Memory, art and the social condition Open Access

Tensions are knitted into the social fabric of society, social interaction, the social system, and each and every social formation. Along with these tensions, there are attempts to respond: to control, defuse, suppress, co-opt and utilise tensions. But often there are no easy or definitive ways out, something very clearly revealed in the case of memory. Dilemmas emerge from the human condition, where sociality adds another dimension, making for problems that are impossible to solve because of the limitations of the social. In art, the dilemmas of remembering and confronting difficult pasts are illuminated as dilemmas, though certainly not resolved.

Memory is fraught with tensions that persistently present difficulties both for individuals and for groups. The most basic: in order to remember some things, we must forget others. Consider the simple case of remembering a loved one. You may remember a radiant smile, as well as a distinctive expression of serious concentration, but the facial expressions between concentrating and smiling are forgotten. Indeed, they must be forgotten in order to remember the appearance of the loved one’s distinctive intelligence and humour. Artists play with this. Thus, for example, against the memory grain, the photography of Diane Arbus established its critical edge because she not only took pictures of disturbing-looking people, she often focused on transitory expressive moments that we commonly do not remember.¹ Beyond personal, individual perception and memory, collectivities develop identities by together remembering some things while forgetting others.²

Proud sons and daughters of the Confederacy remember their heritage, the genteel ways and manners of their ancestors, their Southern ways. They visit former plantations, as tourists, with pride. They display the Confederate flag, which has mobilised a specific regional politics aimed against the national centre, the Pride of the South against the Yankees. Many still want the flag to be displayed officially. But such memories involve forgetting other experiences, the brutality of slavery and racism. Thus, for others, the memories of the proud sons and daughters are assaults. Critics of southern ways visit the plantations noting that they often do not include exhibition of the slave quarters, and even when such quarters are present, the brutality of slavery is usually underplayed. And like-minded people see the Confederate flag as both representing the war to maintain the slavery-based regime, and also symbolising racist attitudes and practices of the post-Civil War era up to the present day.

On the other hand, remembering slavery is difficult for the descendants of slaves and empathetic onlookers, not just for white racists. Remembered suffering, and the stigma associated with it, stimulates resistance, revenge and contemplation, but also shame, yielding all sorts of political projects (Goffman, 1986). The long civil rights movement, from the Niagara Movement to the Black Live Matters Movement, includes all of this.³ Especially striking is how it was not until the 24th of September, 2016 that the long-planned National Museum of African-American History and Culture on the national mall in Washington DC finally opened.⁴ It took so long, no doubt, partly as a result of white racism, but also white and black shame. Memory is difficult. The museum curators face a dilemma: to celebrate African-American accomplishments or lament African-American suffering, or more precisely, their challenge is how to balance lament with celebration.

Jews have lived on Polish lands for hundreds of years. The oldest synagogue dates back to the 15th century. ‘Poles’ and ‘Jews’ (the terms are commonly used as mutually exclusive in Poland, and among people from Poland) have lived together ever since. It is a history of great suffering, as well as great religious, cultural, political and economic achievements. Many Jews remember the hardships: ghettos, pogroms, the political anti-Semitism of the nineteenth and twentieth century, and the long Catholic anti-Semitism that preceded it, the Holocaust and the very bitter experiences of the more recent pogroms and official anti-Semitism of the post-war years. Yet many Poles note that it is the supposed history of Polish tolerance that enabled Poland to become the European centre of Jewish life for centuries. And, of course, there are many Jews and Poles who remember great cultural achievements and the very fertile cultural interactions between Poles and Jews throughout their shared history. Memories of all of this have a factual basis.

But what people with various identities have remembered and what they have forgotten has led to much misunderstanding and conflict (Goldfarb, 2012). Many Jews, especially abroad, do not realise the depth and breadth of Polish-Catholic suffering during the Nazi occupation. Many Poles know this quite well, but cannot face the fact that Poles murdered Jews during the war years in great number, both with the Nazis and on their own. There are Jews who cannot imagine and do not remember that Poles were also victims of war crimes, indeed crimes against humanity, and there are many Poles who do not remember Polish complicity. They cannot conceive of themselves as perpetrators of such crimes. And the remembered and the forgotten have long-lasting consequences. Thus, because of the ways they remember, Jews cannot conceive that there have been Jews who have committed atrocities, on a large scale in Israel and its occupied territories, but also back in Poland during the post-war Communist regime. Memory constitutes identity, personal and collective, and to that end much is forgotten, intentionally and unintentionally.

