DOMINIQUE SCHNAPPER
Memory in Politics
D
URING MY RESEARCH
on the Jews of France more than twenty
years ago, a livestock dealer in Lorraine, whose family had
nearly all been deported, made a deep impression on me with a
remark: "All must be forgiven-but nothing forgotten." I was won over
to this moral stance, which I heard then for the first time, as it combined
the imperative of faithfulness to the victims with the willingness to relin–
quish all desire for revenge; my interlocutor was practicing Paul
Ricoeur's "amnesty without amnesia ." That the executioners have never
asked for forgiveness, and that the survivors have never been in a posi–
tion to grant pardon where none has been asked, only reinforces the
moral position of the Thionville livestock dealer.
But historical collectivities, whether they are organized as nations or
otherwise, are not individuals, and are not subject to the same moral
rules relied upon quite instinctively by individuals. Politics is a dirty busi–
ness. The obligation of memory within politics must be different from its
counterpart in the realm of the individual. "Life goes on," says the tag
(so repugnant to one who has just lost a loved one); there is no "end of
history." Powerful political figures, even when not deliberately manipu–
lating collective memory, not destroying archives, or willfully making
truth into travesty, nonetheless perpetuate and always use collective
memory to construct the future; this may be deplorable but is no cause
for outrage. Memory in political life obviously has a political function.
Memory is inseparable from all historical collectivity, whether it is a
nation or a particular group. A society without history would not be
human. We know that nations are the historians' invention: it was they
who worked actual circumstances into the glorious birth of the great
Western democracies, the birth of the state of Israel amid tragedy, and
the myth of the freedom of Europe's smaller nations. In the age of
nations and of triumphant nationalisms, the catalogue of past events,
established through scholarship, was used to affirm collective identity
and to encourage the living society, ordain heirs to this glorious history,
extend the heritage of the past, and concern itself with common action.
Gerard Namer has shown how a dual Gaullist/Communist memory
