Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

compartments, and that one must sometimes look closely at a text
or discourse in order to allot it to the former or the latter.
The difference between memory and history is of fundamental
importance for politics. The former is a legitimate field of political action.
The latter must be left outside it. Collective memory is unanimous
only in small groups. All national memories are divided. The
European memory is divided. It is commonplace to say that workers’
memory is different from that of the social elite or that Polish
memory is different from the German or the French ones. But it
does not seem to be a commonplace to insist that such differences
may provoke, what I would call, memory wars. Now memory wars
may result in open conflict or may fuel an already existent one. In
other words, memory wars often acquire a political significance.
They call, therefore, for political action.
Memory wars have at least three dimensions: a cognitive, an emotional,
and an existential one. The cognitive belongs to historians
who have tools to establish with reasonable certainty what actually
happened in the past. The emotional and the existential dimensions
of memory wars, however, are beyond the scope of historians as
historians. They belong to writers and to artists. And they belong to
educators in the largest meaning of the term among whom a prominent
role falls to politicians. Useless to say that their intervention into
memory wars may intend either to pacify them or, on the contrary,
to exacerbate them so as to transform a verbal controversy into a
real confrontation. In the last years in Poland, the so called “historical
politics” tried to do exactly that. It does not seem to have succeeded.
But Law and Justice, the political party that promoted
“historical politics”, is still very active and exerts a harmful influence
upon the memory wars between Poles and their neighbours, in particular
Germans and Russians.
I presume that the issue here is not how to help escalate memory
wars but to see under which conditions one can pacify them. At
the cognitive level, historians are entitled to do that because history
– as an academic discipline that is in principle different from
memory – possesses tools that permit it to conclude a conflict of
memories, otherwise insoluble, when it comes to the facts.
However, it happens that history shows the past as different from
the image of it preserved in memory. This opens a conflict between
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