Museum Management and Curatorship (1993), 12, 171-182

Memory and Oblivion

DAVID LOWENTHAL

Museums exemplify the urge to remember. It is their r&on d’k?ye to remind us how
exotics and ancestors lived and what they did. Their custodial role underscores that duty.
But keepers of social memory are now required to transcend their collections. They must
tell the whole truth, warts and all, about whatever they buy, borrow, steal, or display in
models and pictures. Failure to do so invites charges of bias, be it ethnic, Eurocentric, or
just plain chauvinist. Forgetting thus flies in the face of museum morality. Yet without
forgetting, recall would be useless. Memories are salvaged, just as collections are made
and exhibits mounted, by selecting and culling. ‘Every memory is also a forgetting since
it is choosing of what, among a multitude of possibilities, to keep in mind’; so Americans
still remember Watergate partly to forget Vietnam. ’ We cannot remember or display
everything, so we must choose what to leave out-to consign to oblivion. Safer to make
choices than to discard by chance or accident!
Unlike amnesia, oblivion is purposeful and regulated. Some find this shocking. How
can we justify expelling things and thoughts from sight and even from storerooms?
Other cullers too are castigated-iconoclasts who purge our images, bowdlerizers who
purge our books, censors who purge our thoughts. But museums get most blame, for
fumigating flagrantly violates their m&tier.
Oblivion is rife, and everywhere reviled. Never have the waters of Lethe seemed less
potable. Wherever Waldheim went in Austria he was followed by a huge wooden
creature dubbed ‘the Horse of Amnesia’; at his audience with the Pope a banner read,
‘DON’T FORGET TO RESIGN’.2 Small wonder historical amnesia was termed ‘the
growth industry of the 1980s’. As attention-spans dwindle to IO-second sound-bites,
memory also decays. Americans have ‘no revered past, no yesterday’, says an annalist.
‘It’s like a national Alzheimer’s.‘3 Recall is all the rage. We are constantly enjoined to
remember, forbidden to forget. ‘If only one priory, one long barrow, or one master-
restorer thrown overboard by [English Heritage] falls into the sea of oblivion, we are all
diminished.‘4 While warning lest memory also become obsessive, a folklorist fears a tilt
toward oblivion that will paralyse us a1L5
Memory is indispensable, its loss incapacitating. Ignorant of the past, we could find no
future. Nothing done would link with anything learned. Bereft of customs and habits,
tales and traditions, life would lack meaning or purpose. But while recall is essential, we
ought not make memory an absolute deity. We know with Borges’s Furies, the
Memorious that total recall is idiocy, selective forgetting the genie of generalization.6
Were memory rampant, reverie or regret would paralyse the present. Why then all the
alarm over forgetting ? ‘Why’, asks an authority on the eminently forgettable American

0260-4779/93/02 0171-12 0 1993 Butterworth Heinemann Ltd.

 172 Memory and Oblivion

scandal of Watergate, ‘does oblivion seem so likely and so threatening?‘7 Here are half a
dozen quasi-historical reasons.
European upheavals of the late-l 8th and 19th centuries severed generational memories
and truncated traditional modes of recall. The past became a realm of nostalgic fantasy,
memory an obsession of poets and painters, philosophers and psychologists, from
Rousseau and Musset to Ribot and Freud.’ For the first time, knowing oneself meant
knowing what one bad been.
New insights augmented old. One was that repressing recall had pathological effects.
Failure to confront painful or guilt-laden memories led to regression; victims were seen
as condemned to relive the past rather than reshaping it to present ends. Maturity meant
coping with memories we might prefer to forget. The same held for group identity. A
sense of the past became crucial to communal goals. Collective memory sustained races
and religions, neighbourhoods and nation-states. This heritage had to be laudable rather
than accurate; its exemplary force relied on faith not reason. Memorial reverence did not
supplant historical analysis but outweighed it. A third function of memory illumined the
past’s rich yet evanescent diversity. The reach of historical insight into new realms and
the attrition of previous certainties made mankind’s codified memories at once more
precious and more precarious.
Memory was also invoked to stay the dissolution of familiar landscapes. Since the
French Revolution, the pace of change has ever more swiftly outmoded and swept away
familiar tangible scenes, sundering each generation’s recollections from the last.
Intangible memories have likewise succumbed; and the fugitive nature of the media
nullifies the immortality of print.
Indeed, writing itself provokes memory loss. The textual depot or monument
preserves memory but engenders forgetfulness. 9 It is no accident that a defect often
associated with time capsules, the archetypal collective memento of our era, is that those
responsible have forgotten where they were put and can find no record of them.” A
record once set down precludes alternative memories, notes a novelist; recollections
congealed in print prevent other recall:

Don’t hope in a memoir to preserve your memories; . . . it is a certain way to lose

them . . . The work battens on your memories. And it replaces them . . . After you’ve
written, you can no longer remember anything but the writing.

