History, always open to interpretation, is not limited to traditional sources. It can be seen through forms such as fiction, autobiography or journalistic memoir, as demonstrated respectively by Erich Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz and Timothy Garton Ash's The Magic Lantern . These various platforms for representing history and demonstrating historical memory provide insight into the effect of history on the individual and prevent the glorification of historical events unlike more traditional sources. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get Original Essay Note is a master of debunking: in his classic All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), there is no no great heroes, no men bravely going into battle in the style of German nationalist war novels like The Storm of Steel (1920). Instead, through characterization and intimate details, Remarque unflinchingly shows the brutality of World War I. But there's more than Remarque's graphic descriptions of war: we discover the surprising boredom and agony of anticipation, where our narrator, the young and once idealistic Paul, tells us that "the days pass and the hours incredible ones follow one another like a business. of course." In a single paragraph, there is a fixation on the concept of day: whether "14 days", "last night", "the last day" or simply the fact that the narrator, Paul, is delighted to have “enough for one day.” Note shows the reader that time becomes tedious and oppressive during wartime. The young men that Note shows us are also hurt by the brutality they have become so dehumanized that when their friend Kemmerich dies they feel nothing more than anything. a desire to take the dead man's boots, because men "have lost track of all other considerations, because they are artificial." As a novelist, Remarque can use symbols to make his point; the boots are more than objects, they represent the cheapness that human life acquires in an environment that teaches men to kill each other. Throughout the novel, Remarque strives to preserve historical memory in order to. preventing a repeat of a terrible past It is not Paul who is working for such a cause, for he is, as he describes his own lost generation, too indifferent to care. the idea of ​​the generation lost in a remains that could only be reproduced by fiction; we intrinsically think of Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf, wounded by a shell after the First World War. Palmer's brief reference to "cultural pessimism" could not drive the point home as effectively or memorably as when Remarque writes: "It is the common fate of our generation...the war has ruined us for everything." » Everything that Remarque writes is a warning against the need to idealize or glorify war. Every character in the novel we love dies or is mutilated, even the brilliant and resourceful Kat. And the battles that claim them are nameless; For Remarque, the war and the glory associated with its famous battles like that of the Marne and the Somme mean nothing in comparison to the deaths of so many innocent boys. The more traditional textbook provided by Palmer gives us in-depth military history, recounting the battles with abstract language; in place of the grotesque image of the men of Note ("someone's bellyis torn out, the hoses come out"), we have the detached "the Germans attacked Verdun in February". By the end, the need to get away from the horrors of battle extended to the novel itself. Paul's death, which marks the end of the novel, could be treated with nationalistic fervor as a martyrdom for the country, but instead a coldly anonymous third-person narration takes over, putting more distance between the novel and his readers than Paul's own first-person perspective. Note gives no chance to romanticize the war with Paul's tragic and inexplicable death. Writing a novel requires readers to empathize with characters who in traditional sources might become caricatures or, at worst, forgotten and turned into a reckoning anonymous. Note literally puts a human face on the unknowable suffering of war, writing: “A man cannot realize that above such broken bodies there are still human faces. » We cannot see the young men dying as martyrs for the nationalist cause, but rather as human beings going through incredible suffering, and to see characters suffering is to resent the war that causes this suffering. Characterization in a work of fiction allows not only for intimacy with the boys dying in meaningless conflict, but also the potential for grand allegories and symbolism. Rather than explaining the cause of the war by saying, like Palmer, "nationalist ideologies should be emphasized," Stratégie gives us Kantorek, the physical embodiment of the German nationalist sentiment behind the First World War. Introduced as one of many “convinced that they were doing what was best – in a way that cost them nothing,” Kantorek told his students to go to war for reasons of base nationalism. Note makes no pretense of the historian's remote objectivity in saying of Kantorek and other German nationalists like Houston Chamberlain and Johann Fichte that "they let us down so badly." Note, as a novelist, is allowed to be perfectly frank with his emotions in a way that a traditional source, subject to obligations of objectivity, cannot. Later, the revelation that Kantorek is "an impossible soldier" only shows how meaningless all the warmongers' demands are: they ask young people to die and fight when they cannot, for beliefs that young people do not have. Likewise, the cruel Corporal Himmelstoss is revealed as "a raging book of military regulations", demonstrating Remarque's complete lack of sympathy for the butchers behind the war. Ultimately, a work of fiction is more trustworthy than a traditional historical source because it is not beholden to historical conventions of authority and accuracy. We know that a novel is fiction and that the story it tells should not be taken literally. This is why the novel is so valuable: a historical work can sneak in its own biases and prejudices and these will be considered authoritative, because the historical source has the dubious honor of being considered factual and impartial. A novel makes us question one's own intentions because it is overtly subjective and thus allows one to examine a problem that, with a source like Palmer, might be assumed to have easy answers. Unlike a textbook that could have depicted the Allies determined against the malevolent Axis powers and been considered authoritative, Remarque's novel forces us to confront "the other side", and ultimately engage in internal debate on morality and guilt which would not havenot happened without the answers presented by a traditional source, especially a textbook. If the winners write history, then both sides write novels. Primo