Are Places of Memory and Memories of the Past Useless?

Today's essay is one in a series of reflections from Sites of Conscience to mark the 10th anniversary of September 11, 2001. Each essay is the perspective of the author and does not necessarily reflect the views of the entire Coalition.

Are Places of Memory and Memories of the Past Useless? 

by The Peace School Foundation of Monte Sole

The 10th anniversary of 9/11 and the public commemoration around it become for us a new core moment of reflection. We are struck again by the possibilities and the pitfalls in the road to remembering tragic events.

In 1944, the hills of Monte Sole became a theater for the biggest Nazi massacre of civilians in western Europe. Now it is a place for remembering and learning about this history. So, at the Peace School Foundation of Monte Sole, we often ask ourselves:

What is the pedagogical role of places of memory?(1) How can we openly discuss war and violence at such places without justifying such violence? How can places remembering tragedies avoid becoming just a stop on the “dark tourism” route of memory?(2)

Memory, and in particular visiting places of memory, is generally seen as an effective tool to put an end to further violence, a talisman against the expression of evil. But if we look at the world today, it is impossible to say that various forms of violence are distant from the human experience.

Is memory useless then, or should we consider memory practices from a different point of view?

September 29th – October 5th 1944: The 16th Division of the SS carries out a military operation lasting seven days. Of approximately 800 casualties, almost all are Italian civilians, most of whom are children and women. The massacre has been planned in advance, and the slaughter of civilians is considered a part of anti-guerrilla activities.

The careful orchestration of this event makes it clear that the Monte Sole massacre is not the result of demoniac persons, or monsters acting on a whim, but of human beings, who chose to act in a specific way in a specific environment of which they were part. They cannot be divorced from their environment or the historic sequence of events that they lived through and which influenced them; their actions were self-determined.

Hence, we are rightly eager to condemn perpetrators. But we are used to defining perpetrators as inhuman, and many people choose to remember them this way. Turning perpetrators into "evil-doers" sets them apart from ourselves. We cannot ever imagine such evil existing within us.

It is easy to think this way. Nevertheless, as Tzvetan Todorov wrote, “If you want the past not to come back, to perform it is not enough.” (3)

That is to say, the narration of the horror is not enough to vaccinate against it. For example, describing the horrors of the Holocaust could not prevent massacres in the very heart of Europe, such as in the former Yugoslavia. And often, students who visit Monte Sole condemn the Nazi soldiers in one breath, while in the next support violence against various groups today.

So how useful is remembering the past? Can it help us examine and accept that good and evil start from the same source, the human being? This means that we must interrogate ourselves, because evil is not outside us in a far-away place; it is part of us. We have to try to understand, to hold down, to dominate evil, recognizing that it is in us, too.

At some places of memory, we have the opportunity to confront evil that was manifest at a specific time and place. But to use the power of these places as tools for education requires us to draw out the universal mechanisms that allow and lead to evil's expressions. Our analysis of histories shows us that propaganda, advertisements, mass media, education, stereotypes, discrimination, exclusion, racism, and dehumanization through images and language all help to create an “us” and a “them,” which enables violence to occur.

Therefore, for us, to educate through a place of memory means to bring to light the "continuum of violence" that exists in all human beings. Rather than an isolated aberration, violence has its premises and development process, starting from nothing and growing in intensity and scale. For us, education through a place of memory means an opportunity to make every individual conscious of his or her own possibility of choice along this continuum.

What are your thoughts on the importance of understanding how and why humans commit violent acts? Share them with us and the world by e-mail or on Facebook or Twitter (@sitesconscience).

This essay is a distillation of ten years' research by many people on many subjects: Coordinamento delle Associazioni per Monte Sole was the most important promoter and developer of the Peace School Foundation project (namely thanks to Nadia Baiesi and Maria Laura Marescalchi); the research group born from the course “Peace Theories and Practices” in 2004 (namely thanks to Elisa Coco, Francesca and Maria Chiara Patuelli, and Roberta Pellizzoli); the present educational working group of the Peace School (Marzia Gigli, Elena Monicelli, Mattia Seligardi and Elena Bergonzini, together with Francesca Coltellacci and Stefano Merzi).

(1) About the concept of “place of memory,” cfr. P. Nora, Entre mémoire et histoire, in Id. (sous la direction de), Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 1997) 15-43 (1st ed. 1984).

(2) About criticisms of "dark tourism," see for example G. Borghi, a high school Italian student, when he came back from Auschwitz in La memoria di un viaggio, ed. M. Bacchi, (Modena: Edizioni Artestampa e Fondazione, 2010), 74: “... what I felt more was anger, even if not well identified: anger towards the hypocrisy of the youngsters participating who are religiously silent and sad when they are in front of the crematory ovens but who are not doing anything to fight everyday fascism; anger towards the hypocrisy of the institutions that absolve themselves with celebrations, every day the same every day more empty; anger towards the silence that is around the extermination camps, the same silence that you have to have in churches, in cemeteries, to funerals; anger towards this duty. I, in Birkenau, was really willing to scream.” [our translation]

(3) Cfr. T. Todorov, Mémoire du mal, tentation du bien(Paris: Robert Laffont, 2000); our translation from trans. R. Rossi, Memoria del male. Tentazione del bene (Milano: Garzanti, 2001), 211.

The International Coalition of Sites of Conscience is a worldwide network of historic sites dedicated to remembering past struggles for justice and addressing their contemporary legacies. More about us.