Holocaust museums, which gives "a perverse view of Jewish experience, perpetuates Jewish fears, and has a pernicious effect on Jewish life." He did not live to hear of another Holocaust museum in Manchester, but he would have been just as disdainful. For that matter, he was disdainful of one more curious phenomenon, the pursuit of financial compensation for victims of the Shoah?curious, because this is reaching a crescendo more than 50 years after the event, as if recompense had been sought in the late 1860s for a crime committed before Waterloo. And I am quite sure that he would have rejected the proposal for an annual Holocaust Day recently made by Andrew Dismore, the Labour MP.
along with the Great War and the Shoah, communism is the third memory haunting the century. Once again there has been a time-delay, though with important differences. Any lull or lapse of consciousness had come long before "the end."
Although Nicholas Bethell called the forcible repatriation of prisoners to Russia in 1945 The Last Secret, it was a secret known to many at the time. What was even more of an open secret was the character of communism. Anyone who wanted to know the truth could find it out. But there has notoriously been a great display of denial or plain falsehood. Reading the great anti-communist writers of 50 years ago?George Orwell, Ignazio Silone, Dwight Macdonald?you detect a paranoid tone, until you recall what they were up against in terms of sheer mendacity and falsification. Some of the best minds of the age insisted that Soviet Russia was a democracy, that communist show trials were just, and that there were no labour camps in Russia.
Since the collapse of communism, a torrent of books have exposed the horrors of Soviet and Chinese communism, given all the more authenticity by the opening of archives and files. Those only strengthen the argument made in The Black Book of Communism (reviewed in the French edition by Timothy Garton Ash, Prospect, June 1998) or Fran?ois Furet?s The Passing of an Illusion. Like the Holocaust museums, these have come too late to help the victims.
Such books ask whether the memories of these events have practical lessons. AJP Taylor once complained that history, alone of the arts, was supposed to have a purpose: he listened to Beethoven quartets for aesthetic and intellectual pleasure, but he did not expect the experience to be of any use when, after the recital, he found himself driving the wrong way up a one-way street. Why should history be different?
This is a little skittish, but we have seen how too many memories of the 20th century have been misappropriated?lessons learned, but the wrong lessons. "Never again" became a slogan used by some Jews, notably by the Israelis, whose own appropriation of the Shoah has sometimes been dubious. The sententious words "it must not happen again," intoned over the Shoah by popular historians, do not carry much sense. If "it" meant the extermination of the European Jews, it could not happen again. If "it" means the killing of millions of innocents, then it has happened again several times, if not in the same way.
There has been an increasingly vehement debate about whether the crimes of communism and national socialism are morally equivalent. On one view the question seems frivolous. You might as well ask whether it is "worse" to die of leukemia than of a brain tumour. If one is worse, then it follows logically that the other is better, which is truly absurd.
Related to this is the painful debate about the "uniqueness of the Holocaust." All this illustrates one of the most depressing aspects of memorialism and false memory: the competition of suffering, in which one nation or group after another stakes a claim for its own "Holocaust." Thus the great famine in Ireland is called an act of genocide, as are the Armenian massacres. (With his own war on Poles and Jews in mind, Hitler said, "Who after all today is speaking of the destruction of the Armenians?" Sixty years later, the answer is the Armenians, as anyone knows who visits Jerusalem or Los Angeles.)
All these disputes are ultimately sterile, if not indecent. Robert Conquest, the veteran historian of Soviet Russia, is as conscious as anyone of the enormity of what happened under Stalin, and also of the continuing "asymmetry of indulgence" which to this day treats the crimes of communism more leniently than those of fascism. Conquest has nevertheless said that, if he were obliged to choose, he would say that the Shoah was worse "because I feel it to be so."
The title of Conquest?s latest book is Reflections on a Ravaged Century. As I have said, our century has been wonderfully successful and happy as well as ravaged ?and it has been ravaged only because of what men have done to one another when driven by nationalism, power hunger and ideology. In an objective spirit, we have to say that most of these ideologies call themselves socialist, which must mean something.
So many obsessive memories, so many distorted memories, so many false memories haunt us as this strange century ends. Most of the huge benefits which mankind has enjoyed over the past 100 years have come when people have left one another alone. And, as Conquest says: "The main responsibility for the century?s disasters lies not so much in the problems as in the solutions, not in impersonal forces but in human beings, thinking certain thoughts and as a result performing certain actions." Now that is worth remembering.
