Postmodernism and European Memory

Events do not happen; events are produced. An occurrence becomes an event only
when certain groups in society pay attention to it, consider it important, speak and
write about it, react to it, and remember it. Thus events are socially constructed.
This does not mean, however, that they are pure constructs. At their starting point,
they have acts and occurrences that are very real indeed.¹

EWA M. THOMPSON is Research Professor of Slavic Studies and former chairperson of the Department of German and Slavic Studies at Rice University. Her books include Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism, Understanding Russia: The Holy Fool in Russian Culture, Witold Gombrowicz, and Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism: A Camparative Study. She is Editor of the Sarmation Review, a quarterly on Central and Eastern European affairs.

This postmodern statement was made
by the German Historical Institute’s
Research Fellow, Carola Dietze, in November
2006 at a conference/workshop
partly dedicated to European memory
and sponsored by the Institute in Washington,
DC. It was not incongruent with
the views of other participants on historical
subjects and memory. The key participants
included Aleida Assmann, Professor
of English at the University of Konstanz
and acclaimed author of numerous books
on memory, and Peter Novick, Emeritus
Professor of History at the University of
Chicago and author of The Holocaust in
American Life.² I submit that this statement
represents a widely accepted postmodern
view of the study of history in Germany
and the United States at the beginning of
the twenty-first century. It promotes the
view that might makes right and suggests
that certain communities and groups of
people produce only “occurrences” not
worth remembering, occurrences that may
be mentioned wholesale but then quickly
dismissed. Not only did this conference
fail to move the European discussion on
memory forward, it made accord among
the EU nations more difficult by adopting
and proclaiming the faulty postmodern
ways of approaching history.

At first glance, Dietze’s thesis may seem
defensible. History consists of events and
not of occurrences; it consists of things
deemed important and selected for their
importance. However, a foundational assumption
of this kind is a different matter.
First, on the ontological level, it is predicated
on an a priori certainty that select
human beings are the sole creators of history—
that facts do not matter unless given
importance by the intellectually powerful
individuals who decide which facts are
important and which are not. This view
is not uncommon among Western historians
today. In contrast, most earlier historians,
even when they wrote from a secular
point of view and declared themselves
historicists, carried in their methodology
traces of the belief that there exists some
kind of ordering grid, whether epistemological
or value-oriented, that transcends
individual historians and their time. They
might have done so unconsciously, as they
were influenced by the customs and habits
of Western tradition, or they might have
done so consciously. The entire corpus
of Holocaust studies is predicated on the
quasi-transcendent idea that certain things
are unacceptable, regardless of whether
they have undergone “social construction.”
Without an appeal to moral indignation,
Holocaust studies would lose their
resonance. Similarly, without the grounding
in traditional moral valuation and/or
in customary ways of assessing historical
facts, historical books would become obsolete
as soon as new contingencies appeared.

Second, Dietze’s statement cancels out
the assumption, long taken for granted,
that historical narratives are always incomplete
and tentative. “Incompleteness”
ceases to be a meaningful term, as there are
no yardsticks measuring “correctness” or
“incorrectness” of a “socially constructed
event.” Indeed, the word “correctness”
appears absurd in this context. Select human
beings are accepted as legitimate creators
of the narrative of history because
they succeeded in constructing an event
by speaking of it often and authoritatively.
Their efforts and abilities ultimately determine
what the rest of us remember—and
we are supposed to find nothing wrong
with such a state of affairs.

The difference between the postmodern
view and the “traditional” view may appear
slight, but it is critical. Dietze’s postulate,
while ostensibly acceptable, is destructive
of Western culture, which is predicated
on the possibility of disputation about the
relative importance of events regardless of
how much attention or publicity they have
so far received from historians or the public.
Dietze’s statement does not leave room
for correction, except when correction is
based on force, and implies that greater
power is inherently the ground for historical,
and therefore moral, authority.

