CH student highly commended in global essay competition

Deputy Grecian (Year 12) Amber has been awarded a very high commendation in this year’s prestigious John Locke Global History Essay Competition.

The competition, which attracts entries from students across the world, received an incredible 63,000 submissions this year. Amber’s outstanding performance places her among the top-ranked participants internationally.

Head of History and Politics, Mr Neil Martin, praised her achievement, saying:

‘This is a significant achievement for Amber. To achieve a very high commendation in a global competition that attracted 63,000 entrants demonstrates determination and commitment to scholarly success. Well done!’

Amber’s success reflects both her intellectual curiosity and the academic rigour encouraged within the History Department at Christ’s Hospital.

Read Amber’s essay below:

“We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation”
— Erich Maria Remarque

The Photo on the Mantelpiece

In a family of both Jewish and German heritage, on the mantelpiece of a great aunt’s
house — through marriage, yet a matriarchal figure — sits a photo of a man. He possesses a warm,
endearing gaze, fixed just past the viewer’s shoulder.

Yet, upon his collar sits a set of entwined lightning bolts; his hat bears the emblematic
insignia of a skull and crossbones. The great-aunt passes it without flinching. For her, it’s just
Papa. The man who tucked her in at night, whose hands always smelt of saddle soap and schnapps.
However, as the mother’s family enters, the air thickens. Their eyes snag on the insignia,
the black-and-white violence of that silhouette. They count the cracks in the ceiling, the pattern of
the rug. Anywhere but there. The room becomes a minefield; the photograph a live charge
humming with all it refuses to say.

Here, one family exhales remembrance, the other chokes on it.

Introduction

This essay argues that history is not a fixed narrative but a dynamic interplay of
interpretations. To reduce its complexity to rigid categories of pride or shame is to overlook the
integration of subjective human experience: the memories, creativity, and contradictions that
shape our collective memory. Pride and shame are not emotions which are inherent to history
itself; they emerge relational, contingent upon the when, where, and who of their invocation. This
essay argues that history should not be treated as a tribunal, morally judging the past, but rather as
a testament or record of the evolving human condition whose stories resist simple moral
categorisation. As Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (2013) argues that historical
meaning is uncovered not from official chronicles but from the subjective lived experience of
individuals. From ancient civilisations to modern nations, history has been rendered not only
through textual artefact, but also through art, architecture, and memorials. These can be read as
nascent modes of expression that capture the ambivalence of their creators: their perceived
admiration as much as their perceived regrets. With the London Cenotaph and the Nanjing
Massacre Memorial as case studies, and through the lenses of Reinhart Koselleck’s conceptual
history, this essay will examine how historical memory is aesthetically constructed, ultimately
arguing that neither pride nor shame should define our engagement with the past.

Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’: Against a Teleological Understanding of the Past

To reduce history to pride or shame is to ignore its fundamental unfinishedness— a
critique described in allegorical length in Walter Benjamin’s On the Concept of History.
Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’, when blown bodily backwards into the future can only gaze at the
wreckage of the past. The position of the angel’s body backwards bespeaks Benjamin’s rejection of
teleological understandings of history. The past, according to Benjamin is therefore perhaps not so
much a series of moral lessons — as a lesson, by its very nature, implies an end, a goal, a telos —
but rather a cacophony of lives and voices largely acting in their own interests in different spaces
and times. For Benjamin, true historical engagement requires ‘seizing hold of a memory as it
flashes up in a moment of danger’ — not to judge, but to redeem. This essay argues that, using this
framework, the historian can dissolve binaries: pride and shame are not binaries but rather
intersecting currents of all dynamic human lives.

