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Pierre Nora, National Memory, and
Democracy: A Review
John Bodnar
Realms of
Memory: Rethinking the French Past. Vol. 1: Conflicts and
Divisions. Directed by Pierre Nora. Trans. by Arthur Goldhammer.
Ed. by Lawrence D. Kritzman. (New York: Columbia University Press,
1996. xxviii, 651 pp. $37.50, ISBN 0-231-08404-8.) |
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Realms of
Memory: The Construction of the French Past. Vol. 2:
Traditions. Directed by Pierre Nora. Trans. by Arthur
Goldhammer. Ed. by Lawrence D. Kritzman. (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1997. xiv, 591 pp. $37.50, isbn 0-231-10634-3.) |
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Realms of
Memory: The Construction of the French Past. Vol. 3:
Symbols. Directed by Pierre Nora. Trans. by Arthur
Goldhammer. Ed. by Lawrence D. Kritzman. (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1998. xiv, 751 pp. $37.50, ISBN 0-231-10926-1.) |
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The study of
national memory emerged at a time when the coherence of what was
generally known as national history was severely contested and
disturbed. The opportunity to review an English-language edition of
Pierre Nora's massive study of French national memory for an
American history journal is a reminder not only that this disruption
marked the histories of many nations but also that the fracturing of
national histories involved a beginning—a political
transformation—that has yet to be fully examined or conceptualized.
Scholars such as Michael Kammen in the United States and Raphael
Samuel in Britain have brilliantly established the outlines of this
alteration in nations other than France. It is less certain,
however, when and how this change began and what the political
consequences were for the nations involved. |
2 |
The
rise of modern nations was rooted in a crisis of authority. In the
late eighteenth century democratic revolutionaries with visions of
popular participation in government and greater personal freedom
came forward to overturn autocratic regimes. Imbued with the faith
of the Enlightenment in human reason and potential, these new states
in places such as France and America took up the highly romantic
project to make the future better than the past. This democratic
upheaval did not eradicate conservative ideals less trusting of
popular rule and personal independence. Indeed, a struggle between
democratic and conservative dreams marked the political history of
most nations touched by the democratic upheaval long after the
founding of democratic regimes. There is little need to recount the
familiar points of this political history. But there is a need to
explore the connections linking the vast projects to promote
democracy, those designed to construct representations of national
pasts, and the controversies they initiated. |
3 |
Although
it exaggerates the coherence of former times, Nora's multivolume
history of French national memory sharply raises the connection
between the rise of democracy and the problem of making a national
past. It centers its attention on three distinct topics: the key
ideological streams that needed to be merged in French national
memory after the Revolution of 1789; important sites such as
medieval cathedrals or battlefields that were inscribed with the
ideas and sentiments of French nationalism; and powerful symbols
such as Joan of Arc that mediated diverse political interests and
sustained a sense of a national past over a long period.