And how, indeed, do we remember differently together? This is the challenge that Americans faced after the war in Vietnam. For some of us, it had been clear from its beginning that the war was wrong and had to be opposed. Others have seen the war as a necessary battle in the long war against Communism, a hot moment in the Cold War struggle. They have supported Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon as they led us in the battle. Young men enlisted or were drafted without objection, and they made great sacrifices. As the years passed and the war progressed, the country became more and more divided, and when it ended, even though the great majority remembered it as a sad chapter in the American experience, this majority was divided between those who thought that the war was wrong and never should have been fought, and those who thought that it was a failure because we did not fight it fully. They have remembered very different parts of the American Vietnam adventure. A polarised society has remembered and forgotten opposing aspects of the war, from misguided restraints to uncontrolled atrocities.

Memory requires forgetting, and in each of these cases the ways people balance their memory and forgetting yields social conflict, for better and for worse. Memory and forgetting becomes political. And while the politics is often conducted in the name of the truth, truth cannot easily, if ever, settle the matter.

The sons and daughters of the Confederacy, along with the descendants of slaves, indeed all Americans, are confronted with the great American dilemma of race and racism, and the legacies of slavery. We must remember and forget, as we constitute our identities and act. Problems linger, deeply embedded in American social, political and cultural life. Old problems have a way of reappearing in new but related ways. Debates about civil rights, affirmative action, crime and punishment, education, reparations, housing, healthcare and even environmental policy all have racial and racist dimensions, and the way we consider and act upon these issues depends on how we navigate the dilemmas of memory.

The argument for reparations for African-Americans, for the descendants of slavery and the victims of racism, is intriguing and provocative. The mark left by slavery runs long and deep, followed by the continuing injustices of Jim Crow and its aftermath. The legacy of slavery is disgraceful, as was the internment of the Japanese Americans during the Second World War, and the legacy of slavery is atrocious, as was the European racism and anti-Semitism of the Holocaust. Great injustices have led to reparations for the interned Japanese and for the victims of the Shoah in recent decades. Following this logic, reparations appear to be due in the case of the African-Americans.

Thus Ta-Nehisi Coates has forcefully made the case, which has led to much public discussion (2014). He frames the argument by starting with a focus on real-estate. With great specificity, he describes what has been forgotten: how a series of public policies shaped by racism has undermined the capacity of African-Americans to own real property, and then, more generally, how slavery played a substantial role in the development of American economic wealth and power. He demonstrates how unequally wealth and power have been distributed in the aftermath of slavery, as a result of explicit political and governmental actions. He shows how attempts to address the unjust legacies of slavery have been lost in political struggles, while a new racist regime solidified. It is a compelling account. It draws upon sober scholarship (Darity & Frank, 2005), and concludes on a very practical note, supporting the long-standing political work of Congressman John Conyers, who has presented to Congress Bill HR 40 to initiate an official study of slavery and its legacies, and the possibility of reparations. It is a cogent article, well- argued and documented, drawing upon solid reporting and scholarly knowledge, and pointing to a very practical course of action. As such, it has attracted a great deal of serious attention. How the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow are remembered, and the way they are remembered, shapes judgement.

From the conservative point of view, as expressed, for example, by Rachel Lu in The Federalist, slavery is a thing of the past and continuing injustice must be focused on individual opportunity and responsibility (2014). It is conceded that there was suffering and injustice, but the focus is on the individual, and it is even maintained that concerted collective attempts to address past injustice are more a part of the problem than the solution. Lu therefore approves of Coates’ critique of the ways the New Deal of the 1930s supported racism.⁵ Nonetheless, from this point of view reparations make no sense. Both because they are impractical and because they apparently make the fundamental mistake of separating the African-American experience from the American experience. Since explicit racial discrimination is now illegal, for such conservatives the problem has been solved.

On the other hand, for those who understand that racial justice was not achieved with Lyndon Banes Johnson’s signing of the civil rights law of 1965, and that continuing injustice is not only a matter of individual culture and responsibility, there has been a serious debate, shaped not only by political conviction, but also by memory. Remember one way, and the thread from slavery to the great inequalities between black and white in America today, and reparations are on the agenda. Remember differently, and they are not.

David Frum suggests that reparations have already been tried and that they have failed, maintaining that affirmative action is a mode of reparations, a proposition that is contested (2014). Nonetheless, its failure, he asserts, includes that the specific logic of correcting political wrongs is infectious, and thus that affirmative action as a way to repair the wrongs of slavery would yield calls for similar affirmative actions from and for those who have suffered from many other injustices: women, Latinos, American Indians, and so on. Frum argues that each move emerges from a sense of specific injustice, going beyond the ideal of equal treatment towards special treatment. In addition, he notes an ironic consequence of affirmative action – it casts into doubt the achievements of those who benefit from such action. Thus, to take the most prominent extreme, this leads to the idea that President Obama has been an affirmative-action President.