The keynote speaker of the GHI conference,
Aleida Assmann, tried to define the
parameters of European memory. This was
not the first European attempt to do so. After
the bloodletting of the Second World
War, European intellectuals repeatedly
tried to create a discourse that would process
and preserve national memories in such
a way as to invalidate their ability to infl
ame the masses. European countries have
overwhelmingly declared that the places of
former confl icts are the sacred lieux de mémoire
worthy of respect by all. The idea was
to preserve memories without inciting resentment
and the desire to get even, so that
cultural memory would become a common
property of nations participating in
a memory community—and Western Europe
was ripe to form such a memory community.
To a large degree, this readiness to
develop a common memory was helped by
the perception of a common danger from
the East (and the concomitant erroneous
implication that non-Germanic Central
Europe was part of the East and a friend of
the East). Western European countries succeeded
in the enterprise of reconciling their
memories or at least papering over their
differences. French theorist Pierre Nora
has noted that the lieux de mémoire became
a common element of social and political
life in Europe; they have become places
that unite rather than divide the Western
European nations.³ Jay Winters, the author
of one of the best English-language books
on European memory, gave a sympathetic
account of these lieux de mémoire in a way
that inspired communal melancholy and
strengthened, rather than weakened, European
unity.⁴

Thus the recent studies in memory have
differed from nineteenth-century attempts
to promote national chauvinism through
memory, both by means of books and by
other symbolic representations of the past.
It has been shown that throughout that
century commemorative rituals were embraced
and promoted by the European
empires eager to confirm and consolidate
their imperial status, while nineteenthcentury
historians created the visions of
Europe advantageous to their particular
nations. Many of the memory rituals, often
treated as if they were a legacy of centuries,
were produced by the imperial imagination
rather than being a work of many generations:
parades, monuments, and museums
were founded and paid for by the European
monarchs in order to strengthen their legitimacy
and the citizens’ loyalty to the imperial
state.⁵ In contrast, the lieux de mémoire as
described by Pierre Nora or the battlefields
of the First World War as described by Jay
Winters are attempts to set aside European
pugnaciousness and replace it with the
spirit of cooperation. The GHI conference
was ostensibly conceived in that spirit. But
unlike Nora or Winters, who merely ignored
the eastern half of Europe, the keynote
speaker’s tone was bent on instructing
the unfamiliar “Eastern European Other”
(I have in mind nations of the European
Union located east of Germany) on how to
construct a common memory in countries
whose national memories were a source of
conflict in the past. She proposed an acceptance
of certain rules that in her view
would facilitate the desired outcome. Her
approach differed radically from the piecemeal
approach of Jay Winters or Pierre
Nora or from the traditional historians’ approach
to history that strives for objectivity,
confrontation with available evidence,
checking and rechecking of sources and
facts, and the arrangement of facts according
to their significance.

The key part of Assmann’s proposal
had to do with the methodology of creating
the proposed common memory. She
quoted approvingly the standard for a “European
identity for Germany” formulated,
she said, by a German-Syrian student of
Max Horkheimer, Bassam Tibi. His first
postulate, and presumably hers as well,
was to reject whatever transcendent truths
some European historians might consider
foundational to their researches and
instead to embrace “reason” as the central
concept. What kind of reason? From
Assmann’s presentation it was clear that
she and Tibi (and Novick as well) had in
mind the Enlightenment understanding
of “reason,” rather than the Aristotelian
or Christian one. Assmann thus excluded
from the company that should determine
what Europeans should remember all those
who do not subscribe to the kind of subjectivism
the Enlightenment generated.
She then stated that church and politics
must be separate, while pluralism and tolerance
should reign. The possibility that
the first part of this statement is a tautology
and that both parts taken together are
a contradiction apparently did not occur to
her. Assmann further proposed to give priority
to memories rather than arguments
about memories, stop the “competition
of martyrologies,” respect each group’s
memory, and introduce contextual frames
for the memory of individuals and groups.
She submitted these guidelines while demonstrating,
over and over again, ignorance
of the martyrologies of Germany’s eastern
neighbors; this, however, did not prevent
her from summarizing them in one word—
“Jedwabne.” Finally, she proclaimed her
agreement with Tibi concerning the primacy
of the rights of the individual over
communal rights.

