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DOI: 10.1177/0265691407075596
2007 37: 291 European History Quarterly
Stefan Berger
National Myths in Europe

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National Myths in Europe
Stefan Berger
University of Manchester
Monika Flacke, ed., Mythen der Nationen. 1945: Arena der Erinnerungen, 2 vols,
Verlag Philipp von Zabern: Mainz, 2004; 970 pp., 353 colour illus., 551 b&w illus.;
380533298X, E128 (hbk)
Monika Flacke, ed., Mythen der Nationen. Ein europisches Panorama, 2nd edn,
Koehler and Amelung: Munich, 2001 (original edition Berlin, 1998); 600 pp.;
3733802217, E19.90 (hbk)
In 2004/5 the German Historical Museum in Berlin staged a marvellous exhibi-
tion on the twentieth-century myths of the European nations. It was accompanied
by a lavishly illustrated two-volume catalogue covering 25 European countries as
well as Israel and the United States. Each article on a particular national memory
was followed by one or more maps (the two unexplained exceptions being the
USA and Israel) and a chronology. At the end of the volumes, we find useful
glossaries which include short biographies of the most important personalities
which figure in the volumes.
Monika Flacke, who organized the exhibition and edited the volumes, chose the
Second World War as the central memory event in twentieth-century Europe and
asked contributors to focus on that war and the Holocaust. By doing this she both
confirms the strong current interest in this subject and underlines how much
Europe has been a child of war and violent conflict.
1
Yet beyond that, the volumes
are not characterized by a strong argument or thesis unifying all contributions.
It reads more like a broad tableau of European myths arising from particular
national collective memories of the Second World War. That perhaps is not a dis-
advantage, as it allows the editor to give due space to the multiplicity of ways in
which the collective memory of that war has been shaped in different European
nation-states.
All of the chapters focus on various genres of what Michael Billig has called
european hi story quarterly :,r
European History Quarterly Copyright 2007 SAGE Publications,
London, Thousand Oaks, ca, and New Delhi (www.sagepublications.com), Vol. 37(2), 291300.
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banal nationalism.
2
Thus, many authors pay due attention to the representation
of the Second World War on stamps and other objects of everyday usage. The
broadest coverage is given to film and photography, no doubt the most important
media for shaping and reflecting collective memory processes. As Horst
Bredekamp emphasizes in his lucid introduction to the use of pictorial evidence for
memory purposes, these pictures have actively shaped the past just as much as
they reflected it. He presents us with a differentiated picture of diverse icono-
clasms after 1945, stresses the diversity of forms of remembrance and underlines
the point that the memory of the Holocaust was almost nowhere the centre of
attention (but not for lack of pictorial evidence).
At the heart of collective remembrance in Europe stood the victory over Nazi
Germany and the celebrations each year surrounding the end of the war in Europe
on 8/9 May. The heroic resistance against the universal bad guys of the war was
romanticized and foregrounded, whereas the (quite extensive) collaboration and
collusion with the occupiers was conveniently forgotten. Throughout communist
Europe, the role of the Red Army as liberator of the people from the yoke of Nazi
and/or indigenous fascist forces was celebrated. Monumental memorial parks
reminded the population of the heroic struggle by the Soviet Union against fascist
barbarity. Throughout much of Western Europe, the role of the Allies in defeating
Hitler was not forgotten, but the emphasis was on the part played by the national
resistance to German occupation. This patriotic memory, as Etienne Franois
calls it in his concise introduction to the volumes, became more problematic from
the 1960s onwards, as a new generation began to question the heroic national
narratives of their parents generation.
But was there really, as Franois claims, a move towards a genocide memory
in Europe?
3
Within the official memory of communist Eastern Europe between
1945 and 1990 the Holocaust did not play a major role, as all contributions to these
volumes emphasize. After 1990, many of the post-communist states struggled to
develop a self-critical perspective on their own nations part in the Holocaust. It
was easily externalized as a German problem, and the perception of their own
nation as victim (first of German, then of Soviet aggression) left little room for
other interpretations.