Collectively, the volumes by Nora and his collaborators chronicle
how ideas, places, images, stories, and rituals were fused together
into a cultural edifice that was widely assumed by most citizens to
be part of the natural order of things. |
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As he
conceived of his project during the last two decades of the
twentieth century, Nora perceived an overall decline in the
importance of the French nation and in the capacity of its national
culture to sustain what he called "realms of memory," the array of
rituals, sites, ideas, and traditions that had long been part of the
nation's collective past. "A nation that was long agriculturalist,
universalist, imperialist, and state-centered has passed away," he
wrote, "and in its place has emerged a nation conscious of its
diminished power." He deplored controversies that surrounded recent
commemorative events in France as a "politicization of
commemoration" and the end of "order and hierarchy" in the
representation of national heritage. "Gone is the time when major
events were celebrated simultaneously throughout the country at
identical sites with identical rituals and processions," he
lamented, "without regard to specific individual and group
identities."1 |
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Indeed,
a close reading of Nora's work leaves a strong impression that his
goals went beyond describing the rise and fall of a cultural
superstructure that served the interests of a strong nation. He
gives evidence of regret over what has been lost and a hint that his
task is in part one of recovery. In his opinion, the very idea of
the nation and the realms of memory that served it have been turned
"upside down" by broad forces of change such as globalization,
democratization, mass culture, and the proliferation of private
interests. What is missing in the present that, in his view, was
abundant in the realms of memory of the past is a sense of mediation
between the central ideological formulations that resided at the
heart of national culture. That is why he referred to the realms or
sites he studied as "hybrid places," locations where contrasting
interests and ideas found some common ground. Because they
privileged the power of culture and because they could link private
and collective, democratic and conservative conceptions of the past
and present, his realms of memory represent the possibility of
significant cohesion and order in the national project. Nora
criticizes history as it has come to be practiced and written in our
times as overly concerned with the analysis of social structures
and, therefore, insufficiently sympathetic to the countless
subjective and local views that existed in French society. Nora's
realms of memory thrived in the past partly because they were able
to connect individuals to the nation. In a sense his entire project
attempts to reverse the direction of history—whose "true mission,"
he believes, is to "demolish" memory—by reminding his readers that
there were once realms of memory that combined a sense of solidarity
and organization with a toleration for "multiple voices."2 |
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Realms
of Memory begins with the French Revolution and the end of the
ancien régime. He argues that unlike the United States, the modern
French nation could not begin as an entirely new experiment. Rather,
the task of creating a nation of citizens with equal rights replaced
an older national structure that had rested on the twin pillars of
the Catholic Church and the monarchy or, we might say, on the rule
of faith and devotion rather than the rule of reason. Consequently,
an endless battle ensued in French national culture between highly
conservative and democratic visions of what the French nation should
be. Thus, one could celebrate Bastille Day at Versailles and imagine
either regal splendor or democratic futures. "The French of the
nineteenth century were a people who could not cherish as one what
1789 had put asunder," one contributor concluded, "those who loved
the Revolution detested the Ancien Regime and those who loved
the Ancien Regime detested the
Revolution."3 Importantly, however, a
national memory was constructed in nineteenth-century France as it
was in the United States, and it was broad enough to incorporate
such democratic ideas as the "rights of man" and antidemocratic
visions emanating from the church and the monarchy. |
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This
process of mediation is clarified nicely by an extended discussion
of Catholic cathedrals as realms of memory. In the two centuries
before 1789 these massive structures represented the union of
"throne and altar." After the Revolution they tended to fall into
disrepair as the flag replaced the cross as a national symbol.
Between 1870 and 1918, however, these buildings acquired new
importance as national treasures or "expressions of the cultural and
artistic genius of the French people." In the twentieth century
national and local governments mounted efforts to restore and
recognize them as crucial parts of France's "national patrimony." In
a similar fashion, the symbol of Joan of Arc, after being ignored
for centuries, appeared everywhere in France in the late nineteenth
century because it could coerce diverse interests such as the church
and the peasantry into a united front on behalf of the nation.4 |
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The
essays in Nora's collection do detect some difficulties facing the
project to create and sustain a national memory early in the
twentieth century, even before globalization and mass culture. The
problems had less to do with the democratization of remembrance or
longings for the old regime and more to do with war and trauma. The
experience of war disrupted the entire undertaking of the nation and
its implicit aim of managing the public expression of private and
personal desire. At issue was what the nation was about, its
ideological core. Nora reminds readers that at its inception the
nation—both the French and the American—had nourished the idea that
it would bring material and political progress to all citizens.
