ABSTRACT
The past has been used and abused by those wielding power as well as by the powerless – both for the purpose of producing legitimacy and collective identity and in order to secure power or to mobilize against it. Since Howard Zinn’s seminal book The Politics of History of 1970 and the German Historikerstreit of the 1980s, political scientists, sociologists, and historians have called this concept-cum-strategy of making pointed use of history in the public sphere the “politics of history.” 1 The practice has, of course, much older roots. After the medieval doctrine of the divine right of kings, dynastic rights legitimized political rule in the early modern period. In the nineteenth century, in the realm of politics as well as in the public sphere, the idea of “historical rights” was originally developed and utilized primarily for the purpose of nation-building and state-building (including territorial demands); subsequently it was used to rally political support and mobilize the population. Tsars, emperors, sultans, kings, presidents, prime ministers, and other governmental actors, as well as political parties, religious institutions, trade unions, civic organizations, and protagonists of culture have formulated and pursued the “politics of history” in order to reach their aims. Monuments, holidays, anniversaries, celebrations, historical sites, museums, exhibitions, plays, and operas, not to mention national, religious, regional and cultural symbols, and cults of saints, heroes, or battles have all been thus instrumentalized. The results of such activities on the political level – in combination with family memories, private recollections, and individual memory as well as with the products of oral epic, folklore, literature, art, and scholarship – form the culture of remembrance of larger human collectives. This holds true, first of all, for national societies, but also for ethnic groups, speakers of one and the same language, regions and their inhabitants, and of course for social, professional, religious, cultural, and other communities. In Central and Eastern Europe, the categories of religion and denomination, and later of nation and language, and finally that of state have framed both the “politics of history” and the culture of remembrance.
