The dangers of memory

I had never heard of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a victim of the atomic bomb in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who died recently, aged 93. I had no idea that anyone experienced both bomb attacks and lived. In fact, there were dozens like him. But Yamaguchi was the only one to be officially registered as an atomic bomb victim in both cities. Gone forever is his unique, personal memory of those horrific events, which he only began to speak about publicly in 2005. Once he found his voice, Yamaguchi used his personal experience to argue for nuclear disarmament – which seems to justify setting great store by the testimony of eye witnesses, who can influence the present by teaching moral lessons, act as guardians of the truth and defend against forgetting. Yet when he recounted his experience of the 6 August Hiroshima blast to his colleagues in Nagasaki on the morning of 9 August, he was met with disbelief. His director thought he'd "gone a little mad". Moments later, the second atomic bomb exploded over the city. We may well privilege the testimony of the victim and lament the passing of the memory of cataclysmic events into history, but Yamaguchi's experience – scepticism when he told the truth, many decades of public silence, in his last years openness about being a survivor – shows how flawed is our modern preoccupation with memory and the tendency to treat it as if it were a simple, uncontested, unalloyed good. When the victim dies, society has certainly lost something beyond a precious life. Is it the very past itself that is now lost and irrecoverable? Or do we lose a fixation that prevents society from embracing the future? It seems that when we speak of memory we often mean personal memory, or memory of the person. A family mourns and remembers the soldier who dies in Afghanistan, and the people of Wootton Bassett respectfully join them. But is that at the cost of questioning why we are there and ignoring both the history of failed past interventions and the memory of recent strategic mistakes? As Holocaust surviviors fast disappear and racism continues to scar our societies, we are driven to record their memories and use them to mobilise against hatred. But does it divert attention from the systematic moral collapse a society can undergo? Did the focus on the passing of the last veterans of the first world war not mean that their memory of the trenches was partially eclipsed and replaced with an expression of wistfulness for the values of an imagined better time? Memory is selective. Total recall is extremely rare. And when memory is pressed into national service, the selectivity is even greater, more premeditated and often dangerous. The construction of collective or national memory may be used to justify war and repression. The imagined memory of a golden age or an ethnically homogenous society can lead to the demonisation and exclusion of groups judged to have been absent from this nostalgic picture of the past. And the more selective memory is at the collective level, the more it engenders what is seen to be its very opposite: forgetting. Making a fetish out of remembering one big thing for its symbolic national value, inevitably involves consigning other things, which may constitute competing narratives, to the shredder. Yet, just as it would be wrong to overvalue memory, it would be wrong to utterly damn forgetting. In a sense, they are not opposites, but two sides of the same coin. And just as there are different levels of memory, there are different degrees of forgetting, some of them temporary. Perhaps this is what Yamaguchi experienced while he kept the horrors or Hiroshima and Nagasaki to himself – in order to have a future. A healthy society needs to value, memorialise and recall the past, but if, in doing that, preparing for the future is neglected, memory is betrayed. For when it comes to the seismic tragedies of the past, if memory is to be of any value, it must be a spur to creating a better world. Still, the death of those deemed to be the repository of memory might also be seen to help liberate us from the tyranny of memory. Rather than make us fear the shift from memory to history, their passing is more honoured if it helps us realise that history can gives a sense of perspective and complexity of meaning that memory cannot provide. History, too, can be manipulated, but it's practised in a space where analysis, discussion, interpretation and the refinement of understanding can better resist the pressures which troublingly dictate forms of public memory. Memory can trap us in the past and yet make us strangers to its complexities. It is history that keeps the doors open and recognises, in the opening words of the German writer Christa Wolf 's autobiographical novel, that "The past is not dead; it is not even past."