While I definitely agree with the sentiment, I would flip this argument around slightly and say people do remember history but don’t remember experience. Most people can rattle off some of the main events of the past few centuries, or at least generally know about the historical events that shape our Zeitgeist; Agincourt, the French Revolution, WWI and WWII, the Cold War, all of these are events which most British people will know are important and involved conflict, even if just in the simplest terms. However, what is truly forgotten because of the exact reason highlighted above is the experience of these events. It is impossible, for many reasons as a historian I have no doubt you already understand, to accurately portray the experience of the people who were alive and present for most of my examples. It is equally as difficult to understand how people reacted to them. Yet it’s this experience and these reactions that drives the response of the public.

I would, for this reason, say your atomic bomb analogy might not quite hold in the context of historical analysis. It is not predestined that when one person erupts into outrage that others in their immediate surroundings do the same. History is not written in some narrative of destruction, even though it might seem like that in retrospect. History is written by the decisions we make every day in deciding how we are going to respond to the experiences we are having.

Looking at your main case study, Nazi Germany, an interesting book you might like that looks at exactly this idea is Pamela Swett’s Neighbors and Enemies. It makes a solid argument for why we should focus more on the visceral experience of people in historical analyses rather than looking at purely institutional, or more relevantly, in this case, narrative-based, interpretations of history.

Either way, really liked the article. Good job!