The classic opposition between
history and memory, putting forward history as objective, scientific,
and definitive knowledge of the past, and memory as a subjective, changing,
and erroneous vulgate, has changed. For about fifteen years now, memory,
taken as the set of representations of a past - from erudite history
to oral tradition - has been presenting new interest for historians
as a subject for study. In this research perspective, the memory of
the two world wars occupies a central place.
Firstly, we should stress the terminological confusion that exists about
the word "memory." An amalgamation is often made between memory
proper, which is an inalienably individual capacity, and "memory"
as a metaphor, in an anthropomorphism that is often not conscious, for
the entire set of current representations in a community.
"National memory" is doubtless the best example of this ambivalence.
Is it constituted by commemorative policies, common or majority opinions,
hegemonic accounts, or national myths? In the absence of a "national
brain," what carries this memory: the national elite, official
speeches, the media? According to the work directed by Pierre Nora,
Lieux de mémoire, the "national memory" would seem
to be as much the product of a certain historiography as its subject.
Comparative history makes it possible to shed new light on the way different
countries may manage their past.
If reference is made to the Nazi occupation, that occupation has long
been integrated by each country into a perspective of singularity. The
singularity of the Vichy regime was that of a regime that was well and
truly French, with very particular moral responsibilities; the German
occupation of the Netherlands, marked by its Nazification efforts and
by the national tragedy of the famine of the winter of 1944-45; the
occupation of Belgium, with the policies of discrimination between the
Flemish and Walloon populations, and the separatist and annexationist
undertakings.
In this conception, the scars of the war and the type of "national
memory" generated by the conflict would appear to have been determined
by the national particularities of the event itself. However, studying
the various periods of occupation reveals that, in spite of their particular
forms, the consequences were similar, if not identical: economic exploitation,
transfer of labor, genocide, political persecution, and fight against
the resistance.
Two factors seem to be essential in order to explain how, on the basis
of shared experiences, the countries of Western Europe have developed
memories that differ widely. The first of these factors concerns the
vectors of the memory of the war.
In France, as of 1945, the State was not capable of promoting a consensus
on the period of occupation. The political economy of the "Quatrième
République" encouraged political polarization around memory
issues. Even more importantly, the French associative culture generated
a categorized memory around tragic and outstanding events: the deportation
to concentration camps, the resistance, captivity, being put to work
in Germany, etc. - which were referred to later as "the media of
memory." In the "French" memory of the occupation, the
categorized, political, and regional particularities take precedent
over the national view.
The case of the Netherlands shows quite another way of managing the
past. Faced with the national distress and the urgency of reconstruction,
the national elite built a governmental coalition marking a will to
de-politicize the memory of the occupation. No particularist claim was
recognized either in the national recognition policies (monuments, medals,
commemorations), or even in the social policies. The "exceptional"
situations, including those of concentration camp and genocide survivors,
were deliberately ignored, based on the assumption of the collective,
indistinct suffering of the entire Dutch society. The "media of
memory" found it very hard to organize themselves, and found no
one to listen to them.
The second factor that can justify the specificity of the memory of
a country concerns the antecedence of war experiences. The memory traces
of the Second World War were grafted on an older, original memory, namely
that of the Great War.
In France, the front-line soldier and the trench war were a model for
the next generation, those who saw themselves as a "second generation
under fire." French society's experience of the Great War enabled
it to react in the face of the scars of another war, unlike a country
such as the Netherlands which had no experience of "modern warfare."
However, the emulation of the memory of the Second World War contributed
to a mismatch between the multiple individual experiences of Nazi warfare,
and a national account structured around patriotism, military combat,
and collective grieving. Genocide victims and labor conscripts, prisoners
of war, and indeed a vast majority of the population found it harder
than after 1918 to recognize their own experiences in this collective
narrative, and therefore to connect individual memories to collective
"memories."