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European Review , Vol.11, No.4, 519-525 (2003)
Focus: History and memory
Introduction
MADELON DE KEIZER
Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, Herengracht 380, 1016 CJ
Amsterdam, The Netherlands. E-mail:
m.de.keizer@niod.knaw.nl
The story goes that in the 1980s and 1990s no publisher in Paris was
prepared to issue a historical study that did not have the word ‘memory’
in the title. Identity, a congener of memory, was equally popular in the
same period. One of the experts in the field, John Gillis, claimed that
identity has become no more than a cliché and that memory has lost a lot
of its precision, but both terms have remained key concepts. ‘The core
meaning of any individual or group identity, namely, a sense of sameness
over time and space, is sustained by remembering: and what is remembered
is defined by the assumed identity‘. Memories and identities are
anything but certain facts: they are ‘representations or constructions
of reality, subjective rather than objective phenomena. [ …] “Memory
work” is, like any kind of physical or mental labor, embedded in complex
class, gender and power relations that determine what is remembered (or
forgotten ), by whom, and for what end’. 1
It has been suggested that the demise of the vainglorious
future-orientated ideologies in the late 1980s brought about a shift in
focus towards the past. However that may be, the wave of interest in
memory did receive an enormous impulse from one of the most
controversial studies in this field, the seven-volume series Les
Lieux de Mémoire (1984-1992), published under the direction of the
French historian Pierre Nora. In the last volume he argued that France
had gradually disappeared as a ‘memory nation’; the national memory had
been supplanted by a series of lieux de mémoire and the
conflicting social identities that this entailed. La France,
according to Nora, had entered the ‘era of commemoration ‘ as Les
Frances as a result of what he called a ‘democratization of the
commemorative spirit’. 2
The relation between national identity and collective memory is
highlighted by the many commemorative events organized in the 1980s and
1990s. In 1980, the French, British and Brazilian governments had a Year
of National Heritage, while in Israel a ‘memory industry’ specially
devoted to the Holocaust got under way. The Austrian government called
1988 the Year of Reflection, and in 1992 many commemorative events were
held in Spain and the Americas to mark the 500th anniversary of the
landing of Columbus. The last decade of the 20th century, when the
relaxation of the pressure of the Cold War created an opportunity for a
fresh view of past history, was marked by the need to clear the
conscience of past errors. The Second World War was an important
benchmark, and celebrations were held all over the world in 1995 to mark
the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.
The four articles presented here are derived from a conference that
was held in Amsterdam in 1995, at which historians from every corner of
the globe evaluated the way in which the memory of the Second World War
had evolved in the past 50 years.3 They concentrated on the
public memory, that is, on the way in which a complex tissue of meaning
is conferred on the past in the context of the political demands of the
present and the future.
It is evident that the question of whether a country was on the
winning or the losing side - a victim or a perpetrator in the
terminology of Friso Wielenga - was crucially important for the postwar
construction of memory. Pieter Lagrou presents a comparative analysis of
the politics of memory in France, Belgium and the Netherlands -
countries in Western Europe that can be considered to have emerged as
victors of the conflict. On the other hand Friso Wielenga, writes about
the country that was the main European loser, West Germany. Another
loser, though not in Europe, was Japan, and the article by the Cooks
deal with the politics of memory there. The Soviet Union whose politics
of memory is analyzed by Nina Tumarkin, with 30 million dead in four
years and the destruction of 1700 towns and 70 000 villages, can he
regarded as the ultimate example of a totalitarian victim country.
It is fascinating to read in these articles how a certain shared
conjuncture can be distinguished in the development of the politics of
memory in Europe. As the experience of the Second World War receded more
and more into the background, a fairly rapid construction of a cult,
legend or myth of the War began in the early 1960s. This was when the
construction of the national myth reached its apogee; the case of the
Netherlands is emblematic, as Lagrou shows.
In the Soviet Union, the political memory constructed almost
immediately after May 1945 attributed the victory to Stalin, the Red
Army and the Socialist system. There was no room in the reconstruction
for individual heroes, there was only one hero, Stalin. Victory Day was
already declared a normal working day in 1947 (an idea that the Dutch
government also regularly toyed with from the 1950s). Nina Tumarkin
notes how a transition took place in the Soviet Union after 1945 from a
‘national trauma of monumental proportions to a cluster of heroic
exploits that had once and for all proven the superiority of Communism
over Capitalism’. In West Germany, as elsewhere, all eyes were fixed on
the future in the 1950s, even though the past continued to play a part
in literature (700 000 copies of the diary of Anne Frank were sold
between 1950 and 1958) and in historiography. Nevertheless, this period
of a ‘gewisse Stille’ fostered the smooth integration of the millions
who had supported Hitler into the German democracy.