Although Nora does not problematize the impact of war on national
memory as fully as he might, he suggests that a "disintegration" of
the national myth took place at the end of both World War I and
World War II, and it is easy to conclude that part of the problem
was the irrationality of war itself.5 |
9 |
One way
war upset the balance between the pivotal forces of democracy,
monarchy, and church in France is suggested in the essay "Monuments
to the Dead," by Antoine Prost. Whether citizens espoused the
conservative or the democratic ideal of the nation, they had
remained optimistic about the future. The connection between the
nation and mass death disturbed such optimism. Nations were about
citizenship and order, but not about human devastation, no matter
how justified a conflict was. Prost shows that in France, after the
Franco-Prussian War, thousands of monuments were built by numerous
national committees that raised their own funds. Most of the
monuments that were erected conveyed, not democratic or conservative
national visions, but meanspirited desires for revenge against the
Germans. Following World War I local citizens took an even more
pronounced role in building monuments to ordinary infantrymen and
their deeds of service and sacrifice. Armistice Day, according to
Prost, became more important than Bastille Day. And that was the
point. Democratic dimensions of French civic life began to give way
to a "cult of the war dead" and to expressions of nationalistic
aggression. Patriotic sacrifice may have been noble, but it tended
to direct cultural attention toward the state and away from the
rights of citizens or, for that matter, the interests of the church
and the old idea of a monarchy. It comes as no surprise, therefore,
to learn that Verdun, the site of a horrific battle between the
French and Germans in 1916, became the "central element" in national
commemoration in the interwar period as veterans worked assiduously
to make their fellow citizens realize the extent of their pain and
suffering. But to recognize the plight of the veterans was not the
same as acknowledging the rights of all men or women or even the
power of a monarch. And to gaze upon the rows of graves at Verdun
did little to raise optimism that a nation devoted to reason could
survive. As Prost writes, the ultimate intent of the commemoration
at Verdun was "funerary." It moved away from associating the nation
with progress and came to symbolize, I suspect, a rupture in the
reconciling of faith and reason that had been vital to the
construction of national culture in the first
place.6 |
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Memorials to dead
soldiers, such as the one at Verdun pictured here,
undermined the cultural memory of the nation as a
project that would create a better future for all.
Photograph by Michael Green.
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It was
the idea of the nation, standing above the sentiments of elites,
religious leaders, citizens, and even veterans, that organized the
public expression of the past in France. After World War II,
however, a process that had begun after earlier wars and that
hindered the task of forming national memory was reinvigorated. That
is to say, trust in the promises of the nation—the dreams of
progress, reason, fairness, and order—was seriously undermined. The
war against fascism was a disaster for the French. Paris was
invaded; citizens turned against other citizens. The regime of Vichy
became a dark spot in French national memory not only because
calling it to mind stirred recollections of national defeat but also
because it had denied basic human rights to those of the nation's
citizens who were Jewish. We could say that Vichy stood for the end
of democracy. Other historians who have looked at the public
representation of the past in postwar France, such as Henry Rousso,
have also noted the problems caused by remembering Vichy and the
strong imperative in the first years after the war to forget it by
glorifying the patriotic resistance led by Charles de Gaulle. Rousso
pointed out that the silence over Vichy—and by implication the
heroic view of war—proved impossible to maintain once Jewish memory
began to express itself in the 1960s. At that point "traditional
forms of commemoration" became inappropriate for recalling the
Jewish deportations.7 |
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Nora's history of
French national memory invites comparison and contrast with Michael
Kammen's extensive study of the subject in the United States over
much the same period. In Mystic Chords of Memory, Kammen took
up many of the same issues as Nora and concluded that national
memory in the United States, as in France, went through a series of
stages. In both nations, moreover, political and cultural tensions
had to be reconciled under the signs and symbols of the nation. In
Kammen's first stage, from the American Revolution to about 1870,
attempts to remember the birth of the nation were pervasive and
rested on the "firm ground of national consensus" in all regions.
Kammen argued that, unlike the French Revolution, the American
rebellion against monarchy was not controversial. Nevertheless, his
work suggested, there was debate over commemorating the past and,
consequently, over what the Revolution meant. In this early period
tension erupted along a line that divided "tradition," a sense that
culture and commemoration should uphold ideals of order and
hierarchy, from democracy. Thus, by the 1820s the Fourth of July was
"central to civil religion in America." Traditionalists used the day
to celebrate the heroic deeds of leaders of the Revolution as a way
of reminding the masses of the continuing importance of elites.
