NATIONAL IDENTITY IN THE VANQUISHED STATE: GERMAN AND JAPANESE POSTWAR HISTORIOGRAPHY FROM A TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

The defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945 required historians in both countries to reevaluate the past to make sense of national catastrophe. Sebastian Conrad's The Quest for the Lost Nation analyzes this process comparatively in the context of allied military occupation and the Cold War to revea...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:History and theory :Studies in the philosophy of history 2012-05, Vol.51 (2), p.280-291
Main Author: Grimmer-Solem, Erik
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cold War
Comparative history
Conrad, Sebastian
Cultural identity
Fascism
Federal Republic of Germany
Germany
Historians
Historiography
History
Japan
Military Occupation
Narratives
National Identity
Nonfiction
Nothnagle, Alan
Post Cold War Period
Post-war history
Research trends
Review articles
Review Essays
transnational history
Transnationalism
West Germany
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Summary:The defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945 required historians in both countries to reevaluate the past to make sense of national catastrophe. Sebastian Conrad's The Quest for the Lost Nation analyzes this process comparatively in the context of allied military occupation and the Cold War to reveal how historians in both countries coped with a discredited national history and gradually salvaged a national identity. He pays special attention to the role of social, discursive, and transnational contexts that shaped this process to highlight the different courses that the politics of the past took in postwar Germany and Japan. The picture that emerges of German and Japanese historiography and the respective attempts to come to terms with the past is at odds with the conventional narrative that usually praises West German historians and society for having come to terms with their dark past, as opposed to postwar Japan, which is usually regarded as having fallen short by comparison. There was in fact far more critical historiographical engagement with the past in Japan than in West Germany in the 1950s. Reasons for the divergent evolution of the politics of the past in Germany and Japan should not be sought in the peculiarities of postwar national history but rather in an entangled transnational context of defeat, occupation, and the Cold War, whose effects played out differently in each country. These conclusions and others reveal some of the opportunities and special challenges of comparative transnational history.
ISSN:0018-2656
1468-2303
DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2303.2012.00626.x