During his campaign for the Democratic Party’s nomination to be President of the United States, Bernie Sanders uncharacteristically wavered on the question of reparations. He first indicated that he was against them. Confronted by Black Lives Matter activists, he refused to support reparations. He explained that it would be impractical to pursue them because they could not possibly pass Congress, and he changed the subject in a conventional way, asserting that the best way to address the injuries of race and racism is to forthrightly address the injuries of class and economic inequality. Although he was forthright in his economic positions, his move on racism and the legacies of slavery have been the conventional ones of the Democratic Party since the early 1990s, the position of Bill Clinton and the sociologist William Julius Wilson Jr.⁶ He later backtracked and added more subtlety to his position, supporting investments in black communities as a form of reparations. This position was not all that different from that of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.⁷ As practical and principled politicians, they sought to both reveal sensitivity to the injustices of race, but not excite resentment.

For Black activists, and to Coates specifically, their attempt to get around the problem is unsatisfactory, as he writes: ‘Reparations is not one possible tool against white supremacy’ (2016). But even he, when it comes to specifying exactly what form reparations would take, does not go much beyond the idea of studying the matter (2014).

Some fundamental factual truths about the history of slavery and its legacies are commonly agreed upon. Whites owned blacks, and not the other way around. Jim Crow laws were directed at blacks, not whites. The Ku Klux Klan and other such groups terrorised blacks, and it was blacks who were lynched by whites. Although how vividly this all is remembered varies, and there is a political conflict about its continued significance, recently in the debate about reparations some basic facts have been generally acknowledged by conservatives, liberals and radicals, such as the ones just considered. In contrast, the memory struggles between Poles and Jews (and gentile Europeans more generally) are not so settled. Holocaust denial exists. Less perniciously, exactly who were the victims and who were the perpetrators, and what were the specific details of the crimes against humanity, are contested. This is particularly true when it comes to comparisons between the modern barbarism of both Stalinist and Nazi regimes, especially among people who experienced both Soviet and Nazi occupation, in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Poland.

In Poland, there have been many manifestations of the problem, but the most clear involve the controversies surrounding the publication of Neighbors by Jan Gross, about a massacre in the town of Jedwabne, Poland. The publication of Gross’s book fundamentally challenged the collective memory of Poles and Jews in Poland, as the world watched on. Gross described what happened in a remote town in eastern Poland. ‘[O]ne day, in July 1941, half the population of a small East European town murdered the other half – some 1,600 men, women and children’ (2002). He reported in the introduction that it took him four years from the time he first read the testimony of Szmul Wasersztajn, describing the atrocities of Jedwabne, to when he really understood what happened. He read the description, but was not able to process its implications. As an expert in the Polish interwar experience, he had overlooked the evidence of Polish atrocities. He then started exploring them and wrote the most controversial book in recent decades in Poland, with more books to follow.

The debate over Jedwabne⁸ has made visible fundamental lapses in Polish memory and identity, which have continued: many people still have not been able to process the implications. Gross reported that a common practice of historiography blocked him, along with conventional Polish historians, from recognising a very dark corner of the Polish-Jewish experience. Testimonies of atrocities were critically doubted unless confirmed by further, less fallible evidence. He made his breakthrough by reversing the process, assuming that an atrocity occurred unless there was solid evidence that it had not.

For many, what Gross revealed was aggressively challenged – especially noteworthy was the resistance from the Polish-Catholic Church. The head of the Church, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, was interviewed in the Catholic News Agency (KAI) about Gross and his book, and revealed one of the chief reasons Jews and Poles remember persistent anti-Semitism differently. Polish-Jewish conflicts in the 1930s had no religious basis, according to the Cardinal. Asked if he thought, as Gross reported, that Jews experienced a rise in attacks during Holy Week because of accusations of God-killing, he expressed astonishment. ‘This statement strikes me as improbable. The first time I ever heard of this rise in anti-Jewish feeling was in Mr. Gross’s book. Clearly the book was written “on commission” for someone’ (Michlic & Polonsky, 2003). The Cardinal went on: ‘Polish-Jewish conflicts did occur in those times, but they had an economic basis. Jews were cleverer, and they knew how to take advantage of Poles.’ The Parish Priest of Jedwabne has even maintained that the massacre was organised by a Jewish captain of the Wehrmacht. A rabid anti-Semitism thus fabricates an account of the event that is widely accepted, particularly by the people of Jedwabne, according to the report of Anna Bikont, the author of The Crime and the Silence: The Quest for Truth of a Wartime Massacre, the definitive book responding to the controversy opened by Gross, both in her close examination of the massacre itself and the way Poles have in recent years remembered it.⁹

