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…
