Remembering the past is easy; the difficult part is forgetting

"Perhaps the only thing which a human being can completely forget is that which is unknown to him. And all other kinds of forgetting are no more than weaker forms of remembering."

With these words, a German friend of mine ended her review of a book about forgetting. Franziska Augstein was writing about a new book by Harald Weinrich entitled: Lethe: the Art and Criticism of Forgetting, and she found it rather unsatisfactory. In Germany of all countries, an argument in favour of the ars oblivionis, the art of obliterating the past, is not exactly what's needed.

As Augstein says, the book has come out at a moment when Germany is noisy with fresh disputes about what should be remembered and how. In Munich, the "Wehrmacht Exhibition" - revealing that it was not just the SS but the regular German army which took part in the slaughter of civilians in the Second World War - has run into frantic right-wing protest, although it was received with melancholy respect elsewhere in the country. "Many older people and those of later generations find the past a burden," she writes, "and would like it laid to rest among the archives. That may not be Weinrich's own view, but it is the view of the times in which 'Lethe' is reflected."

Weinrich's view, a high-faluting and self-consciously "literary" one, seems to be that remembering is a science but forgetting is an art. He explicitly makes an exception for the Holocaust, which should never be forgotten. But that exception would seem to knock a hole in his entire enterprise. All arguments in favour of remembering relate, in the end, to the absolute commandment that no detail, no relic of that supreme crime should be lost. It is the dark background against which all 20th century Europeans are recognised.

And yet forgetting is not just a blameable technique for escaping from pain and guilt. The most interesting remark I heard when I was at Cambridge was made by the young Jonathan Miller. A medical student at the time, he announced to me one day: "The main function of the central nervous system is to exclude the majority of impulses coming into it!" In other words, the entire cult of sensibility was unnatural. The efforts of all intellectuals, ever since the Romantic movement, had been to hold their minds open to every conceivable sense-impression, to miss nothing and forget nothing - but this was a violation of the way the human brain works. And, in the end, the man or woman who managed to achieve and then maintain this state of hyper-sensibility would be rewarded by nervous breakdown as all the overloaded fuses blew.

The power to forget, then, is in a crude way therapeutic. Nobody disputes that, or the pain that an implacable memory inflicts. When I was younger, I was for a time half in love with a woman afflicted with total recall. The worst of it was that she never abused her gift; it was only gradually that I became aware that she could repeat, word for word, anything that I or her other friends had ever said to her. Everything, every silly gesture or lost ticket or missed bus, was retained in that phenomenal head.

The good things were remembered too: the sweet moments in life, or the poems she read. But it was hard sometimes not to feel that, for her, behaving "normally" with other people was a process of continually forgiving them. It was as if she were the only self-aware human being in a herd of unreflecting animals. She longed for the art of oblivion, but could not learn it. Sometimes I think that she showed me the inner meaning of the myth of Cassandra, the doomed prophetess who could not forget a single detail of the future.

Most of the letters I get from you, the readers, are about remembering and forgetting. Usually they are about the moral choice between holding on to something in the past or letting it go. But the other day a reader in Western Australia told me about being "bushed" - about a place with the uncanny property of wiping memory.

She had gone to see an old mine and taken a short cut off the tarred road. Two hundred yards on, she stopped without the faintest idea of where she was or how she had got there. A few weeks later, she was comforting another woman who had just had the same experience in the same place. I have the same problem with the Meadows, the green space in the middle of Edinburgh. When I walk across them, I emerge the other side with absolutely no memory of crossing them - although I can perfectly recollect entering through the arch made from the jawbones of two whales.

More often, I get letters complaining about the refusal of parents to share memory. Almost always, this is about a war generation which remembers its past all too well - the Nazi camps, the years in Siberian slavery - but which has taken a conscious decision not to transmit it. This is not forgetting. Instead, it is an attempt to tie off the flow of memory. Why, parents asked themselves after the war, should their past darken and infect the minds of children who have the right to grow up in new times and places where such things are unimaginable? The case of Madeleine Albright was exactly this. The parents of that little girl who is now Secretary of State kept from her the fact that her family was Jewish and that many of them had perished in the Holocaust.

Was this wrong? Children do not have the right to know everything about their parents. At the same time, they do have a right to know that their own existence, as the children of survivors, is a special marvel. And withholding memory is often a sort of unadmitted transference. Those with terrible memories - killers as well as victims - long to be reborn as new people, free of nightmares. As that is impossible, they stage that innocent rebirth in their children. Sometimes it works. Often it does not. The thick silence of their parents about the Nazi past helped to drive young Germans to revolutionary politics in the 1960s.

In spite of Harald Weinrich and his praise of "Lethe", forgetting is not the only way to overcome memory. There are other strategies. One, as I have said, is silence - deciding that memory stops here. But a much wilder and more mystical strategy is to get oneself reborn - to become a new person whose memories belong to an older self who has passed away. East Germany did this on a collective scale. We remember the Nazi crimes, the Communist leaders said. But they were done by capitalist Ger-many, and we are socialist Germany.

Here in Britain it is Easter and election time. Thoughts of rebirth and forgetting are to the point. Both main parties ask us to perform miracles of forgetfulness. Tory election booms, the poll tax, lies about mad cows? Never heard of them. Winters of discontent, nationalisation, taxing the rich? News to me. But if this is an election inviting the British voters to lobotomise themselves and stop remembering what they remember perfectly plainly, then Mr Blair's invitation is more impressive than Mr Major's.

The Tories are perceived as the same old Tories, unchanged for nearly 20 years. Labour, on the other hand, is freshly New Labour. It has not forgotten its past, but it has escaped from those memories by rebirth - by becoming a different animal. Yes, we remember those sins, but they were committed by another party, that Old Labour which no longer exists.

You can call this a genuine conversion. The Book of Revelation says that sinners who overcome will be given a white stone, and in the stone a new name written. Or you can call it a neat stroke of political surgery, disconnecting old memories from the pain cells. For myself, I think it's certainly neat - but a trifle East German.