Generally speaking, whether the country concerned was a loser or a
winner, in the 1960s there was a strong urge to pass on the values of
the wartime generation to the succeeding one. 4 Whether one
considers the USSR or a country like the Netherlands, the wartime
generation’s motto ‘It must never happen again’ created obligations. In
the Netherlands, the attitude of the wartime generation during the
occupation of the country (1940 - 1945 ) became a stake in a broader
calling into question of the authority and culture of the older
generations. Youth culture in the West demanded a new approach to the
wartime past. An offensive of norms and values in the Soviet Union
targeted what the wartime generation regarded as degenerate youth that
no longer shared the ideals of their parents. The country and the Party
were at stake. Victory Day was restored as a public holiday in the USSR
in 1965. The same emphasis on the succession of generations in the
memory conjuncture can be detected in the politics of memory of West
Germany. At a time of rapid changes in the fields of politics, society
and the economy, new generations sought a new identity of their own. A
turning point can he discerned in the Federal Republic around 1960, both
in prosecution policy and in the political and social attitude towards
the Nazi past. The German people had engaged in the confrontation with
its past not in 1968, but ten years earlier. It was the merit of this
new generation that its lack of direct contamination by the past
provided an openness about that past with a broader political and social
basis. The past of the Third Reich was given priority, particularly in
schools, with the result that a highly moralizing approach to that past
became the dominant one. Less than a generation later - the time of the
Historikerstreit - that attitude was replaced by a longing for
normality.
In every country in Western and Central Europe the unique, personal
memories of individual men and women or of a specific group were
sacrificed on the altar of the national myth. This was reflected in
histories of the war. In countries like the Netherlands, where the
national memory was in the ascendancy, the contours of that national
myth are easy to detect in history writing. In 28 volumes, Louis de
Jong produced a master narrative that was to dominate Dutch
historiography of the occupation until late in the 1980s. 5
Similarly, in the Soviet Union, the history of the Great Patriotic War
remained uncontested until the late 1980s. 6 Lagrou’s
article analyses the politics of memory in France, Belgium and the
Netherlands up to the moment in the 1960s when an unmistakable pluralism
began to develop in memory - a phenomenon that can subsequently be seen
all over Western Europe.7 The Netherlands stood out for the
early creation and long dominance of a virtually uncontested national
myth. It was not until the 1980s that scope arose for a ‘countermemory’.
A good example of the long struggle against the dominant national myth
is the politics of memory of Putten, a village in the Netherlands that
was the victim of reprisals by the Wehrmacht. 8.9 It
is the Dutch equivalent of Ouradour in France, and held a special place
in the national memory of the Second World War for a long time.10
Pluralism was kept out of the politics of memory the longest in the
USSR. The year 1989 marked a clear turning-point in this respect,
when Russia came to realize that the victory had been stolen from the
people and one revelation followed another, not only to the detriment of
Stalin and the Party, but even going back to 1917.
It has often been suggested that Japan has always had particular
difficulty in coming to terms with its wartime past. The cultural
difference - a Christian sense of guilt versus an oriental shame culture
- has been adduced as an important factor. However, Japan was primarily
embarrassed by the unprecedented problem of having to construct a
narrative of defeat. At the heart of the Japanese post-war ‘Legend of
War’ or ‘Wartime Myth’ lies a reticence about the war at the individual
level, which still prevails in Japan today. Narratives that are not in
harmony with the Wartime Myth are largely suppressed. The counter-memory
of the Japanese who returned from China is but a footnote in the master
narrative. The inability of the Japanese to come to terms with their
recent past in the Second World War is in marked contrast to the way in
which another loser, West Germany, dealt with its Nazi past after the
fall of the Third Reich.
Unlike the situation in Japan, a debate on the significance of the
war began in occupied Germany immediately after the hostilities had
ended. The key issue in this debate was the question of the collective
guilt of the German people. The thesis that Germany denied and
suppressed its past for a long time will no longer stand up to
historical scrutiny. Friso Wielenga’s acute analysis shows how that
thesis is incompatible with the political and cultural reality of the
post-1945 period. ‘The reality of the way in which the Nazi past has
been dealt with has obviously been painful, but at the same time more
capricious and subtle than the general theory of repression and denial
suggests.’ An important contribution was made to the debate by Karl
Jaspers in 1946, when he developed a differentiated concept of guilt,
because the Germans had all experienced the Third Reich in different
ways. No less important was the Stuttgarter Schuldbekenntnis of
the Evangelical Church of October 1945, whose impact was not confined to
Germany alone. In the village of Putten in the Netherlands it was of
great significance for coming to terms with the deaths of more than 500
villagers in concentration camps in Germany 8 Jaspers concept
of guilt was so influential because it was aimed at social action with
regard to the recent past to arrive at a cleansing. He considered that
purification was a condition of genuine political liberty. The low level
of response that this received was due to the total defeat, the national
paralysis that ensued, and the fear of being punished by the Allies.