While Tibi apparently formulated these
postulates for Germany only, perhaps owing
to the peculiarities of twentieth-century
German politics, Assmann implicitly
proposed that they be given validity for the
entire European Union. She did so without
any input of scholars from other EU countries,
especially those that so far have had
little opportunity to engage in dialogue
with their German colleagues or present
their possible objections to Assmann’s and
Tibi’s way of defining European identity.
In other words, when Assmann moved
onto the territory of the Others’ history
and how one should look at it, her elegant
and apparently seamless theory rode
roughshod over areas of which she demonstrated
little knowledge but about which
she was ready to theorize.

After exporting Bassan Tibi’s German
product into countries unfamiliar to her,
Assmann quoted a British expatriate in
America, Tony Judt, as an authority on
Eastern and Western Europe. In her opinion,
one of Judt’s essays “showed” that
after the Second World War, Eastern European
memories froze “in such a way as
to support the political status quo.” Judt’s
(and Assmann’s) disregard for the realities
of Soviet occupation of Central and Eastern
Europe allowed both of them to speak
nonsense. The risings in some countries
against the Soviet power, the well-camoufl
aged but now known Soviet efforts to
suppress the culprits by minimizing the
development of infrastructure and educational
system in their countries should have
alerted both scholars to the incorrectness
of such “Orientalist” bagging of apples and
oranges together—they did not. Assmann
went on to say that the countries of Eastern
and Central Europe illegitimately assumed
the role of blameless victims and/or resisters
to German onslaught, while in fact
they are not entitled to such a unitary pose.
The illegitimate assumption of the victim’s
pose involved “screening memories” and
“forgetting” about collaboration with the
Germans, generally directed against the
universal Jewish victims. Assmann then
opined that while these “defensive strategies”
began to crumble in Western Europe
in the 1980s, no such crumbling occurred
in Eastern Europe. The incommensurability
of her comparison (Eastern Europe
was occupied by the Soviet Communists
between 1944–89 and between 1939–41,
that is, during the first two years of the
Second World War—with momentous
consequences) apparently did not cross
her mind. But even with regard to Western
Europe, Assmann displayed an amazing
lack of discernment. From the Vichy
government collaboration to Switzerland’s
protection of its “banks and borders,” she
concluded that Western European countries,
if not as guilty as Germany, were at
least heir to many “conflicting and shameful
memories.” With a facility unworthy
of a great scholar, Assmann looked for
parallels where there are none, and then
opined that the story of Jedwabne in Poland
caused a reaction of denial because
the Polish attitude of victimhood was so
deeply and wrongly entrenched. “Psychoanalysts,”
Assmann instructed, “speak
of ‘screen memories’ that suppress other
memories and serve to protect a positive
self-image. To put it another way, one remembers
something in order to be better
able to forget something else. When applied
to the realm of national memory, this
means that one recalls one’s own suffering
in order to avoid being reminded of one’s
own guilt. Myths arise when partial memories
supported by experience are claimed
as the homogeneous and exclusive memory
for the national collective, while memories
deemed inappropriate are excluded
from the national discourse and expunged
from the collective self-image.”⁶ She further
advised that Poland’s self-perception
as victim could lead to self-immunization
against guilt and responsibility.⁷

The epistemological principles espoused
by Assmann do not allow her to make elementary
distinctions concerning the scale
of responsibility or the indecency of advising
a nation ravaged by Nazis and Soviets
on how it should handle its indescribable
losses. Furthermore, she appears unable
to see the qualitative difference between
France’s creation of a contemptible Vichy
government in conditions of foreign occupation,
and the implications of the unprovoked
attack on France by Nazi Germany.
She is further unable to understand
the incomparably more brutal treatment of
Poles than of the French under Nazi occupation,
the differences in scale between the
resistance in both countries, and numerous
other circumstances (virtually ignored
by Western and Soviet historians) that the
two long years of Nazi-Soviet friendship
(1939–41) created. In her recent novel
Anne Rice captured well the wave of consequences
that evil deeds entail, depending
on their weight and circumstances:

I saw the deeds…the smallest, most
trivial things…I saw them growing,
intertwining with other deeds, and
those deeds come to form a thicket
and a woodland and a great roving
wilderness that dwarfed the world
as we hold it on a map, the world
as we hold it in our minds…and
James’ face when I said it, I am weary
of you, my brother, and from that instant
outwards a million echoes of
those words in all present who heard
or thought they heard, who would
remember, repeat, confess, defend…
and so it goes for the lifting of a finger,
the launching of the ship, the
fall of an army in a northern forest,
the burning of a city as flames rage
through house after house!⁸