So too with visual souvenirs: the photos you took ‘will both fix and ruin your memory
of your travels, or your childhood . . . You can’t remember anything from this trip except
this wretched collection of snapshots.’ Oral recounting also reduces recall. ‘If you
describe a dream you’ve gained a verbal description but lost the dream.“i Hence US
Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger’s defense in the Iran-Contra scandal: so habitual
were his daily jottings that he at once forgot the shameful events they described.12
Traumas of aging now stress Alzheimer’s as the archetype of amnesia. For sufferers
whose memories have regressed several decades, an Australian hospital seeks 1950s and
1960s furniture ‘to recreate a room in the period in which their minds now live, so they
will be comfortable there’.” Here is a ready-made role for museums.
Even reveries undimmed by senility presage oblivion. ‘You realize that someday, if you
live long enough, your past will exist only in your mind.‘14 Gerontologists count the
ensuing grief: ‘Unable to pass on her inherited stores of memories, the lone elderly
survivor of an ancient lineage bears the heavy burden of being “the Last Leaf”. Her mind
is all that the past still had to rely upon-and she knows it.‘15 During a scene in the film
Back to the Future when the protagonist’s parents-to-be seem unlikely to meet, their
 DAVID LOWENTHAL 173

children are shown fading out of later family photos. So in real life: as others who knew
them die off, ‘the people in your pictures just fade and fade and fade, until only the
background remains’.”
Children fear oblivion no less than the aged. So minute is their portion of the world’s
time-span that some youngsters cannot bear to let anything go. ‘The growing size of the
past already piling up behind me frightened’ the future writer Annie Dillard: ‘it loomed
beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim.’ Only
by ‘remembering everything-everything’ could she ‘fill that blank and darkening
past’.”
Most potent today is the need to confront nightmare pasts hidden by complicit makers
or heirs. Harking back to the Second World War, France still agonizes over collaboration;
Japan recalls little (beyond its own war-time griefs) and that without remorse. For
Germans the Holocaust is the archetype of atrocities denied, painfully contested,
confronted anew in the Historikerstreit. A resurgence of Heimat, combining forgiving
and forgetting, advanced selective amnesia as Vergangenheitsbezdtigzmg, a way of
coming to terms with the past. I8 For this the film Heimat was harshly rebuked: ‘Some
things they remember in full color. Some in sepia. Others they prefer to forget. Not for
Reitz the effort to come to terms with or “master” the past.“’ Coupled with war crimes
are the Stalinist erasures that stunted East European memory. The forbidden past was
never wholly occluded; dormant folk memory is enshrined in the 1948 photo that
expunged Clementis, his ghostly cap on Gottwald’s head.20 Now we see hideous mass
memories every day officially retrieved from oblivion. In sum, private lives and public
histories alike attest our debt to memory. Oblivion now seems not just an affliction but
a culpable evil.
Oblivion’s bad image is ancient, however. As an Old Testament term for extermina-
tion, it suggests that anyone no longer named or remembered ceases to exist.*’ Of
English words for forgetting, oblivion is the most odious. ‘Amnesia’ has a pathological
aura; the amnesiac is ill, his forgetting is an ailment; his loss of memory involuntary,
hence pardonable. Oblivion is unpardonable. It means wilful neglect or outright erasure
of unwanted memories. An oblivious man is not just absent-minded, he is delinquent;
those forgotten by him suffer for it. Amnesiacs are self-isolated, like Garcia Marques’s
afflicted villagers. 22 But what they forget is still remembered by others. People
‘consigned to oblivion’ are cast out of history, recalled by no one. The direction is always
downward, like the road to hell. Thus unpopularity was said to set President Bush
‘sliding’ or ‘diving’ into oblivion.23
Oblivion’s lexical echoes are just as bad. It recalls Oblomov, that listless prototype of
limp passivity. To ‘obliterate’ is to wipe out, expunge, get rid of people or places, things
or thoughts. Like obloquy, oblivion sounds objectionable, obnoxious. What is obligatory
has the odious overtone of a distressing duty. The very prefix ‘ob’ is mournful and
obsequious, obtrusive as an obituary.
Oblivion has been accursed since the 12th century when John of Salisbury damned it
as ‘fraudatrix scientiae, inimica et infida semper memoriae nouerca’-‘that traitor to
learning, that hostile and faithless stepmother to memory’.” Shakespeare denied it all
merit. Second childhood, ‘sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’, was ‘mere
oblivion’. Troilus terms oblivion ‘formless ruin’.25 Thomas Browne decried ‘the iniquity
of oblivion’, Shelley rued its coldness. 26 Only Matthew Arnold invoked ‘Oblivion in lost
angels’ for his ‘Gipsy Child by the Sea-shore’.
With such bad marks, what redeems oblivion? Just our vital need for it. For some the
memory of ignoble origins is a crippling burden. To give their children a self-respecting
174 Memory and Oblivion

