On why it is not enough to know your past

I saw a disturbing video the other day. It was of a young Turkish female Ph.D.-student, Romeyza Ozturk, surrounded and arrested by masked men claiming to be from ICE, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Her crime, apparently, was that she had written a piece calling for more attention to the Palestinian situation. The video – more resembling a kidnapping than an arrest – made me physically uncomfortable. It reminded me of what we sometimes see happening in non-democratic countries or something from another time. But my visceral reaction wasn’t from reading about similar historical events in textbooks. It came from a deeper, embodied recognition. This distinction between knowing about the past versus feeling its resonance in the present is at the heart of how we engage with history.

In Denmark, we have a saying that “those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” The saying is a mistranslation of the philosopher George Santayana. In the Life of Reason in 1905 wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

While many Danish history teachers have used the mistranslation as an underlying argument for spamming students with historical facts, the mistranslation calls into question the difference between history and memory. Santayana’s original quote points to a different way of engaging with the past, stressing actual remembrance over mere knowledge.

The same division between history and memory can be found in Pierre Nora’s monumental three-volume work Realms of Memory, where he juxtaposes the abstract historical with cultural memory.

The historical, he says, separates us from the past. History belongs to everyone and no one, stripping events of their sacred context and emotional resonance to place them within a universal, chronological framework. While valuable for analysis, this intellectual distance creates a gap between ourselves and the lessons of the past, potentially letting us study past horrors without truly feeling their warnings.

Cultural memory, on the other hand, lives and evolves within communities. It connects us to the past through rituals and emotional bonds. Memory keeps past events relevant to our present. To avoid repeating mistakes, we need more than historical knowledge. We need the past alive in our collective memory, guiding our moral choices today. In this sense, the past must also be a living present to hold significance for us.

If we want to avoid letting our past become a history of forgetting, it is not enough to learn the history of the past or preserve the knowledge of what happened. If we are to learn from the past, we need to design our interactions with it so that it is invoked as a part of the present.

This calls for entanglement rather than the intellectual, distancing gaze.
This calls for collective rituals rather than tomes of knowledge.
This calls for performative encounters rather than mere replication.

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