However this war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world will not believe him. . . . people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed.
... We will be the ones to dictate the history of the Lagers.
SS man, cited by Simon Wiesenthal, in Primo Levi,
The Drowned and the Saved
Utopian visions combine hopes for an idyllic future with recollections of a mythical past; they are also about wiping out the reality and memory of the present in order to facilitate the creation of a new world no longer haunted by ancient nightmares and lingering nostalgia. The construction of utopia requires radical mental and physical measures, geared not only toward the future but also to a reorganization of the past. Holy war or social revolution, for instance, even while they strive to change present reality, derive their image of an ideal future from a selective representation of history, where both that which should be restored and that which must be destroyed are to be found. This in turn makes for the centrality of historical records, their keepers and interpreters. To be sure, memory and erasure are not only the outcome of conscious and willed acts of man but also of chance and nature. Yet the discourse of utopia often refers to precisely those past events whose disastrous consequences had ensured the destruction of their records, leaving behind only scattered remains and traumatic recollections. Thus if utopia is about radically changing the past, it does so both by material eradication and by erasure of memory; it therefore suffers from both chronic and self-induced amnesia, while legitimizing and sustaining itself by means of vivid, but highly selective memories.
Such memories are contained not only in historical documents and personal recollections but also in collections of artifacts. For utopia’s ambivalent relationship with the past concerns both a desire to overcome it and a need to retain a link to it, if only so as to manifest its own superiority. But this competition between past and future cannot avoid a measure of nostalgia, since the collected remnants of the past are by their very nature the last symbols of a lost world, acting as the agents provocateurs of a forbidden longing for preutopian existence. Yet utopias cannot desist from collecting and presenting such relics, even when they serve as evidence of the present’s murderous roots. Thus the Nazis began collecting material for a museum of Judaica even as the Holocaust was in progress so as to document their triumph over Germany’s most evil, repulsive enemy; precisely because the Jews were to be wiped off the face of the earth, the public had to be provided with the Nazi version of their past existence. Similarly, Goebbels arranged for an exhibit of “degenerate art” before stowing away some of Germany’s greatest modernist works. In this manner Germans were shown one last time what would never be seen again, that is, reminded of what must no longer be remembered: that so-called Nazi art was a cultural throwback made possible by massive erasure, just as Jewish life in Eastern Europe had been so thoroughly erased that its only surviving echo remains in Polish ethnic museums representing a long forgotten and exotic people that had once inhabited the land.
Collections of remnants of the past have served many other regimes to glorify their own accomplishments and demonstrate their greater proximity to current ideals, while simultaneously provoking nostalgia for a mythical past. Communists often resorted to an arsenal of nationalist sentiments in periods of crisis. Thus Stalin encouraged references to Holy Russia’s medieval wars against the Teutonic Order during the early phases of what was significantly called the Great Patriotic War of 1941—45, even if the Bolshevik revolution’s main slogan had been “destroy the old world and build up the new.” Nor could aesthetic sensibilities always entirely dismiss the great works of the past. The British and the French, for their part, filled vast museums with the riches of ancient empires looted from their colonies, even as they claimed to bring civilization to the “natives” and show them the path to Western utopia. The same Europeans who carried the “white man’s burden” thus became fascinated with African “primitivism” and Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Near Eastern, and pre-Columbian art, and expressed a longing to a presumed state of primeval harmony that they were in the process of destroying.
For utopia, the selective memory and erasure of past or competing utopias is crucial not least because attempts to create a perfect humanity often generate conflict, violence, and victims and therefore also potential counternarratives by witnesses and chroniclers. The memory of utopia is predicated on perspective, for in the process of carving out a place for itself in a world that denies it a site, utopia may resort to a violent overthrow of existing structures. Hence those who inhabit the newly created utopian space will necessarily perceive reality differently from those who had been bansished from it. In this sense one person’s utopia is another person’s hell. In our own century in particular, this mechanism has created a crisis of testimony and evidence, confronted as we are with a multiplicity of contradictory documents and memories all vying for attention with the kind of urgency and desperation characteristic of the extremity of the events they recall. Hence, too, the crisis experienced by historians, who find themselves torn between a hankering for the alleged objectivity of archival records and a sense that, however hard they toil, their reconstruction of the past will be dismissed or rejected by those whose perspective of the events cannot allow for the balanced narrative demanded by modern historiography. This, in turn, has led to the emergence of radical skepticism and historical relativity, for if the historian’s utopia is to tell the past as it really happened, the reaction to this utopia’s perceived failure is the assertion that the past can never be told, that it is, so to speak, not only a foreign country but a vast Tower of Babel in which each individual or group experiences the world through the prism of its own unique and untranslatable tongue.
The historian is therefore actively, albeit not always consciously, engaged in the creation of utopia, for it is the historian’s authority—dating back in some civilizations to early antiquity—that provides a picture of the past as a model for the future; it is the historian’s selection of episodes and personages from both a documented and a mythical past that determines what will be remembered and what will recede forever into oblivion, erased without a trace from the written annals of historical time. And while this is surely the case when we ponder the remote past, our own time, too, contains gaping black holes, the consequence of material destruction, tormented and distorted memories, or events whose nature defies representation and comprehension by means of conventional scholarship and fiction, art and philosophy. Thus individual and often inarticulate, inexpressible, and unstable memories are ultimately erased through the biological extinction of their carriers, without ever having been molded into a transmittable, even if selective narrative. Paradoxically, it is precisely thanks to the haphazard but unrelenting erasure of these memories that future utopias can be woven, whose fundamental outlines do not differ in any essential sense from those that had produced the necessary space of material and mental erasure on which they are built. And yet, if our current civilization has recently become so concerned with memory, it is because the shattered utopias of the past have profoundly undermined hope; and in order to dream of the future, we need to remember the past.