The Morals of Remembering

By LANCE MORROW

The style of monuments in Washington (the Lincoln, the Washington, the Jefferson) runs to idealizations in cool, white stone.

The places are abstracted: alabaster, clean, undimmed by human tears. They are also shrines for the tourists who come in doubleknits and halters. They are entirely American.

A new memorial in Washington will be different. It will be installed on the edge of the Mall, not far from the Washington Monument. It will be utterly European. It will reek of a European suffering and evil.

The memorial, a museum commemorating the millions of Jews and others who died at Auschwitz and Dachau and Treblinka, will be housed in two large, red brick turn-of-the-century buildings. The catastrophic drama of genocide will thus be installed in the middle of the Washington tourist round, along with the Capitol and the cherry blossoms. The museum will detain tourists as the Ancient Mariner seized the wedding guests to make them listen to an uglier tale than they might want to hear.

The idea of such a place has caused a certain subdued muttering. The muttering grants the enormity of the Holocaust, but it suggests: Why should the U.S. Government set aside land and buildings to commemorate a tragedy that occurred on another continent, a horror in which Americans had no part either as victims or persecutors? Americans have their own native horrors. Why not a memorial museum to black slavery? Why not a memorial to the American Indian culture? The American conscience could be engaged much closer to home than Auschwitz.

So says the muttering. But there is a deeper question. It involves a difficult,

sometimes grotesque moral calculus of comparative genocides. What does the historical memory remember? Over which slaughters does it grieve? Over which does it pass obliviously? And why?

Consider one that has almost got lost. This is the 50th anniversary of the enforced famine, engineered by Stalin, in which some 8 million to 10 million Ukrainians and Cossacks perished. Their extermination was a matter of state policy, just as the ovens of Dachau were a matter of state policy. The Ukrainian kulaks died under the great brute wheel of an idea. They died for the convenience of the state, to help with the organization of the new order of things.

They died, and yet the grass has grown over the world's memory of their murder. Why? The numbers of the dead would surely qualify that entry (one thinks mordantly) for some genocidal hall of fame. Perhaps that is the sort of museum we need on the edge of the Mall: a home for all the great blood scandals: the Armenians slaughtered by the Turks, the Hutus slain by the Tutsis in Burundi, the Cambodians who have died in Pol Pot's haunting imitation of Stalin's barbarisms.

Is it evil to forget? Is it necessary to remember? Perhaps remembrance is a matter of sociobiology. Perhaps we remember what it is necessary to remember for survival, and we forget what it is necessary to forget. The author Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, states the case on eloquently pragmatic grounds: "Memory is our shield, our only shield." To Wiesel, only memory can immunize mankind against a repetition of the slaughter.

A memorial, of course, is not the same as a memory. In some deep ways, the two are opposite. The memorial makes memory objective. The memorial rescues suffering from its degrading pointlessness and installs it in the stone or in the photo exhibits and libraries. It is an event in the process of mourning, helping to set the pain to rest at an endurable distance. It helps to heal. It is the thing we build to signal our acceptance. In a way, we make memorials so that we can begin at last to forget. The Holocaust, on that corner of the Mall, must become in some sense something else, something like Wordsworth in paraphrase: horror recollected in tranquillity.

A memorial can relieve the poor daily mind of the responsibility of obsessive remembering. Memorials may sometimes simultaneously idealize and trivialize terrible events. On the other hand, one cannot approach the memorial at Hiroshima without seeing and feeling again the apocalyptic flash. Busloads of Japanese children arrive every day and gravely absorb the meaning of the place.

Still, a memorial is a way of saying goodbye. Every memorial needs its proper time. In that sense, American blacks may not yet be ready for a memorial. Slavery, or its long, tenacious afterlife, is still in business. What one sees in Harlem or Watts or South Side Chicago is really slavery in other forms. So it is not yet time for that memorial. Americans still do not know the outcome of slavery. A memorial needs finality. A memorial, the final seal upon the wound and the grief, cannot be articulate until the drama is ended.

Life eventually rejects too many claims being made upon it by the dead.

The capacity for grief is finite. Life likes to forget a little. The living, if they are sane, want memory and death and obsession to observe certain house rules. That is difficult in a century in which genocide has become, so to speak, a way of life. It is difficult for great cataclysms to coexist morally with the smaller homely business of things.

At the most obvious, the moral intention of a memorial is simple: Lest we forget. The stone formalizes a relationship between past and future. It solemnizes and legitimizes and dignifies those who have departed into the squalid indignity of death, departed in a way so inhuman that humanity wants to pile on posthumous kindnesses, posthumous significances.

Perhaps it is grotesque for people to wish to commemorate their blackest acts, their atrocities. In their traditional function, memorials glorify our heroes, our battles, our ideals, our (presumably) higher values. Erecting memorials to our horrors is the moral equivalent of impaling heads on spikes by the roadside: it rivets the attention of the passers-by and leaves them with a memorable warning. It is a form of tutoring in the truth, both edifying and horrifying, that man is capable of anything. He can go either way, and does.

Only the faculty of moral memory can begin to redeem the worst deeds. In another context, the poet Robert Lowell wrote: "My eyes have seen what my hand did." Self-awareness is precisely what makes us human, the action of the judging inner eye, the intelligent witness that keeps house in the brain. Memory is eventually a moralist, and memory educates the beast. --By Lance Morrow This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.