David Rieff
The historian Tony Judt once recalled that during a visit to Berlin’s
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, he saw “bored schoolchildren on
an obligatory outing [playing] hide-and-seek among the stones.” He
argued, “When we ransack the past for political profit — selecting the
bits that can serve our purposes and recruiting history to teach
opportunistic moral lessons — we get bad morality and bad history.” To which one should add: We also get kitsch.