A genocide memory is more observable across Western Europe, especially
throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The remarkable impact of the TV soap opera
Holocaust on a great number of collective national memories across Western
Europe is emphasized here. Several authors also rightly point to the major impact
of legal proceedings against perpetrators. Equally important was the emergence
of the writing of contemporary history and newly founded historical institutes
where research on the most immediate past found an important institutional
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anchor. However, for this reviewer, one of the most striking results to emerge
from a reading of these 27 case studies is the dominance of national story-lines, in
which the Holocaust remains, at best, a sub-plot. There were only three excep-
tions to this rule: Germany, i.e. the key nation of the perpetrators; Israel, where
the Holocaust is closely linked to state legitimization; and the USA, where the
universalization of the Holocaust serves as justification for the global political role
of the USA.
4
Even where the Holocaust could have been potentially integrated as
a proud story of national resistance to National Socialism, as in Denmark or
Bulgaria, this was not done. Early accounts of the Holocaust in diverse European
countries tended to stress that the Holocaust was part of Jewish history and not
part of national history. In some storylines it appears as an exclusively German
problem, even where, as in Austria and Hungary, a popular anti-Semitism with
deadly consequences was unleashed with the help of the National Socialists.
If anything, one could in fact argue that the Second World War directly con-
tributed to an increased nationalization of memory cultures across Europe, as it put
an end to the rich hybrid of identities and cultures which characterized, in particu-
lar, East Central Europe before 1939. With diverse processes of ethnic cleansing
carried out in and after the Second World War, the map of Europe did indeed
become one in which ethnic and state borderlines were congruent as never before.
The National Socialist principle of Ein Volk, ein Reich perversely succeeded in
the post-1945 world. Ethno-cultural anchors of national identity were now more
unproblematic than they had ever been, and yet, ironically, the Holocaust meant
that these ethnicized versions of national identity were also deeply discredited.
Many contributions emphasize the importance of the positioning of nations in
the conflict. Few major protagonists actually stood unequivocally on the same
ground during the entire war. Germany and Britain would be the obvious cases.
Many of the leading players had more complex histories: the Soviet Union before
and after Nazi Germanys attack, the USA before and after Pearl Harbour, Vichy
France and the Free French, the ousting of Mussolini in Italy in 1943 and the
Republic of Sal all illustrating the diversity of experience. Some of the major and
all of the minor countries which were occupied faced the dilemmas of resistance
and collaboration. Then there were the minor protagonists who were allied to
Germany such as Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Finland, but at
some point and with varying degrees of success, performed U-turns in their
primary allegiances. And there were the neutral states, Spain, Switzerland and
Sweden, with their championing of neutrality and their own complex relation-
ships to both sides in the conflict.
An important sub-theme moving through virtually all contributions concerns
the relationship between official memory and what one could term memory from
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below, i.e. a memory which relied not so much on the state as on diverse actors
within civil society. Their very diversity tended to fracture the collective memory
of the war. Even the guided memories that communist parties provided across
Eastern Europe were contested by dissident movements and their instability was
revealed with the collapse of communism in 1990. Only in the Soviet Union and
some of its successor states did significant remnants of that memory culture
survive the collapse of communism. In Russia, as Jutta Scherrer emphasizes in
her contribution, the continuity of memory cultures of the Second World War
underpin Vladimir Putins attempt to return to more authoritarian and less demo-
cratic forms of government. Holm Sundhausen, in his insightful contribution on
Yugoslavia, puts paid to an influential interpretation of the revival of nation-
alisms in the Balkans from the late 1980s onwards. Communism, so the well-
rehearsed argument goes, just froze the national conflicts which characterized
that region. Once communism was gone, nationalist conflicts erupted again. This,
Sundhausen notes, comes close to an essentialist understanding of nationalism as
something which is always already there. He compellingly demonstrates that
Yugoslavias attempt to overcome Serb, Croat and other nationalisms and build a
Yugoslav nation based on neutrality in the Cold War, its own version of com-
munism, and federal political structures was reasonably successful. It only began
to crumble for a variety of economic and political reasons from the second half of
the 1980s onwards.
Most contributions on communist Eastern Europe deal not only with the
Second World War but with the war under conditions of Stalinization and
Sovietization. The impact of the Soviet Union as Eastern Europes dominant
power explains a lot about the ways in which Eastern European countries dealt
with the legacies of the Second World War. Although the position of the Western
European dominant power, the USA, cannot be equated with that of the USSR in
Eastern Europe, it nevertheless strikes me as peculiar that there is generally no
reflection at all in any of the chapters on Western Europe about the role of
Americanization in Western Europe.
