Radicaal voor het levensverhaal

Geschiedenis als narratieve verwerking

Samenvatting

A Radical Choice for Life Stories. History as Narrative Coping

In this valedictory lecture, the author draws lessons from his research into the Jewish Polak family, who built and lived in his own house, and applies them to a program for future historical research based on life stories. He argues for moving away from the idea that history is merely the story of victims and perpetrators. The emphasis on victimhood often means pointing fingers at perpetrators and does not do justice to historical complexity. Furthermore, this black-and-white thinking does not lead to a shared culture of remembrance and commemoration. By reconstructing and analyzing life histories in context, people today can better understand the past.

History can connect people with their own past and thus with each other. But because we define our group identity based on a narrative of victim versus perpetrator, we are unable to commemorate and deal with the past together, whether it concerns slavery, colonialism, or the Second World War. This also means that intergenerational traumas remain misunderstood. As long as we judge people in the past, we fail to see the multivocality of and paradoxes in every life story. Any understanding of the past begins with knowing the facts in order to combat myths and one-sided interpretations.

Only when we develop empathy with people in the past can we take joint responsibility for it. This collective coping process can be achieved by accumulating and researching individual memories of certain events. One way of doing this is by describing life stories. Literary non-fiction based on family histories has become a popular genre. These stories serve collective coping when they are provided with context, viewed from a comparative perspective, and given interpretation and meaning. This reveals why and how people acted under oppression in a particular time and context. We see their dilemmas and the mistakes they made. Only then can we gain insight into their scope for action or agency, value their resilience, and ask ourselves what we would have done in their place. Then we can take joint responsibility for remembering and commemorating the past in the present.