Still, this was by no means a total suppression or denial of the past.
In Germany, reflection on the past was dominated by the value
of learning from that past, as in the various trials of
Hauptkriegsverbrecher. No less influential was the de-Nazification,
the cleansing of government bodies, the economy, and social life in
general. The integration of Germany in the West in the context of the
growing Cold War, however, soon led to a change in what had at first
been a strict policy. One of the effects of this was the way in which
former Nazis could now be inconspicuously incorporated into the German
democracy. However, like the Nuremberg trials, the process of de-Nazification,
though not carried to completion, still led to a permanent condemnation
of the former Nazi regime, not least in the media. And it was only
because these views of the past were widely disseminated that the
foundation was laid for a constructive dealing with the past. Whatever
choice you made as a German - whether you sided with the conservative
relativists or with the real guardians of a charged historical
legacy - there was no way of evading the Nazi past, which was too much
a part of German identity for that.
The era of universal confessions was ushered in with the 50th
anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe and South-east
Asia in 1995. The commemorations after the fall of the Berlin Wall in
1989 and the ensuing unification of Germany were marked by the spirit of
international reconciliation. The leaders of the Allies in the Second
World War formally recognized the incomparably enormous losses of the
USSR; President Clinton underlined that message in Moscow. The attempt
to come to terms with the past was marked all over the world with the
offering of excuses for crimes committed long ago (such as slavery) as
well as during the Second World War.
The spotlight came to play on Japan. Although most Japanese felt
that their government ought to do more to express its regret of the war,
Tokyo remained silent. In the previous decades a strong lobby of
veterans had emerged. They and their families considered that any excuse
for the war would dishonour those who had lost their lives in that war.
After months of debates and discussions, a rather vague parliamentary
resolution was finally adopted in 1995 which recognized Japanese
aggression and colonialism, but only in the context that other countries
had also committed offences. 11 This partial resolution was
largely an initiative of the Liberal Democratic Party, the largest party
in Japan, and the Prime Minister, Tomiichi Murayama. This resolution
recognized and expressed ‘deep remorse’, or rather reflection on Japan’s
behaviour (hansei), depending on the translation, but no apology.
This shift in the Japanese politics of memory was connected with
Japan’s role in the world of the 1990s. If Japan refused to come to
terms with the destructive role it had played in Asia in the past, it
would be unable to play a constructive role in Asia in the future. The
colonialism referred to in the resolution was not the essence of the
problem, nor was Japanese military aggression. After all, other states
had been guilty of the same. The key problem was that of the killing of
millions of Chinese, the medical experiments carried out on citizens,
and the enforced prostitution of thousands of Korean and other women for
the Japanese troops. More than a vague declaration of remorse was needed
to satisfy the feelings of the victims of those crimes and their next of
kin. By failing to offer proper excuses, Japan created a dangerous
psychological rift between itself and the neighbouring countries.
Unlike Germany in Europe, Japan had, until then, played only a
modest role in the promotion of new trade and security systems. During
the Cold War, it had followed US policy but that era was now over. With
Tokyo and Washington growing apart over economics and China developing
its military strength, Japan had to play a more forthright role in the
region, and it had to start by squarely facing up to its record in the
Second World War. The issue flared up again in 1997 when the Japanese
premier Hashimoto visited China to celebrate the 25th anniversary of
diplomatic relations between these two Far Eastern superpowers. On that
occasion, Beijing demanded that Japan recognize the atrocities that the
Japanese imperial army had committed in China during the Second World
War (1937-1945). Four years later Koizumi was the first Japanese premier
to refer explicitly to Japan in an excuse that explicitly mentioned ‘our
country’.
In the meantime, the world has witnessed the attacks on the Twin
Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on 11 September 2001.
Does that date herald the end of the politics of the memory of the
Second World War? At any rate, it looks as though that war is hardly any
longer relevant to the current political concerns of the West and
South-east Asia. However, for historians of the 20th century, research
on history and memory, especially with respect to the Second World War,
has lost none of its relevance.
I am grateful to the editors of the Historical Review for
their willingness to allow us to publish these four papers. |
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