How Should We Remember 9/11? History suggests that — for better and for worse — a cultural narrative of hope and optimism will eventually prevail, said Alvin Rosenfeld, author of “The End of the Holocaust” and a professor of English and Jewish Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, who is also Gavriel Rosenfeld’s father.As an example, he pointed to Anne Frank. Although she suffered terribly as a girl during the Holocaust, every American movie and play that was eventually made about her focused on one unusually cheerful line in her diary: “Despite everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.”“If it is at all analogous to how Holocaust memory has evolved in a collective sense, we will remember, but time tends to take the sting out of it,” Alvin Rosenfeld said. “Americans tend to like things to turn up at the end rather than down. We like to have happy endings. We put a premium on hope. We don’t like to linger too long in the past, especially if the past is a gruesome past, as the Holocaust and 9/11 were.” An interesting look at how we form a narrative around historical events, tragic and otherwise. Read more

How Should We Remember 9/11?

History suggests that — for better and for worse — a cultural narrative of hope and optimism will eventually prevail, said Alvin Rosenfeld, author of “The End of the Holocaust” and a professor of English and Jewish Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, who is also Gavriel Rosenfeld’s father.

As an example, he pointed to Anne Frank. Although she suffered terribly as a girl during the Holocaust, every American movie and play that was eventually made about her focused on one unusually cheerful line in her diary: “Despite everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.”

“If it is at all analogous to how Holocaust memory has evolved in a collective sense, we will remember, but time tends to take the sting out of it,” Alvin Rosenfeld said. “Americans tend to like things to turn up at the end rather than down. We like to have happy endings. We put a premium on hope. We don’t like to linger too long in the past, especially if the past is a gruesome past, as the Holocaust and 9/11 were.”

An interesting look at how we form a narrative around historical events, tragic and otherwise. Read more

Source: news.discovery.com