identity and some hope in life, Indian Untouchables try to hide from them all knowledge
of the hereditary stain. The hereditary hangman in Swiss cantons inspired tales of origins
concealed so as to spare descendants the dread stigma.*’ We all forget much so as to retain
a residue that is comprehensible, even credible. To salvage useful memory we slough off
the rest. Indeed, for a while even the residue. Only what is forgotten can really be
remembered, as in A la recberche du tempr perdu. ‘As Habit weakens everything, what
best reminds us of a person is precisely what we had forgotten. It is thanks to this
oblivion alone, Proust writes, that he regained the past. To be recognized as such ‘it must
be summoned back after a period of absence. The original experience or image must have
been forgotten, completely forgotten.‘28
Selective oblivion helps us to avoid anachronistic confusion. It may be better to
conceal than to lay bare what hindsight has made reprehensible. A surfeit of scabrous
detail can block one’s grasp of the essence. The social and literary legacy of Virginia
Woolf and Victoria Sackville-West was recently submerged by the infamy of their love-
affair. Sightseers thronged Knole and Sissinghurst to glimpse supposed lesbian locales
shown on TV’s version of Nigel Nicolson’s Portrait ofa Marriage. Guides had to be ‘told
to assure visitors that nothing like that happens on National Trust property’.29 Prissy
sanctimony, yes; yet ridding these scenes of prurient notoriety restored them to the
cultural heritage.
Storytellers and folksingers must bowdlerize past works whose uncut versions would
today grossly offend. One stanza of the classic Oh Susannah runs ‘I jumped aboard de
telegraph/And trabbled down de ribber/De ‘lectric fluid magnified/And killed five
hundred nigger’. Nineteenth-century folk took these lines for granted, but their blatant
racism would so dismay modern audiences that they could attend to nothing else. So this
verse is now left out; the song is never sung in its entirety. Oh Susannah endures only
through selective oblivion.30
The burden of the past also argues for oblivion. The old must make way for the new.
Housekeeping demands clearing the decks, sweeping clean. Mental rubbish-heaps also
need new brooms. New memories mean the attrition of old ones, just as each former
Rome had to succumb to its successor. 31 Old memories survive only culled and reshaped
for present recall. To exorcise the past’s dead weight, 19th-century Americans envisaged
making Indian bonfires of all their possessions. ‘* The British Museum’s glut of relics
provoked Hawthorne to wish ‘the Elgin Marbles and the frieze of the Parthenon all
burnt into lime and the mummies all turned to dust’.33 They were redundant both as
objects and as emblems of history and memory. Americans should periodically pull
down old houses ‘as a hint to the people to.. . reform the institutions which they
symbolize’. Consigned to the metaphorical flames to ‘get rid of the weight of dead men’s
thought’ were heaps of books and pamphlets, reminders of outworn theories.34 The
American ideal was an Adamic being owing nothing to old memories or past
attachments.
Newcomers soon imbibed this notion. To make new lives in new lands, immigrants
must shun nostalgia and forget their pasts. America is suffused with sagas of those who
denied roots, consigning to oblivion the terms and texts of ancestral cultures. The
rejection of memory stemmed less from choice than from circumstance. Inherited
traditions were disowned as obstacles; immigrant Jews in the 1890s were publicly advised
to ‘Forget your past, your customs, and your ideals.‘35 Wiping out the past to start afresh
remains the American way. Each incoming head of state strips the presidential mansion
of all reminders of his precursors lest any residue crimp his style. ‘Everything in the
[previous] White House, including the pictures and the Filipino waiters, [is] considered
 DAVID LOWENTHAL 175

tainted.’ But obliterative overkill results. In removing ‘not only the people who wrote on
the blackboard, but . . . the blackboard’ itself, the new President has to ‘fly blind and
tend[s] to repeat’ past mistakes. A permanent secretariat is now proposed to ‘embody the
institutional memory of previous presidencies’ against this excess of oblivion.36
The regressive peril of amnesia is a famed Freudian insight. We risk forgetting its
broader opposing truth: that a compulsion to remember occludes present concerns. Only
forgetting lets us emplot a livable past into our life history. The ultimate aim of analytic
memory is not to recall the past but to win free of it. 37 A Christian precursor of analysis
is confession, a purifying ritual that forgives past error. Sins are related, guilt for acts and
feelings are owned, to gain oblivion from odium. To recount misdeeds not only absolves
the sinner but shields him from the whole baleful past. The penitent remembers so as to
be allowed to forget; memory confessionally voiced wipes the slate clean.38
Remedial oblivion extends to groups. It became an explicit tool of English statecraft.
To heal Civil War hatreds meant forgetting animus. Two general pardons, expressly
termed ‘Acts of Oblivion’, in 1660 exempted from punishment men who had borne arms
against Charles II and in 1690 those who had opposed William III. A li’th-century writer
termed ‘the oblivion of injuries. . . an Act in every way as noble as revenge’.39 The
political rationale was put by Hobbes: forgetting is the basis of a just state, amnesia the
cornerstone of the social contract. Suppressing recollected wrongs enabled England to
avoid being crippled by inherited resentment. Offenses must be pardoned, evils forgotten
not avenged. Consigned to oblivion should be history’s habitual grievous distinctions.
Men need recall only one crucial difference-the fear and terror of their early forebears
in the contractless state of nature.40
‘icrdsez l’infzme in its widest sense exhorted reformers to expunge all traces of a base
past. The French Revolution decreed oblivion in the name of freedom; a century later
Renan enlarged on Hobbes. True patriots should share both memories and amnesties.
‘Why have other peoples felt required to proclaim their crimes’, asks an historian,
‘whereas we [French] continue to keep ours hidden?’ Renan knew why: ‘Every French
citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the massacres in the 13th
century Midi.’ Consigning such crimes to oblivion ensured undivided loyalty to ‘Za
patrie une et indivisible’. The statecraft of oblivion is intoned to this day. ‘The final lesson
of Vietnam’, said Bush in his inaugural, ‘is that no great nation can long afford to be
sundered by a memory.‘42 Alas, it was a memory the President himself four years later
forgot to forget.
Renan’s dictum still guides French schooling. A 1989 history text extols the unity that
‘allowed our people to give the whole world a model of moderation, of progress, of
civilization. To be sure, unity had a high price; Languedocs, Bretons, Corsicans could no
more forget their sorrows than Protestants or Jews.’ But while these misdeeds should not
be expelled from students’ memories, neither should they constrain their pride in being
French.43 French history seems designed to expunge divisive counter-memories.
Dkpartementalisation not only centralized power but erased prior provincial
attachments.
Oblivion stimulates self-regard in new nations. To retrieve a prideful past they must
retrieve memories of continuity that had been suppressed or allowed to decay; thus the
Latvian folk hero ‘Bearslayer’ restores a collective heritage by awakening consciousness
of the past. 44 At the same time reminders of colonial subordination must be expunged.
Statues of imperial worthies are supplanted by native heroes, and foreign improvements
by home-grown achievements; texts and relics show ancestral resistance not adaptation,
rejection not embrace of conquerers. Self-esteem may in time recoup a cast-off heritage.
176 Memory and Oblivion

