How to Deal with Tormented Pasts
Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, history has been
a battleground regarding the traumatic events of the past, mainly
those of the same century. The past has become the apple of discord
between historians, governments, lawmakers and the media. Memory wars and memory laws have reproduced each other and this spiral
has spread from one country to the other. Although history and politics were always entangled in different forms and roles, today memory
laws, history wars, transitional justice and the creation of an international framework of norms regarding the teaching of history at school
level are presenting historians with new epistemological problems
and moral dilemmas. This volume of Historein addresses the question
of how to come to terms with dark pasts: partly in terms of the legacies of division and conflict created by them but mainly those pasts that
still create suffering and are related with historical traumas. This is a
pressing question
because historians are obliged not
only to research
the past but to shift
their attention from the question of what happened in the past to the
question of what is happening in our present regarding its past. This
latter question, which is the subject of this issue, marks a shift from
history, as an enquiry into the traces of the past, to the historical culture which regards the way in which the past lives in the present and
is related to our lives, decisions and future orientations.
Introduction
The idea to focus this issue originates in the panel on Ethics, Historical Research and Law, organised by Luigi Cajani at the 21st International Congress of Historical Sciences in Amsterdam in August
2010, in which Pierre Nora, Jörn Rüsen, Paolo Pezzino and Antonis
Liakos participated. All the speakers agreed that laws attempting
to regulate the ways we talk about the past constitute a new field of
How to Deal with Tormented Pasts
controversy between historians, lawmakers and the European and national parliaments. The
initial legislative intervention regarding the denial of the Holocaust was soon followed by new
laws condemning north Atlantic slavery, colonial crimes, the communist repression in central
and eastern Europe and specific crimes in national historiographies. Pierre Nora, in his intervention “History, Memory and the Law in France, 1990–2010”, recognises that governments and
legislative bodies have the right to orientate the collective memory but disputes strongly the legal sanctions on topics concerning the representation of the past. He argues that the subjection
of historical events to legal qualification renders any further discussion impossible at the risk
of sanctions and paralyses research. He explains why he took the initiative to create the French
association Liberté pour l’histoire. In his words, “it is up to the politicians to commemorate, to
pay homage and to organise compensation; it is up to them to honour the victims. It is up to the
historians to do the rest, to establish the facts and to propose interpretations of these facts, restricted by neither constraint nor taboo.” Taking an opposite position, Wolfgang Benz, in his article “Holocaust Denial: Anti-Semitism as a Refusal to Accept Reality”, argues that the law does
not concern itself with historians and truth seekers but only those who deny or tend to marginalise the genocide of six million Jews. The denial or marginalisation of genocide is a typical attitude among people who share a rightwing extremist worldview and who adopt hate speech
against Jews and immigrants.
One of the main issues of concern in the public use of history and the memory wars is the conceptualisation of genocides and crimes against humanity. How can these horrific events be conceived? How can we talk and write about the mass killing of human beings and the destruction
of their lives? What concepts should be used? Should we adopt a position of historical distance,
or should we advocate the cause of the victims? Are genocides just something that happened
in the twentieth century, or are historians more able and sensitive to see and explore them now
because their mentality and the way of doing history has changed? Antoon De Baets, in his article “Conceptualising Historical Crimes”, reflects on the historicity of the concepts we possess
and use. “Should crimes committed in the course of history that are comparable to genocide,
crimes against humanity or war crimes be referred to as such, whatever the label used at the
time?” The framework of the present debate on mass atrocities is the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948. This law introduced
a moral dimension in thinking and writing about the past. Does the involvement of morality in
historical work strike at the value freedom of historians, one of the pillars of their profession, at
least since the rise of nineteenth-century historicism? The neutrality and objectivity demanded
of historical scholarship have, in fact, been replaced by open sympathy and a sense of respect
for victims, which has gone along with open public revulsion at such acts, captured by the popular expression Never again! Historians could no longer behave as distant and indifferent observers, without taking into consideration the moral ethic and implications of their writings. But does
this preoccupation hinder the autonomy of historical thinking and prescribe historical interpretations and representations by the force of law or by political pressure? Jörn Rüsen responds to
this question in his article “Using History: The Struggle over Traumatic Experiences of the Past
in Historical Culture”. For Rüsen, although there is “a clear distinction between political and judicial intentions and norms, on the one hand, and the principles of proper historical thinking . . . on
the other”, there are intersections between politics and law, and historical thinking. Rüsen reads
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these intersections through three successive generations in Germany, where historians shared
common perspectives on the past with public opinion. His conclusion is that historical research
is not in contradiction with the universal principles of morality. It is the trap of moralistic ethnocentrism which leads historical integrity to be compromised through political intentions.
