Abstract

It takes a brave man to speak out against remembrance these days. Journalist David Rieff has identified remembrance as one of the pieties of our age and in this slim volume seeks to think through an alternative means of creating and sustaining justice when dealing with past tragedies, atrocities and wrongs. Rieff poses the question that what if remembrance does not help create a good and just society, but that forgetting has its role too? Here he sets himself against the zeitgeist for public commemoration and argues that ‘what ensures the health of societies and individuals alike is not their capacity for remembering but rather their capacity for eventually forgetting’. Review by Ben Wellings

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