Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History by Erna Paris (Bloomsbury, £9.99)
The best history books ask what history is for, and Long Shadows is an ambitious attempt to address that question as it applies to much of the 20th century. Erna Paris's subject - which she describes as "the underpinnings of national remembrance", the question of "who gets to decide what happened yesterday, then to tell the tale" - has become one of the most consuming for historians of all ages and specialisations.
The traumas of the past century have led different societies to approach their past as individuals do: by repression (see Japan, and until recently, France); by confession (Germany, South Africa); or by ritualisation (Israel and, in a very different way, Serbia). Paris's study also encompasses America's confused official historiography of slavery, and the very recent attempts to impose the strictures of international law on its most flagrant transgressors: Milosevic and company, Pinochet, and (in passing) the perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda.
Paris's approach, more travelogue than dry academic research, aims to gauge how ordinary people come to terms with such tumultuous memories. She strikes a fine balance between empathy and emotionalism. As a Canadian, she is able to resist most national prejudices and received ideas. She travels to France, Germany, South Africa and the deep south of the US, and interviews everyone from Holocaust survivors and slaves' descendants to South African secret policemen and the sons and daughters of top Nazis - men like Martin Bormann Jr, who has become a Catholic priest.
Paris's treatment of Bormann is exemplary. On the surface, Bormann, who teaches "Holocaust education" in German schools, has devoted his whole life to facing up to the legacy to which his name condemns him. But Paris shows how, by embracing Catholicism and believing that, as he puts it, his father "is responsible only before God", he has avoided the very issue that has defined his life. "Theology has allowed him to transform pain and grief over a criminal father into a bland, bloodless paste." She goes further, explaining the "dollop of pop psychology" that has led Bormann to the conclusion that "his father was probably a victim of Hitler".
Paris concedes that at least this is a genuine attempt to face up to the past. She has less sympathy for those who prefer to forget, or to believe in a myth. She recalls that Ronald Reagan initially rejected a visit to Dachau because "I want to put that history behind me". Similarly, in South Africa, despite the attempts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission - the purest expression of the belief that a nation's catharsis can be found more in confession than in seeking retribution - polls have found that 80% of the white population did not support its work.
There, Paris meets another famous man's son, Nkosinathi Biko, who was six years old when his father was murdered by the Security Police. The son has tried to "wriggle away" from the memory of the father, but he acknowledges that such a representative figure cannot be so simply laid to rest.
Official memorials and international efforts to impose justice are the final two themes of the book. Paris makes an instructive comparison between the American memorialisation of the Holocaust and its disinclination to make any similar gesture for the victims of slavery - a crime committed, after all, on American soil.
It might seem unfair to complain of a book which attempts so much that it should do more, but one very important player seems to be missing: Russia. The blood-soaked Soviet epic was, in part, a manipulation of history in a way unparalleled anywhere or at any time. Orwell, who had seemed to exaggerate for dramatic effect in Nineteen Eighty-four, turned out to have underestimated the pervading intrusion of the Soviet state into its people's collective memory. One wishes that Paris's travels had taken her to Moscow and St Petersburg, to see how the new Russia has faced up to the old.
It might be too much to hope that so vast a subject could be dealt with in a comparative work, but Long Shadows shows that Paris is ideally suited to turn her attentions to it in the future.