Ordinary citizens responded by drinking heavily and ignoring calls
for order and deference.8 |
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The
Civil War and the period of industrialization that followed both
expanded the content of national memory and made it more
controversial. In Kammen's second stage, from 1870 to 1915, "diverse
traditions" meeting various imperatives appeared. The focus of
attention was not, and could not be, on the Revolution alone. New
narratives of the past, dealing with the Lost Cause of the
Confederacy and the legacy of massive numbers of war dead, began to
claim more of the public space devoted to national commemoration.
Thus, Memorial Day began in the South in 1866 and eventually spread
throughout the nation. Near the end of this period, driven by a need
to reconcile the North and the South, national memory became more
heavily patriotic (and less democratic) as the deeds of soldiers and
veterans from both regions were honored in ways that made one forget
that some of them had mounted a rebellion against the ideals of
national unity and democracy. Reunions of veterans from both the
North and the South celebrated memories of male valor on
battlefields and overlooked the significance of the Civil War as a
struggle over equal rights for African Americans. The patriotic and
nationalistic tone of the period was also manifested by an increase
of instruction in national history in public schools in all regions,
which promoted not only sectional reconciliation but also the
assimilation of millions of immigrant arrivals to expanding
industrial cities.9 |
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Mystic
Chords of Memory divided the twentieth century into two phases.
From 1915 to 1945, traditionalists who valued political and social
order tended to venerate a nostalgic past before industrialization
and the Great War that was dominated by powerful men such as George
Washington. Their opponents were not so much new immigrants or
people in the lower social ranks as intellectuals and artists
attracted to the modernist project of exploring the fate and
subjective desires of individuals. Modernists were more likely to
preserve or commemorate images of common people or regional culture
free of the highly centralized ideals of corporatism and patriotism.
Thus, Kammen noted the work of Thomas Hart Benton, who in the 1920s
undertook to paint murals of ordinary folks and their life-styles as
a way of democratizing the larger imaginary of the nation itself.10 |
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Kammen's
final stage began in 1945. In the era since World War II, the
contest between tradition and democracy dissipated, without
necessarily being resolved in favor of one or the other. In its
place he found a discourse over the national past whose features
were so broad as to defy easy categorization. In the contemporary
age, the politics of commemoration are not sharply defined. Memory
has been replaced by "heritage," a term that signifies a past that
is highly abstract, malleable, and susceptible to serving all kinds
of national, group, and individual interests. Putting Kammen's
account of the post-1945 period alongside Nora's, it seems that
public discussion over the past has been detached considerably from
the political contest between elites and democrats that had marked
the revolutions of both nations and the politics of national memory
for a very long time. |
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Other
scholars have discovered this newfound "cult of heritage" and
detected the expanding range of commemoration in our time. David
Lowenthal argued that heritage is much less about "grand monuments,
unique treasures, and great heroes" and now "touts the typical and
the vernacular." Raphael Samuel, who looked at this issue in
England, concluded that heritage has become a "nomadic" concept that
is attached to almost anything including landscapes, country houses,
family albums, and the museums of local football clubs. Citizens are
less likely to get representations of the past that evoke the need
for a democratic society tempered by traditions and are more likely
to encounter either nostalgic renderings of the past, such as Main
Street at Disneyland, that delete knowledge of social turmoil and
personal anguish or urban restorations that bring pleasure to the
upper middle class and developers. Tourism as well contributed to
this watered-down version of national politics by inventing historic
sites that appealed to all kinds of people and classes. The
objective, I suspect, was not to reaffirm either tradition or
democracy but to imagine a mythical nation drained of politics and
inequality where people were free to pursue a myriad of personal
pleasures and leisure-time fantasies. Heritage did not exclude
democratic or traditional aspirations, but it muted the attention
they had once received. Consequently, the past became, in Samuel's
word, "dissevered" from the idea of national or collective destiny.
