“And in the Beginning There Was Oblivion”: The Role of Forgetting in Working through the Holocaust Trauma within Poetic Language

Odysseus, in The Odyssey, struggles not to forget Ithaca, the birthplace to which he strives to return. His encounters with the Lotus Eaters, Cirque, the Sirens, and Calypso were rites of passage in this struggle. In Homer, forgetting is of home and of homeland. As forgetting takes hold, personality risks disintegration. In this sense, the Homeric epic epitomizes the struggle of Western culture to immortalize memory as a central pillar of self-identity. Forgetting is commonly considered an attack on the reliability of memory, a deficiency in human ability to cope with reality, and an obstacle to overcome in the attempt to recollect. But is this view a faithful representation of the role of forgetting in molding the self? Or might forgetting have an active, essential role in establishing and maintaining self-identity?

The act of forgetting is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon. It has been defined in various ways by different paradigms, which attribute it diverse roles in relation to memory. In the following, I will examine the role of forgetting in coping with the memory of the Holocaust, as it is expressed in the poetic language of trauma.¹ Specifically, I argue for the existence of two types of forgetting in the aftermath of traumatic experience, each of which can also be usefully divided into two distinct subcategories: unintentional forgetting, which exists as both deep and shallow forgetting, and intentional forgetting, which may take place either in terms of erasure or cathartic forgetting. Though often considered to be a failure or malfunction, forgetting will be explored, through these four types and their representations in Holocaust texts, as a positive mechanism allowing the victim to map out, process, and at times let go of paralyzing traumatic memories.

In his book Oblivion, Marc Augé writes, “Memories are crafted by oblivion as the outlines of the shore are created by the sea. . . . [O]blivion is the life force of memory and remembrance is its product.”² This metaphor, in which oblivion is depicted as the sea and memory as the land, serves Augé to illustrate the outlines of memory, claiming that as the land is defined by the sea, so is memory defined by oblivion. By turning upside down what is considered to be foreground (land = memory) and background (sea = oblivion), Augé modifies the relationship between memory and forgetting and hence suggests a reconsideration of the discourse about memory by emphasizing the dialectic nature of the relationship between remembrance and forgetting.

In his essay “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” Friedrich Nietzsche writes about the significance of forgetting in a man’s as well as in a nation’s life. His main claim refers to two attributes of real-life memory: capacity and flexibility. Nietzsche claims that much as one cannot live without sleeping, it is impossible to live without forgetting. He seeks for the correct ratio of memory to forgetting:

To fix this degree and the limits to the memory of the past, if it is not to become the graved digger of the present, we must see clearly how great is the “plastic power” of a man or a community or a culture; I mean the power of specifically growing out of one’s self, of making the past . . . of healing wounds, replacing what is lost, repairing broken molds. . . . [W]e must know the right time to forget as well as the right time to remember; . . . that the unhistorical and the historical are equally necessary to the health of an individual, a community, and a system of culture.³

Following Nietzsche, one might claim that rigid memory might turn our future into a graveyard. For him, a flexible memory, namely, a memory that allows forgetting, enables reshaping one’s future and breaking away from one’s memory’s chains. In order to grow and mold a new future, one must undertake a different approach to memories of the past: active forgetting.

Another point of view concerning forgetting is the psychoanalytic paradigm. Here, forgetting mechanisms are studied not as...