Through the wars

History I'm keeping myself busy. Before going over to a friend's hall for a drink last night (my Dad would be proud - I was on the red wine) I attended this lecture about how time and other factors effects the memory that people have of war. It was given by a Professor Sandro Portelli, who has published a few books and the crux of the talk was that...

"memory is not just a mirror of what has happened, it is one of the things that happens, which merits study', continuing to say 'oral sources tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing and what they now think they did.'" [from]

The item which really struck me was his description of how Germans have moved on from the wars but also how their memory of what has occured has subtely changed. The professor quoted a survey in which a group of Germans were asked who bombed them during the Second World War. The vast majority said, 'The Nazis'. They apprently couldn't conceive that the liberators would be the ones who also decimated some of their cities. Human psychology is a complicated thing.