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Truth and Memory After Catastrophe: Historical Fact and the Historical Witness

Eric Hobsbawm's idea that the twentieth century is a ‘short century’, enclosed between the Great War and the end of the Cold War, characterizes this era as the age of extremes, or rather, as the century of catastrophes. The impact of the two World Wars flagged new questions for historians and it transformed the relationship between history and memory. The true hero of the age of extremes is the witness. His account is a public document that certifies the truth of which he is a bearer. But a witness cannot be completely objective while recounting something he has experienced. The mechanical fidelity is inhibited by the functioning of his memory, so he can easily forget and recreate what oblivion deletes and this creation never perfectly coincides with original reality. The event is, in fact, something that goes beyond the factual truth, because it is not expressible only in logical-rational terms. Historical witness account has not only merely a testimony function, that is, a sincere effort at truthful recollection of a real experience, but also a narrative function by which reconstructed memory is turned by a complex process into language and story. Finally, it is comprised of a relational link with the public which serves as a context for memory and narrative construction and as an independent assigner of meaning as well. Consequently, the memory of an event is not an exact copy, but a copy that contains the essence. The very fact of thinking about using witness accounts as evidence exposes them to the risk of being challenged. The historian's expertise and his public function are located right here, in the challenge that the analysis of the past puts to the present.