As well as a more fine-grained historical analysis of the past, confronting our past requires addressing how we remember it. Remembering is an activity in the present oriented to the future. We cannot change the past, but we can change how we remember it.

Introduction

Today, politically charged issues of historical memory are widespread. Ethnic conflicts, intercommunal violence, colonial and civil wars stand out as historical situations of intense controversy and emotion. Several European states have passed laws criminalising denial of historical genocidal policies of Nazi and Communist regimes.

This chapter deals with a number of themes.

First, in addressing memory in its collective, social and public dimensions involving commemoration, silence or condemnation in relation to historical figures and events, we are not looking at historians’ work (Cubitt 2007; Cohen 1997). We (including historians) confront the past, not as historians, but as moral agents who must reckon with the impact of past events on our time. That impact affects our thinking, emotional attitudes, worldview and actions: it also shapes our sense of who we are historically, where we came from and where we are going.

Second, the dead are not answerable for how we remember them or what warrant for our actions we claim to find in their actions. Our relationship to the dead is complex. As rational moral agents, we must, in the matter of historical memory, be not so much critical of historical figures as self-critical with respect to our relationship to them.

Third, in relation to what is remembered, the core issue is why they are remembered in the particular way we remember them. At present, the trend is in the direction of expanding the list, particularly seeking to include groups traditionally excluded but whose exclusion is unacceptable today. The criterion for inclusion seems simple enough: they mattered in history, positively or negatively.