Memory and Identity, Forgetting and Oppression

The theme of the tour I am leading to the Czech Republic is memory and identity. It corresponds to the name of the academic program that I work in at DIS: European Culture and History. The basic idea is that, through a class and this trip, the students are supposed to tie history as the collective memory of a nation, to current culture, politics, lifestyle, national identity.

The concept seems a bit vague at first, but the idea is that our identity, or how we think of who we are, is tied to the stories that we tell about ourselves, especially our past. So, when you ask me who I am, I will likely think through the various situations in my life that have led me to live in Copenhagen, love philosophy, and lead a group of possibly asinine students to Prague.

Now, expand this same concept to a nation, and you can see how the history, or collective memory of a nation, can tell a lot about how that nation collectively imagines itself to be. For instance, the United States rests on a solid narrative around the Revolutionary War, the war for independence, the breaking away from an oppressor. This story shapes how we see ourselves today, as independent, strong, and individualistic people who value liberty, who fight for what is right, etc.

Who we are is strongly tied to what we remember about ourselves, but there is also the possibility for pathology, because we can be so wrong about ourselves. We can fool ourselves and undermine ourselves, and because our memories are so spotty, so unreliable, our identity is often built on something that is anything but sturdy.

So, if nationalism is built on a possibly flawed memory, nationalism is an identity plagued by the possibility of pathology. I have tried a half dozen times to distill the history of the Czech Republic into a blog-sized explanation of the frailty of nationalism, but I simply am not able. Because the Czech Republic is built on the illusion of ethnic unity, its pathology shows its face in ethnic tension and identity crisis. The reality is that the interests of nationalism have only divided this nation. The quest for a unified Czech identity has led to the attempted extermination of not only Jews, but Germans and Czechs at different times and in different places, and an identity could only be forged by forgetting some of these events while highlighting others . Even the Czechs, who were oppressed by German empires and nations for years, turned to expulsion and genocide as forms of ethnic cleansing when they held the power in this region, the long proclaimed as the heart of Europe. In the Czech obsession with rejecting German-ness, it has embraced one empire after another, from the Soviets to Corporate Capitalism.

But the stories that we tell ourselves, that Czechs might tell themselves, are the justification of our actions, or, maybe more often, the denial of them. So, we can pretend to be nations of a unified people, while forgetting that we killed those who we could not unify, that we expelled those who disagreed, and the storytellers edit their identity as they forget the past.

This was not a coherent or well-written post, and believe me, I have edited it a lot, but I am practicing explaining these ideas because I am still working out what I think, and not to publish or include in any thesis, but just so I can reconcile what I see. I want to be able to tell a story about Europe and my time here that doesn't forget, and I want to tell a story about myself that doesn't forget either, if it is possible.