by Tony Judt
Ostalgie, as it was known in Germany, drew on a similar vein of forgetful remembering. Considering that the GDR—to adapt Mirabeau’s description of Hohenzollern Prussia—was little more than a security service with a state, it demonstrated in the glow of retrospect a remarkable capacity to evoke affection and even longing. While Czechs were admiring their old clothes, Germans were flocking to Goodbye Lenin: a film whose ostensible mocking of the shortages, dogmas and general absurdity of life under Erich Honecker was knowingly offset by a certain sympathy for its subject and more than a little ambivalence at its sudden loss.
But Germans and Czechs, like other central Europeans, have had all too much experience of sudden, traumatic national re-starts. Their selective nostalgia for whatever might be retrieved from the detritus of lost pasts made a lot of sense—it was not by chance that Edgar Reitz’s Heimat: Eine Deutsche Chronik attracted an average of nine million West German viewers per episode when it was televised in 1984. The obsession with nostalgia that swept across the rest of Western Europe in the last years of the old century, giving rise to heritage industries, memorials, reconstructions, reenactments and renovations, is not so readily accounted for.
What the historian Eric Hobsbawm described in 1995 as ‘the great age of historical mythology’ was not of course unprecedented—Hobsbawm himself had written brilliantly about the ‘invention of tradition’ in nineteenth-century Europe, at the dawning of the national age: the sort of ersatz culture dismissed by Edwin Muir (writing of Burns and Scott in Scotland 1941) as ‘sham bards for a sham nation’. But the creative re-imagining of the national past in France and the UK at the end of the twentieth century was of another order altogether.
It was not by chance that history-as-nostalgia was so very pronounced in these two national settings in particular. Having entered the twentieth century as proud imperial powers, both countries had been stripped of territory and resources by war and decolonization. The confidence and security of global empire had been replaced by uneasy memories and uncertain future prospects. What it meant to be French, or British, had once been very clear, but no longer. The alternative, to become enthusiastically ‘European’, was far easier in small countries like Belgium or Portugal, or in places—like Italy or Spain—where the recent national past was best left in shadow.389 But for nations reared within living memory on grandeur and glory, ‘Europe’ would always be an uncomfortable transition: a compromise, not a choice.
Institutionally speaking, the British turn to nostalgia began almost immediately after World War Two, when the Labour Minister Hugh Dalton established a ‘National Land Fund’ to acquire sites and buildings of ‘beauty and history’ for the nation, to be administered by a National Trust. Within a generation ‘NT’ properties—parks, castles, palaces and ‘areas of outstanding natural beauty’ had become prominent tourist attractions: some of them still occupied by their original owners, who had bequeathed their heirlooms to the nation in return for significant fiscal relief.
From the Fifties through the Seventies a reassuring version of the recent past surfaced and resurfaced in the form of war films, costume dramas and clothing: the recycling of Edwardian fashion, from teddy boys to hirsute facial ornaments, was a particular feature of this trend—culminating, in 1977, in a self-consciously ‘retro’ and nostalgic celebration of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee amid street parties, photographic exhibits and nationwide invocation of older and better times. But after the Thatcherite revolution of the Eighties even this element of continuity was lost. In the course of that decade the Britain—more precisely the England—that could feel a certain warm glow of recognition when looking back to the ’40s, or even to 1913, was quite swept away.
In its place there emerged a country incapable of relating to its immediate past except through the unintentional irony of denial, or else as a sort of disinfected, disembodied ‘heritage’. The denial was well captured by the insecurities of the old educational establishment of Oxford and Cambridge, humiliatingly constrained in the new Blairite atmosphere of egalitarian opportunism to insist on their ‘anti-élitism’; or in the grotesque self-deprecation of cultural institutions like London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, reduced in the 1990s to marketing itself with wink and nod as ‘an ace caff’ with quite a nice museum attached’.