Rice’s poetic text could find its parallel
in a scholarly text, if the scholar did
not adhere to the mechanistic logic of the
Enlightenment. For a scholar who knows
the facts, even if they have not congealed
into “events,” the consequences of German
deeds throughout Europe were
incomparably more malignant than the
consequences of French or Swiss inaction,
itself being caused by German misdeeds to
begin with. Any theorizing of the relative
weight of consequences has to be done by
scholars well-acquainted with each damaged
(France) or mortally wounded (Poland)
country. But Assmann is unable to
make the distinctions necessary to assess
the consequences of German deeds.

The Enlightenment reason Assmann
invokes at the beginning of her presentation
offers little in the way of methodological
tools to deal justly with the problems
described above. Therefore, her attempts
to forge a common approach to memory
among countries whose burdens are incommensurate
is doomed to failure. To
find one’s way around deeds, the consequences
of deeds, and the relative weight
of deeds, one has to bring to bear concepts
grounded in a morality based on something
other than Enlightenment logic.
Surely comparing a country like Switzerland,
with its admittedly clannish policy of
assuring its own citizens’ comfort before
opening its borders in a rescue mission, to
the German onslaught not only on Jews
but also on Catholics, who were the primary
target of the Nazi murder campaign
in 1939–41 (Auschwitz was originally
built to exterminate the Polish educated
classes), demonstrates an inability to assess
the comparative moral significance of
historical events while at the same time
calling for an adoption of universal criteria
that would ensure the primacy of ethical
principles in inter-European relations.
Assmann wishes to prevent “competition”
among victims and “comparisons” between
stages of victimhood without having
studied these stages and without having
acquired the knowledge necessary finally
to put an end to such comparisons and such
competition. She appears unaware of the
fact that, while Germany has fully shouldered
the consequences of its behavior toward
Jews (and part of this shouldering has
been to educate every German about what
happened in German-Jewish relations during
the war), no such awareness exists in
Germany of what Germans did to Catholics
in the East—or what the Soviets did,
for that matter. It is clear from Assmann’s
essay and her endnotes that she has read
no books detailing Nazi and Soviet pronouncements
and their implementation
regarding the Catholic East. She knows of
Jedwabne but does not know of Koniuchy
or Naliboki; nor has she heard of Bykovnia,
Zamosc, Rajsk, Michniów, Skloby,
Kulno, Cyców, Olszanka, Borów, Lazek,
Józefów, Sumin, Jamy, Milejów, Kaszyce,
Sochy, Lipnia, Mrozy, Krusze—each of
them with a story no less poignant and in
which Catholics were the victims. Her references
do not even contain such elementary
books as Richard Lucas’s The Forgotten
Holocaust. She seems totally unaware of the
issue of “pollution of the soil” that Germans
accomplished on Polish, Czech, and
Ukrainian territory by placing Auschwitz,
Theresienstadt, Babiy Yar, and other death
camps and killing fields there. While death
camps were built on German soil as well,
to mention only Buchenwald and Dachau,
the majority were built on occupied territory
so that “Others” would have to deal
with the humiliation of having such memories
imposed on them. It is not a question
of “competition of victims”; it is a question
of German ignorance of what Nazis
did to Eastern European Catholics and the
lack of willingness to remedy that ignorance.
Such issues should be discussed by
German scholars before they offer Eastern
and Central European colleagues instruction
about how to move “from trauma to
understanding,” how to “separate memory
from argument,” how to stop “competition
among victims,” and how to “share memories”
rather than exclusively embrace the
memories of one’s own community.

The consequences of fifty years of Soviet
totalitarianism (a direct result of the Nazi
onslaught) for Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia,
Poland, western Ukraine, and Belarus, the
loss of several generations of people in this
way, do not affect Assmann’s facile call to
abandon comparisons and freeze memories
at their present stage. By invoking the
tainted memories of the French and the
Swiss in the context of German crimes,
Assmann tries to suggest that today those
Western European countries that behaved
shamefully in the Second World War
should stand alongside Germany as examples
not to be emulated, and she invites
the countries east of Germany to confess
and acknowledge their co-participation in
Nazi crimes. Historically, psychologically,
and morally, this is an absurd demand.

