May 2, 2008
At Cliopatria, Claire Potter sadly reports on the passing of Charles Tilly, a giant of French history. “Memorials to Credit and Blame”, excerpted in The American Interest ( May/June 2008 ) from an upcoming book, is worth perusing for its brief reflections on the personal life of an academic history and for his analysis of the Hermann Monument and Sacré Coeur. However, he ends on a cautionary note:
We should therefore be very careful when asking authorities to officially sanction our assignments of credit and blame. One day, for sure, there will be some kind of memorial for the Iraq war, and perhaps the Afghanistan war as well. We had better be careful how we design those monuments and the stories of credit and blame they invariably will tell. We can only hope that, when all is said and done, we will build and tell stories about those monuments in a way that creates consensus instead of separation. It is not always easy or obvious how to do that.
May 3, 2008 at 12:11 am
I was just having a discussion like this in my 20c China course, comparing Cultural Revolution forgetfulness with Japanese and German WWII memorialization. We were talking about the Yasukuni shrine to Japan’s war dead, and I pointed out that the Vietnam War Memorial in the US probably has more than a few names on it that the Vietnamese consider war criminals.
It’s an obvious point, perhaps, but most memorials aren’t really to both sides of a conflict.
May 3, 2008 at 7:48 am
I would be interested to read more of Tilly’s analysis of post-war Germany, assuming the same patterns of “credit and blame”, as he calls it, are present even though most monuments memorialize German crimes. Perhaps the line between us and them that is being drawn is not so much one between nations or political ideologies, but between generations. (Of course, there are the attempts to remember the fallen soldiers and the academic conflicts.)
A more interesting comparison might be the few monuments being erected around the DDR. Western Germans want to emphasize the artificiality of the division of the two nations and the oppression of the communist regime. But eastern Germans have relativized it. It’s just another nation-state, albeit one under which they were not exposed to the contingencies of the market. From their perspective, memory of the DDR is still something that divides, and that potentially makes them perpetrators rather than victims.