5
Clearly, Westernization or Americanization
impacted massively on self-definitions of the nations in Western Europe under the
conditions of the Cold War, and it also seems reasonable to assume that it had an
influence on commemorations of the Second World War. Yet the myths of the
Second World War in Western Europe appear exclusively as national myths,
autonomous from and unrelated to any international developments.
Furthermore, the gendering of the collective memories of the Second World
War is an important, albeit unacknowledged theme in many contributions. The
heroization of female resistance fighters and the shaming of collaborators, the role
of womens organizations on both sides of the conflict, the role of mother Heimat
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in Russia, the depiction of women in national memorials, such as the one in
Bratislava, female war-time icons, such as Rosie the Riveter in the USA, and
many more images, which depict women and make their special role in the
national narratives of war a direct topic, demonstrate how valuable future
research into the theme of gender and nation will be.
6
What also emerges clearly from these volumes is that the degree of suffering
and devastation across much of Eastern Europe, especially in Poland and the
Soviet Union, was such that the memory of the Second World War in these places
has a very different quality from that in Western Europe. For some nations, such
as Spain or Greece, the war itself was not as important as the civil wars which
preceded (Spain) or followed (Greece) it. Some countries built megalomaniac
memorials to their war-time efforts (none more so than the Soviet Union); others,
notably Britain, built hardly any. As for Britain, I cannot share Athena Syriatous
argument that the lack of memorialization had to do with the orientation of the
country to the future. Rather, Britain had already developed a memorial culture of
the First World War, onto which the memory of the Second World War fitted
remarkably well.
Britain is also a good example of how 1945 cannot necessarily work as a single
focus for capturing twentieth-century national narratives. The war was not
crucial in making the traditional national narratives crumble from the 1960s
onwards, as was the case in countries such as Germany, France and Italy.
7
Rather
it was the challenges of Celtic nationalisms, decolonization and European integra-
tion which provided the major transition points in the recasting of national narra-
tives for the island nation. Important as the Second World War undoubtedly is
for European memory cultures, if one wanted to look at the entire twentieth
century, one would have to incorporate the First World War and also the golden
age of the second half of the twentieth century more firmly into the analytical
framework. Following the long economic boom after 1945, the success of the
welfare state, and the coming and going of the Cold War, one is tempted to ask
whether the Second World War still is the most important event of recent history.
The twentieth-century myths of the nations will only be partially revealed from
the perspective of 1945.
Another problematic impression left by these two volumes is that, not the
least through the proper historisation of myths by the historical profession, the
European nations have moved from myths to history. After initial periods of
repressing and sidelining uncomfortable truths about the war, most European
societies, aided by their historical professions, have allegedly begun to face the
darker aspects of their war-time record. While there undoubtedly have been
attempts to come to terms with shameful elements of the national past, the under-
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lying juxtaposition between scientific history and myths is difficult to main-
tain, as Chris Lorenz has shown.
8
The claim by historians that their work was
scientific first arose around the late eighteenth century and has been crucial to
the self-understanding of professional historians ever since. However, this notion
of the scientificity of the historical sciences became itself one of the greatest
myths of modern historiography.
9
The argument that we move in time from myths
to history is even more problematic when it is connected to assumptions about the
Europeanization of collective memories. Can we really speak of a Europeanization
of the historical consciousness today? And if so, what does it consist of? Does any
such Europeanization really mean a weakening of national historical myths? Are
new European myths replacing them? All available surveys indicate that the
primary allegiance of most Europeans is still overwhelmingly with the nation-
state. National myths are still going strong and remain without serious rivals at
the European level. Nations have been and continue to be founded on history. The
Dutch nation even printed its history into the passports of its citizens between
1994 and 2001. One might want to consider whether such historical rootedness of
nations and national identities is not one of the major difficulties in breaking
through to stronger European identities. Arguably, Europe does not need more
history; it needs less.
10
These volumes on the twentieth-century myths of the nations have been con-
ceptualized as successor volumes to a book which accompanied another exhibi-
tion of the German historical museum in 1998. That prequel dealt with the myths
of the nations in the long nineteenth century, and hence provides some stimulating
points of comparison. This again is a wonderfully illustrated volume dealing with
17 European nations and the USA. Every contributor was asked by Monika
Flacke, who was likewise responsible for this undertaking, to highlight five
key national myths and analyse their depiction in, above all, historical painting,
but also in monuments, festivities, scholarly literature, schoolbooks, fictional
accounts, music and other genres.
