Last week I watched the recent Ken Burns series, U.S. and the Holocaust, which is an incredible and heart wrenching work, and also an artifact of remembrance. It delivers the familiar facts of the holocaust with fresh weight, but then adds many new layers and details, new for me anyway. I could only bear to watch it in small increments, so it took me a while to get through it, and then afterwards I finally got around to reading an Atlantic article that had been sitting out on my nightstand for a while about how Germany remembers and memorializes the holocaust, contrasting this to how we in the United States (mostly have not) reckoned with our nation’s role in slavery and genocide. It was this article that made me see the Ken Burns work itself as a remembrance, and to understand that a film can exist as a monument just as much as any physical structure can.
Sometime during the same week I also saw a headline about Ron DeSantis’s crusade in Florida to ban “woke” books and restrict how schools can teach students about African slavery and the Civil Rights movement and pretty much anything related to black history. And this struck me as the exact opposite of remembrance.
All this got me thinking about the question of remembrance more broadly. When people advocate for remembrance, or when cretins like DeSantis push back against it, what exactly are people wrestling with? What is the purpose of remembrance with something like the holocaust, or slavery, or the genocide of indigenous peoples? And what does it mean to resist or oppose it?
When we build monuments to the holocaust, of course we do it to honor the victims. Many of the jews who were murdered by the Nazis left behind simple testimonies to their own existence—in buried notes, smuggled letters, scratches on walls. In many cases the message was simply, “I was here. I existed,” and it was clear the author expected to die within months or weeks. In many of the notes there was an explicit plea to be remembered, and so we can think of physical monuments and works like the Ken Burns series as fulfilling their stated wishes, if modestly.
We also want to remember the perpetrators in a certain way—as an object lesson perhaps, a kind of caution. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” as the phrase goes.
But what does this mean exactly? Or, how does it work? How exactly does remembrance help us avoid repeating the mistakes of the past? I was thinking about this as I watched the Ken Burns series and as I read the Atlantic article. I wondered what role most of us might actually play in avoiding the mistakes of the past. What exactly does remembrance instill in us to act as a backstop?
One familiar narrative is that remembering history will help us recognize ominous signs in our leaders and institutions while there’s still time to act. This is probably true, although it feels pretty abstract to me. History is riddled with people who saw the signs but rationalized them, or who failed to grasp that the slow drip drip drip of evil was gathering into a stream that would become an unstoppable river. In the Ken Burns series, historian Deborah Lipstadt says at one point, “The time to stop a holocaust is before it happens.” And indeed the film makes it clear just how impossible it became for the world to stop the Nazi killing machine once Germany had achieved enough military strength. By 1942, there was no stopping the extermination of European Jews without first defeating Germany in all out war, and then most of the killing occurred in just a nine-month period of 1942-43 when German power was at its height.
So we must see the signs while there’s still time to act, but what is it in us that recognizes something as a sign? And what does it mean to act? My experience of watching the Ken Burns series was literally gut wrenching—as in I felt my chest tighten and my stomach turn, repeatedly. Tears welled up in my eyes, repeatedly. My physical body recoiled from what it was showing me, and that’s when I felt like I had an answer to those questions.
The discomfort I felt was important. I could feel it stirring a new resolve inside me to commit to goodness, compassion, and reason. I had understood on some level, but now I felt in in my guts the the significance of what it means to embody love. I recognized this expansion in myself because I have experienced it before, but I had never reflected so carefully on what was stirring it or what it was telling me.
The sentiment that our own suffering expands our capacities for empathy and compassion is implicit in works by the social philosophers who emerged from the holocaust—Viktor Frankl, Elie Wiesel, Hannah Arendt, and others. And we continue to hear it from individuals who survive traumas and draw from their experience the inspiration to teach. “If my sharing this can help just one person,” they say.
It’s ironic that the anti-woke crusade has produced legislation intended specifically to protect students from feeling “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress,” because it’s the experience of discomfort that truly transforms us. Through experiencing discomfort, our capacity to recognize ominous signs becomes a thing that happens in our very bodies. We become people who physically recoil at even the smallest acts of cruelty. We speak up and act because we find cruelty difficult to tolerate, physically difficult. That’s how we avoid repeating the mistakes of history.
Maybe the true purpose of remembrance is to deliver discomfort without actually putting us in danger, because we need discomfort if we are to transform.