Since the nineteenth century, historians have had a strong interest in international relations,
and the history of foreign policy was a stronghold of their field. But genocides are not only a historical problem. Their politicisation through the question of official recognition, restitution and
apologies have implicated history and historians in the forming of international policy. Since the
end of the Second World War, petitions requesting recognition of more than 40 genocides from
around the world have been submitted to international organisations and national parliaments.
Some of them, such as the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian Holodomor and Japanese atrocities in China and Korea are still the subjects of international dispute. Some others, such as the
Rwandan and the Bosnian massacres, are being tried in international criminal courts. A number
of genocides or massacres of communities are related to emerging nationalities and their campaign for recognition and emancipation, but there are also genocides espoused mostly by academics and campus activists such as those of the Native Americans and African slaves. Historians were called to advocate or oppose these petitions for official recognition, and, in one way or
the other, were deeply implicated in all of these cases. But this involvement, although it allowed
historians to address audiences much bigger than their usual readership, was not without consequences for what these audiences expected from them because the legal recognition and the
institutionalisation of the Holocaust and the genocides which preceded or followed it affect the
expectations of history, change the forms of representation and commemoration of these events
and also impose terms on the nature of the related historical debates.
VOLUME 11 (2011)
HISTOREIN
By institutionalising the memory of crimes against humanity, the world order that was established after the Second World War defended a certain way of remembering the past and proclaimed it as a moral value that needs to be respected, even by coercion. In the following years,
the expansion of the definition of what constitutes a “genocide” and the drive for recognition led
to an effort by various nations or ethnic groups to seek revenge for the injustices they have experienced in the past. The term “genocide”, besides being a demand for justice, is a symbol of recognition for crimes committed since it has acquired performative power. It validates in the public memory the suffering of a community and produces a demand that it be respected at home
and abroad. When genocides are declared as such, past sufferings acquire the status of a cultural distinction and become a source of moral obligation in politics and international relations.
As a consequence, the official recognition of certain traumas and the institutionalisation of their
memory becomes a way of dealing with the past under certain rules. At the same time, the institutionalisation of memory becomes highly selective, and not all memories are considered
worthy of safeguarding. Memorialisation of the past in the public domain depends on power relations in the present, and there are horrendous crimes against humanity that are still unrecognised and unpunished because the victims do not have the power to bring their cases before the
global public or because the perpetrators are still in power. But respect should be defended, and
defended by law. The penalisation of the denial of genocide is the subject of Luigi Cajani’s “Crimi7
How to Deal with Tormented Pasts
nal Laws on History: The Case of the European Union”. He refers to the memory laws not only in
the countries of the European Union and in the European Parliament but also in Israel, Ukraine
and Switzerland. He recognises that memory laws, and in some cases criminal legislation, are
now the custodian of memory. Reading his article it is understandable why the intervention of
the law in the remembering of the past means that historians and historical institutions can no
longer perform their traditional role as the guardians of memory because the relationship with
the past is much more diffused and, through the effects of new media, has acquired dimensions
that make it impossible for academic institutions to control. The claim to history has become an
uncontrollable force, affecting not only the learned elites but also the masses. History is read as
literature and the borders between the reception of history, the historical novel and fiction are
coming down. In contemporary historical culture, the traumatic stands for the sublime, martyrdom and victimhood stand for the heroic and the past is regarded as a symptomatology of unrelated symptoms and is connected with justice and moral demands. Finally, the new eponymous heroes of the past are not illustrious men but evil people. Marina Cattaruzza, in her article
“How Much Does Historical Truth Still Matter?”, examines how historical narratives are affected
by existing practices of victimisation and self-victimisation. Her purpose is to “examine to what
degree the currently widespread attribution of victim status to groups of people in the past can
be a hindrance to an unbiased historical analysis. In other words, to what degree do historians
tend to adopt in their historical narrative to what I want to call here a “moral narrative”.