The controversy continues, pitting those who have walked through the door Gross opened, including many Polish journalists, scholars, and even members of the Polish clergy, to report, analyse and reflect on dark corners of Polish history, against those who have done everything they can to prevent them being illuminated. These include sober commentators who worry about the numbers, who think the evidence on the responsibility for the murders is still not in. Was it Poles acting on their own, as Gross maintained, or was it Poles encouraged by the Germans, or was it only Germans, as was the official story during the Communist era? And when it comes to responsibility, there is a provocative turn, as one polemist put it: ‘Is the hubbub surrounding Jedwabne intended to eclipse the responsibility of Jews for communism and the Soviet occupation of Poland?’ And all of this entered Presidential politics in 2015, with one candidate, the incumbent, Bronisław Komorowski of the Civic Platform, recognising and publicly acknowledging Polish complicity, while the other candidate, the challenger, Andrzej Duda of Law and Justice, arguing strongly that such moves undermine the honour of the Polish nation. In 2016, with the Law and Justice Party victory in not only the Presidential, but also parliamentary elections, the systematic forgetting of Polish complicity is official policy, though this faces considerable social-movement resistance.

American liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, leftists and rightists, all remember the Vietnam War as an American tragedy, but do so quite differently, in ways that are fundamentally conflicting. This emerges from the complex relationships between ends and means – these relationships, as they have been differently remembered, have subsequently shaped American political and military history.

The war started within the bi-partisan Cold War consensus. The Communists were threatening the Free World. They had to be resolutely opposed. The North Vietnamese threatened the freedom of South Vietnam. If it were lost, there would be a domino effect; next Cambodia, Thailand, and then South East Asia as a whole would be lost, followed by nations beyond the region. After the fall of Saigon, indeed the Communists did take over. If we had forthrightly fought the war, this would not have happened. We should have invaded the North, sent in the troops that were needed for victory and fully supported them, perhaps even with a tactical nuclear weapon. Because of inadequate support the war ended without the achievement of our goals. There was a clear lesson, to not hold back: inadequate means undermined just ends.

Guerrilla warfare presents new challenges, which were not met. Confusion about who the enemy was and who were innocent citizens led to atrocities. The unstable and unpopular South Vietnamese regimes led to the support of untrustworthy and corrupt allies, which compromised the American mission. As it became clear the war was at best a stalemate and as the horrors of war became visible nightly on the evening news, the futility of the struggle and its brutality made it clear to many people who initially supported the intervention that there was something fundamentally wrong. The means destroyed the ends.

Hundreds of thousands were drafted or joined up. Tens of thousands were killed, and when those who did survive came home, they were not treated with proper respect. They returned to little fanfare and even to disgrace. The public did not recognise their sacrifice, and, as a result, many suffered. What was seen on television undermined the glory and honour that has long been attached to military service. This has led many to want to correct the hard experiences of the returning veterans. Regardless of the worthiness of the ends, the means should have been honoured.

There never was a global-international communist threat, as imagined by the war’s planners, both civilian and military. The domino theory – if we do not stand up to the communists in South East Asia, we will have to face them on the beaches of California – was a complete fantasy. The war was a struggle for national independence, first fought against the French and then the Americans. American involvement marked a major transformation of power, making the United States the primary imperial power. American support for corrupt South Vietnamese regimes was a function of a more general Pax Americana, overthrowing legitimate regimes around the world and supporting repressive ones, and being repressive in the United States, with the CIA and the FBI working in tandem against progressive change. The stated ends of the Vietnam War dramatically revealed flaws in, or even more radically, the complete bankruptcy of the American experiment.

There is a broad consensus: the Vietnam War is remembered very critically across the political spectrum. But there are very strong disagreements among the critics.

Thus we see that remembering slavery, the Holocaust and American involvement in Vietnam is difficult. We forget and remember together yet differently, fuelling political conflicts. This is not necessarily a bad thing in the view of the political actors involved. The advocates of reparations are remembering slavery and its legacies differently from the dominant tradition in America, opening up a path for political action against racism. When Poles remember the evidence that the mass murder of their Jewish compatriots was the responsibility also of other Poles and not exclusively of German Nazis, a less self-righteous politics becomes possible, more open to difference than has been the dominant pattern in the recent past. And when the complexities of the Vietnam War are remembered, a recognition of the complexities of present military adventures, such as the so-called ‘war on terrorism’, becomes more likely.

Then again, conflicts of memory can poison an independent politics. For it is just as likely that one limited pattern will be remembered over the other, and memory can just as easily foster delusion as enlightenment: from the point of view of memory activists, a benign view of slavery, a chauvinistic Polish politics and new hegemonic warriors, for example. This is where art can play a special role. Because if it is truly independent, art cannot be reduced to any one point of view, it opens memory to the complexities of the social condition, specifically the social condition as it applies to memory. Here I will introduce some specific examples. Then I will conclude with a more general formulation.

