From the Editor

Abstract

From the Editor José Brunner As we know, modern societies have developed a broad spectrum of practices to preserve the memory of their past. They impose a history curriculum on pupils, store documents in archives, build museums and proclaim official days of remembrance. In all these instances they seek not only to provide information about a world that no longer exists, but also to produce narratives of past events and experiences, giving them present meaning and pointing to future ramifications. Literature constitutes a less formal and more imaginary way of resuscitating the past, giving it a fictional new life and narrative meaning. In the first contribution to this issue, Nathan Bracher analyzes a striking phenomenon in the French literary scene: the recent appearance of a number of prominent historical novels and narratives of World War II, which, along with an account of traumatic events, relate their authors’ own quest to reveal the truth about the past and explore its meaning for the present. Describing these novels as written in the “first-person present imperfect,” Bracher refers both to the fact that this past is not yet entirely over or complete and to the narrator’s deep involvement in this history. The following two contributions deal with problems in narrating the First World War in contemporary Britain, which also arise from the involvement of the narrators in the history they wish to relate. Catriona Pennell discusses the ways in which the history of the war is taught in English secondary schools and investigates the consequences of such narratives for British society. Marlene A. Briggs analyzes the transcribed oral history of “Harry” Patch, The Last Fighting Tommy, in order to reveal the psychic and social dimensions of trauma in the testimonies of Great War veterans. She points to the ways in which such oral histories may contradict established versions of the experience of the war and shed light on reconstructions of memory after trauma The analysis also raises broader questions about the reception of the First World War in Britain today. [End Page 1] It may seem, perhaps, that questions relating to narrative entanglements, omissions and emphases are more relevant to literary representations, history teaching and oral accounts of the past than to the collection and storage of testimonies in archives. But Ari Joskowicz’s exploration of the ways in which testimonies of the Romani Holocaust are often provided by Jewish survivors or stored in archives dedicated to the Jewish Holocaust is a striking example of how one minority controls a large portion of the public memories of another. Noah Shenker examines how the distinct archival techniques and testimonial methodologies that the USC Shoah Foundation Institute developed for recording the testimony of Holocaust survivors may affect our understanding of other genocides and the fate of their victims, in this case those of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. He argues that although the transfer of these methodologies to the Cambodian context may obscure the historical and cultural specificities of the Cambodian genocide, they can nonetheless contribute to the documentation of that event. Thus, while the first three contributions to this issue analyze the effects of present personal, political or social entanglements on the way history is narrated, the latter two essays analyze their effects on the techniques and methods deployed to record and store testimonies about the past. [End Page 2] Copyright © 2016 The Trustees of Indiana University