Between “Never Forget” and the Bending of History

As a journalist in New York City, Andrew Bernstein had been planning to work the late shift on September 11, 2001, as the results of the mayoral primary election came in. Instead, she ended up rushing towards Lower Manhattan, interviewing waves of refugees from the Twin Towers, who described bodies jumping from the highest floors of the World Trade Center, the city’s tallest buildings that were collapsing in a tremendous plume of smoke and dust.

“Never forget!,” a phrase borrowed from the Holocaust, became the slogan of 9/11 and incorporated into the very conception of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. The words carried an implied faith that remembering could somehow inoculate humanity from repeating its horrors. But memory is neither a shield nor a vaccine. Walter Benjamin wrote in On The Concept of History: “Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate.”

Twenty years after 9/11, Bernstein reported on another attack: on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. “Despite reams of documentary evidence to the contrary,” Bernstein writes, “President Trump has used the term ‘hostages’ to describe the men and women who bludgeoned police officers with flag poles, crushed them in doorways and gouged their eyes. On his first day in office, he gave full pardons to nearly all the fifteen hundred demonstrators. He’s pushed scores of prosecutors and law enforcement who investigated the attacks out of government. No one who says that the 2020 election was fair can today hold an important administration post, or even a federal judgeship.”

We are living in an age when, as Hannah Arendt wrote, “the chances of factual truth’s surviving the onslaught of power are very slim indeed; it is always in danger of being maneuvered out of the world not only for a time but, potentially, forever.” And yet, Arendt also fervently believed in the ever-present possibility of better outcomes. Bernstein argues that America appears to be on a long slide towards erasing factual truth forever and asks, “What is the path back to truth, memory, facts, and historical understanding?”

This lecture is part of the event series “America at 250: What’s to Celebrate?” and a cooperation with the Einstein Forum