Levi's haunting Survival at Auschwitz (1958) functions as the exact antithesis of the Lager system it describes. We get a first-hand look at Hitler's concentration camps and the distorted racist and nationalist logic on which they thrived. The Lager is dehumanizing towards all its prisoners, especially the Jews. Levi, an Italian Jew, learns that he is “robbed of everyone he loves…of everything he owns.” He and his fellow Jews are reduced to numbers and begin to think of their fellow men not in names but rather in “high numbers.” Historically, these camps were supported by the logic of the dehumanizing Nuremberg Laws (1935), which stated: “A Jew cannot be a citizen of the Reich.” The laws defined what made a citizen and a human being, and a Jewish person was considered neither. But Levi, through the form of his memoir, is able to reverse Nazi dehumanization and depict the atrocities of the Holocaust in a way more memorable than any traditional historical source. Through first-person point of view, Levi gives us a horrifying insight into the Lager system. He rebels against German attempts at dehumanization by the simple act of writing such a human memoir, filled with determination to survive. Levi refuses German attempts to silence him simply by writing his book. The novel's first-person perspective gives us access to Levi's mind and puts a human face on the Holocaust. There is no cold, authoritarian narrative as seen in Palmer and other historical sources. Rather, there is the incredibly human voice of Levi himself; growing up with Levi, we suffer with him and see the Holocaust in terms of the destruction of individuals. The small-scale nature of great tragedies often comes into play in Levi's work, and in Survival in Auschwitz it is through the prisoners we meet there; Levi's goal is to work on the individual level because "no human experience is meaningless or unworthy of analysis." Instead of learning in Palmer that there were "extraordinary acts of courage and human suffering among the prisoners," we instead hear from Levi, on an intimate scale, "Alberto, my best friend," in a sentence so honest and simple that it almost seems childish. He tells us the stories of inmates, not of “seducers,” “crazy” or “criminals,” but rather of men who carry these descriptions in the Lager; rather than a clinical explanation, Levi decides that "we will try to show in what ways it was possible to achieve salvation with the stories of Schepschel, Alfred L., Elias and Henri." The human face is impossible to avoid, because unlike Palmer's work which only mentions that at Auschwitz "12,000 victims per day were gassed to death", Levi attempts to tell the story of as many individuals as possible , whether it is his friend Albert or the distant acquaintances of Elias and Henri. Levi is able to work on two different levels: he tells the great history of a people, the great atrocities of the 20th century, but paying attention to the small details of a pair of boots or an unmade bed. Levi strives to tell an epic tragedy on a small scale, to see if the suffering of the entire Jewish people can be explained by giving the reader a small view of the Lager. In this, he reaches heights that traditional sources cannot reach, giving us heartbreaking accuracy in the face of historical generalizations. Levi is able to tellreaders more than any source with his eye for detail, to give a human face to what might otherwise become a distant tragedy of historical memory, something studied and mourned but not truly experienced. Like Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Levi places us there, and his conclusion that "destroying a man is difficult... but you Germans have succeeded" is all the more poignant because we have been there . We shared Levi's moments of hope, the final destruction of the soul where, even upon learning of the liberation of the camp by the Russians, Levi can only confess: "I no longer felt pain, joy or fear, except in this detached and distant feeling. characteristic way of Lager. In The Magic Lantern (1993), Timothy Garton Ash provides an eyewitness account of the fall of the Soviet Empire. Much like Remark and Levi before him, Ash is able to give us insight into the men who made history; we see the revolutionaries of 1989 in Eastern Europe not as iconoclastic leaders but as human beings, with both greatness and flaws. Ash thus strives to demystify the current of historical memory. He does not wish to create great legacies or historical representations, particularly in a Soviet Europe still shaken by the cult of personality that surrounded Stalin and his ilk. Rather, Ash wants to give us an intimate portrait of the revolution. He abandons all pretense of authority early on with dismissive phrases like “My contribution to the Velvet Revolution was a joke.” » He admits that he is not a hero and the men he describes, revolutionaries like Vaclav Havel and Miklos Vasarhelyi, are just as human. Because Ash works in the field, because he is able to talking closely with the men he interviews. He is able to give us an honest and straightforward portrait that prevents any sort of myth-making, and in this regard, Ash is a more reliable source than any supposedly objective textbook which, often due to the need to address many subjects in a short time, could easily caricature the revolutionaries by considering them as simple benevolent heroes. It is natural, when reading a source with presumed authority, to see Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa arbitrarily described as "a national symbol of protest", or simply to assert that there was doubts about Walesa's democratic goals, without ever having the slightest idea of ​​what was happening. the man behind the legacy. Yet Ash is able to show us, with almost mocking enthusiasm, Walesa's insistent arguments: "I love democracy, I love democracy," because as a journalist he observed first-hand the speeches and the actions of the time. So we learn Walesa's sometimes dictatorial techniques directly from his own words, thanks to Ash's reporting. We see Czech opposition leader Vaclav Havel beyond his own writings; there is more than the poetic Havel of “The Power of the Powerless” (1979). Instead, we also find a genial, fun-loving man who is "a bohemian in both senses of the word." Ash does not show the "cult of personality" that surrounded even the repressive Romanian Soviet dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, but rather implies that great men like Havel and Walesa are just as human as the ordinary people who destroyed the Berlin Wall. Ash has the right to not have all the answers. He is neither a historian nor a supposed source of knowledge. He uses the intimacy of the journalist, observing on the front line, without preparation, only the awareness that a great revolution is in progress. :.