Given that the conventions we use for our calendar are cyclical, there is a moment every year when we are thought to find ourselves close to the end of World War II. In the minds of some readers, this imagined closeness can even be invoked to explain the periodic recurrence of texts related to the commemorated events of the war. On the surface of it, this answer may seem preferable to imagining that such texts appear because they may be more marketable on the occasion of some major anniversary. In similar fashion, the recurrent discussions in the press about how to celebrate an anniversary of a wartime event seems to suggest that the occasion somehow places us “close” to the event or even to the memory of it. In fact, we are not close at all; our choice of certain dates as the appropriate time for commemoration of various events of World War II is a cultural construct based on nothing more than the arbitrary linguistic sign of the date (e.g., June for the commemoration of D-Day, August for the observance of the anniversary of the first use of the atomic bomb). We are in fact at a greater remove from the event with every commemoration.

To a certain extent, the commemorative exercise underscores our distance even as it is used in an attempt to help us remember. It is at once an appeal to common memory and an implicit statement of difference about those who experience the event as remembered experience and those who do not. This sense of the duality of a central event seen in retrospect is similar to the phrase I commonly heard in the Netherlands as I was growing up in the postwar period – “Jij hebt de oorlog niet meegemaakt”, (“You haven't been through the war”). As I came to understand it, it was a phrase which, in some cases, despite the speaker's conscious intentions, had the effect of distancing two people – usually a parent and child – by emphasizing the two very different sets of experiences which populate their memories. With this old truism the speaker intends to communicate to the listener: “If this had happened to you, you would understand me.” The notion implicit in the phrase is the assumption that shared experience tends to lead to shared understanding and automatic acceptance and – perhaps – even shared memory.