| Events of the last decade in Europe have forced us all to be challenged by history. The reappearance of nations and nationalism in the vacuum of post-Communism and the resurgence of ethnic conflict, based upon unrequited perceptions of injustice, compound collective memories of atrocity in East-Central Europe. The economic "Volkerwanderung" westward, as Schengen sets up its outer defenses, parallels increasing restrictions on foreign migrants. The post-unification engineered identity-myth for a new Germany’s "drang nach Ost", drawn ever eastward around the fulcrum of its new-old capital in Berlin, is an intriguing conundrum. new small-state "rearview mirror" redefintions of national identity in the Baltics, or in the Balkans, run together with their quest for legitimization by membership of the Council of Europe, security in NATO and the seal of authenticity as candidates for civilization in the European Union. Old propaganda school texts are being replaced by new orthodoxies based on pre-war cherished national myths. In 1995, many believed that, by the fiftieth anniversary of V-E-Day, a line would finally be drwawn. Yet the fascination persists as never before. - With be opening of archives, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the ineluctable drive towards universal "transparency", a new generation of political leadership - born after the War - is facing a crisis of memory.
- Swiss, indignant at the years their fathers spent in mountain redoubts, to defend the country from a Nazi invasion that now appears to have been less than probable.
- Austrians, confronting facts that belie the myth that theirs was "the first invaded country, Hitler’s first victim" - a device enunciated by the United States as a function of the Cold War.
These reevaluations of national histories are, normatively, not the replacement of one official version of history for another, nor a revisionist act of denial and falsification of facts. These are painful deconstrucitons of memory that can leave perceptual withdrawal symptoms - in psychological terms, "cognitive dissonance". |
