Why Centenary?

The recent announcement of National Archives about the possibility of having more than 1.2 million pages of 300,000 digitised diaries available represents a good news and something frightening at the same time. We all have seen that the year 2014 has started with a generalized frantic (sometimes even hysterical) warm-up around the themes of World War One Centenary and in such way we all really run the risk of forgetting why we (have to) remember. In other words, mainly in the politicians’ speeches we are already detecting a strange mixture of arrogance, pride, embarrassment and pointless declarations about the Great War and its legacy. The problems often rise when their declarations take off and land on a political map. Forgetting for a while about numbers and recurrence, all the players now active in the Centenary machine should ask themselves what’s the main goal of such Centenary. This is really a turning point: either we understand it as new knowledge opportunity or we are going to throw away a great one-off (in a lifetime) historical knowledge challenge.

In such very complicated frame, the above mentioned announcement by National Archives is going to put in front of everyone’s eyes a simple matter of fact: there are many opportunities to take advantage of and there are risks we are running as well, if we will not be able to manage the complexity that this anniversary is already unveiling. The overload of initiatives, information and new unbound sources that we will bump into during the next years is something that would need to be managed and supervised. We also know that there are no wise global directors and director’s cuts. If we are not able to do this hard work of selection and mutual understanding and if we’re not even willing to try to tackle its criticalities, it would be better to look to the other side of the Centenary, namely the business and touristic side of this event (something that in all countries is not detachable from the event itself) and consequently to concentrate on this part of the job. There’s nothing wrong in doing this, on the contrary we could succeed in doing something good for this time of doldrums…