I would argue that it is now scattered into a thousand preservation
projects and commemorative sites that are frequently seen as part of
a world that has disappeared never to return, rather than as part of
a long-term quest for reason and justice.11 |
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These overviews of
the history of national memory are important not simply because they
offer insights, but because they raise questions of staggering
importance that need careful analysis. Taken together they mute
inclinations to overstate the exceptionalism of any democratic
nation and insinuate that for nearly two centuries after their
founding revolutions, the politics of national memory in such
nations revolved around a fundamental issue: Democracy. How much was
there to be and to what extent was it to be venerated? Forces of
tradition, as described by Nora and Kammen, tended to celebrate a
past without much popular politics; those more accepting of popular
politics looked toward a future with less tradition. Overall, the
discourse over national memory fixed on this issue. To suggest that
in public discourse concerning the past, the tension between
democracy and tradition may have dissolved is to raise the
possibility that debate over how much democracy there should be is
no longer central to national politics as well. This point is surely
suggested by Anthony Giddens. In his study of contemporary politics,
Beyond Left and Right, Giddens takes up the question of the
"altered context of political life" in our times. For him (and for
me) older forms of liberal democracy, socialism, and conservatism
have "disintegrated" in the face of a tidal wave of globalization
and the increased speed of transportation and, especially,
communication. The consequence of this process, according to
Giddens, has been a profound decline in the ability of powerful
organizations to establish a dominant political viewpoint. The
implications for the nation-state as well as for the individual have
been monumental. "Totalizing" political ideologies such as
nationalism, conservatism, and socialism have floundered as people
have demanded "more autonomy in their lives than ever before."12 |
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Although
Giddens does not explore the particular problems of national culture
or a national past, he understands that both democracy and
conservatism remained strong long after the Enlightenment. Thus, he
argues that even after the democratic revolutions, "grand
traditions" such as nationalism, patriotism, and patriarchy were
invented as well as new forms of representative government. Even as
democracy spread, what Giddens called the "Old Conservatism" stood
strong with its affirmation of hierarchy and the "primacy of the
collectivity, or state, over the individual, and the overreaching
importance of the sacred." To extrapolate from the work of Nora,
Kammen, and Giddens, we can say that under the nation-state there
was a sense of the transcendent in cultural politics that helped
conservatism and democracy get along and that fostered a belief
system that seemed both eternal and loftier than either conservative
visions of authority or leftist dreams of mass democracy. In a sense
the impulses to democratize and to reassert tradition needed each
other. Democracy pushed outward for greater personal freedom;
tradition worked to constrain the individual and to maintain the
collective. More important, this system had specific implications
for the formation of national memory. The American and French
revolutions were both about "breaking away from the hold of the
past." For Giddens this process was never defined primarily by the
Right or the Left but by what he calls "progressivism": The past was
to be mobilized and molded for the future benefit of all—not simply
for elites or workers or Aryans or veterans or urban
preservationists. Under a progressive culture of mediation, in
Giddens's words, "History was there to be seized hold of, to be
moulded to human purposes, such that the advantages which in
previous eras seemed given by God, and the prerogative of the few,
could be developed and organized for the benefit of all."13 |
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Although
globalization disrupted this effort at mediating tradition and
democracy, as Giddens, Nora, and Kammen have all suggested, national
commemorations gave evidence of breaking away from Giddens's
idealistic goal of using the past for the "benefit of all" long
before our contemporary age. Recent scholarship has benefited
immensely from the insights of Nora and Kammen. It has, however,
also moved further in explaining the repercussions of warfare on the
project of national memory. It suggests that the effort to join the
traditional with the modern, the collective with the individual,
under the sign of reason and progress was badly shaken. I think that
this happened in at least two fundamental ways. First, large-scale
warfare generated a new social group—veterans—that made claims on
the state, not in the language of equality or democratic rights, but
in what I would call a language of compensation. Veterans and their
supporters were more likely to call for recognition of their special
anguish than to endorse a universal politics. Patrick Joyce has
argued that for a democracy to be imagined it was necessary for
individuals to think of themselves as "subjects" of the democratic
polity and the nation.14 Veterans, in their quest
for benefits and special monuments, thought of themselves as part of
a nation but as somewhat apart from the rest of the body politic.