As for the nation’s heritage, it was quite avowedly transformed into a business proposition, the ‘heritage industry’: promoted and underwritten by a new government ‘Department of National Heritage’. Established in 1992 by a Conservative government but in conformity with plans originally drafted under Labour, the new ministry would later be absorbed under Tony Blair’s New Labour governments into a revealingly labeled ‘Department for Culture, Media and Sport’. The ecumenical background is significant: heritage was not a political-party project. The past was not abused or exploited; it was sanitized and given a happy face.
Barnsley, at the heart of the defunct South Yorkshire coalfield, was a case in point. Once an important mining hub, Barnsley in the post-Thatcher era had been transformed beyond recognition. Its town center was eviscerated, its civic core ripped up and replaced by tawdry pedestrian malls encased in concrete parking garages. All that remained were the town hall and a handful of neighbouring buildings, architectural relics of Barnsley’s nineteenth-century municipal glory, to which visitors were directed by fake-ancient, ‘olde-worlde’ signposts. Meanwhile, book-stalls in the local market now specialized in selling local nostalgia to the area’s own residents (Barnsley was not on any established tourist route)—sepia photos and prints and books with titles like The Golden Years of Barnsley or Memories of Old Doncaster (a neighbouring town): reminders of a world only recently lost and already half-forgotten.
A few miles from Barnsley, near the village of Orgreave, the ‘Battle of Orgreave’ was rerun for television in 2001. The June 1984 confrontation there between striking miners and police was the most violent and desperate of the clashes that marked Margaret Thatcher’s confrontation with the National Union of Miners that year. Since then many of the miners had been unemployed—some of them took part (for cash) in the re-enactment, dressed in appropriate ‘period’ clothing. This ‘performing’ of famous battles was an established English pastime. But that Orgreave should have been getting the ‘heritage’ treatment was illustrative of the accelerated historicizing now under way. After all, it took three hundred years before the English got around to re-enacting the Civil War Battle of Naseby a couple of hours to the south; Orgreave was being rerun for television just seventeen years after the fact.
The town of Barnsley figured prominently in The Road to Wigan Pier, where George Orwell wrote unforgettably of the tragedy of inter-war unemployment in Britain’s industrial working class. Seventy years on, in Wigan itself, there was now not only a pier (Orwell famously remarked upon its absence) but also a signpost on the nearby motorway encouraging people to visit it. Next to the cleaned-up canal there had been constructed ‘The Way We Were’ museum and ‘The Orwell at Wigan Pier’, a generic modern pub selling burgers and chips. Orwell’s fearful northern slums had indeed been erased—not only from the landscape but also from local memory: Memories of Wigan 1930-1970, a guide on sale at the museum, offered pretty sepia pictures of demure salesgirls and quaint, forgotten shops. But of the pits and the workers whose condition drew Orwell there and gave Wigan its dubious fame, there was not a word.
It was not just the North that had been given the Heritage treatment. In England’s West Midland potteries district, tourists and local schoolchildren were encouraged to learn how Josiah Wedgwood, the eighteenth-century ceramics manufacturer, fashioned his famous wares. But they would search in vain for evidence of how the pottery workers lived or why the region was called the Black Country (Orwell described how even the snow turned black from the belching smoke of a hundred chimneys). And such examples—where the way things ought to have been was substituted for the way they were (or are)—could be multiplied hundredfold.
Thus the rea
l, existing British railways were an acknowledged national scandal; but by the year 2000 Great Britain had more steam railways and steam-railway museums than all the rest of Europe combined: one hundred and twenty of them, ninety-one in England alone. Most of the trains don’t go anywhere, and even those that do manage to interweave reality and fantasy with a certain marvelous insouciance: summer visitors to the West Riding of Yorkshire are invited to ride Thomas the Tank Engine up the Keighley-Haworth line to visit the Brontë Parsonage.
In contemporary England, then, history and fiction blend seamlessly. Industry, poverty, and class conflict have been officially forgotten and paved over. Deep social contrasts are denied or homogenized. And even the most recent and contested past is available only in nostalgic plastic reproduction. This countrywide bowdlerization of memory was the signal achievement of the nation’s new political élite. Riding on Mrs. Thatcher’s coattails, New Labour successfully dispensed with the past; and England’s thriving Heritage industry has duly replaced it with ‘the Past’.
