Thus begins Harald Weinrich's discussion of Dante's restoration of the memory of the dead in his book on forgetting. In this paragraph, Weinrich establishes three basic points that bear on the subject of historical memory. First, the link between memory and the human condition, which comes down, in essence, to the evidence that to be human is to fight not against death (which is a survival strategy common to all living creatures) but against extinction, which only humans are capable of comprehending. To struggle against extinction involves resisting obliteration after the catastrophe of death has taken place. And this is of course what the Dantean characters do in the beyond, when they entreat the Christian poet to remember their stories. Short of undoing death, the poet may hold back their disappearance at the cost of immortalizing their suffering. Thus, they meet their punishment in their own desire to become images of horror for all eternity.

The second point is that the rituals of burial (and, we should add, of mourning) are meant to ensure the smooth departure of the dead; in other words, to sever their emotional entanglement with the living and to secure their status as images in memory. And the third point is the role that certain public acts of memory fulfill in the body politic, warning the living not to forget, or vice versa, stimulating oblivion so that life, a certain quality of life, “can go on.”