Beloved by Toni Morrison is her masterpiece. It ‘re-remembers’ (the term Morrison introduces in her text) slavery, the task of the main character of the novel and of the novel’s readers. It has been broadly recognised as one of the great American novels, and probably was a major reason why Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Despite this near-universal praise, a negative review by Stanley Crouch (1987) reveals how it is that art can play an important role in facilitating remembrance of the barbarism of slavery, more even than those who with sound historical evidence argue the pros and cons of reparations.¹⁰

According to Couch, Morrison’s writings are saddled by an overly sentimental depiction of African-American suffering, drawing from a literary tradition established by James Baldwin, and a stereotypical portrayal of ‘bestial black men’, influenced by the feminist writings of black women. He concedes that ‘Morrison, unlike Alice Walker, has real talent, an ability to write a novel in a musical structure, deftly using images as motifs,’ but he condemns the writing for what he terms ‘maudlin ideological commercials’. He reviewed the book as if it were a bad TV movie. He summarises Beloved without its musical structure, satirising it as melodrama. It is a novel about an escaped slave, treated well at first by a benevolent master, but then brutally abused when the master dies, and the cruel overseer takes over. The heroine Sethe escapes, pregnant, slave catchers intercede, and she kills her baby in childbirth, instead of condemning her to the life of a slave. Then the long-lost father of her children, Paul D., mysteriously returns from the dead and a semblance of a life returns when ‘Beloved’, the ghost of the murdered baby, possesses Denver, Sethe’s surviving child. And then Couch offers his satirical acclaim:

This is like summarising Romeo and Juliet as the story of two mixed-up kids from opposite sides of the tracks who end up killing themselves. Any story can be trivialised by such summary, as it overlooks the artistry, with only banality remaining. Beloved is presented not as a linear narrative but a painful nightmare, recalled and analysed. The reader meets characters with uncertainty, not knowing who and what they are, as they only slowly reveal themselves and their relationships. Time and setting are unclear, as are the motivations behind the narrated action.

Sethe was to meet her husband on their escape from slavery. Instead she was brutalised and he never appeared, leading to the murder of ‘Beloved’. The story is told and retold. New details are slowly revealed. Brutalisation, powerlessness, and the distortion of normal human relations are given artistic shape. The story of a pregnant slave woman seeking freedom, attacked by a gang of white boys while her husband helplessly watched and fled, told directly, is but a sentimental example of what we know to be a reprehensible ‘peculiar institution’. But telling the story as it is subjectively remembered in bits and pieces gives both the reprehensible actions and their legacies life. We observe how under the strain of racism the understanding between black men and women becomes next to impossible. This is revealed poetically, not polemically, opening up collective memory to include the deeply problematic intersection between race and gender relations in America. And since the distorted relations examined include centrally the relations between a mother and her children (‘Beloved’ is the ghost of Sethe’s murdered child), even more centrally it addresses the additional intersection of generational transference. Art facilitates memory, which makes possible the constitution of human dignity, despite the most horrific of human experiences, rape and infanticide, as Morrison ‘re-remembers’ the pains and consequences of slavery, giving memory artistic life. The reader explores the difficulty of memory and the unclear problems of responsible actions and their tragedies.

Ida, by Paweł Pawlikowski, illuminates the social conditions in a different place and at a different time, concerning different atrocities.¹¹ But like Beloved, the film makes remembering possible. As it focuses on the personal to illuminate the political, it re-remembers. Ida is a novice, preparing to soon take her vows. Raised as an orphan in the convent, she is informed that she has a living aunt who had chosen to never visit or even reveal herself to Ida. Before taking her vows, her superior instructs Ida that she must try to meet her aunt. Ida did not know of her aunt’s existence and only goes on the visit because she is told she must. The film is about the mysteries between Ida and her aunt, as they are embedded in the Poland of the recent past. It touches troubling issues, the Holocaust and its memory, Polish suffering in and responsibility for those dark times, and Jewish responsibility for Stalinism. All this runs through the specific relationships between Ida and her aunt, their family and their Polish neighbours.

In its form as well as its content, the film remembers. Released in 2014, the action takes place in the early 1960s, and the dramatic focus is on events that happened during and soon after the Second World War. It is filmed in black and white, and has the look and feel of films made in the 1960s, comparable to the early films of the great Polish film makers of that period, Roman Polanski and Andrzej Wajda. Indeed, the action moves slowly and at times the beauty of the cinematography resembles exquisite still-life photography, of Polish fields, roads, thatch-roofed peasant houses, and expressive faces. The storyline is straightforward, with formal realism, but the images are too fine to actually seem real. In the storytelling and the filming an austere minimalism prevails, drawing us back in time.

