I had a memory of the past, well now it is history.

In class last time we had a good discussion on the difference between past and history. I finally could wear my elegant senatorial toga with the crimson stripes so en vogue in the hipster community nowadays, put on the table my Greek and Latin dictionaries and pontificate on the subtle differences between the past that’s past, the one that’s history, the presence of the past in history’s stories. Too bad that there was not a theater outside participating to the awe of the class and the enthusiastic applause of the teacher. But perhaps my memories differ a little bit from the reality.

In the introduction to his A Shared Authority, Michael Frisch touches the interesting topic of Memory. He underlines the double nature of this elusive but omnipresent principle in which coexist both the value of the “remembered past” and of the “deeply cultural artifact” subject to manipulation.

The historical value of Memory is out of discussion, but Memory, like a sponge, has a structure that revolves around voids. The past, long or short gone, is the same: it leaves footprints all over the place like a lovely cat in his solitary adventures in the house. What about History? The historian is the one that tries to find out where the cat is and what he did in the meantime.  The relationship between past, memory and history probably seems an academic problem, but it is not. The interpretation of the past and of the memory, seen as a collective or personal view on the past, do not influence only the historian. Indeed the view of the past strongly modifies societies, communities, countries, in one word it influence and modify the present and the future with it.

Obviously the past is the main field and minefield of the historian. He can either try to follow the sacred grail of objectivity or dismiss it as impossible, but he has to deal with the process of the interpretation of the past. Reading The Oral History Manual you can have the impression that the structured techniques provide an objective terrain to start a study, reading Frisch and his analysis of Author and Authority you can almost think that the copyright of the study should be of the interviewed people, but the truth is that at the end of all, what makes the research are the questions that the historian makes and his answers, which are, like every memory, an interpretation.