In a masterly introductory chapter, the art historian Stefan Germer argues that
six themes were particularly prominent in nineteenth-century national historical
paintings: first, the theme of heroic opposition against foreign occupation;
secondly, foundational moments; thirdly, important victories; and fourthly,
heroic defeats. Fifthly, national painters liked to remind their audiences of the
Christian faith as a vital aspect of national self-definitions in Europe, and sixthly,
the mobilization of masses in the name of the nation was also a popular theme.
Important absences from the collective memory of the nations included the indus-
trial revolution and colonialism, neither of which created central national myths.
As Germer emphasizes, historical paintings reorganized and re-assembled the
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past with the aim of equating the picture of an event with the event itself. Hence
historical paintings attempted to hide their own fictionality and pretended to act
as transparent windows onto the past (p. 44).
Those incidents in national history which become symbolically important for
national myths are not necessarily the ones which are of truly historical signifi-
cance. The half-legendary story of the boy Balilla and the Genua uprising is an
excellent example of a totally banal historical incident taking on a major role in the
national imagination. Once again the individual country contributions reveal a
range of common themes, including the importance of medievalism, of Islam as
the crucial other to European culture and civilization, of national enemies (both
internal and external), and of the French revolution as a founding moment of
many national narratives. The Romantic cult of subjectivity shines through
very clearly in the nineteenth-century construction of national myths. National
narratives everywhere depended on the individualization of heroism just as much
as on depictions of collective mass mobilization. Wars and battles figure promi-
nently among the myths of the nations. One wonders, reading in particular the
contributions on Switzerland and Britain, whether there was a link between early
democratization and early nationalization.
11
The gendering of the national discourse is again striking. Whether it is in the
depiction of queens as mothers of the nation, or in the portrayal of idealized
family relations, such as in the Sicilian Vesper, gender relations play an important
part in telling the tales of the nations. The beautiful Polish Queen Wanda, who
commits suicide to escape the overtures of a German tyrant, or the Czech Libue
and her role in choosing Pemysl as founding father of the Czechs, the importance
of the Danish Queen Thyre Danebrod for building the Danewerk in tenth-century
Denmark, Joan of Orleans driving the English off French soil, or the role of women
in the aftermath of the battle of Mohcs gender relations are often at the heart of
particular images seeking to narrate the nation to diverse audiences.
One problematic aspect of concentrating on only five key myths is that authors
understandably concentrate on the most important ones, which tend to coincide
with the dominant national narratives. Hence minority myths which were part of
counter-narratives often do not come into play and the national narratives and
myths appear as unduly homogeneous, stable and uncontested. Thus we learn
little here about socialist myths of the nation or about Catholic ones in majority
Protestant nations.
12
We also rarely encounter Jews or gypsies and their attempts
to imagine a national belonging in nineteenth-century Europe.
13
In the volumes on
the Second World War, the emphasis is on memory cultures becoming more frac-
tious and more contested over time, but again this underestimates the degree to
which memory cultures always already appeared in the plural.
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The essential contestedness of national myths leads one to ask who initiated
and paid for these national narratives in the fine arts and elsewhere. Sometimes
the state was of crucial importance. At other times and in other places, civil
society was more important, while the church also remained an important player
in the realm of providing national images. One also wonders for which audiences
these narratives were produced and how they were received by those audiences.
The issue of reception of historical national symbols and narratives generally
remains an intriguing, but heavily under-researched topic.
14
Furthermore, one wonders, while reading these fascinating vignettes about the
depiction of national myths in high and popular art forms and in banal national-
ism, whether there was and perhaps continues to be a fundamental difference
between the representation of nations in art and in other genres, such as profes-
sional history writing, which is only treated very marginally in these volumes.
15
Was the textual construction of national narratives different from the pictorial
one, and if so, how? Did certain myths lend themselves more to illustration than
others and therefore figure more prominently in art than in history?
The reader might also ask how relevant many of the nineteenth-century
national myths still are today. Would most of todays schoolchildren across
Europe be still familiar with those legends, images and myths? My suspicion is
that the answer is probably no, although the situation might well differ substan-
tially from country to country. This, of course, does not mean that nationalism as
such has ceased to be of importance for twenty-first-century politics. Quite the
contrary: issues of national identity form a vital part of national politics from
Norway to Italy and from Britain to Russia. For Hagen Schulze and Etienne
Franois, who wrote the introduction to the nineteenth-century volume, it is this
topicality of national identity debates which makes them search for a patriotism
without nationalism. But can nationalism be freed of its Janus-faced character?