Assmann’s paper, and indeed the entire
conference, were free of the input
of scholars elaborating on the memories
and ways of dealing with them in Eastern
and Central Europe. Assmann opined on
the status of “commemorative consciousness”
in countries whose histories she had
not studied. Furthermore, she took it for
granted that in constructing the European
memory all metaphysical considerations
should be put aside; the audacity of making
such proclamations regarding countries
like Poland or Lithuania, where a crushing
majority are religious believers, is mindboggling.
This, I submit, is a frequent oc-
currence in German intellectual life. The
boldness of German theorizing about the
world and reality is well known, and it has
often been accepted and followed by scholarly
communities in First World countries.
However, when this audacity is applied to
peoples on whose soil the Germans built
the death camps and who remained practicing
Christian believers, it becomes unacceptable.

It amazes me that a scholar like Assmann,
highly sensitive to the details of the suffering
of Jews and knowledgeable about the
ways Jewish memories are contextualized,
felt free to theorize about nations unfamiliar
to her. The only possible explanation is that
the fifty years of silence imposed by Soviet
terror on non-Germanic Central and Eastern
Europe has made German scholars feel
that nations east of Germany have nothing
to say about the Second World War, that
everything has been said already by Holocaust
scholars and German scholars.

Assmann quotes with approval Peter
Esterhazy’s opinion on the “untruth of the
exclusive perpetrator…[and] the untruth
of the exclusive victim of World War II.”
Not once does she mention the crucial yet
forgotten two years of the Second World
War from September 1939 to the German
attack on Soviet Russia on June 24, 1941.
She apparently does not know who fought
against whom at that time, and why, and
what were the consequences. She does
quote Christian Meier’s comment about
“atrocities” Germany perpetrated against
“Poland and Russia.” But can one really
dismiss the consequences of German actions
in Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania with
just this curt word, “atrocities,” and then
lecture those countries on how they should
deal with their knowledge and their memories?
At the GHI conference there were no
scholars representing Polish, Lithuanian,
Latvian, Estonian, Belorussian, Ukrainian
or Russian territories—no Andrzej Paczkowski,
Janusz Kurtyka, Jan Kieniewicz,
Andrzej Nowak, Henryk Wisner, Antoni
Dudek, Jan aryn, Mariusz Muszynski,
Piotr Gontarczyk, Marek Jan Chodakiewicz,
or Sebastian Bojemski. Indeed,
the entire conference seems to have been
structured in such a way as to deny the
Eastern European Catholics a voice. The
German cultural habits place Germany at
the “center” of civilization and intellectual
articulation, thus seeing German scholars
as those destined to articulate single-handedly
the “periphery” (Central/Eastern
Europe). This “other Europe” is deemed
to be a place of colonization, instruction,
experimentation, and German-initiated
development—but never a place that has
its own narrative to offer, a place where
Western civilization developed in a unique
way, somewhat different from Western Europe
while remaining indubitably Western
and Latin-based. In a recent article historian
Jan Kieniewicz argued that the Baltic
states, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and
the Czech Republic developed their own
civilizational model based on the same
principles as those adopted in Western Europe
but utilized them differently because
of the different geographical and political
circumstances.⁹ I have yet to find a German
scholar who would take such propositions
seriously. In German historiography,
countries east of Germany do not exist as
separate and distinctive cultural entities.
They are all subsumed under a vague image
of a territory that needs tutelage and
articulation from the outside, a waystation
on the road to Russia with which Germans
display a continuing fascination.

Assmann’s presentation perpetuated
these colonialist habits of mind. She offered
a model of memory that she claimed
was universal but was based solely on the
experiences of Western Europe and Germany.
I submit that, without taking the
voices and the point of view of “new Eu-
rope” into account, the project of developing
a common European memory cannot
be launched.

The speakers at the conference were selected
by the German Historical Institute.
In this context, the gesture made toward
the “inarticulate masses” in the East is signifi
cant. Instead of inviting the Polish, Latvian,
Estonian, Ukrainian, or Lithuanian
scholars specializing in the history of the
Second World War and the issues of memory,
the GHI invited the Polish ambassador
to the United States, Janusz Reiter. It is
not difficult to conclude that the presence
of Ambassador Reiter was meant to create
an impression that all sides had been given
their due and that theorizing could now
proceed in an aura of full agreement.

