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 1 The 'ability to mourn', of course, refers to Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern (München 1968). 2 Even Ian Buruma's masterful Wages of Guilt. Memories of War in Germany and Japan (London 1994) is not free from such a tendency.

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“…Within the ongoing Cold War environment where Japan was incorporated into the Western Club, coming to terms with the West also meant keeping Japan's distance from Asia. While post‐War West German Sonderweg (or, peculiar course of German modern history) was the ‘long path towards the West’ (Conrad : 93), Japan's path was the orientation towards De‐Asianization. That is, ‘Asia virtually disappeared not only in rhetorical but in real terms as well’ (Gluck : 5).…”

“…That is, ‘Asia virtually disappeared not only in rhetorical but in real terms as well’ (Gluck : 5). In Conrad (: 94): ‘Asia largely remained in a political and historiographical vacuum . … there was no space in Japanese discourse for the concerns of other Asian nations.…”

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“…According to Tsutsui's () content analysis of major newspaper editorials and speeches by the prime ministers in the postwar years (1945–2004), despite the occasional conservative backlashes, it was clear that by the mid‐1990s the underlying master narratives in Japanese society had become the admittance and acceptance of war guilt, which is characterized by what he calls remorse that “[takes] responsibility as a nation, accepting the collective guilt for the crimes” and universalism , which dovetails “the rise of global norms on reparation for past injustices” (p. 1393; cf. Conrad, ; Seaton, ; Seraphim, ). Unlike in the 1980s where the dominant societal discourse was evasion , which is closely connected to the widespread victim mentality (Tsutsui, , p. 1411), the voices of Asian people were finally heard in the 1990s, and they were “no longer marginalized” (Conrad, , p. 94) .…”

Italia docet? The Relationship between Italian Fascism and Nazism Revisited

“…More recently, historians have proposed a history of crossovers and exchanges, a two-way process. 35 However, it is time to clarify our terminology and think more concretely in terms of a history of fascist entanglement, a history that examines both mutual influences amongst fascist regimes and their interconnectedness rather than simply looking at transfers. The 'fascist entanglement' perspective also examines the significance of transfers and does not assume that all crossovers were necessarily equally important for the actors involved, paying close attention to friction amongst the actors.…”