Thus, they demanded redress rather than equal rights. Second, and
this follows from the previous point, warfare tended to transform
the conception of the state from an entity that protected the rights
of all citizens to one that had distinctive obligations to some
citizens whom it had hurt or punished. As the case of Germany after
World War II demonstrated, there can be valid reasons for a state to
come to terms with its wrongdoing and to offer atonement, but this
activity represented a departure from the nineteenth-century ideal
of a state that would work for the benefit of a democratic polity.
The nation became associated with production of victims, rather than
the making of citizens. The cultural deployment of group and
personal identities therefore made more political sense in the
twentieth century than it had in the nineteenth. |
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The
findings of Jay Winter and Daniel Sherman on war and remembrance
after World War I support the notion that war shrank the place of
democracy in visions of the nation and its future. After studying
postwar commemorations in several countries, Winter suggested that
the commemoration of the war dead, especially in monuments, tended
to assert the healing language of tradition, the sentimentality of
honor, duty, and patriotism, more than the language of modernism
because it offered better explanations of why people had to suffer
and die. And such language helped heal ruptures caused by war
itself. If veterans said they had faced death for the democratic
polity or "the people," they might have blunted their distinctive
claim. It may have been better to invoke their service to the entity
that would reward and honor them—the nation-state itself. Impressed
with what he saw as a proliferation of monuments, Winter discovered
that the collective remembrance of war led to an increase of
groups—"second- or third-order elites within civil society"—who took
up commemorative work formerly orchestrated by powerful people,
organizations, or the state itself. After 1918 such groups,
operating at a level between the interests of the nation and those
of the private individual, sought to organize private, family, and
collective memories rather than leave the task to people they did
not know. In effect, Winter found more participants in the
commemorative process. Ironically, the images they venerated were
not so much about democratic futures for all as about what families
and victims had lost. Sherman's work on France after 1918 also noted
a paradox in the commemorative process: Popular participation in
public memory activity increased, but not the expression of
democratic ideals. He saw a growing interest in recognizing
individual suffering and listing the names of the dead. But this
impulse, often most powerful at the local level, was usually
incorporated into projects that placed the remains and memory of
fallen soldiers into larger cultural and physical sites that honored
the nation and its traditions. Thus, in the great national
cemeteries that were built in the 1920s, bodies were mobilized at
sites that evoked a sense of national unity and that were inscribed
with traditional Christian symbols such as crosses. Patriotism and
Christianity stood above ideals of reason and freedom.15 |
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Powerful
expressions of patriotism were not found in Germany after 1945. In
the nineteenth century, German national memory, like that of other
nations, had blended democratic and traditional impulses, often
incorporating local symbols into the national imagination. At least
two problems affected the survival of that national memory after
1945. German responsibility for mass destruction and mass murder
presented an obvious obstacle to idealizations of national unity and
progress. Furthermore, the assumption that the past (in either
traditional or democratic form) could easily be retrieved for useful
purposes in the present was undermined by a tremendous desire to
forget. This desire was sometimes manifested in a growing nostalgia
for the period prior to the twentieth century or in what Nancy Wood
has called "displacement activities," such as the fostering of
postwar economic reconstruction to the exclusion of political
discussions. By the 1980s, however, it became increasingly difficult
to discount the Nazi past or its implications for national culture.
In 1985 Ronald Reagan's visit to a cemetery at Bitburg that
contained graves of the Waffen SS caused widespread controversy.
Critics of German cultural amnesia, such as Jürgen Habermas,
attacked government officials for manipulating patriotic images of
fallen soldiers to seek international respect for the German nation
during Reagan's visit and for allowing the event to suggest that
Germans were allies with Americans in the fight against Communism
without recalling sufficiently the misdeeds of the Holocaust.
Habermas insisted that it was time for Germans to reflect in a
meaningful way on the war period and to resist the temptation to
turn the German dead into heroes. By remembering the violence and
the victims, Habermas hoped to force Germans to take collective
responsibility for what they did and to acknowledge the need for a
larger discussion on what citizens in a nation owed other citizens.16 |
21 |
On the
surface it might seem that the United States could have avoided the
disruption in national memory that other nations encountered after
World War II. Certainly the desire to forget the war and, therefore,
to avoid discussion of the need to retain hope in both tradition and
democracy was not as strong as in Germany, France, or Japan. The
Americans had won, and good reasons existed to celebrate "the
people" who had made so many sacrifices and the power of democratic
institutions and traditional American values. And this was done.
