Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan

them because times and attitudes change over the years. In the early years after World War I, the dead were commemorated in France and Britain as fallen heroes who had fought to defend their civilization. It was only later as disillusionment about the war grew that the British and French publics came to remember them as the victims of a futile struggle.We also edit out of our memories what no longer seems appropriate or right. When I interviewed British women who had lived in India as part of the Raj, I always asked them what the relations between the British rulers and their Indian subjects were like. They all invariably told me that there was never any tension between the races and that the British never expressed racist views. Yet we know from contemporary sources—letters, for example, or diaries—that many, perhaps most, of the British in India saw Indians as their inferiors.
    We also polish our memories in the recounting. Primo Levi, who did so much to keep the memory of the Nazi concentration camps alive, warned, “A memory evoked too often, and expressed in the form of a story, tends to become fixed in stereotype … crystallized, perfected, adorned, installing itself in the place of the raw memory and growing at its expense.” As we learn more about the past, that knowledge can become part of our memory, too. The director of the Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust in Israel once said sadly that most of the oral histories that had been collected were unreliable. Holocaust survivors thought, for example, that they remembered witnessing well-known atrocities when in fact they were nowhere near the place where the events happened.
    In the 1920s, the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs coined the term “collective memory” for the things we think we know for certain about the past of our own societies. “Typically,” he wrote, “a collective memory, at least a significant collective memory, is understood to express some eternal or essential truth about the group—usually tragic.” So the Poles remember the partitions of their country—”the Christ among nations”—in the eighteenth century as part of their martyrdom as a nation. The Serbs remember the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 as their defeat on earth but their moral victory in their unending struggleagainst Muslims. Often present-day concerns affect what we remember as a group. Kosovo acquired its particularly deep significance in the memory of the Serbs as they were struggling to become an independent nation in the nineteenth century. In earlier centuries, the battle was remembered as one incident in a much larger story. Collective memory is more about the present than the past because it is integral to how a group sees itself. And what that memory is can be and often is the subject of debate and argument where, in Halbwachs’s words, “competing narratives about central symbols in the collective past, and the collectivity’s relationship to that past, are disputed and negotiated in the interest of redefining the collective present.”
    Peter Novick has argued forcefully in his book The Holocaust in American Life that for American Jews, the Holocaust became a central identifying feature of who they were only in the 1960s. In the years after World War II, few American Jews wanted to remember that their co-religionists had been victims. Jewish organizations urged their community to look to the future and not the past. It was only in the 1960s that attitudes began to change, partly, Novick argues, because victimhood began to acquire a more positive status and partly because the 1967 and 1973 wars showed both Israel’s strength and its continuing vulnerability.
    As the nineteenth-century Zionists began their bold project of re-creating a Jewish state, they looked to Jewish history for symbols and lessons. They found, among much else, the story of Masada. In A.D. 73, as the Romans stamped out the last remnants of Jewish resistance to their rule, a band of