Not surprisingly, given that it covers some very difficult memory problems, Ida has been criticised from multiple directions, as anti-Polish and anti-Jewish, as well as for its aesthetic. The minimalism has been confused with thinness. The story of a Polish family that saved a Jewish one, until it decided it could not do so any longer and murdered all but the infant daughter, Ida, has been condemned as anti-Polish. The portrait of the aunt, as a Jewish anti-Nazi, Communist partisan turned Stalinist prosecutor turned cynic, who drinks too much, sleeps around too freely, and takes full advantage of her privilege, too neatly fits the anti-Semitic stereotype of Żydokomuna (the Jewish Commune). Critics worry what others might think of the focus on this story and these characters. The film has been condemned because the murdering Polish family is taken to be representative of Poles, the Jewish aunt, of Jews. Yet the concreteness of the specific individuals and their stories, and the specific fates of these stories, enable the viewer to remember tragic history and illuminate the dimensions of its tragic outcomes. It creates a field of memory, which reveals much that is forgotten in the Polish-Jewish memory conflicts, made possible by the art of the film.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was conceived in the then still-fresh aftermath of a controversial war. The conception, creation and on-going significance of the Memorial as a significant social creation responds to the social condition as it applies to the memory of a war. It in fact has changed the way wars are remembered and has proved to be a model for how societies memorialise and commemorate difficult pasts.¹² Among the co-creators have been the Pentagon (which originally proposed a modest plaque at Arlington National Cemetery), Congress, Vietnam War veterans, promoting a memorial, then protesting its radical design, the United States Commission of Fine Arts that set out the guidelines for the memorial and chose the design for the project, the designer of the now famous black wall, Maya Lin, those who lobbied for and against the memorial, creating modifications of Lin’s design by adding more traditional elements, and the public’s extraordinary response to Lin’s Memorial.¹³

The memorial was built with ambivalence, shared both among the general public and the officials who promoted it. Because of the war’s unpopularity, the returning soldiers had not been officially recognised for their service. The Memorial was created to right this wrong. The goal was to recognise what distinguished this war from all other American wars – a defeat, broadly unpopular, polarising the public – but simultaneously to recognise the ways it was similar; primarily, there was great sacrifice, with tens of thousand killed and wounded, and many more enduring the war’s traumas. Also, as in previous American wars, a significant part of the public understood the war as having been just, supporting it to the end and continuing to support it to this day. Conflicting judgements of the relationship between the veterans’ service and the war’s cause led to the creation of this unusual memorial. The design embraced and represented these tensions, but at the same time, somehow has managed to reconcile them, even as they have continued to be present. Thus, not the Vietnam War Memorial but rather the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, with the service remembered and honoured, while the specifics of the war are not present. These specifics are ultimately brought to the memorial by the public, as they have been differently remembered.

Despite the plan to heal and avoid inflaming the wounds of the war on the body politic, the memorial at first provoked great controversy. Maya Lin won the blind competition for her design. The arts panel was drawn to its minimalism and its subtle formal aesthetic, and the way it addressed the guidelines from beginning to end with elegance. Many patriotic Americans, vocal veterans of the war among them, objected to the unconventional design; non-representational, horizontal instead of vertical, non-heroic, or perhaps even anti-heroic, not hard and masculine, even soft and feminine in its implications. Pressure from the public and from political leaders insisted on changes in the design. There was give and take. Following protests, a conventional sculpture of soldiers, heroic, though apparently exhausted and also un-uniformed, was added; women were included and the flag stands high adjacent to Lin’s memorial. Yet in the give and take of the protest, the added elements were placed adjacent to and not within the monument, and did not as Lin had feared compromise her conception, or its life as a living work of art addressed to the social condition.

The memorial is striking in its simplicity, designed for a specific corner of the national mall, composed to the contours of the topography, and its position between the Washington and Lincoln Memorials, a monument composed of the names of the Americans who died in the war. In each instance Lin’s minimalism yielded the aesthetic and social power of her design. She eloquently illuminated her intentions in creating her masterpiece in an article written soon after the completion of the memorial, but published years after, in 2000.

She explains her starting point:

‘I wanted to create a memorial that everyone would be able to respond to, regardless of whether one thought our country should or should not have participated in the war.’ Wanting the memorial to fit into the contours of the Washington Mall and its natural beauty and symbolic importance, she worked with the setting not against it; ‘I had a simple impulse to cut into the earth.’ And further:

And finally she notes her response to the work as a visitor to the memorial:

Beloved, Ida, and The Vietnam Veterans Memorial each address a difficult past, which involves memory disputes concerning what is remembered and what is forgotten. These works do not resolve memory conflicts, but they do make it possible to see them in a new light, to feel about them differently, to embrace alternative points of view, to live with and against them in surprising ways. They present a crack in encrusted memories, making it possible to look around and see things differently together, as was Lin’s self-conscious intention.

