Identity and Memory (Collection Penser L’Europe 08)
The Penser l’Europe or ‘Think Europe’ review published by CULTURESFRANCE is a collection of 7 reflections on the debate on European ideas for the political and cultural construction of Europe. Each theme title tackles fundamental questions of European frontiers, diversity and culture, Europe and power, Europe and the Mediterranean, its economic social model and sustainable development. Singapore’s French Ambassador Pierre Buhler is among the contributors. Here, Gwendolyn Thong, EU Centre intern, reviews “Identity and Memory”, a series of four works.
Dominique Schnapper opens this collection of thoughts on how European identities are shaped with “Memory and Identity in the Age of the European Construction”, where she tries to establish a link between creating a collective European identity and fashioning a common identity that is independent of national histories, particularly when memories are interpretative and cultivated by national history, ideology and political will. She suggests that the growing value attached to economic and social collective existence tends to undermine the political project. The social human being is “more than a homo economicus; that person lives through passion, values and willpower”. For European citizenship to become a real experience to people, they need to cultivate common memories; to feel “togetherness with society”. Schnapper proposed that state institutions, education, military, judiciary and civil services, “which had the task of instilling the values of the political nation and democracy are increasingly apt to conform to the business model and neglect their original civic vocation”. Thus, she believes that the invention of a European civic education system that inculcates civic instead of national values could be a solution.
The second essay, by Katarina von Bülow, is a biographical account of her experience of identity born in Sofia in 1938. As a child dislocated by the Second World War, she spent time in East Germany after fleeing the bombing raids, Later, she escaped to a newly partitioned West Germany. As a young adult, she worked as a ballerina in the United States for several years before returning to Europe. Hitch-hiking and out of money, she was dropped off in Paris where her subsequent work in a publishing house exposed her to prominent intellectuals at that time, such as Foucault, Genet, Sartre and others. In her later years, she returned to travel in Germany, “foreign” to the Federal Republic. A visit to her cousin’s, his introduction to a member of the aristocratic family, a Hohenzollern ‘Wilhelm Karl’, and his interpretation of the war events, left her with mixed feelings, and no closer to a love for the German homeland. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Katarina attempted to retrace her past in a visit to her childhood landscapes, but she found the territory had changed beyond relevance to her memories, and moreover what used to be German land belonged to Poland. Finally, she went back to Paris and applied for French citizenship. This account reveals the multiple identities and allegiances war flung Europeans possess and how these affirm the commonalities that Europeans culturally shared for centuries.
Horst Möller’s “Historical Memory and National Identity” comes next as a solemn account of the subjective, selective memories created by the horrors of the Holocaust of the twentieth century. He emphasizes the importance of “historically objectivized memory” explaining that individual memory is at best fragmented and ignorant of overarching causes and consequences. Commemoration allows the perpetuation of the lessons learned from these events particularly to a new generation and is indispensible, though it risks diluting the gravity of criminal ideology through ritual. He suggests that Europe should shoulder the responsibility of the memorial as a collectivity.
The final contribution comes from Timothy Garton Ash in an interview entitled “How is Memory formed?” Ash is convinced of the correlation between identity and memory, particularly war memory. Yet, keeping in mind the diversity of 27 identities and national histories, he advocates the construction of an identity based on shared goals. In responding to the question of where the exploration of a common history should occur, Ash points out that politicians such as Vaclav Havel, De Gaulle, Churchill and Willy Brandt had enormous power of influence especially in the presence of national media to that end, and there is a place for that, yet, writers, historians and scholars should spearhead the process too. And as Europe exists really most strongly in the personal experience of the citizens, the European story should be more humanised. The history of Europe, of reconciliation, unification, economic improvement is reaching its limits. What would define the European project is its actorness beyond its own frontiers, a Europe defining its identity by what it does, rather than what it was or is.
* Views expressed are the author's and not necessarily the EU Centre’s.
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