Contingency was assumed to be total
and all-encompassing, the only possible
guideposts being the functions of power
(“whether an occurrence has been much
spoken about”). Peter Novick spoke contemptuously
of the vision of “organic development”
of society that was the core of
John Henry Newman’s and T. S. Eliot’s
thinking (not to mention the millions of
less articulate people who continue to see
society as “organically developing”). But
according to Novick, this way of thinking
has been discredited and should not
be invoked by a scholar aspiring to worldclass
status.¹⁰ In other words, Novick proclaimed
that those whose worldview is
founded on such essentialist concepts lack
scholarly respectability. Thus, for instance,
Catholic scholars, including the last two
popes, must be denied scholarly status simply
because they recognize the realities
that give rise to the metaphor of “organic
development.” Denying them the status of
world-class scholars is dogmatism à rebours,
inconsistent with open enquiry and a welcoming
attitude toward a range of epistemological
approaches that scholarship in
an open society supposedly entails.

It is also worth noting that the postulate
of the rights of the individual trumping
the rights of the community came from a
member of the strongest of all European
communities—namely, the German nation.
It seems rather unlikely that its rights
as a community would be trampled under
any foreseeable circumstances. Their communal
rights have recently been asserted
through the government-sponsored building
in Berlin of a “Center against Expulsions”
that commemorates the expulsion
of Germans from territories awarded by
the four Great Powers to Czechoslovakia
and Poland after the Second World War.
The Center was built in spite of strong opposition
by Czechs and Poles. The Center
ignores or barely mentions the other expulsions—
those initiated by Soviet Russia
and resulting in a relocation to formerly
German territories of over one million
non-Russians previously living in Lithuania,
Belarus, and Ukraine. Those who
protested against the Center saw an element
of the grotesque in honoring German
suffering associated with Hitler’s war,
before the suffering of the non-German
Catholic victims—whose numbers ran in
the millions—is properly acknowledged in
German history books.¹¹ While Assmann
declared her disagreement with some of the
aggressive doings of the German expellees’
organizations, she could not have been unaware
that protests such as hers, expressed
at a learned conference on American territory,
played no role whatsoever in the
policies of the German state.

Can a common memory develop in Europe?
I believe it can. In the twenty-first
century Europe is united politically and, to
some extent, also economically and ideologically.
However, there exists an imbalance
of mutual knowledge and recognition
between the countries of “old Europe” and
those of “new Europe.” A rectification of
that situation can be accomplished if Ger-
man scholars in particular acquaint themselves
with the history and memories of
their Eastern neighbors. So far, they have
refused to do so.

There is a relation between a nation’s
perceived political security and its ability
to convert its memories into the kind of
memory Jay Winters describes in his book
or the kind of memory the participants in
the GHI conference assumed could instantly
become a part of everyone’s selfperception.
When a nation reaches the state
of stability and is respectfully recognized
by the neighboring nations as a creator and
carrier of its own history (and a contributor
to the ways its neighbors see history), it
can reminisce about the past with its erstwhile
adversaries without bitterness about
past grievances and losses. Reaching that
stage requires that its history and self-perception
be in some measure internalized
by the neighboring nations, and especially
by the nations that once brutalized it. If
a nation has not reached this stage of security
and stability, attempts to lecture it
about the culturally superior ways of its
neighbors amount to intellectual violence
and cultural imperialism.

To give the German Historical Institute
its due, another German scholar appearing
at the conference, Gesine Schwan, came
forward with similar postulates:

Surveys show that Poles have not
only more respect, but more sympathy
for Germans than the other way
around. German attitudes are very
slowly improving. But it remains remarkable
that Poles—who were victims
of German policy not only under
the National Socialists but also
earlier—are more at ease and more
sympathetic toward Germans than
the other way around. In a way, this
is psychologically understandable
because those who have done something
bad often have an unconscious
tendency to think that the victims
must also have had their part in it.
This psychological mechanism is at
the basis of the “anti-Semitism of
resentment.” Because we don’t want
to acknowledge our role as perpetrators,
we say in order to ease our feelings:
“There must have been something
about the victims themselves.”
And this is the case to a certain degree
with Poland too, I would say,
especially in the last few years. Public
discussions of the Nazi past and
World War II in Germany were first
about Jews and then expellees, but
not that much about what was done
to Poland. I think this is a deficit
that has to be overcome in order to
teach contemporary Germany what
really happened in Poland.¹²

Schwan’s remarks, however, fell on deaf
ears.