While not all art accomplishes this and while there are other ways to confront the problems of memory and forgetting, art’s critical autonomy, as Adorno illuminated, and its endurance, as Arendt highlighted, do provide an opening for such accomplishment (Goldfarb, 1983, 1998).

A most vivid account of art’s autonomy comes from the pen of the novelist, Milan Kundera. In his Art of the Novel (2003), he declared that the only responsibility a novelist has is to answer the questions raised by Cervantes. In this declaration, Kundera is criticising those who expect or want the novelist to hold one political, social or moral position or another, who celebrate such achievements. He knows that writers do apply their art in this fashion, but underscores that to be a novelist one needs to write novels, not political tracts, social manifestos or ethical theses. To be a novelist one can be concerned with all sorts of things, but ultimately one must write novels. The same applies to other art forms: theatre, dance, performance, painting, sculpture, poetry, film, video, and so on. The art form is created and developed through time, artists responds to previous creativity and development and share their work with their contemporaries. This is the cultural freedom in the arts (and sciences for that matter), a free, on-going conversation of artists with their predecessors and contemporaries, keeping traditions of art alive and dynamic and forming publics around artistic practices, composed of and for other artists and critics, as well as broader publics (Goldfarb, 1983).

Art demonstrates its autonomy when it follows the logic of its formal invention. This was the central observation of Theodor Adorno and his Frankfurt School colleagues.¹⁴ Art’s critical potential is associated with this observation. When the arts develop following their own imperatives, they do so apart from the functionalities of the institutions of systemic social reproduction, both of the state and of the economy; that is, as long as art develops freely, the logic of its development, creation and appreciation offers an alternative to the logic of capitalism and the state. And as we have seen here, it also offers an alternative to the logic of prevailing and contested collective memories.

To fully appreciate this, it is important to also recognise the position of Hannah Arendt that art’s endurance through time keeps this alternative open. She offers a different, but complementary perspective on the critical attributes of art and how it can enrich collective memory about difficult pasts. For Arendt, art is non-instrumental work. Its deep cultural significance lies in its uselessness. It is work as an end in itself, creating artefacts in the world beyond utility, tools without specific purpose. Through such work, a world of meaningful artefacts is created. Through such work, when it endures, cultures persist and develop through time. Through such work, the distinctively human world is created (Arendt, 1998).

Exactly what Morrison’s critic, Stanley Couch, missed makes it so that Beloved does this work and makes an enduring contribution to remembering the difficult past of slavery. It is Morrison’s artistry that makes the novel a novel, not a polemic to remember the suffering of slavery and the texture of the suffering, the way it poisoned the relationship between men and women, parents and children. We return to the novel because it is a work of art. It is hard to imagine future novelists not reading and responding to the work, future readers of literature ignoring it. Although we may be mistaken in this, it is the accomplishment of its writing, how it responded to novels past (ironically Couch noticed this as well) and will serve as an inspiration or a foil for novels in future. It creates a part of our cultural world that is not defined by political or economic imperatives, and also, crucially for us here (please note, beyond the position of the critical theorists), beyond the clichés of one-dimensional collective memory.

Ida also opens memory through art. The film’s beauty, the poignancy of the drama between Ida and her aunt, the sympathetic and complex ways the Polish family accounts for its treatment of Ida and her family, the equally complex and sympathetic ways Ida’s aunt’s communist convictions and disillusionment are portrayed, ending with her suicide, Ida’s apparent turn from her upbringing and Catholic beliefs, and her return to the Church, all filmed in rich shades of grey, makes for a great film, very much in the tradition of classic films past, Polish, Central European and beyond. It challenges memory clichés of the Polish patriot and anti-anti-Semitic, suggesting alternatives.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, too, is a response to memorials past, and has fundamentally challenged the memorial as a human artefact. Its formal innovations and excellence, responding to the demands of conflicting memories, the physical and symbolic environment in which it is located and the artistic and architectural formal traditions, makes it one of the great public art works of the twentieth century. And this is revealed in the work itself, for the professional critics and judges that originally awarded Lin with the commission. But even more significantly, it becomes clear by the way the work continues to attract visitors, how they use it, with tens of thousands of people leaving meaningful objects to mark the name of a loved one or to just pay respect (all of which has been collected and is now housed in a special warehouse). Notably, the visitors to the memorial site visit the wall in silence or speak in hushed tones, while they speak more loudly and more openly pose for photos and selfies in the part of the site made up of the more conventional sculpture and the American flag. Lin’s work has become a sacred space for people to remember together, differently, about a difficult past. This could only be accomplished through a work of art.