As reminders of the hated Ascendancy, Irish Georgian buildings were left to crumble.
But ‘now that we have our own government’, urges the Irish Georgian Society, ‘we
should forget all that and appreciate our 18th-century inheritance.‘45 Bypassing alien
owners and architects, the Irish today evoke their own masons and carpenters. Often the
mere passage of time distances ‘bad’ events and encourages their retrieval from
oblivion.46
Victims and victimizers alike are moved to forget a shameful past. American slave
descendants commonly shun recalling ancestral servitude, stressing advances toward
freedom instead. ‘It is high time we buried atrocious reminders of our shameful past’,
said a 1960s spokesman; ‘for the purpose of Negro history. , . the topic of slavery in the
United States has been virtually exhausted.’ Another agreed: ‘I want free of that history,
that burden,’ And when Civil Rightists scuttled segregation codes, a white anthro-
pologist judged that ‘the American Negro no longer has to seek a past’.47 Yet just a
decade on Alex Haley’s Roots 48 showed how vital to black identity was that past.
Victims need both to forget und to remember. To bear witness to buried atrocities is
a supreme duty, as Holocaust diarists attest. But festering memories become unbearable.
An aged Civil War matriarch who ‘remembered too much’ felt that ‘sometimes a good
memory does you no service’. To protect oneself or one’s children, painful times may be
repressed and forgotten-if they can be.49 One unbearable legacy of the Holocaust is the
humiliation of memories that can never be harmonized with acceptable life, yet cannot be
erased.50
When horrific memories obsess whole nations, recollection becomes ritualized hatred.
Armenian recall of Turkish massacre, Polish brooding over annals of national sacrifice,
Irish iteration of British iniquity are scars that never heal.51 As corrosive as a lack of
history is Israeli fixation on an ancient myth, the suicidal self-sacrifice at Masada two
millennia ago. Commemorating Yom ha-Shoah shores up Holocaust memory against
oblivion: ‘the unity of a shared ceremony creates the sense of a shared past’. But this
makes too literal the command to remember. It forces each Israeli to adopt the nation’s
past as though it were his own, and to act on the basis of this vicarious legacy.52 Yet such
events are not actually remembered; what is recalled is the ensuing grief. Pearl Harbor
endures in American memory as a paradigmatic failure, fatal to supposed innate
superiority. Stunned by the loss not just of ships but self-image, they cannot forget the
Japanese attack because they cannot bear that it could have happened. The 50th
anniversary provoked the plaint that ‘It’s time to remember to forget.‘j3
Oblivion comes hardest to those charged with atrocities. They must face both accusers
and their own guilty memories. The world does not let Germany forget, and Germans
have counted the costs of repression for the complicit and for their children. Moreover,
the Nazi epoch is part and parcel of a larger past. What is ‘right’ in German history, notes
Habermas, is interwoven with what is barbaric. 54 Linder plans attest the widespread
popularity of protecting historic buildings today. But preservers must disown Nazi
precursors who made the cultural landscape a redemptive realm of racist nationalism.
Bent on forgetting that taint, heritage managers today reduce historic sites to mere stages
with stranded objects. 55 Anti-monuments (Gegendenkmul) to Nazi victims stress the
ambivalence of German memory. The public inscribe messages on lead-sheathed obelisks
which are then slowly submerged, leaving no trace but the souvenir graffiti of site
visitors. These memorials are the obverse of 19th-century mnemonic aids: adjuncts to
oblivion.56
Oblivion is most sought for pasts that unite the shame of victim and victimizer, such
as Australians who would forget the convict past. Penal relics are regularly destroyed as
 DAVID LOWENTHAL 177

