Entangled Memories: Versions of the Past in Germany and Japan, 1945—2001

Abstract

In the history of memory, the national paradigm continues to reign supreme. This may come as a surprise at a time when the historical profession is beginning to discard the category of the nation and starting to produce transnational work. International comparisons and relational histories, and also the larger frameworks of European, post-colonial, or world history gradually seem to be replacing the narrow confines of the nineteenth-century paradigm of national history. Studies of memory, however, continue to cling to the nation with a peculiar stubbornness. Remembering and forgetting are the means through which nations confront their respective pasts. At the same time, nations appear as the products of memory forged into imagined communities through a series of memorial days, public speeches and visits to memorial sites. Within this scheme, an idealized or traumatic moment is remembered internally in metaphors of a 'past that does not go away'. Memory thus appears as largely a temporal relation between significant moments in the national past that linger on as memories for generations to come. In the cases of postwar Germany and Japan, the past and the present are severed through historical ruptures and 'zero hours' which, it is held, need to be bridged in order to come to terms with a traumatic experience that haunts both societies. From this perspective, memory appears as the almost direct expression of a national mentality, indicative of a nation's ability to mourn, to learn and to mature (by overcoming narrow nationalist perspectives).1 The language of temporality thus produces the familiar image of the interpretation of the past as a matter of national culture. The conventional picture of Japan as inherently unable to deal critically with her aggressive and expansionist history falls in this category. This 'inability' and 'deficiency' is frequently couched in cultural terms and explained as the product of national character.2 The German preoccupation with the nazi past, on the other hand, is attributed to a process of collective learning. Daniel Goldhagen's thesis