I looked in on this article because of the mounting expectation in some sections of the media wrt the forthcoming D-Day celebrations. I have people I call friends who are Germans and I am concerned that the Hitler years seem never to be forgotten -or at least put behind us. This article is by a German contemplating the same phenomenon; which is challenging in itself.
What is doubly interesting is towards the end when he posits a reason why this piece of history seems to refuse to lie down as history: photography and film; the images are kept always current because of 'modern' technology.
Indeed, what is it doing to our culture to have a different method of remembering our collective past than sotries and written documents? Indeed; is the self-referentiality of much fashion, popular music etc a product of the fact that collective memory is now held differntly to previously and that it is so young -relatively [what? -ninety years?] ? Is there anything to deliver us from it? Indeed - do we want to be delivered? Is our culture going to develop a short-time but very vivid memory? History is bunk except the stuff that got filmed?
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