History as Lived Experience: Aristotle and Kosseleck

This vision of history as a fluid allowing collision of subjective experiences finds ancient
resonance in Aristotle’s thought. As Aristotle had once written, “The life of the community, or
the life of the individual, is not just a matter of particular facts, but of the totality of actions and
decisions made over time” (Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, Chapter 13). His theory paints the
grounding for understanding history as a running river woven from the subjective, lived
experiences of individuals — a tapestry that gains meaning through the cumulative weight of
human decisions. The notion of this view of history finds resonance in the German school of
conceptual history. Reinhart Koselleck, in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time
gives theoretical substance to Aristotle’s notion of how socio-political concepts evolve in different
times and spaces. This work introduces the concepts of “space of experience” and the “horizon of
expectation” which primarily attempts to bridge history and anthropology through analysing how
humans perceive time. Kosseleck’s analysis, while not belonging to the Frankfurt School of
Thought, offers a critique of progressive narratives in a way that resonates strongly with
Benjamin’s and Aristotle’s close attention to temporal structures and lived experiences.
Koselleck’s “space of experience” re-imagines history as a melting pot: a reservoir of the lived,
subjective moments — allowing interactions, layering, and reshaping of how one will relate to
their present. These experiences are not standing relics; they are constantly reinterpreted, similar
to how the generational memories of war and cultural narratives evolve over time. They are
corrected once and again, recasting the totality of what a person, a community, a nation recognizes
as their history. This fluidity of experience melts into Koselleck’s idea of the “horizon of
expectation”: when the accumulated weight of these subjective experiences constructs a lens
through which societies anticipate their future. What we imagine for tomorrow is not arbitrary, but
rooted in the lived realities we receive from yesterday. This interplay between experience and
expectation underlines that history does not march toward a single, inevitable end, it is not
teleological. Instead, it is a breathing process, built up by the messy, personal, and often
contradictory stories of those who came before us. In this flow, history emerges as an ongoing
dialogue between individual matters and collective memory, as Aristotle had observed, the hidden
theory in the totality of actions and decisions — defining humanity’s journey. It is less about
isolating particular truths and more about honoring the way that all the subjective experiences,
ever redefined, shape both our understanding of the past and our hopes for what comes ahead.

The Aesthetics of Memory: The London Cenotaph

Monuments, as physical embodiments of historical understanding, they actively shape
how a nation engages with its space of experience and describes its horizon of expectation. They
either preserves its dynamism or condenses it into a singular, static story. The London Cenotaph,
rising from the aftermath of World War I in 1920, is far more than just a block of white stone; it
stands as an instrument delivering the memory of its nation, marking the sacrifice of 1.1 million
British soldiers with its art of erasure. Michel Foucault’s theories on historical semiotics suggest
that power structures often deliver meaning through absence and silence — aligning with the
design of The London Cenotaph. It’s design encourages shared sacrifice, a macro-historical
perspective that values the totality of sacrifices above the individual stories. The Cenotaph itself is
a powerful condenser of national pride, the stark anonymity it hold obscures the grief of countless
individuals into a unified narrative. Foucault’s lens are to reveal how the Cenotaph wields power
through silence and erasure, while taking inspiration from Kosseleck’s theory of the space of
experience, what is being set aside in that process is illuminated: the layers of narratives that
builds history its depth. As an anchor of national memory, the Cenotaph functions as a focal point
for reflection, which fosters a sense of unity. It does not inherently discourage critical engagement
with the nation’s history, but its design and context guides attention toward the collective
endurance. In this way, the monument reflects the challenge of balancing collective memory with
the infinite varieties of individual experiences, proposing the emotion of pride from its white yet
solid walls.

Commemoration and Confrontation: The Nanjing Massacre Memorial

Unlike the London Cenotaph’s emphasis on collective sacrifice through erasure, the
Nanjing Massacre Memorial rejects silence, instead engaging in visceral, often violent exhibits.
The graphic photographs, reconstructed torture chambers, and the remains of victims makes its
space of experience inescapable. The brutality bleeding from the past is felt in the body, taking the
trauma of the massacre into the present. With this design, the Memorial confronts the question of
national shame not as an moral dilemma, but as a lived, urgent, and present reality. To engage
with this memorial is to hold the weight of a nation’s wounds, to feel the shame that makes the
nation stronger. Most crucially, this shame is not left to fester in isolation. Drawing on Koselleck’s
framework, the memorial ties this bruised space of experience to a deliberate horizon of
expectation: this will never happen again. This refrain transforms shame into a strengthful catalyst,
activating the pride in resilience, in the tenacity of the people who survived and remembers, in the
commitment to prevent such horrors from recurring in tomorrow. The memorial’s power lies in its
purpose, it refuses to let pride drown out shame, just as it refuses to let shame drown out the
dignity of survival. In asking whether anyone should be ashamed or proud of their nation’s history,
the Nanjing Massacre Memorial answers with both: shame is not a burden to be avoided, and
pride, when rooted in the resolution to learn, becomes shame’s necessary partner.

