He estado leyendo algunos de
los artículos en la prensa sobre Eric Hobsbawm, que murió ayer, 1 de octubre. En The
Guardian han seleccionado algunos extractos de algunos de sus libros o
escritos. Me ha parecido muy interesante el siguiente, en el que Hobsbawm
defiende la opinión de la enorme importancia que tiene no olvidar el pasado.
Según él en los tiempos actuales nos hemos acostumbrado a vivir sólo en el
presente, olvidando, pues, las experiencias del pasado. Él cree que una de las funciones
del historiador es precisamente hacer presentes las enseñanzas de la historia.
On 28 June 1992 President
Mitterrand of France made a sudden, unannounced and unexpected appearance in
Sarajevo, already the centre of a Balkan war that was to cost many thousands of
lives during the remainder of the year. His object was to remind world opinion
of the seriousness of the Bosnian crisis. Indeed, the presence of a
distinguished, elderly and visibly frail statesman under small-arms and
artillery fire was much remarked on and admired. However, one aspect of M
Mitterrand's visit passed virtually without comment, even though it was plainly
central to it: the date. Why has the president of France chosen to go to
Sarajevo on that particular day? Because 28 June was the anniversary of the
assassination, in Sarajevo, in 1914, of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of
Austria-Hungary, which led, within a matter of weeks, to the outbreak of the
first world war. For any educated European of Mitterrand's age, the connection
between date, place and the reminder of a historic catastrophe precipitated by
political error and miscalculation leaped to the eye. How better to dramatise
the potential implications of the Bosnian crisis than by choosing so symbolic a
date? But hardly anyone caught the allusion, except a few professional
historians and very senior citizens. The historical memory was no longer alive.
The destruction of the past,
or rather of the social mechanisms that link one's comtemporary experience to
that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie
phenomena of the late 20th century. Most young men and women at the century's
end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the
public past of the times they live in. This makes historians, whose business it
is to remember what others forget, more essential at the end of the second
millennium than ever before. But for that very reason they must be more than
simply chroniclers, remembrancers and compilers, though this is also the
historians' necessary function. In 1989 all governments and especially all
foreign ministers in the world would have benefited from a seminar on the peace
settlements after the two world wars, which most of them had apparently
forgotten.
The Age of Extremes, Little
Brown, 1994
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