Introduction: Memory and the Nation—Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations

Extract

Since at least the nineteenth century, scholars and politicians alike have recognized the fundamental connection between memory and the nation. While political elites invented and propagated legitimating traditions, historians objectified the nation as a unitary entity with a linear descent. At the same time, critics like Ernest Renan pointed out that forgetting—that is, forgetting alternative possible stories and alternate possible identifications—is at the heart of national self-understanding, while Nietzsche bemoaned the proliferation of “monumental” history. World War I seemed to many good enough reason to abandon nationalist chauvinism, but for others a myth of the war experience “provided the nation with a new depth of religious feeling, putting at its disposal ever-present saints and martyrs, places of worship, and a heritage to emulate” (Mosse 1990: 7). And the anemic internationalism of the 1920s was just that—inter-nationalism rather than postnationalism, based on a nebulous and misunderstood notion of “self-determination”—where the burning memory of stabs in the back and imposed settlements fanned old antipathies to new heights. Memory has long been the handmaiden of nationalist zeal, history its high counsel. Even those like Nietzsche and Renan who worried about it understood its centrality.