reminders of infamy: a convict post at Macquarie Harbour blown up; a shipload of

documents linking convicts with living descendants sunk in Sydney Harbour.57 Elite
Tasmanians still expunge archival papers that record their link with convict forebears.
Two generations ago Tasmanians crusaded to erase all memory of Port Arthur,
Australia’s notorious prison camp. It closed in 1876, becoming a resort where
honeymooners gaped at ruins of a ghastly past. But Tasmanians baulked at a 1920s film
publicizing the atrocities. ‘Everything associated with Port Arthur [should] be scrapped
forever’, stormed the Bishop of Tasmania; the local press would ‘sweep away every relic
of those bad old times, whether in stone, in paper, in film’, perpetuating ‘memories better
forgotten, and creating nothing but hatred’.58 The past half century has assuaged convict
shame. The prison ruins are now conserved. Brochures aim to ‘destroy many of the
popular myths about Port Arthur and the convict system’. What Tasmanians would now
forget is aboriginal genocide. Yet the final round-up was not their own but a British
Army deed.
Efforts to shed memory thus vary in motive, form, and intensity. Some seek simply to
obliterate, others to substitute. Some enjoin oblivion for certain periods only, saving the
rest of the past intact. For many in Islam all before Muhammad was wrong, misguided,
heretical; the most awesome pre-Muslim relics inspire only antipathy or indifference.59
That oblivion might prove irreversible seems to some, like Orwell, the ultimate horror.
Many like St Augustine took comfort in the Biblical promise that all would be revealed
at the Last Judgment.60 The l%h-century mathematician Babbage aimed to prove that no
action, no thought, no intention could ever be wholly extinguished. ‘The air itself is one
vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or even
whispered.“’ That some events are forever effaced seems probable. But the resurfacing of
Nazi and Soviet crimes shows how memories outlast the most ruthless concealment.
Holocaust victims ensured the survival of witnesses to genocide. Polish memorial acts
kept the 1940 Katyn massacre from oblivion, confirming ‘the almost mystical belief that
nothing is forgotten, that no despotic system can instill collective amnesia’.62
Many dreadful memories survive .because even the perpetrators never really tried to
efface them. Deeds now judged unspeakable were done by those then convinced of their
worth. The glory of Rome or of God justified the sack of Carthage, the tortures of the
Inquisition. Evidence mounts that far from expunging the Holocaust the Nazis meant to
immortalize it. ‘Jews were not to be annihilated and then forgotten, but annihilated and
then remembered forever.’ In Frankfurt and Prague confiscated Jewish treasures were
collected and catalogued by experts before the latter were gassed, Nazi notables given
special shows on kosher butchering and the Jewish life cycle. Such museums would
‘transform [the Nazis] from the masters of Jewish lives into the masters of Jewish
afterlives. Eternal death was not to be oblivion, but the torture of being eternally
remembered by the German persecutors.‘63 Only hindsight makes such acts so
reprehensible as to need palliative forgetting. An evil may be unspoken or hushed up, but
is rarely-save by lunatic revisionists such as David Irving-utterly denied.64 Oblivion
is usually selective not total, revocable rather than irreversible.
Consider France’s Cathars and Huguenots. Renan’s references to the Midi and St.
Bartholomew massacres needed no explanation because these were not in fact forgotten.
They were now openly recalled because religious toleration made past fanaticism
irrelevant. Why then should Renan stress ‘forgetting’ ? Since recalling these wrongs no
longer endangered the French state, would it not have been healthier to acknowledge
them? The answer is that remembering differs from memorializing. Time had distanced
Renan’s countrymen from corporate complicity. But they still felt close enough to prefer
178 Memory and Oblivion

that these infamies, though not forgotten, remained uncelebrated.65

The distinction may be a matter of genre. Oblivion is approved in some contexts but
not others. History warts-and-all applies only to certain kinds of history. In free societies
historical texts may corrupt but should not conceal known facts. But museums,
monuments, commemorations need not show the entire past, only sanctified (or
scandalous) bits of it. Animal-rights partisans damned a proposed museum of Britain’s
hunting history for glorifying ‘a part of our heritage we ought to eradicate altogether’.
But they meant to blot it out as heritage, not as history. To delete hunting from the
written record would falsify the past and, indeed, hide its iniquities from public
knowledge. But to museum&e hunting implied approving of it. Inclusion in a museum
signals moral endorsement no matter what display labels may say.
Stockholm’s Historical Museum leaves a virtual blank between Sweden’s imperial 16th
and late 18th centuries. A critic chides them for this ‘liquidation of their history. . . How
can such an old nation know what it is doing if it doesn’t know what it has inherited?‘66
But Swedes do know; it is in their history books. What they avoid is public stress on a
now discredited past, a heritage unworthy to be showcased. The same selectivity affects
the Ukraine. The government confesses complicity at Babi Yar; but this is not mentioned
in the museums, which present a Ukraine without ethnic divisions6’ Monuments too are
spared distressing truth. ‘Let’s not perpetuate the memory of such dishonorable events
by erecting monuments to them’, urged an opponent of Washington’s Vietnam War
Memorial.68 And iconoclasts through the ages have torched tangible reminders of
abhorrent creeds; out of sight, out of mind.
To prevent idolatrous infection Reformation Protestants felt it essential to obliterate all
physical and mental trace of icons; true faith depended on total extinction of error. Hence
a 1547 Tudor injunction to make ‘utterly extinct and destroy all shrines . . . so that there
remain no memory of the same’.59 The missionary founder of Berea College so loathed
slavery that he snipped out every Scriptural reference to it; his mutilated Bible, proudly
displayed, is touching faith that evil can be obliterated. Some destroy memories of others
to preserve their own: thus Herostratus burned down the temple of Diana at Ephesus to
ensure that posterity would not forget his name.‘* Others would tear down anything
built in a bad cause, retrospectively proscribing the world’s best-known monuments.
Happily few recall or care that the Pyramids reek of incest and slavery, the Arch of Titus
of empire, Versailles of absolutism, the civic splendours of Victorian Britain of
paternalistic privilege.‘l
If history texts escape oblivion in theory, they get truncated in practice. Profits if not
patriotism sway school-books to expunge the infamous, the awkward, even the
debatable. To avoid possible offense, one American publisher would omit ‘controversial’
past notables like Roosevelt and Nixon, along with any ‘living people who might
possibly become infamous’.72 The dubious future is to be forgotten along with the
discreditable past. This fits Reagan’s view that American history is ‘about why the
Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo
meant’. The rest can be forgotten, as he told the bereaved at Bitburg: ‘I want to put that
history behind me’.73
Forgetting and remembering warp the past in differing ways: ‘The Italians must forget
a defeat. The French must invent a victory. Our task’, remarked an Italian statesman, ‘is
infinitely easier.‘74 Forgetting is presumed to be easier as it requires no thought or
artifice. Yet oblivion promotes invention no less compelling for being unintended. Not
only episodes long-forgotten surge to the Proustian mind, but also imaginary events that
never occurred. An autobiographer invented a tale about her brother saving her from
 DAVID LOWENTHAL 179

