Europe’s Deadly Century Edited by Forbes, Page, and Pérez

One of the strengths of this volume comes from bringing essays from different parts of Europe together.

In the UK we have a particular narrative associated with the “Deadly Century” of the title, having been on the “winning” side in both World Wars as well, arguably, as the Cold War – this creates a strong temptation to frame our relationship with the physical remains of those conflicts within a context of pride.

The contrast to this is powerfully explored within the essay about the relationships to the monuments and other physical remains from the Franco era in Spain.

While Michael Kimmelman is cited as saying that Franco’s monuments should be ignored because “they have been displaced from Spanish collective memory” there is a concern that this can create a silence around them and “silence belongs with dictatorship and is the product of fear and trauma”.

The essay looks at both the “monuments” put up by Franco and the regime and also some of the other remains, in particular the Carabanchel Prison, where political prisoners with held and tortured. The site has been demolished – and some would see that as a positive act, cleansing and allowing Spain to move on. But there is a risk that this allows a dark era to be forgotten – and forgetting favours those that might support authoritarianism more than those that support liberty.

We end up with “sanitised, apolitical visions of the past” when Jameson claims that “History is what hurts”. They go on to say “A narrative that presents everybody as a victim or everybody as a perpetrator is politically irresponsible. As Hannah Ardent wrote: ‘Where everybody is guilty, nobody is; public confessions of collective guilt are the best defence against the discovery of culprits, and the magnitude of a crime is the best excuse to not do anything.’”.

This plays out beyond our relationship with remains of war.

When governments give apologies for past wrongs it can be a powerful act of reconciliation, but it can also be used to draw a line – a logic that says that once the apology is given no further inquires needed, it can act as a way of blocking access to the truth.

It is also at play in some of the debates within Universities around statues of past benefactors who made the money they gave to the institution from slavery. There needs to be an open relationship with that past – if you are too quick to take down the statues and rename the colleges and lecture halls you can miss out on a real acknowledgement of the link between the crime of slavery and the good of the University. Hiding that past is potentially as problematic as celebrating it. It would be better, for example, to explore how you might use historic links to slavery as a motivation to action tackling modern slavery?