History, always open to interpretation, is not simply limited to traditional sources. It can be seen through forms such as fiction, autobiography, or journalistic memoirs, as demonstrated by Erich Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Primo Levi's Survival of Auschwitz, and Timothy Garton Ash's The Magic Lantern, respectively. These different platforms for representing history and demonstrating historical memory allow us to visualize the effects of history on the individual and prevent the glorification of historical events in contrast to more traditional sources. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Remarque is a master of demystification: in his classic All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), there are no great heroes, no men bravely going into battle in the style of German nationalist war novels such as The Storm of Steel (1920 ). Instead, through characterization and intimate detail, Remarque unflinchingly shows the brutality of the First World War. But there is more than Remarque's vivid descriptions of war: we learn of the surprising boredom and agony of waiting, where our narrator, the young and once idealistic Paul, tells us that “the days pass and the hours incredibles follow one another as a matter of course." In just one paragraph, there is a fixation with the concept of the day: whether it is "14 days", "the last night", "the last day" or simply having the narrator, Paul, delighted to have “enough for one day”.” Remarque shows the reader that time becomes boring and oppressive in war. Even the young men that Remarque shows us are wounded by the brutality; they have become so dehumanized that upon the death of their friend Kemmerich they only feel the desire to take the dead man's boots, because the men "have lost all other considerations, because they are artificial." novelist, Remarque can use symbols to make his point; boots are more than objects, they represent the convenience that human life acquires in an environment that teaches men to slaughter each other. Throughout the novel, Remarque works to preserve historical memory to prevent a terrible past from repeating itself. It is not Paul who works for such a cause, because he is, as he describes his lost generation, too indifferent to. worry about it. Again and again Remarque reinforces the idea of ​​the lost generation with a crudeness that cannot be replicated except through fiction; one intrinsically thinks of Septimus Smith in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925), injured by shock after the First World War. A brief reference in Palmer to “cultural pessimism” could not get the point across as deftly and memorably as when Remarque writes “It is the common fate of our generation… the war has ruined us for everything.” Everything Remarque writes is a warning not to romanticize or glorify war. All the characters in the novel that we learn to love die or are maimed, even the brilliant and resourceful Kat. And the battles that claim them are nameless; for Remarque the war and the glory associated with his famous battles such as the Marne and the Somme mean nothing compared to the deaths of so many innocent boys. The more traditional textbook Palmer provides gives us broad military history, recounting battles in abstract language; instead of the grotesque image of Remarque's men ("one has his belly ripped open, his entrails come out") we have the detached "the Germans attacked Verdun in February". Ultimately, the need to retreat from the horrors of battle aroseextended to the novel itself. Paul's death, the novel's conclusion, could be treated with nationalistic fervor as a martyrdom for the country, but instead a coldly anonymous third-person narrative takes over, putting more distance between the novel and its readers than the perspective in first person of Paul. Remarque gives no opportunity to romanticize the war with Paul's tragic and inexplicable death. Writing a novel forces readers to sympathize with characters who in traditional sources could become caricatured or, in the worst case scenario, forgotten and transformed into an anonymous balance sheet of victims. Remarque literally puts a human face on the unknowable suffering of war, writing: “a man cannot realize that above such destroyed bodies there are still human faces.” We cannot see young people dying as martyrs for the nationalist cause, rather, they are human beings going through incredible suffering, and to see characters suffer is to resent the war that causes this suffering. Characterization in a work of fiction allows not only an intimacy with the boys who die in a senseless conflict, but also the potential for great allegory and symbolism. Rather than explaining the cause of the war by saying, like Palmer, “nationalist ideologies should be emphasized,” Remarque gives us Kantorek, the physical embodiment of the German nationalist sentiment behind the First World War. Presented as one of many "convinced that they were doing what was best - in a way that cost them nothing", Kantorek tells his students to go to war for reasons of low nationalism. Remarque does not claim the distant objectivity of the historian in saying of Kantorek and other German nationalists such as Houston Chamberlain and Johann Fichte that they “let us down so badly.” Remarque, as a novelist, can be perfectly frank with his emotions in a way that a traditional source, subject to the obligation of objectivity, cannot. Later, the revelation that Kantorek is “an impossible soldier” only shows how empty all the warmongers' demands are: they ask young people to die and fight when they can't, for beliefs that young people don't possess. Likewise, the cruel Corporal Himmelstoss reveals himself as “a furious book of military regulations,” showing Remarque's utter lack of sympathy for the butchers behind the war. Ultimately, a work of fiction is more reliable than a traditional historical source because it is not beholden to historical conventions of authority and accuracy. We know that a novel is fictional and that the story it tells should not be taken at face value. This is why the novel is so valuable: a historical work can insinuate itself into its own biases and prejudices and these will be assumed as authority, because the historical source has the dubious honor of being deemed factual and impartial. A novel makes us question its own intentions because it is overtly subjective and therefore allows for the examination of a problem that, with a source like Palmer, one might assume has easy answers. Unlike a textbook that could have represented determined allies against the malevolent Axis powers and been taken as authority, Remarque's novel forces us to confront "the other side" and, ultimately, engage in a internal debate about morality and culpability that would not have occurred with answers presented by a traditional source, especially a textbook. If the winners write history, both sides write novels. Primo Levi's disturbing Survival at Auschwitz (1958) functions as the exact antithesis to the Lager system it describes. We get a first-hand look at Hitler's concentration camps and twisted logicand racist nationalist they thrived on. The Lager is dehumanizing towards all its prisoners, especially the Jewish ones. Levi, an Italian