Yet, even a quick review of American cultural representations of the
war in its immediate aftermath—long before the Vietnam War disputed
optimistic and heroic visions of the United States—suggests that the
encounter with trauma and death had disturbed the type of national
memory that Nora, Kammen, and others had found in many Western
nations before the 1940s. That is to say, the blending of
traditional and democratic sentiments appeared more difficult to
achieve. Monuments such as the Iwo Jima memorial, dedicated in 1954,
gravitated toward the heroic but forgot the suffering of the dead
or, for that matter, the rights and contributions of those who
worked on the home front. By the time the USS Arizona
memorial was dedicated at Pearl Harbor in 1962, a countermemory of
the war embracing at least the dead sailors was claiming memorial
space, in part because their remains rested below the memorial
itself. It is no wonder their names were inscribed inside the shrine
above. In both of these prominent memorials, however, reaffirmations
of democracy were hard to locate amid images of traditional
masculine power and patriotic sacrifice. |
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The Iwo Jima
memorial to the American victory in World War II
tended to reinforce the connection between the nation
and such traditional ideas as patriotism and
patriarchy more than to evoke associations between the
nation and democracy. Photograph by Mary
Bender.
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In mass
culture the ideals of reason and fair treatment for all appeared to
be in open conflict with traditional images such as patriotism and
national unity. Omer Bartov has argued that the encounter with
trauma in modern warfare has invariably led societies to ask why so
many had to suffer and die. Such searches were evident in postwar
American culture, and they undermined any hope that American
national memory could continue to coerce both traditional and
democratic images into a seamless story. Briefly, think of Norman
Mailer's novel The Naked and the Dead (1948). In this
remembrance of the war and quest for explanations for the explosion
of brutality, American men are inherently violent because they have
grown up in a competitive society that nurtured dangerous emotions.
This was a direct attack on the wartime ideology that idealized the
ordinary men who fought the nation's enemies. Harriet Arnow's The
Dollmaker (1954) castigated the war experience for destroying
the independence and life of a proud woman; this narrative—and
Mailer's—raised the possibility that the war undermined progress
toward democracy and that it served the needs of some men more than
the just expectations of women. Customary gender roles, powerful
men, and veterans received unflattering portrayals in Grace
Metalious's novel Peyton Place (1954). The film All My
Sons (1948) depicted American citizens as greedy in their
efforts to profit from war production. The film Home of the
Brave (1949) represented the violence of war as a force that
could destroy the emotional stability of soldiers, linked to similar
destructive (read racial) forces in American society itself. The
Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), which is frequently referred to as a
patriotic film, was filled with criticism of patriotic heroes. These
cultural stories and many others prompted by the experience of war
raised doubts about the future of democracy as long as traditional
forms ofpower were maintained.17 |
23 |
|
In a sense the
rupture between efforts to accord customary veneration to patriotic
devotion and efforts to sustain hope in reason and democracy was at
the heart of the 1995 controversy over the Enola Gay
exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution. In that episode museum
curators argued with veterans' organizations over how much to
represent the trauma of war and how much to ignore an American
penchant for violence, a penchant that stands as an obstacle to
imagining a future of reason and fairness in our times. Recent
commemorative activity at the dedication of the U.S. National D-Day
Museum in New Orleans and in plans for a World War II memorial on
the National Mall give further evidence that impulses to celebrate
heroism and sacrifice at the expense of reasoned discussion are
gaining the upper hand. Many scholars have emphasized that the
Vietnam War raised awareness of the innate ability of American men
to be violent (rather than democratic) and of the contested nature
of American cultural memory. But too many times Vietnam has served
as the catalyst that disrupted the American master narrative that
blended conservative, democratic, masculine, and racial ideals. In
reality, the decomposition of American national memory was well
under way in the decade after 1945, the process begun by the
generation that had witnessed the "good war" and its challenges to
the optimism and the faith sustaining the compromise between the
forces of tradition and those of democracy.18 |
24 |
Notes
John Bodnar is Chancellors' Professor and chair of
the history department at Indiana University.