childhood bullies; reading it, he said, ‘I’m so glad you put that in, I’d forgotten all about
it. Now I remember it perfectly.‘75
Searing sagas of abuse are often recalled only after decades of repression. Many such
traumas are corroborated, even confessed. But others are imagined memories, some
induced under hypnosis or narcoanalysis. Philadelphia’s False Memory Syndrome
Foundation counsels a thousand devastated parents accused by grown offspring of
childhood sexual abuse. 76 Many such memories have symbolic rather than objective
bases in reality. Intervening oblivion blurs the bounds between these types of truth,
owing to the attrition of witnesses to what the victim now revivifies.
Other injuries of oblivion seem to me more corrigible than those of falsified recall.
While oblivion seldom survives the light, perverted memories may forever occlude past
realities. Today’s approved icons evoke American Indians as metaphors of Nature, the
Past, or Summer Camp. But these stereotypical virtues, like the war-bonnetted
apparitions pasted to football helmets or baseball caps, act as impermeable curtains or
solid walls of white noise that block or distort all vision of the real lives and legacies of
two million living Native Americans. Relegated to a romanticized long-ago, Indians
disappear from public consciousness and conscience.” Their virtual oblivion in
schoolbooks is being rectified. But to uproot ‘memories’ of savages immured in Western
movies and cigar-store effigies is far harder.
The arts best surmount the limitations of both memory and oblivion. ‘Instead of
abolishing and erasing the past, art includes the past as an acknowledged loss, and hence
as a possibility.“* Fiction and film recover episodes that would vanish from the factual
record. In representing both the past’s glories and its disasters, the arts release them from
the confines of veridical memory and transcend history’s need to be reasonable or
natural.79 Reclaiming the past for the present, creative artists ransack and reinvent our
recollections. For this creative process oblivion and memory are alike essential.
Public pressures tempt museums to palliate acts of oblivion as partial and corrigible.
We cannot yet show you everything, they imply, but that is our true aim. We would do
better to praise oblivion. The need to forget pervades all of life. Museums play a prime
role in shaping what is hidden as well as revealed. They alone can tell if what is not
displayed has been veiled, suppressed, or truly forgotten.

Notes
1. Michael Schudson, Watergate and American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct
the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 220.
2. Amos Elon, ‘Report from Vienna’, New Yorker, 13 May 1991, pp. 92-102.
3. Elizabeth Ewen, ‘The memory hole’, Nation, 13 September 1986, pp. 224-226; Studs Terkel quoted
in Frank J. Prial, ‘Algren, Riccardo’s and Mr. Chicago at SO’, International Herald Tribune, 12 May
1992.
4. Neal Ascherson, ‘How our heritage could be turned into a circus’, Independent on Sunday, 1
November 1992, p. 25.
5. Bert Feintuch (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in The Conservation of Culture: Folklorists and the Public Sector
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988), pp. 6, 12, 14.
6. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Funes, The memorious’, in Personal Anthology (London: Cape, 1967), pp.
35-43. The classic statement is Friedrich Nietzsche’s: ‘Without forgetting, it is quite impossible to
live at all’ (On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life [1874], transl. Peter Preuss,
Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980, p. 10). On the pathology of excessive memory, see Paolo Rossi,
‘Creativity and the art of memory’, in William R. Shea and Antonio Spadafora, eds, Creativity in
the Arts and Science (3rd International Locarno Conference, 1988; Canton, Mass: Science History
Publications, 1990), pp. l-13.
7. Schudson, Watergate and American Memory, op. cit., note 1, p. 52.
180 Memory and Oblivion

