In this episode of NIOD Rewind Anne van Mourik speaks with Ralf Futselaar about his inaugural lecture Born under a bad sign. The indelible Marks of Total War on Twentieth Century Lives (November 2021). Ralf warns against focusing too much on individual lives in historical narratives that suppose to ‘give history a face’. Instead, he advocates to investigate warfare and its long-term consequences on large, specific groups of people. What are the drawbacks of making history relatable by telling individual life stories to represent violent episodes? How can computational analysis of large data sets help us understand group effects of violent episodes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Can such analyses further our understandings of the Dutch Hunger Winter, for example?
Photo: Collectie Fries Verzetsmuseum, Leeuwarden