The Past Is Another Country - Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe

[dry oak]

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20027138
Tony Judt (1992):

From the end of the Second World War until the revolutions of 1989, the frontiers of Europe and with them the forms of identity associated with the term ‘European’ were shaped by two dominant concerns: the pattern of division drafted at Yalta and frozen into place during the Cold War, and the desire, common to both sides of the divide, to forget the recent past and forge a new continent. In the West this took the form of a movement for trans-national unification tied to the reconstruction and modernisation of the west European economy; in the East an analogous unity, similarly obsessed with productivity, was imposed in the name of a shared interest in social revolution. Both sides of the divide had good reason to put behind them the experience of war and occupation, and a future-oriented vocabulary of social harmony and material improvement emerged to occupy a public space hitherto filled with older, divisive and more provincial claims and resentments.

@sand sparrow

[dry oak]

@soft meadow after reading this article I now cleanly empathise with Adorno, and no longer feel the need for an ironic distance as I separate out his paranoia from his insights

[soft meadow]

oops my university login doesnt give access to this particular paper

[dry oak]

it's on scihub

[soft meadow]

oh true

[dry oak]

I'm completely shocked and befuddled by the extent to which ww2 history had been suppressed in european countries (they were collaborative with nazi occupiers to various extents, and suppressed this history and forewent serious purging or punishment of ex nazis or their collaborators after the war, in order to achieve stability within their societies)

it's uncannily similar to the situation in korea after the japanese occupation

basically there were too many people to punish without completely fucking up their countries, so they all agreed to forget about it and make up a mythology that they had been highly resistant to nazism the entire time

one part that truly stuck out to me is that the votes of the ex nazis were a prime concern for the democratic countries (the competing parties didn't want to alienate these potential voters)

[soft meadow]

haha yes, everyone knows this about poland, but france was very culpable! they love their myth of the french resistance, when actually the resistance was quite small, and there were quite a lot more collaborators. it's funny how Vichy France is almost seen as a foreign country in french history, like somehow Free France was the real france even though it only contained a small fraction of the metropolitan french population

[dry oak]

they had concentration camps even before the nazis got there

[soft meadow]

that's right, the nazis are also a convenient distraction from their native fascism

[dry oak]

adorno was right wtf

[soft meadow]

and yeah, it's outrageous that konrad adenauer was the first postwar chancellor, and that he's remembered as this great democratic figure that rebuilt the country. actually no, he was there to court the vote of recent nazis, because the only reason why he personally wasn't a nazi was because he was too catholic