The Responsibility of Memory

Last Monday, I participated in a workshop on teaching the Holocaust.

I’ve always been interested in the nature of struggle. Growing up, my favorite topics were things like slavery and the Civil War, the struggles of Native American peoples in this country’s history, the Holocaust, and Apartheid in South Africa, and I continued to study these things as I made my way through my college education. More often than not, the electives I took were history classes (I think that I’m only six credits away from being qualified to teach history in my state, and I’m seriously considering going back to school for an M.A. in history) and specialized literature classes that focused in on the literature of struggle - African American Lit., Post-Colonial Lit., Gay and Lesbian Lit., and other courses whose primary focus was on the non-dominant (and, in some cases, the outright oppressed) community.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about civic responsibility and the need of collective memory. I had an opportunity to see Ken Burns speak, not too long ago, about his new book and documentary series, The War. In his opening comments, he talked about how, after he and his group finished The Civil War, they were so spent and so overwhelmed that they swore they’d never “do” another war again. People kept coming to him and practically begging him to tackle the issues of WWII, and he and his team kept resisting; they just didn’t have it in them.

Then he realized how desperately something like his work was needed. He quoted a source, which I can’t find at the moment, that told him that a horrifying percentage of graduating high school seniors think that we fought WWII with the Germans against Russia. Not only that, he said, but literally a thousand WWII vets are dying every day in this country and, with them, the memory of that conflict is also dying.

This is a generation, too, that is particularly reticent about sharing their experiences and their memories; something about the culture of that era said that it wasn’t alright to share difficult or painful things (and, really, is there anything more difficult and painful than war?). It was important, Mr. Burns said, to try to get these people to open up and tell what they remember before those memories are lost, literally, forever. He credited Tom Brokaw’s book, The Greatest Generation, for prying open that tightly closed door, and believes that the work that he’s done with his own book and film is merely a continuation of the desperately important work that Brokaw started.

I think that part of my drive to learn about these struggles - to try to understand them in whatever small way I can - is because I feel a responsibility to learn about them. As a teacher, as a mother, as a citizen of the world, and as a human being, I think it’s important that I have at least a passing familiarity with these important human events so that I can allow them to inform the choices and actions I make in my own life. I feel a need to exercise some agency over my environment; I want to make informed voting decisions; I want to be aware of how terrible things start so that I can be vigilant and aware when I see the warning signs happening around me (hello? Warrantless wiretaps, anyone?!) so that I can at least attempt to stand up against them. I want to do whatever I can to make the world a little safer - not only for my children, but for everyone.

Knowledge really is power, but I think that memory is a vital component of that power. Burns said something that really struck me in his talk a few weeks ago: he said that the difference between what we, as Americans, were asked to do following the Pearl Harbor attacks and what we were asked to do following the 9/11 attacks is very telling to where we find ourselves right now. After the attack in Hawaii, Americans were asked to ration. We were asked to buy bonds and to conserve energy and to pull together toward a common goal. In a fireside chat, FDR said:

On the road ahead there lies hard work-grueling work-day and night, every hour and every minute. I was about to add that ahead there lies sacrifice for all of us.

But it is not correct to use that word. The United States does not consider it a sacrifice to do all one can, to give one’s best to our Nation when the Nation is fighting for its existence and its future life.

It is not a sacrifice for any man, old or young, to be in the Army or the Navy of the United States. Rather is it a privilege.

It is not a sacrifice for the industrialist or the wage earner, the farmer or the shopkeeper, the trainman or the doctor, to pay more taxes, to buy more bonds, to forego extra profits, to work longer or harder at the task for which he is best fitted. Rather is it a privilege.

It is not a sacrifice to do without many things to which we are accustomed if the national defense calls for doing without.

On September 12th, 2001, the president got on the television to ask us to go about our lives as if nothing had changed - we were told to go shopping. There was no call for national service, there was no call for cooperation, there was no call for conservation. EVERYTHING had changed, and if we’d been asked to reflect those changes in positive and cooperative ways, we might be in a very different place - as a nation and as a globe - right now. That’s powerful stuff, and is part of the reason that I keep signing up for workshops about teaching the Holocaust.