Jew, discovers that he is "deprived of all those he loves... of all he possesses." He and his fellow Jews are reduced to numbers and begin to think of their fellow men not with names but instead as “large numbers.” Historically, these camps were supported by the logic of the dehumanizing Nuremberg Laws (1935), which stated: “A Jew cannot be a citizen of the Reich.” The Laws defined what made a citizen a human being, and a Jewish person was considered neither. But Levi, despite the form of his memoirs, is able to subvert Nazi dehumanization and describe the atrocities of the Holocaust in a more memorable way than any traditional historical source. Through his first-person perspective, Levi gives us a terrifying look at the Lager system. He rebels against German attempts at dehumanization in the simple act of writing such a human memoir, full of determination to survive. Levi rejects German attempts to silence him by simply writing his book. The novel's first-person view gives us access to Levi's mind and puts a human face on the Holocaust. There is no cold, authoritarian narrative as seen in Palmer and other historical sources. Rather, there is the incredibly human voice of Levi himself; growing up with Levi we suffer with him and see the Holocaust in terms of the destruction of individuals. The small-scale nature of great tragedy often comes into play in Levi's work, and in Survival at Auschwitz it is through the prisoners we meet there; Levi's goal is to work on an individual level because "no human experience is meaningless or unworthy of analysis." Instead of learning from Palmer that there were “acts of extraordinary courage and human disease among the prisoners,” we instead hear, on an intimate scale, from Levi speak of “Alberto, my best friend,” in a sentence so honest and simple that be almost childish. He gives us the stories of the inmates, not of the "seducers" or the "madmen" or the "criminals", but of the men who carry those descriptions in the Lager; rather than a clinical explanation, Levi decides that "we will try to show how many ways it was possible to achieve salvation with the stories of Schepschel, Alfred L., Elias and Henri". The human face is impossible to avoid, because unlike Palmer's work which only mentions that in Auschwitz "up to 12,000 victims per day were gassed to death", Levi tries to tell the stories of as many individuals as possible, be they his friend Albert or the distant acquaintances of Elias and Henri. Levi manages to work on two different levels: he tells the great story of a people, of the great atrocities of the twentieth century, but with an eye for the small details of a pair of boots or an unmade bed. Levi works to tell the epic tragedy on a small scale, to see if the suffering of the entire Jewish people can be explained by offering the reader a tiny glimpse into the Lager. In this it reaches heights to which traditional sources cannot aspire, giving us a heartbreaking precision in the face of historical generalizations. Levi manages to tell readers more than any source could thanks to his eye for detail, to give a human face to what could otherwise become a distant tragedy of historical memory, something studied and mourned but not actually experienced. Like Solzhenitsyn's A Day of Ivan Denisovich, Levi places us right there, and his conclusion that "to destroy a man is difficult... but you Germans succeeded" is all the more poignant because we have been there. We shared Levi's moments of hope, the final destruction of the soul where, even at the news ofRussian liberation of the camp, Levi can only confess: "I no longer felt pain, nor joy, nor fear, except in that detached and distant moment, characteristic of the Lager". In The Magic Lantern (1993), Timothy Garton Ash provides an eyewitness report of the fall of the Soviet Empire. Just like Remarque and Levi before him, Ash is able to give us a look behind the men who made history; we see the 1989 revolutionaries in Eastern Europe not as iconoclastic leaders but as human beings, with both greatness and flaws. In this way Ash works to demystify the current of historical memory. He has no desire to create great legacies or historical representations, especially in Soviet Europe still reeling from the cult of personality surrounding Stalin and his ilk. Rather, Ash wishes to give us an intimate portrait of the revolution. He quickly abandons any pretense of authority with self-depreciating lines like “My contribution to the Velvet Revolution was a joke.” He admits that he is not a hero and that the men he describes, revolutionaries like Vaclav Havel and Miklos Vasarhelyi, are just as human. Because Ash works in the field, because he manages to talk closely with the men he interviews. He is able to give us an honest and direct portrait that prevents any kind of myth-making, and in this respect Ash is a more reliable source than any seemingly objective textbook which, due often to the need to cover many topics in a short time , could easily caricaturize revolutionaries as mere benevolent heroes. It is natural, reading a source loaded with supposed authority, to see the Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa arbitrarily described as “a national symbol of protest”, or simply to state that there were doubts about Walesa's democratic objectives, without ever having a sense of the man behind the legacy. Yet Ash is able to show us, with an almost mocking enthusiasm, Walesa's insistent pleas “I like democracy, I love democracy”, because as a journalist he observed firsthand the speeches and actions of the time. We thus learn of Walesa's occasionally dictatorial techniques directly from his own words, thanks to Ash's reporting. We see Czech opposition leader Vaclav Havel beyond his writings; there is more of the poetic Havel of “The Power of the Powerless” (1979). Instead we also find a fun-loving, genial man who is “a bohemian in both senses of the word.” Ash does not show the “cult of personality” that surrounded even the repressive Romanian Soviet dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, but rather implies that great men like Havel and Walesa are as human as the ordinary people who tore down the Berlin Wall. Ash is allowed to not have all the answers. He is not a historian, nor a source of purported knowledge. He uses the intimacy of the journalist, observing from the front lines without any preparation, only the awareness that a great revolution is underway. Ash can say “like all arguments about historical causality, this one can never be resolved” and the reader does not feel deceived. Instead there is a kinship, a sense of sustaining a major change in human history and being able to report only the feelings that the change elicits, rather than a clinical explanation of the reasoning behind it. As Ash himself admits when speaking of the Prague Civic Forum, "a political scientist would be difficult to find a term to describe the structure of the Forum". But he continues in his writings, never providing answers, but instead allowing glimpses of the men and women behind the revolt and reform. Also, because Ash is a journalist and not a historian, he can make assumptions and look into the future. Invents a theory for “the ingredients of the new model of revolution” based on the.