Gravestones always also serve as ‘monuments’ warning the living not to forget their dead—and yet people often forget all too easily, for ‘life goes on.’” (Weinrich 24). These words from Harald Weinrich's magisterial book on forgetting are an appropriate point of departure for a reflection on the historical memory, because they express the essence of the problem. People forget, often deliberately, against the logic that says that one cannot forget what one tries to forget. Kant wrote in his notebook a reminder that he should forget his assistant, Martin Lampe, whom he missed after firing him. If people usually write what they wish to remember, Kant, in the matter of his servant, wrote to remind himself to forget (122). But if Kant wished to forget Lampe, most people feel a moral duty to remember their departed ones. To that end they institute private acts of remembrance: keeping mementos, discharging promises and obligations to the deceased, filial or marital acts of piety, and often carrying on an internal form of “presencing” that sets limits to the process of mourning and disengagement. Societies are especially oblivious. Like individuals, they exist in time, and time means fleetingness and loss. But, unlike people, societies have no emotional attachment to their “memories” and turn their links to the past into commemoration.

Societies objectivize “memory” through monuments and diverse technologies of retrieval. One of the most recent is the ascent of the discourse on the historical memory in the wake of the human catastrophes of the twentieth century, in particular the Jewish Holocaust, which a number of scholars identify as the origin of the late twentieth century's preoccupation with memory. Whether or not it is the actual source for the rise of the historical memory, the Holocaust has been at its center. It is largely responsible for the emphasis on victimization and for the moral injunction against forgetting, lest the horrific acts be repeated. Paradoxically, for this discourse it is not memory that keeps the past alive with all its dangers, but forgetting that risks reliving it all over again.