I have written this piece following the conventions of academic writing, purposively avoiding the first person singular. I have done this in respect for the editors of this special issue and with respect for a scholarly form. Yet I cannot help but conclude on a more personal note, as a way of highlighting the theoretical argument of this inquiry.

I take personally the problems of collective memory of slavery and its aftermath, Polish-Jewish relations in the twentieth century, and the Vietnam War. As an American, I am necessarily involved in the problems of remembering slavery. As a Jew, with family from Poland, who has studied contemporary Polish politics and culture, ‘Polish-Jewish’ relations have been an important part of my professional and personal life. And as an American man of a certain age, I was subject to the draft during the Vietnam War, which significantly shaped my young-adult life. In each of these cases, the difficulty of remembering together about a difficult past very much includes me. I have struggled along with my friends, colleagues and compatriots.

Like many American citizens today, I have no direct ties with slavery, my ancestors were neither victims nor perpetrators. They then were in what is now Ukraine and Russia, until some made it out in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. But as a citizen of the American Republic and indeed as an individual in American society, I am still very much implicated. I was socialised and hold a position in American society as a white person. Whether I understand this as important to my personal identity or not, in my daily life people respond to me as white, and my life has been shaped by the racist practices that developed after the Civil War. Coates, in making the case for reparations, demonstrates how real-estate practices and mortgages, available to returning GIs after the Second World War, favoured whites, in a variety of different ways blocking African-Americans from acquiring real property. I grew up in a house that was so acquired. My relatively good primary and secondary schooling, which, combined with my family’s relatively low income, led to a subsidised state-university education, which led to my fellowship at the University of Chicago and my position at The New School for Social Research. All this was a consequence of the mortgage for a home purchase that an African-American of my father’s age was not likely to receive. Morrison’s re-remembering of slavery and its legacies, highlighting how hard it is to confront a deeply problematic past, is a project of collective remembering of which I am part. Her art brings me in and, in fact, brings in anyone who has to remember any difficult past, for hers is a great novel and not a political tract. She helps us not only re-remember slavery but also to understand re-remembering a painful past as a human imperative. The task is of remembering again in a different way, in light of one’s own experience, confronting the fundamental dilemmas of memory as it is embedded in social life, that is, confronting the social condition of memory.

When I went to Poland in the early 1970s to do my dissertation research on theatre and their publics, I did not understand how problematic the relationship between Poles and Jews had been (Goldfarb,1980). I have since told the story of my discovery of and experiences with these complexities (Goldfarb, 2012). A colleague, David Plotke, on reading my account, offered a startling observation, comparing collective memory in the United States and Poland. Plotke observed that ‘Poles’ tell themselves about themselves and their histories, and ‘Jews’ tell themselves about themselves and their histories, apart from each other, seeming to have little or no overlap, even as they have lived in close proximity for centuries. In contrast, Americans, black and white, left and right have struggled over the meaning of the American experience, of slavery, the civil war and their aftermaths, but they do agree upon what the crucial events are and how they are related. Ida addresses this situation. I particularly appreciate that it tells the tragedy of the Polish and the Jewish stories together. It does not resolve the problem Plotke noted, but it makes it visible. Going further, through its artistic achievement, it forces us to see the problem clearly.

Although most of my friends and acquaintances avoided the draft and military service in Vietnam, I knew people who served, and one high-school classmate who died in the war. I thought of him when I first visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I also thought of my years as an anti-war activist and as a person not as brave as my friends who went to jail for their draft resistance. I had plans to flee to Canada, which in the end proved to be unnecessary. As I was completing my graduate education, a couple of years after the war’s end, I had the opportunity to teach a course on social problems in America to a group of army captains and majors, who were on their way to teach officer training courses at American universities and colleges. They were open to me, belying my concerns that they would not be.

The tragedy of the war, its brutality and futility, the way it polarised American society, are all very much part of my lived experience. And thus I marvel at Lin’s memorial design, the way it makes it possible for us to remember together despite our differences, even as we remember different things. I can imagine arranging a meeting with my former students, talking to them at the site, though of course, not at the wall. We would have been able to share our different kinds of memories, our different takes on the war’s development and end, our recognition of the loses and of competing principles, and we would have been able to take stock of how all of this has affected our lives now.

Art does not only open up ways to see how memory and forgetting work differently among groups that share much in common, but also much that is not common. Art informs memory beyond clichés. It opens us to the social condition of memory, not providing easy lessons, but rather questions, alternative understandings and commitments. Enriching collective memory, art can, as Beloved, Ida and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial do, bring people together, making it possible to speak and act in each others’ presence in our differences, as they deal with dilemmas of social life. It also opens up the possibility of a more democratic political life, confronting the social condition of memory of difficult pasts in ways that make it less likely that the pasts will repeat themselves.¹⁵

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.