8. Richard Terdiman, ‘The mnemonics of Musset’s Confession’, Representations, 26, 1989, pp. 26-48;
idem, ‘Deconstructing memory: on representing the past and theorizing culture in France since the
Revolution’, Diacritics, lfi, 1985, pp. 13-36.
9. Huntington Williams, Rogsreau and Romantic Autobiography (London: Oxford University Press,
1983), p. 229 n9.
10. Helen Fraser, The Time Capsule: Repository of the Past or Romantic Notion? (American
Association of State and Locai History, Technical Leaflet 182, Nashville, Tenn., 1992).
11. Annie Dillard, ‘To fashion a text’, in William Zinsser, ed. Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft
of Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), pp. 53-76, quotations on pp. 70-71. Putting one’s
memories in print also pre-empts, discredits, and consigns to oblivion alternative unrecorded
memories of others (Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 19891, pp. 200-208, 230-236).
12. Walter Pincus and George Lardner Jr., ‘Weinberger stance: no criminal intent’, International Herald
Tribune, 20-21 June 1992.
13. Sydney Morning Herald, 9 July 1991, p. 1.
14. Anna Quindlen, ‘Life’s mosaic wears away, but what are the options?’ International Herald
Tribatne, 7 April 1988, p. 3.
15. Robert Kastenbaum, ‘Memories of tomorrow’, in Bernard S. Gorman and Alden D. Wessman, eds,
The Personal Experience of Time (New York: Plenum, 1977), pp. 193-214, ref. on p. 204.
16. Quindlen, ‘Life’s mosaic wears away’, op. cit., note 14.
17. Annie Dillard, An American C~~Zd~ood (London: Picador, 1988), p. 130.
18. Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterubie Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The
German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 19, 229, 234, 242;
Michael Townson, Mother-Tongue and Fatherland: Language and Politics in German History
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), pp. 168-171.
19. Timothy Garton Ash, ‘The life of death’, New York Review of Books, 19 December 1985. See Anton
Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film {Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1989), Ch. 6.
20. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (London: Penguin, 1983), p. 22. See Per
Qhrgaard, ‘Nazism and national identity: a current issue in West Germany’, Cstlture & History, 4,
1989: pp. 65-90.
21. Johs. Pedersen, Israel: Its Life and Culture (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), pp.
256-257.
22. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years ofsolit~de (London: Penguin, 1972).
23. Nick Brogan, ‘Panic surges as Bush dives to oblivion’, Observer, 2 August 1992.
24. John of Salisbury, Prologue to the Policraticus (1159), ed. C.C.J. Webb (Oxford, 19O9), I: 12,11.13-
16.
25. As You Like it, II, vii, 138-139; Troilus and Cressida, IV, v, 165.
26. Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, Ume-Burial (1658), in Works, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London:
Faber and Faber, 1928), I, Ch. 5; Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais, 1. 405; Epipsychidion, 1. 146.
27. Harold R. Isaacs, Zndiai ox-~nto~c~ab~es (New York, 1965); James Fenimore Cooper, The
Headsman; or, The Abbuye des Vignerons (London, 1833).
28. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, 3 vols (London: Penguin, 1983), 1:692, 3:903; Roger
Shattuck, Prottsti Binoculars: A Sttidy of Memory, Time, and Recognition in ‘A la rechercbe du
temps perdu’ (London: Chatto and Windus, 1964) p. 63.
29. ‘Times Diary’, The Times, 10 October 1990, p. 8.
30. Ian Bell, ‘Skeletons in the closet: choosing a past for our sensitive present’, paper at ALHFAM
(Association of Living Historical Farms and Agricultural Museums) annual meeting, Providence,
RI., June 1990.
31. Freud held the contrary view that memories were imperishable; hence his famous image: were
artifacts like memories, Rome would be a city ‘in which nothing once constructed had perished, and
all the earher stages of development had survived alongside the latest’ (Sigmund Freud, Civilization
and Its Discontents (1930; London: Hogarth Press, 1946, p. 17). As Hawthorne had realized, this
would so crowd the Campagna ‘with memorable events that one obliterates another’ (Nathaniel
Hawthorne, The Marble F&n (1859), Works, Centennial edn, Ohio State University Press, 4:
101).
32. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854; New York: Modern Library, 1937), pp. 60-61.
33. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Engfish Notebooks (New York: Modern Language Association, 1941),
 DAVID LOWENTHAL 181

29 September 1855, p. 243.

34. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables (1852), Works, 2: 263; idem, ‘Earth’s holocaust’
(1844), Works, 10: 445.
35. Quoted in Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in
American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), p. 233. For example, see Cynthia Ozick, ‘A
critic at large: Sholem Aleichem’s revolution’, New Yorker, 28 March 1988, pp. 99-108.
36. Stuart E. Eisenstat, quoted in ‘Too good a cleanup ?’ New York Times, 21 January 1988, p. 14.
37. Michael S. Roth, ‘Remembering forgetting: Maladies de la mPmoire in I9th-century France’,
Representations, 26, 1989, pp. 49-68; J.A.M. Meerloo, ‘The sense of time and history’, Psychitria,
Neurologia, Neurochirungia, 72, 1969, pp. 353-370.
38. Terdiman, ‘Mnemonics of Musset’s Confession’, op. cit., note 8, p. 26. I am grossly simplifying a
complex and tendentious point. For St. Augustine the purging of memory involved self-forgetting;
for St Bernard and the Cistercians, Christian forbearance wiped away sin ‘not by cutting it out of
the memory, but by leaving in the memory what was there’ and blanching it (Janet Coleman,
Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 19921, pp. 185-186.
39. George de Scud&-y, Curia Politiae: or, the Apologies of several1 Princes: justifying to the World their
most eminent Actions, transl. E. Wolley (London: H. Moseley, 1654), p. 98. Such reconciliation was
also termed amnesty, as the word itself implies (e.g., Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning
[1605]). See Peter Burke, ‘History and social memory’, in Thomas Butler, ed., History, Culttrre and
the Mind (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 97-113.
40. Sheldon S. Wolin, The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 37-38, 142.
41. Suzanne Citron, Le mythe national: L’histoire de France en question, 2nd ed. (Paris: Editions
ouvrieres, 1989), p. 183; Ernest Renan, ‘What is a nation?’ (1882), in Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation
and Narration (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1990), pp. 8-22, ref. on p. 11.
42. James Fallows, ‘Lower that bloody shirt and let the nation heal’, Znternational Herald Tribune, 17
September 1992, p. 5.
43. Jean Francois Chiappe, preface, in Henry Servieu, Petite histoire de France, 2nd ed. (Montreuil:
Editions de Chire, 1989), p. 12.
44. Vaira Vike-Freiberga, ‘Andrejs Pumpurs’s L@t&sis (‘Bearslayer’): Latvian national epic or
Romantic literary creation?’ Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis-Studia Baltica Stockholmiensa, 2,
1985, pp. 523-536.
45. Desmond Guinness, quoted in Maria Stieglitz, ‘Saving marvelous monuments’, Preservation News,
May 1990, pp. 17, 19.
46. Candace Floyd, ‘Too close for comfort’, History News, 40: 9, September 1985, pp. 8-14.
47. C. Vann Woodward, ‘Flight from history: the heritage of the Negro’, Nation, 201, 20 September
1965, pp. 142-146.
48. New York: Doubleday, 1976, but widely serialized in Readers Digest in 1974.
49. Civil War matriarch quoted in Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, op. cit., note 35, p. 686; Studs
Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression in America (New York: Pantheon,
1986).
50. Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1991), pp. 104, 191-192.
51. Norman Davies, ‘Poland’s dreams of past glory’, History Today, November 1982, pp. 2-30; Declan
Kiberd, ‘The war against the past’, in Audrey Eyler and Robert E. Garratt, The Uses of the Past:
Essays on Irish Culture (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), pp. 24-54.
52. Robert Alter, ‘The Masada complex’, Commentary, 56, July 1973, pp. 19-24; James E. Young,
‘When a day remembers: a performative history of Yom ha-Shoah’, History and Memory, 2: 2,
Winter 1990, pp. 54-75, quotation on p. 71.
53. Frank Deford, ‘Maybe we should forget it’, Newsweek, 25 November 1991, p. 31.
54. Jiirgen Habermas, ‘Concerning the public use of history’, New German Critique, 44, Spring/
Summer 1988, p. 45.
55. Rudy J. Koshar, ‘Altar, stage and city: historic preservation and urban meaning in Nazi Germany’,
History and Memory, 3: 1, 1991, pp. 30-59; Eric L. Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory,
and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).
56. James E. Young, ‘Memory against itself: the art of Holocaust monuments’, in John R. Gillis, ed,
Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity Princeton University Press: 1993).
57. Richard Griffiths, ‘Past silences: Aborigines and convicts in our history-making’, Australian
182 Memory and Oblivion

