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Bad memories

Timothy Garton-Ash
  20th August 1997  —  Issue 22
From Germany after Nazism to South Africa now, countries and individuals have had to cope with difficult pasts. Timothy Garton Ash considers the labyrinth of public and private memory and the tricks that it plays. He argues that the opening of old wounds can help to close them

The sentence “we all have bad memories” can be interpreted in two ways: “we all have memories of things that we found horrible or embarrassing” or “our memory is intrinsically weak, leading us to forget or misremember.” The two may be connected. We have a bad memory for bad memories.

Evoking German attitudes to war and the Nazi period, James Fenton wrote:

How comforting it is, once or twice a year,

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By Timothy Garton-Ash

Timothy Garton Ash is the author of History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Despatches from Europe in the 1990s (Penguin) to be published in Spring 1999.

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