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It is easy to see why people who believe that the human story ends with death and who do not hope for the Last Judgment or the Final Reconciliation would want to remember forever—or at least as long as humanity lasts. The sentiment Elie Wiesel expressed in his testimony at the Barbie trial (1987) is argument enough for such a stance: "Justice without memory is incomplete justice, false and unjust. To forget would be an absolute injustice in the same way that Auschwitz was the absolute crime. To forget would be the enemy's final triumph." Even if full justice could be achieved, it would not be enough, states Wiesel. For though justice vindicates, it is unable to bring the dead back to life. Memory does that, in a sense—it gives back life to those who are dead because it refuses to let them be effaced from memory as they have been torn from the land of the living. To remember is to deny the perpetrator ultimate triumph. Hence the obligation to remember "always."

If I did not hope in the world to come, I would embrace the "eternal" remembering of wrongs suffered. But I do hope in the world to come. I believe that we will be living with those who have died, not as with the dead but as with the living, looking into their eyes and not just remembering their past. Given this conviction, what moral obligation would there be to remember wrongs suffered eternally? After full justice has been done and final reconciliation accomplished, and after the dead are raised, will we need memory to keep victims "alive" and attend to their suffered wrongs? Will not they themselves be masters of the memory of their sufferings? Will they somehow transgress against themselves and others if they no longer remember there, in that permanent world of perfect love, which has come about after the Final Reconciliation? I do not think so.

Let me press the point a bit further. Would it not be right to ask those who in that world wanted to hold onto memories of evil suffered and committed why they wanted to do so (note: not those who could not let go of these memories but who wanted to hold onto them)? What function would those memories serve in a secure world of perfect love? If those who wanted to keep such memories alive were the perpetrators, would we be wrong in suspecting that they could not forgive themselves for what they had done and therefore needed living memories to keep blaming themselves? If they were the victims, would it not be likely that they wanted to hold onto these memories because they cherished resentment against perpetrators or at least wanted to hold it in reserve? If we remembered wrongs suffered in a secure world of perfect love, might not our memory be doing the bidding of the desire for revenge—either on ourselves or on others? Conversely, would there not be in that world something right about Nietzsche's coupling of nobility and obliviousness to wrongs suffered?

But, some may protest, justice demands that we remember eternally, and that is reason enough to remember. "Forget the past and it will be as if it never happened" is the advice of the evil Mephistopheles to Faust after he has abandoned Margarete, or, as he often calls her, Gretchen. Even if Gretchen and Faust were to reconcile and to inhabit a world of love, would it not be in some deep sense unjust toward both of them for non-remembrance to make Faust's abandonment "never to have happened"? He, the wrongdoer, would be thought of as though he were innocent, and she, the wronged, would be thought of as though she had not been harmed. The offense would have then been completely dissociated from the offender, and its harm would have been completely dissociated from the one who was offended. Would this not falsify their relationship? Would not this falsification be unjust—conveniently unjust to Faust and distressingly unjust to Gretchen? By what right would we detach the wrongdoing even from a judged, repentant, and transformed wrongdoer?

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May (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51