Cultural History, 6, 1987; Richard Flanagan, A Terrible Beauty: History of the Gordon River
Country (Richmond, Victoria: Greenhouse, 1985), p. 74; Kay Daniels, ‘Cults of nature, cults of
history’, Island Magazine (Hobart, Tasmania), 16, Spring 1983, pp. 3-8.
58. Bishop of Tasmania and the Hobart Mercury, both quoted in Judith Brine, ‘Nationalism reflected
in public appreciation of Port Arthur’, paper at Nationalism and Overseas Influences in Australian
Architecture, annual conference, Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand,
Sydney, May 1988.
59. See V. S. Naipaul, ‘Our universal civilization’, New York Review of Books, 31 January 1991, pp.
22-25.
60. Revelation 20: 12; Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992).
61. Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment (London, 1837), pp. 113-116.
62. Andrew Nagorski, ‘Liberation from lies’, Newsweek, 26 October 1992, p. 35.
63. Elisabeth Domansky, ‘ “Kristallnacht,” the Holocaust and German unity’, History and Memory, 4,
1992, pp. 60-94, ref. on p. 60; on Prague and Frankfurt, see Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Resonance and
wonder’, in Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of
Museum Display (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), pp. 47-48.
64. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Les assassins de la me’moire (Paris: Editions la Decouverte, 1991). An April
I993 poll suggests, however, that up to one in three American adults doubts the Holocaust could
have happened (Michiko Kakutani, ‘Down with history, down with truth’, International Herald
Tribune, 4 May 1993, p. 7).
65. Wolin, Presence of the Past, op. cit., note 40, pp. 33-35. At the 1985 tricentenary of the Revocation
of the Edict of Nantes, Huguenot persecution, extermination, and exile was reclaimed within
French national identity, by state and Catholic dignitaries at the Elysee, the Matignon, and the
Hotel de Ville (Pierre Nora, ‘L’ere de la commemoration’, in his (ed.) Les Lieux de mtmoire, III.
Les France, 3. De l’archive ci l’emblkme (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), p. 990).
66. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Europe, Europe: Forays into a Continent (London: Picador, 1990), pp.
26-27.
67. Orvar Lofgren, ‘The nationalization of culture’, Ethnologia Europaea, 19, 1989, pp. 5-23; Edward
Chappell, ‘Politics of Ukrainian museums’, Nation, 2 December 1991, pp. 713-717.
68. Quoted in Robert Wagner-Pacifici and Barry Schwartz, ‘The Vietnam Veterans Memorial:
commemorating a difficult past’, American Journal of Sociology, 97, 1991, pp. 376-420, ref. p.
388n.
69. Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts: I. Laws against Images (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp.
2, 10, 256; Ann Kibbey, The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric,
Prejudice, and Violence (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 47-50.
70. David Freedberg, Iconoclasts and Their Motives (Maarssen, Netherlands: Abner Schram, I985), p.
51, n.89.
71. Charles Moore, ‘Diary’, Spectator, 16 September 1989, p. 6.
72. Quoted in Diane Ravitch, ‘Decline and fall of teaching history’, New York Times Magazine, 17
November 1985, p. 56.
73. Ronald Reagan quoted in New York Times, 12 January 1989, p. 8; and in Michael Wallace, ‘Ronald
Reagan and the politics of history’, Tikkun, 2, Winter 1987, p. 14.
74. Carlo Sforza quoted in Luigi Barzini, The Europeans (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 136.
75. Jean Little, in discussion at ‘Travellers in Time’, Children’s Literature New England Summer
Institute, Newnham College, Cambridge, August 1989.
76. Daniel Goleman, ‘Debate over memories: repressed or fabricated. 7’ International Herald Tribune,
22 July 1992, p. 5.
77. Michael Dorris, ‘Lots of Indian stuff, not an Indian in sight’, International Herald Tribune, 9-10
August 1992, p. 8.
78. Stephen Owen, Mi-Lou: Poetry and the Labyrinth of Desire (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press, 1989), p. 205.
79. Regina Janes, ‘Past possession’, Salmagundi, 68-69, 1986, pp. 291-311.