Can we have a sanitized nationalism? Again, the answer is probably no. The
differentiation between a good patriotism and a bad nationalism is wishful think-
ing.
In the preface to the nineteenth-century volume the former director of the
German Historical Museum, Christoph Stlzl, talks about the indispensability of
the nation. Such perennialist views of the nation find themselves in the minority
among todays nationalism scholars, who tend to emphasize the modern and
constructed nature of national identities. The modernist view of the nation is
sceptical of essentializing the nation and giving it a permanence and durability
because this often disguises both how recent it was and how much construction
went into making it. Yet comprehending the construction of national identities
and national myths is an important prerequisite for undermining their continued
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hold over peoples imagination. And the two volumes under discussion here
certainly contribute a great deal to our understanding of how such myths and
identities have been created in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They
should be read by anyone with an interest in national identity formation and
re-formation in nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe.
Notes
1. See also Adam Krzeminski, As Many Wars as Nations: The Myths and Truths of World War
II, Sign and Sight, 6 April 2005, http://signandsight.com/features/96.html.
2. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism(London 1995).
3. For Germany see Eric Langenbacher, Changing Memory Regimes in Contemporary
Germany?, German Politics and Society, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2003), 4669.
4. For an intriguing comparison of the memorialization of the Holocaust in Germany, Israel and
the USA see Matthias Hass, Gestaltetes Gedenken. Yad Vashem, das U.S. Holocaust
Museum und die Stiftung Topographie des Terrors (Frankfurt am Main 2002).
5. Heide Fehrenbach and Uta Poiger, eds, Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations:
American Culture in Western Europe and Japan (Oxford 2000); see also on Germany,
Michael Ermath, ed., America and the Shaping of German Society 1945 1955 (Oxford 1993);
Konrad Jarausch and Hannes Siegrist, eds, Amerikanisierung und Sowjetisierung in
Deutschland 1945 1970 (Frankfurt am Main 1997).
6. Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann and Catherine Hall, eds, Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and
Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford 2000).
7. Stefan Berger, A Return to the National Paradigm? National History Writing in Germany,
Italy, France and Britain from 1945 to the Present, Journal of Modern History, Vol. 77 (2005),
62978.
8. Chris Lorenz, Drawing the Line: Scientific History Between Myth-Making and Myth-
Breaking, in Stefan Berger and Linas Eriksonas, eds, Narrating the Nation: the
Representation of National Narratives in Different Genres (forthcoming).
9. Heiko Feldner, The New Scientificity in Historical Writing around 1800, in Stefan Berger,
Heiko Feldner and Kevin Passmore, eds, Writing History. Theory and Practice (London
2003), 322.
10. Allan Megill, Historical Representation, Identity, Allegiance, in Berger and Eriksonas, eds,
Narrating the Nation (forthcoming).
11. John Garrard, The Democratic Experience, in Stefan Berger, ed., The Blackwell Companion
to Nineteenth-Century Europe (Oxford 2006).
12. Stefan Berger and Angel Smith, eds, Nationalism, Labour and Ethnicity, 18701939
(Manchester 1999); Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Dieter Langewiesche, eds, Nation und Religion
in Europa (Frankfurt am Main 2004).
13. Ulrich Wyrwa, Narratives of Jewish historiography in Europe, unpublished paper held at the
workshop of team 2 of the European Science Foundation Programme entitled The Writing of
National Histories in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe, held at Munich, 2426
October 2005, see http://www.uni-leipzig.de/zhs/esf-nhist.
14. Michael Bentley has started an intriguing project on the reception of historical texts at a
roundtable of the world historical congress in Sydney in 2005.
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15. Dominik LaCapra, History and Genre: Comment, New Literary History, Vol. 17, No. 2
(1986), 21921.
stefan berger is Professor of Modern German and Comparative European History at the
University of Manchester. He is currently directing a five-year European Science Foundation
Programme entitled Representations of the Past: The Writing of National Histories in Nineteenth
and Twentieth Century Europe (www.uni-leipzig.de/zhs/esf-nhist ). He is also completing a
British Academy funded project on Britain and the GDR, 1949 to 1990. He has published widely
on comparative labour history, nationalism and national identity and the history of historiography
and historical theory.
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