The English capacity to plant and tend a Garden of Forgetting, fondly invoking the past while strenuously denying it, is unique. France’s otherwise comparable obsession with the nation’s heritage—le patrimoine—took a different form. In France, the fascination with identifying and preserving worthy objects and places from the national past went back many decades, beginning between the wars with agrarian exhibitions already nostalgic for the lost world of pre-1914 and accelerated by the Vichy regime’s efforts to replace the inconvenient urban present with an idealized rural past.
After the war, under the Fourth and Fifth Republics, the state poured considerable sums of money into national and regional preservation, accumulating a patrimoine culturel planned as a sort of tangible pedagogy: a frozen contemporary reminder (in the wake of a painful and turbulent century) of the country’s unique past. But by the last decades of the century France—the France of Presidents Mitterrand and Chirac—was changing beyond recognition. Now it was not the continuities with past glory—or past tragedy—that attracted comment, but rather the discontinuities. The past—the revolutionary past, the peasant past, the linguistic past, but above all the recent past, from Vichy to Algiers—offered little guidance for the future. Overtaken by demographic transformation and two generations of socio-geographic mobility, France’s once-seamless history seemed set to disappear from national memory altogether.
The anxiety of loss had two effects. One was an increase in the range of the official patrimoine, the publicly espoused body of monuments and artifacts stamped ‘heritage’ by the authority of the state. In 1988, at the behest of Mitterrand’s Culture Minister Jack Lang, the list of officially protected items in the patrimoine culturel of France—previously restricted to UNESCO-style heirlooms such as the Pont du Gard near Nîmes, or Philip the Bold’s ramparts at Aigues-Mortes—was dramatically enlarged.
It is revealing of the approach taken by Lang and his successors that among France’s new ‘heritage sites’ was the crumbling façade of the Hôtel du Nord on Paris’s Quai de Jemappes: an avowedly nostalgic homage to Marcel Carné’s 1938 film classic of that name. But Carné shot that movie entirely in a studio. So the preservation of a building (or the façade of a building) which never even appeared in the film could be seen—according to taste—either as a subtle French exercise in post-modern irony, or else as symptomatic of the unavoidably bogus nature of any memory when subjected thus to official taxidermy.
Mitterrand’s own distinctive contribution to the national patrimoine was not so much to preserve or classify it as to manufacture it in real time. No French ruler since Louis XIV has marked his reign with such a profusion of buildings and ceremonials. The fourteen years of Mitterrand’s presidency were marked not only by a steady accumulation of museums, memorials, solemn inaugurations, burials and reburials; but also by herculean efforts to secure the President’s own place in the nation’s heritage: from the appalling Grande Arche at La Défense in western Paris, through the graceful Pyramid at the Louvre and the aggressively modernist Opera House by the Bastille, to the controversial new National Library on the south bank of the Seine.
At the same time as Mitterrand was engaged in lapidary monumentalism, inscribing himself quite literally in the physical memory of the nation, a gnawing sense that the country was losing touch with its roots moved a prominent Parisian historian, Pierre Nora, to edit Les Lieux de mémoire, a three-part, seven-volume, 5,600-page collective work published over the course of the years 1984-1992 that sought to identify and explicate the sites and realms of France’s once-shared memory: the names and concepts, the places and people, the projects and symbols that are—or were—France, from cathedrals to gastronomy, from the soil to the language, from town planning to the map of France in the minds of Frenchmen.
No comparable publication has ever been conceived for any other nation, and it is hard to imagine how it could be. For Nora’s Lieux de Mémoire captures both the astonishing confidence of French collective identity—the uncontested assumption that eight hundred years of national history have bequeathed France a singularity and a common heritage that lend themselves to mnemonic representation in this manner—and the anxious sense, as the editor makes explicit in his introduction, that these commonplace collective symbols of a shared past were about to be lost forever.
