MAKING HISTORY PERSONAL
The focus on the personal at the expense of the ideological among modern historians is in tune with the saving work of God in the world.

Continental Europe has now enjoyed over sixty years of peace, apart from a recent and savage decade in the Balkans. There will soon be an entire civilian generation which has known nothing of the terrible intimacy of war, the ‘abode of madness’ as Wilfred Owen coined it. With every national ceremony commemorating sacrifice, one can see quite starkly that the World War II generation is going the way of the first, with death and declining health lowering their visibility in public life. Perhaps this is the reason for the extraordinary boom in military history.

 

Until recently, recollections of this era were buried by a mixture of awkwardness (summed up by Basil Fawlty’s excruciating ‘whatever you do, don’t mention the war’ routine in front of German guests), and political necessity (as West Germany was once a key ally in the frontline of the Cold War). Today our media are swamped with books, articles and programmes about World War II, war tourism has grown in popularity, sparked by films like ‘Saving Private Ryan’, and newspapers are filled weekly with obituaries of ordinary, previously uncelebrated people whom we now realise performed staggering heroics for their country when barely into their twenties.

 

This interest has been generated by other factors too. At a political level, although people may disagree about the nature of our engagement in the European Union, there is a consensus that Europeans have succeeded in making the continent a safer place to live than at any other point in its history, and this has been achieved in a matter of years. Foreign policy specialists describe our continent now as post-modern, bound together by common political and economic goals, freed from the tyranny of once aggressive nation-states. This means we can now reflect with greater maturity on our common past. One outcome of which is that we can now properly embrace the role of Russia in defeating Hitler. The Soviet Union no longer exists, and our historians are gaining access to stories which show the monumental sacrifice the Soviets made to the allied campaign. Within six months of fighting, they had lost 4.5 million men. By the end of the war over 27 million people had perished. These are figures which dwarf our losses.

 

It is not just at a political level that things have changed, but at an academic level too. Lively and articulate historians have taken over out TV screens, leaving many of us to ask where they had been as we were learning boring date after boring date, rote fashion off the blackboard in our history lessons. And it is noticeable how the narratives of history are being re-interpreted, boldly and persuasively. Scholars like Anthony Beevor, Orlando Figes and Simon Schama have abandoned views of history dominated by monolithic rival ideologies – German fascism, Russian communism and French republicanism – and embraced instead the stories of ordinary people. Their sufferings and losses, their successes and survivals. People who had to endure the brutality of regimes which didn’t care how many they slaughtered in pursuit of their chilling goals. So many previous histories of Stalin’s Russia tossed the vast numbers murdered or allowed to die through famine almost carelessly into the bigger story of communism. Now we can read from many sources - more sources than the Russians yet have access to – what it meant to endure such wickedness.

 

These new histories are also allowing ordinary men and women, who fought for Britain, to tell their personal stories to a waiting public. History is not just about the sweeping canvass of global politics – it is played out in the lives of alternately brave and frightened people who fought because they knew they had to, not because they wanted to. As my own parents’ generation recedes slowly, we have one final opportunity to hear their living stories. There is something biblical about this idea. Stories about God and his work of redemption are passed on most effectively by word of mouth. Remembrance Sunday, for instance, is a relational moment when together we stand and reflect on the myriad stories of personal sacrifice made to deliver us to this point today. And it has strong spiritual resonance.

 

The defining act of God in this world was not located in some grand ideology dreamed up on the misty Parisian left bank or among the dank mills of Manchester, but in the personal sacrifice of one man in the sultry heat of Jerusalem. This man was beaten up and nailed to a cross by the soldiers of one of the world’s greatest empires. That empire has long since withered and died, while the redemptive story of this one man has been passed by word of mouth for two thousand years. This man conquered the very worst thing any regime can inflict on someone - torturing them to death in front of their family and friends – and he lives forever.

 

The way the new historians write with greater interest now in the struggles of ordinary people than they do about the angry ideologies which pounded them in the first place should encourage us in our Christian faith. History is made up of countless personal stories – each as important to God as the next – and it is in the detail of these stories that God restores people to himself, and in the telling of them that we reach others with his love.

 

To remember someone is to recall their existence. The act of remembrance goes deeper, being a commitment to re-enact and make relevant the narratives of history. Today we can bring to life the quiet stories of uncelebrated people and use them to strengthen our resolve to live peaceably with others. More importantly still, we can recall the sacrifice of Jesus, whose own story is the only key to life and death giving lasting purpose to the lives of ordinary, fragile people in this careless and sometimes brutal world.

 

One man has died, and this violent death redeems other sacrifices we remember in life. One man has risen, and this triumph assures us of victory over death. And one man will come again, because at the last day we are promised that heaven and earth will fuse together, as the kingdoms of the world become the kingdom of our God.