In the ongoing flood of studies
of memory in its manifold forms and meanings, the no less powerful subject of
forgetting tends to be forgotten. We often think of forgetting as a passive
process, something that simply “happens” to us and to other living beings; but
many of the studies in this inter-disciplinary volume reveal the active and
even creative nature of forgetting, its positive features, and its varied roles
in a wide series of cultural and intercultural templates. Neuroscientists
joined with historians, philologists, a linguist, philosophers, sociologists
and anthropologists, an archaeologist and an artist in the two joint workshops
that generated this volume, under the auspices of the Zukunftskolleg at the
University of Konstanz and the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. The lively exchanges in the workshops are reflected in
the comments and discussion that follow many of these experimental, meditative
essays.