Memory: concepts, processes, and applications

Memory

The (Im) persistence of Historical and Collective Memory: The Collective Forgetting of Vichy France and the Victims of the Holocaust

The unstable nature of human memory even on a personal level has been a persistent theme since Sigmund Freud's analysis of hysterics, to the modern day queries over the 'repressed memory' syndrome of alleged victims of childhood abuse. The fear of 'forgetting' such horrific historical events as the Holocaust in Europe and the crimes of the those collaborators of Vichy France has also spawned an additional, historical query into the nature of collective, human memory and the dangers of the unwillingness of human beings to confront the past.

Cognitive psychology suggests additional challenge to the difficulty of interpreting the Holocaust and also the "Vichy Syndrome" of a lack of historical guilt, that stretch beyond the moral allegations of fear or callousness. There may be a mental process that inhibits a full moral and intellectual apprehension of a traumatic event, as it occurs at the time, that effectively disrupts the accurate recording of such an event 'in the memory,' of the subject or subjects in question. This can take place not only an individual level but also on a collective level.

Vichy France provides a particularly instructive case study of such an example of a willed or unwilled collective forgetting, because it is a story of a nation that would prefer to think of itself as purely the victim of wartime atrocities. Yet many of its citizens either ignored the deportment of Jews in Vichy's midst, or openly collaborated with the Nazi occupiers. Is the forgetting of the Vichy French simply an act of calculated historical re-writing? Or does it have its roots in the cognitive, functional structure of the human mind?

The French scholar Henry Rousso states that France has never truly come to grips with France's bowing to the military and political pressures of Hitler during World War II. Subsequent to the unification of France, he states that that rather than real memories being formed, politicians have simply attempted to formulate highly directed displays of recollection intended to achieve self-interested political goals of the moment, rather than to meaningfully interpret the full guilt that France bears. Rousso calls such constructed memories a form of French neurosis known as the "Vichy syndrome." By refusing to remember accurately, a new historical past can be continually recreated that is comforting to citizens and politicians alike.

An argument against the thesis of the subjectivity of memory may at first be suggested by Dominick LaCapra's book, History and Memory after Auschwitz. In "Chapter 1: History and Memory: In the Shadow of the Holocaust," the author records trauma of the survivors and the long-term affects of how, after watching others die before their eyes, these survivors were haunted by the questions of why they were spared so arbitrarily, and the guilt that subsequently ensued. However, despite this guilt, LaCapra ultimately suggests that memory is an unreliable historical source and narrator. Like Rousso, he also states that memory is ultimately a subjective imprint or blueprint of, not the event in the past that is in question, but of the subject's present consciousness in the moment. The survivors may feel guilt now -- but did they feel guilty in the moment, though they may wish to believe they felt so? LaCapra doubts one is really able to remember at all, much less traumatic events. He notes in his introduction "the word 'after' in the title to this book does not have a merely chronological meaning," rather artistic and recoded memories of the Holocaust have "retrospective effects and prompted belated recognitions." Because these recognitions are after the fact, they generate "new aspects of history that earlier had a different face." (LaCapra, 6)