English History and Memory Speech
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“I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory”, Elie Wiesel. Good afternoon teachers. The concern with history is that it places emphasis on facts and data, thus the experience of individuals are lost in the process of recording history. Differing personal opinions, reflections and experiences of events can provoke debate in the way history is recorded and interpreted. There is merit in individual experiences as they provide us with a personal representation of these facts and humanises the events, as well as filling in the missing gaps that factual data has left. Mark Bakers The Fiftieth Gate, a meta-narrative dealing with the conflict of history and memory relating to the holocaust, uses history to validate Bakers parents memories. Similarly, the documentary Voices From The List directed by Micheal Mayhew, is a compilation of personal eye-witness experiences relating to the holocaust, applying memory to the historical events in the same way Baker does. Both of these texts appreciate that two accounts of the past are rarely alike, being manipulated by bias, and therefore communicate to the responder that history is not merely an objective analysis of the past, but rather a representation of the individual and collective memory.
Memory gives history a personal perspective that is necessary in understanding the historical value and meaning of both the past and the present. Baker struggles initially with appreciating memory as a legitimate historical source, but as The Fiftieth Gate progresses, his grasp on the significance of memory as a valid source of information to apply to factual data increases. Bakers relationship with his mother shows the responder this struggle. At the beginning of the novel, he is entirely unable to empathise with his mothers horrific experiences. He is indifferent to her pain, highlighted using simile, “She wept we responded as only as we could like two little children we laughed tears… alongside my mothers wails”, contrasting their light-hearted laugher to her painful weeping. Bakers own context renders him with an inability to appreciate and connect with her experiences, as his own bias as a historian manifests in his revere for factual data rather than his parents experiences. Because Genias experiences, unlike Yossls, do not have documented sources to match them, Baker struggles to overcome his hardened historical approach when dealing with her recounts, illustrated in his short, sharp sentences written in parallel “He says it was cold. Winter. But it was warm. Autumn”. This approach changes as Baker “… uncover[s] documents so intimately bound to my parents stories” and is able to connect more intimately with his parents recounts. This intimate, emotional retelling of the