Readers may contact Bodnar
at bodnar@indiana.edu.
1 Pierre Nora, dir., Realms of Memory:
Rethinking the French Past, vol. I: Conflicts and
Divisions, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman
(New York, 1996), xxiii; Pierre Nora, dir., Realms of Memory: The
Construction of the French Past, vol. III: Symbols,
trans. Arthur Goldhammer, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York, 1998),
614–15.
2 Ibid., I, xviii, 1–11. See also the
incisive analysis of Nora's work in Nancy Wood, Vectors of
Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe (Oxford, Eng.,
1999), 4.
3 François Furet, "The Ancien Regime and the
Revolution," in Realms of Memory, dir. Nora, trans.
Goldhammer, ed. Kritzman, I, 91.
4 Ibid., I, 83; Pierre Nora, dir.,
Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, vol.
II: Traditions, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, ed. Lawrence D.
Kritzman (New York, 1997), 49–67, esp. 64–67; ibid., III,
433–73.
5 Ibid., III, 633.
6 See Antoine Prost, "Monuments to the Dead,"
ibid., III, 379–89.
7 Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History
and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer
(Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 1–22.
8 Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory:
The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York,
1991), 66.
9 Ibid., 102–31. See also Cecilia
Elizabeth O'Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American
Patriotism (Princeton, 1999), 129–38.
10 Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory,
299–341.
11 Ibid., 434, 548–49; David Lowenthal,
Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of
History (New York, 1996), 6–16, 63. In the cult of heritage, the
consciousness of being a subject-in-history has given way to an
"appetite" to possess a past that serves ends that are narrower and
more personal than those earlier served by collective national
myths; see Wood, Vectors of Memory, 31–32. Raphael Samuel,
Theatres of Memory (2 vols., London, 1994–1998), I, 205–21.
On the definition of mythical, see Roland Barthes,
Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, 1972), 143.
12 Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right:
The Future of Radical Politics (Stanford, 1994), 4–7, esp. 7.
13 Ibid., 1–5, 25, esp. 1; Samuel,
Theatres of Memory, I, 235–46.
14 Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The
Self and the Sacred in Nineteenth Century England (New York,
1994), 5.
15 Jay Winter, "Forms of Kinship and
Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Great War," in War and
Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jay Winter and
Emmanuel Sivan (Cambridge, Eng., 1999), 40–60. On the difficulties
of convincing citizens that they should serve the liberal state
rather than the state serving them, see Robert B. Westbrook,
"Fighting for the American Family: Private Interests and Political
Obligations in World War II," in The Power of Culture: Critical
Essays in American History, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J.
Jackson Lears (Chicago, 1993), 196–221. Daniel Sherman, The
Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago, 1999),
66–93.
16 See Jürgen Habermas, The New
Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians' Debate,
trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 229–48.
Wood, Vectors of Memory, 44–63. On the history of German
national memory, see Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local
Metaphor: Wurttemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory,
1871–1918 (Chapel Hill, 1997).
17 See Omer Bartov, "Defining Enemies, Making
Victims: Germans, Jews, and the Holocaust," American Historical
Review, 103 (June 1998), 771–809. Norman Mailer, The Naked
and the Dead (New York, 1948); Harriet Arnow, The
Dollmaker (New York, 1954); Grace Metalious, Peyton Place
(New York, 1956); All My Sons, dir. Irving Reis (1948; MCA
Home Video, 1987); Home of the Brave, dir. Mark Robson (1949;
Warner Reprise Video, 1986); Sands of Iwo Jima, dir. Allan
Dwan (1949; Republic Pictures Home Video,
1988).
18 Edward Tabor Linenthal, Americans and
Their Battlefields (Urbana, 1991), 181–97; Marita Sturken,
Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the
Politics of Remembering (Berkeley, 1997),
16. |
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