For a Creative Memory: remembering the Holocaust

Historical memory is formed by individual memories, which along the time become a collective heritage. This process has ethical and social implications. In October 1998 the German writer Martin Walser defined the memory of Auschwitz "a compulsory exercise", conditioning the collective consciousness of the Germans. His statements raised a strong debate. Remembering the past is a public phenomenon, because everybody's memory creates a representation of the general history. But this can also produce a manipulation of the past, since emotions may affect the collective memory. The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur has repeatedly recalled the need that memory can do its 'work', that is gaining a full awareness of the event's sense, to turn the human pain into a memory healed from the history's wounds. For this reason we need a creative memory as a free exercise of ethical maturity and moral generativity. Instead of forgiveness, which is not always possible, a creative memory could be the best response against oblivion.