The Trials Of Writing Modern History

Fallible memories and a surplus of sources mean that the most challenging era for historians to tackle is the one in which we now live.

- Ian Kershaw

When I embarked on my most recent book, Roller-Coaster, Europe, 1950–2017, I remarked to a friend that I had a particularly daunting task ahead of me. He, however, was dismissive. “It will be easy”, he said. “You will remember a lot of it.” At first sight, my friend seemed to have a point. After all, the decades since the Second World War largely coincide with my own lifetime. I was born in 1943, so I lived through all of what I am surveying and analysing in the book. How difficult could that be? Very difficult, as it turns out: Roller-Coaster has proved to be the most challenging book I’ve ever attempted.

For one thing, memory is both fickle and fallible. My own memories, like those of any individual, are confined to my own experiences. They can tell me little or nothing about circumstances beyond those experiences, even in my own country let alone in other parts of Europe. Historical assessment cannot rely upon anecdotal evidence. I have added a handful of footnotes in which I do mention my personal recollection of specific events that left a mark on me. One of these refers to my fear during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, another couple to my reactions to the fall of the Berlin Wall, which I witnessed at close quarters while living in West Berlin at the time. But I have kept these out of the main text. In any case, what was clear to me from the start was not only what I didn’t remember, but what I didn’t know. And that was a great deal. Even a keen interest in world affairs did not mean that I was acquainted with more than a fraction of what was needed to understand and write about developments across Europe.