SOURCE: Caute, David. “Guilt-Edged Comforts.” Spectator 282, no. 8894 (23 January 1999): 34-5.

In the following review, Caute delineates the role of memory in The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness.

Among the most thriving branches to have sprouted from the fecund trunk of historical studies is the one called Memory. History, of course, is about remembering, but the study of the collective memory—normally patriotic and piously self-justifying in holy texts, poems, museums and memorials—has recently gained impetus from an increasingly fashionable political project: to force a defeated opponent not merely to surrender his pennant but to crap on it in the same motion.

This is done with the most saintly of smiles: it's called Truth and Reconciliation. The victors of Versailles post-1918 and Nuremberg post-1945 had not thought of it: Germans were required to hand over material reparations, cede provinces and offer certain necks to the hangman. They...