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Article Excerpt
In the group too an impression of the past is retained in unconscious memory-traces.
--Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism
SINCE BENEDICT ANDERSON FIRST PUBLISHED HIS LANDMARK
Imagined Communities in 1991, scholars have almost ritualistically followed Anderson in quoting the nineteenth-century French philosopher Ernst Renan. * According to Renan's pithy formula, "the essence of a nation is that all its people have a great deal in common, and also that they have forgotten a great deal." Indeed, according to Renan, "Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for nationality." Less commonly cited, however, is what follows in Renan: "historical enquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took place at the origin of all political formations, even of those whose consequences have been altogether beneficial. Unity is always effected by means of brutality ..." (Renan, 1990: 11).
Like much of the social scientific literature on identity that followed later, Renan did not particularly highlight the complexities that forgetting--or, in another vocabulary, "repressed memory"--of such violence might cause in the life of a nation. Famously, Renan (1990: 19) characterized national identities as "a daily plebescite" based on perceptions of common interest and celebration of past achievements. To be sure, such a voluntarist account of identity is a salutary response to "essentialist" or "primordialist" understandings, which see collective identities as features of nature. But has it, and the work that cites it, produced an adequate account of the complex aftereffects of the violence Renan did indeed note at the core of identities?
As an example of identity reforged by violence, and the complex ways in which such brutality can challenge identity, we might consider the case of Germany in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Given the enormity of the crimes under the Nazi regime, one might imagine a radical rethinking, even rejection, of German identity, or at least a skeptical reexamination of what in German culture might have led Germany astray. And to be sure, many did undertake such an examination, with results ranging from a more active commitment to a collective European identity to a more thorough recognition of German history's "dialectical" qualities, in which precisely what produced the best from Germany also produced the worst (the most famous example is perhaps Thomas Mann's essay [Mann, 1963] on "The Two Germanys").
More common, however, was a vigorous defense of German identity, claiming not that National Socialism was an expression of something fundamental in German society, but that it was a distortion of what was fundamental. Hence Friedrich Meinecke (1950), doyen of the German historians, argued in 1946 for a return to the German culture represented by Beethoven and Schiller as the road to German recovery. Many argued, furthermore, that German history was one of constant struggle between German culture (pure and high) and the German state (corrupt and low), and that what the German state perpetrated under National Socialism thus argued clearly for a renewed flight from power into culture (this was, for example, the solution pursued by the philosopher Karl Jaspers, who finally abandoned political Germany for cultural Germany by exiling himself to Switzerland--though only in 1948, in response to what he saw as inadequate acknowledgement of Germany's crimes by his contemporaries [Olick, 2005: 317-319]).
Even more surprising, though perhaps only if one lacks an adequate theoretical apparatus for appreciating the complexities brutality produces for identities, is the equation many postwar Germans claimed between themselves and "the Jews." The fact that postwar Germans considered themselves to be victims is well established in the historical literature (for example, Moeller, 2002). But the degree to which commentators made that claim with reference to being like the Jews has been less noticed. To give just a few emblematic examples:
** Bishop Theophil Wurm, criticizing occupation policies: "To squeeze the German people together in an ever more crowded space and to reduce its possibilities for life as much as possible cannot, in fundamental terms, be evaluated any differently than the extermination plans of Hitler against the Jewish race" (Olick, 2005: 222).
** Exile writer Thomas Mann: "Perhaps history has in fact intended for them [the Germans] the role of the Jews, one which even Goethe thought befitted them: to be one day scattered throughout the world and to view their existence with an intellectual proud self-irony" (Olick, 2005: 146).
** Philosopher Karl Jaspers again: "A world opinion which condemns a people collectively is of a kind with the fact that for thousands of years men have thought and said, 'The Jews are guilty of the Crucifixion'" (Olick, 2005: 286). And, in a different context, "The political question is whether it is politically sensible, purposeful, safe and just to turn a whole nation into a pariah nation [the term Max Weber developed to characterize the Jews], to degrade it beneath all others, to dishonor further, once it had dishonored itself" (Olick, 2005: 286).
** And finally, legal theorist Carl Schmitt: "As God allowed hundreds of thousands of Jews to be killed, he simultaneously saw the revenge that they would take on Germany; and that which he foresees today for the avengers and those demanding restitution, humanity will experience in another unexpected moment" (Olick, 2005: 309).
Yet another common trope at the time was that anyone who criticized Germany was being "Pharisaical," referring to the biblical Jewish cult associated with hypocrisy and self-righteousness (hence Cardinal Frings of Cologne as just one among many examples: "When men judge men--particularly victors, the vanquished--Pharisaeism very easily results" [Olick, 2005: 231]). I document this phenomenon--the claimed reversal of the Germans and the Jews--in great detail in my book, In the House of the Hangman (Olick, 2005). My question here, however, is how to explain it. And clearly we need more than the rationalist account of forgetting and voluntarist account of identity Renan offered.
Perhaps the most obvious place to look for such a theory, or at least the easiest explanatory reflex, is to say that these commentators and their cohorts were deploying a variety of classically Freudian defense mechanisms. Most obviously, the pervasive claims that Germans were the new Jews seem to be textbook cases of displacement and projection; elsewhere, particularly in efforts by German commentators to "explain" National Socialism as a disease of the West generally, intellectualization, relativization, and rationalization seem to be at work. The problem, however, is that whether or not psychoanalysis is...
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