Τhe changes in the ways we remember, initiated in the postwar period, were the result of synergies which have to do with the experiences of wars and mass sufferings but also with the aspiration to escape from the previous awful period and reconstruct a peaceful future, and in doing so verbalising and dealing with the past as much as possible. Through these shifts, history
is now rarely conceived as a social science explaining the course of society. It has been transformed into a discipline focused on our relations with the past, including feelings about the past,
the sense of respect, the request for acknowledgement and the attribution of justice. History
was called to meet needs such as healing, respect, reconciliation and the moral reconstruction
of societies in an environment where representation of the past was passing from the printed to
the virtual world. New needs and new environments are outpacing the traditional role of history,
as it has been conceived and elaborated in the communities of scholars based on the pursuit of
a detached and purposeless knowledge. This shift brought history into the realm of historical
culture, where historians are no longer the privileged definers of the relationship of the present
with the past. As a consequence, in order to understand the new roles of historical communities, we should move beyond the normative concept of the uses and abuses of history and see
history not as a window to the past, asking what happened in the past, but as a window into the
house in which we are now living, asking how does the past operate in the present. We should
not cease to be interested in the past, but we should also be interested in history as a cultural
feature of our present societies; not how history should be conducted, but how it is in fact performing. This inversion of our outlook does not imply indifference to or an acceptance of the irresponsible uses of the past or the manipulation of history and historical consciousness. On the
contrary, it helps historians understand better the complexity and the multiple dimensions of the
environment in which we now work. Vangelis Kechriotis attempts such an exploration into the
historical culture of the Turkey of 2011 in his article “From Oblivion to Obsession: The Uses of
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History in Recent Public Debates in Turkey”. He presents two cases, one the TV series on the life
of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent (1494–1566) and the other on a film on Bediüzzaman Said
Nursi, a Kurdish scholar and political leader (1868–1960) of the early Republican period. Both
events challenged the official version of the past and provoked extended reactions, polemics and
debates. For Kechriotis, the political, social and demographic changes in recent Turkey have led
to a questioning of the compatibility of individual and group memories with the public versions of
the past. The result of this questioning is that state and academic elites have lost “the monopoly
over the legitimacy to organise and interpret the past”. History becomes an arena where social
or ethnic groups demand their emancipation from past stigmas and claim their participation in
the shaping of the future. On the same ground, newly emerging elites are establishing their own
hegemony and in the process undermining the authority of older ones.
VOLUME 11 (2011)
HISTOREIN
But what about the rigour of historical inquiry? Do historians, at least historians whose work
is in the tradition of the European and American scholarly tradition of recent decades, have a
distinct role in historical culture and in the uses of the past? What is expected from them in the
coming to terms with a the civil war past? Taking the Greek debate on the Second World War
and the Greek Civil War as a case study, Thanasis Sfikas and Anna Mahera, in their joint article
“Does the Iliad need an Agamemnon Version? History, Politics and the Greek 1940s”, scrutinise
the evidence, the argumentation and the epistemological presupposition of a group of revisionists. Yet, although a juxtaposition between the methodological coherence of historical thinking,
on the one hand, and the political use of history, on the other, might be possible in the present,
it is very interesting to note that when one views the history of historiography from a long perspective, the differences become more and more indistinct. According to Marja Jalava, in her article “Kulturgeschichte as a Political Tool: The Finnish Case”, the methodological modernisation
of Finnish historiography and its turn to social history was concomitant with a turn to national
history, dissociated from the prevailing model of political history in Sweden.
Viewed from the long perspective and from a cultural point of view, the articles included in this
issue of Historein make it obvious how history (or at least public history) has been transformed
or understood and conceived as a political culture of back-projected accountability. From this
point of view, the historical practices became also part of a broader tendency of verbalising and
rationalising differences stemming from wars, civil wars, dictatorships and traumatic experiences. This international or global ideological context has gained increasing importance in shaping
national debates and policies and in producing historical narratives in our time.
Antonis Liakos
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