In his Nobel Lecture, Czeslaw Milosz
spoke about “the other Europe.”¹³ He did
not have in mind Russia, which has famously
assigned to herself a measure of
separateness from Europe, but rather the
countries west of Russia whose culture is
rooted in Western Christianity and Greco-
Roman models, but which lost their political
independence at various points in
history and regained it only as a result of
the First World War.¹⁴ Battles, monuments,
museums, and lieux de mémoire associated
with the Great War are scattered
across those countries, but the names of
these places, cities, localities, and individuals
connected with them do not exist
in the memory of Western Europeans, or
in the common memory discussed at the
GHI conference, except for the sites associated
with the Holocaust. Countries situated
east of Germany, the largest and most
significant of them being Poland, remained
partitioned among empires throughout the
nineteenth century, and as a result, their
earlier history was erased from European
consciousness. Yet these countries played a
significant role in ages past, and even now,
after all the disasters, have strong and distinct
identities. Poland has nearly 40 million
citizens of whom 97 percent consider
themselves Polish (in Germany, 91.5 percent
of citizens consider themselves German).
¹⁵ Who outside Poland remembers
today that at the 1412 Council of Konstanz
Pawel Wlodkovic (1370–1435) presented a
treatise, De potestate papae et imperatoris, in
which he formulated the foundations of
international law and proclaimed that “the
pagans also have the right to live in peace?”
Or that Prague and Kraków had functioning
universities before Vienna and Heidelberg
did? Owing to this kind of amnesia, in
the twenty-first century, after joining the
European Union, the countries east of Germany
have been called “new Europe”—as
if their Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque
periods never existed, as if Europe
began with the Enlightenment.

Why are these issues relevant to American
intellectual life and American conservatism
in particular? Because, to begin with,
there are more conservatives today in new
Europe than in old Europe, and it is with
them that American conservatives should
start a dialogue. There are more Christian
believers in “the other Europe” than
in Western Europe. In spite of the inroads
postmodernism has made into the Central
and Eastern European universities and
education system, humanistic scholarship
in those countries is logocentric to a considerable
degree and therefore much more
in tune with conservative thought in the
United States than with humanistic scholarship
in “old Europe.” This is particularly
true of Poland, where Aristotelian thinking
(that is, the kind of thinking that starts with
acknowledging reality outside the human
mind, rather than starting with the human
mind as Descartes and the Enlightenment
wanted) is accepted much more widely than
in Germany or at American universities.

It is therefore important to understand
the implications of the approach to memory
advanced at the GHI conference. That
approach calls on “the other Europe” to
abandon its logocentric orientation and
restructure its value system according to
postmodern principles. Assmann’s “constructivist”
approach is “the very opposite
of essentialism,” to use her own words.
She claims that we always select from the
past what is most advantageous for us. In
other words, we always treat the past instrumentally,
keeping in mind our own
interests rather than the principle of objectivity.
Yet there is a huge difference
between admitting that we may never
be perfectly objective and reducing our
memory to self-interest only. Assmann
asserts, after Halbwachs, that collective
memory is a construction of memory “according
to the needs of the present. As the
present is in no way stable, reconstructing
the past is a varying and open-ended project.”
¹⁶ I daresay this makes a mockery of
the concept of memory held by American
conservatives. Yes, our imagining of the
past is always in the process of construction.
However, Assmann’s constructivism
lacks the warning mechanisms telling us
that some essential part of the past has not
been taken into account; indeed, it voids
the distinction between “essential” and
“minor,” reducing our remembering processes
to what seems to serve the present.
Assmann’s statement is a sophisticated and
nuanced version of the Marxist assumption
that our material status determines
our consciousness.

