A film I saw last week (German Sons) illustrated well where memory in contemporary Western society has arrived. It presented the recollections of two men whose fathers were on different sides during World War II. One was a German soldier, the other a Jewish resistance fighter. A friendship has now developed between the two sons and their shared exploring of the past is at the heart of the film. This has become a well-tested formula over the last twenty years or so but it contains dangers for our understanding of the twentieth century.

This kind of highly personalised memory has developed unprecedented validity. As I sat watching this film I wondered what motivates audiences to watch such films. I had a disquieting feel that it is somehow voyeuristic, something like memory-porn. In such films history and memory have become the subject of the voyeuristic gaze that lies at the heart of the pornographic. World history is reduced to the microcosmic individual and we watch people doing remembering as cinematic entertainment.

The West's understanding of the conflicts that dominated the first half of the twentieth century has reached a post-memory stage. The number of people who were older than children during the two world wars is now so small that our social knowledge of these momentous and world-shaping events is almost entirely mediated. Hardly any of us were there. What we know we learned from books, films, TV, museums or recollections of individuals. This makes the role of storyteller or in this case documentary-maker that much more freighted with responsibility.

But filmmakers are generally not trained historians. In the case of German Sons the two subjects were insignificant figures in the global conflict. The film was a loose pastiche of platitudes with the historical accuracy and authority of a home-movie. That seems to be where historical narrative has arrived. Our preference for anecdote over analysis, our postmodern inability to see the wood for the trees and our desire to reduce the complexities of the world to individual personal narratives leaves us ill-equipped to grasp and comprehend the really large forces that have shaped our world.

Politics and memory

The German city of Dresden suffered a series of the most destructive bombing raids of World War II between 13 and 15 February 1945. The exact number of casualties will never be known, but reliable estimates range between 25,000 and 35,000 people. Today the bombing of Dresden remains one of the most controversial operations of the allied air forces in World War II.

Sixty-five years later commemoration of Dresden's suffering has become a political hot potato. A 2006 two-part TV mini-series titled Dresden The Inferno helped raise German awareness of the city's fate, even though the film was burdened with a fictional and highly unlikely love story between a British pilot and a German nurse. The commemoration of the dead from Dresden began in the first years after World War II and was politically charged from the beginning. When Germany was divided in 1949 the city found itself in communist East Germany and Dresden became a symbol of American capitalist imperialism. In 1950 signs with slogans such as "We Hate the American Warmongers Who Murdered Dresden".

Today the controversy remains and this weekend's commemoration looked like it would be overshadowed by extreme-right political groups who were keen to push a neo-Nazi agenda and portray the bombing as an attempt to destroy German culture. Last week a German court overruled the City of Dresden's ban on a march by extreme-right groups to commemorate the attacks. Police warned of violence as the Mayor of the city called for a human chain around the city to stop the rally. Eventually the rally was called off and the day passed without any major incidents.

Dresden remains symbolic for the political charge contained in many historical events from different parts of the world. The way we remember, commemorate and interpret the past remains one of the most important elements of our present and future.

Image: Wanderer above the Mists , Caspar David Friedrich (1818) Kunsthalle, Hamburg