Towards an ‘Ethics of Ambivalence’: Between Relativism and Responsibility

One potential danger of such a view — which this essay tentatively terms an ‘ethics of
ambivalence’ — is that a relativisation of the accomplishments or atrocities of the past could
potentially soften critiques of past human behaviour. Put simply, a moral absolutist would argue
that such an exegesis of history could prevent us from learning the so-called ‘lessons’ of the past.
Kantian deontology or human rights universalists, for example, would argue that possible ‘handwringing’
towards condemnation of historical crimes (genocide, slavery, and so on) is nothing less
than complicity. Some modern analysts (Golinkin, 2013) have even gone so far as to describe a
trend towards a ‘quiet betrayal’ of the Holocaust victims where anything close to a perceived
ambivalence is to turn its back on its victims. Similarly, a Marxist historian, for example Eric
Hobsbawn, would argue that moral relativism towards the past is a way of serving ruling class
interests by softening critiques of systemic violence. However, the questions lies in to what extent
ambivalence can be seen as a kind of ‘work of memory’ towards the phenomenology of time. Paul
Ricoeur (2004) describes ambivalence as a ‘kind of mourning’. Saidiya Hartman (2007) in her
critique of state-endorsed condemnation of slavery argues that a renewed ‘critical fabulation’
avoids reducing slavery to spectacle by avoiding both redemptive narratives and voyeuristic horror.
To stand between these positions, therefore, we might put simply that ambivalence is an
acknowledgment of complexity. To return to Ginzburg, by pulling ‘macro-history’ back to the
micro-level, we may be able to reconcile both the ‘space of experience’ and the ‘horizon of
expectation’. The Nanjing Massacre Memorial, for example, could be read in different times and
contexts as both condemning Japanese war crimes and/or avoiding a reduction of Chinese identity
to victimhood, hence its vast number of resilience narratives. An ambivalence towards the
aesthetics of the Cenotaph, similarly, could expose power structures by deepening the
understanding of how shame and pride can be used in socio-political contexts.

Conclusion

This essay has argued that history resists binary moral judgments of pride or shame.
Kosseleck’s “space of experience” and “horizon of expectation” can demonstrate to present
individuals how meaning emerges between the behaviour of rational actors and often state-sponsored
collective memory in various socio-political contexts. The London Cenotaph and the
Nanjing Massacre Memorial are emblematic case studies of this. Ginzburg’s micro-historical
approach further shows how historical understanding stems from engaging with subjective
experience rather than grand narratives. A tentatively ‘ethically ambivalent’ perspective
acknowledges both the weight of the past and its interpretive possibilities. This approach allows us
to confront and interpret difficult histories with neither triumphalism nor guilt, recognising that
historical meaning is perpetually contested and evolving in subjective contexts.

Works Referenced:
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Edited by Roger Crisp. 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Book I, Chapter 1
Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, edited
by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, translated by Edmund Jephcott et al., Harvard
University Press, 2003.
Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.
Golinkin, Lev. “Opinion: Germany’s Quiet Betrayal of Victims of the Holocaust.” CNN, 31 Jan.
2023, www.cnn.com/2023/01/31/opinions/germany-nazi-history-hypocrisy-golinkin. Accessed 2
June 2025.
Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2007.
Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith
Tribe, Columbia University Press, 2004.
Remarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front. Translated by A. W. Wheen, Little,
Brown, 1929, Chapter 6.
Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer,
University of Chicago Press, 2004.