Assmann can only offer us a short-lived
substitute for European memory, one based
on Carola Dietze’s “events” construed by
prominent people, prestigious universities,
and well-known publishing houses. Nations
that have managed to tell their story to the
world will remain satisfied with such an arrangement,
but those that have not cannot
be expected to consent to what to them is
a distortion of history. This is how conflicts
between nations are born.

The historians who gathered in the German
Historical Institute in November 2006
to give their learned papers discussed history
in a way that implied that their discourse
was the only one that has reached
world class and therefore cannot be challenged.
While this tendency to dictate interpretation
appeared in the refined atmosphere
of academia and therefore may seem
insignificant, attention should be drawn to
the dangers of this way of proceeding. The
postmodern approach to history is unacceptable
to Germany’s Eastern neighbors
and also to those who refuse to drop logocentrism
in the memory hole. An analysis of
conferences such as this one makes one realize
that, to a large degree, Western European
scholarship is no ally in the struggle to
pass on the Western tradition. If intellectual
allies are to be sought, one must focus on
the “new Europe” and its intellectuals, from
Václav Havel and Viktor Orbán to Ryszard
Legutko and Zdzislaw Krasnodebski.¹⁷

NOTES

1. Carola Dietze, “Terror in the Nineteenth Century:
   Political Assassinations and Public Discourse in Europe
   and the United States, 1878–1901,” German Historical Institute
   Bulletin, no. 40 (Spring 2007), 91. The entire issue
   is available at www.ghidc.org/publications/ghipubs/
   bu/040/bulletin40.html.

2. Other participants included
   Volker Berghahn, Professor of History at Columbia;
   Janusz Reiter, Polish Ambassador to the United States
   and former Polish Ambassador to Germany; and Gesine
   Schwan, President of the German-Polish Viadrina University.

3. Les Lieux de Mémoire: La République, Vol. 1,
   ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1984). In the twentieth
   century such lieux de mémoire have been officially
   established in France, Holland, Austria, Germany, and
   Spain.

4. Jay Winters, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning:
   The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge,
   UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998).

5. Eric Hobsbawm,
   “Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914,” in
   The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence
   Range (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press,
   1989), 263–307.

6. GHIB, 15.
7. Ibid., 17.
8. Anne Rice,
   The Road to Cana (New York: Knopf, 2008), 181–2.

9. Jan Kieniewicz, “Civilizational Aspects of the Eastern
   Boundaries of Europe,” in The State and Development
   in Africa and Other Regions: Past and Present. Studies and
   Essays in Honor of Professor Jan J. Milewski, ed. Krzysztof
   Trzcinski (Warsaw: ASPRA-JR, 2007).

10. Peter
    Novick, “Comments on Aleida Assmann’s Lecture,”
    GHIB, 28–9.

11. In “Widoczny znak: rzad polski nie
    zglasza sprzeciwu,” Marek Cichocki argues that the
    Center was built in spite of the objections from the
    Polish side. In effect, says Cichocki, “the building of
    the Center showed that the Polish-German dialogue
    is fiction,” Rzeczpospolita, 25 March 2008.

12. Gesine
    Schwan, “Bridging the Oder: Reflections on Poland,
    Germany, and the Transformation of Europe: Part I,”
    GHIB, 45.

13. Czeslaw Milosz, “Nobel Lecture,” available
    at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/
    laureates/1980/milosz-lecture-en.html.

14. An adjustment
    to Western thinking that has to be made here has
    to do with the fact that the First World War is not regarded
    as a disaster in non-Germanic Central Europe
    because it brought liberty to previously suppressed
    nations and allowed them to begin rebuilding their
    statehoods and identities.

15. CIA World Factbook 2008,
    https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-worldfactbook.

16. Assmann, “Response to Peter Novick,”
    GHIB, 34.

17. Viktor Orbán leads the Hungarian Fidesz
    Party; Ryszard Legutko, minister of education
    in the Kaczynski government in Poland, is a professor
    of philosophy at Jagiellonian University; Zdzislaw
    Krasnodebski is a professor of sociology at the University
    of Bremen, Germany and at Stefan Wyszynski University
    in Warsaw. See also Judy Dempsey, “Letter from
    Europe: a new conservatism rises in Eastern Europe,”
    International Herald Tribune, 4 October 2007.