This is nostalgia as Angst: the fear that one day—quite soon—the earth-colored information panels clustered along France’s magnificently engineered, impeccably landscaped autoroutes will cease to hold any meaning for the French themselves. What point would there be in alluding—first in symbols, then a little further along by name—to the cathedral at Reims; the amphitheatre at Nîmes; the vines of Clos de Vougeot; the Mont Ste Victoire or the battlefield of Verdun if the allusion meant nothing? What remains of France if the casual traveller encountering such names has lost touch with the memories they are meant to evoke and the feelings they are intended to stir?
The heritage industry in England suggests an obsession with the way things weren’t—the cultivation, as it were, of genuine nostalgia for a fake past. In contrast, the French fascination with its spiritual patrimoine has a certain cultural authenticity. ‘France’ has always represented itself in allegorical ways: witness the various depictions and incarnations of ‘Marianne’, the Republic. It was thus altogether appropriate that regret for the keys to a lost Frenchness was focused upon a formal body of symbols, whether physical or intellectual. These ‘are’ France. If they are misplaced or no longer shared, France cannot be itself—in the sense Charles de Gaulle meant when he declared that ‘France cannot be France without glory’.
These assumptions were shared by politicians, intellectuals and people of all political persuasions—which is why Les Lieux de mémoire was so successful, encapsulating for tens of thousands of readers an evanescent Frenchness already eluding them in daily French life. And it is therefore very revealing that whereas Christianity—Christian ideas, Christian buildings, practices and symbols—occupy a prominent place in Nora’s tomes, there is but one brief chapter on ‘Jews’—mostly as objects of assimilation, exclusion or persecution—and no entry at all on ‘Muslims’.
This was not an oversight. There was no assigned corner for Islam in the French memory palace and it would have run counter to the purpose of the undertaking to create one after the fact. But the omission nevertheless illustrated the trouble that France, like its neighbours, was going to have in accommodating the millions of new Europeans in its midst. Of the 105 members of the European Convention assigned the task of writing Europe’s constitution, none had a non-European background. Like the rest of the continent’s political élite, from Portugal to Poland, they represented above all white, Christian Europe.
Or, more precisely, formerly Christian Europe. Although the varieties of Christianity within Europe remained many—from Ukrainian Uniates to Welsh Methodists, from Trans-Carpathian Greek Catholics to Norwegian Lutherans—the number of Christians who actuall
y practiced their faith continued to shrink. In Spain, which still boasted 900 convents and monasteries at the end of the twentieth century—60 percent of the world’s total—active faith was on the decline, correlating all too closely with isolation, old age and rural backwardness. In France, only one adult in seven acknowledged even attending church, and then on average just once a month. In Scandinavia and Britain the figures were even lower. Christianity was on the wane even in Poland, where the citizenry was increasingly deaf to the moral exhortations of the once-powerful Catholic hierarchy. By the turn of the century well over half of all Poles (and a much larger majority of those under thirty) favoured legalized abortions.
Islam, in contrast, was expanding its appeal—particularly among the young, for whom it served increasingly as a source of communal identity and collective pride in countries where citizens of Arab or Turkish or African provenance were still widely seen and treated as ‘foreigners’. Whereas their parents and grandparents had made strenuous efforts to integrate and assimilate, young men and women in Antwerp or Marseille or Leicester now vociferously identified both with the land of their birth—Belgium or France or Britain—and with the religion and region of their family’s roots. Girls, especially, took to wearing traditional clothing and religious symbols—sometimes under family pressure, but often in rebellion against the compromises of an older generation.
The reaction of the public authorities, as we have seen, varied somewhat by local tradition and circumstance: only the French National Assembly, in a righteous fit of secular republicanism, opted by a vote of 494-36 to ban the wearing of all religious symbols in state schools. But this move, undertaken in February 2004 and targeted at the voile—the headgear of observant Muslim girls—must be understood in a broader and more troubling context. Racial prejudice in many places was being turned to political advantage by the far Right; and anti-Semitism was on the rise in Europe, for the first time in over forty years.