Conflicted Memories. Europeanizing Contemporary Histories

Until quite recently, historians who attempted to write the history of post-1945 Europe from a transnational perspective were not usually greeted with much enthusiasm by their colleagues or the wider public. Despite the growing importance of European integration, most contemporary historians have tended to focus on national developments. ‘Europe’, for the most part, tended to be a subject for those historians (mostly of a Christian Democratic ilk) who sought to emulate for Europe what the German nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke had done for Germany in the 1870s. By contrast, it was the homely ground of the nation state that seemed, after 1945, to offer the best material for critical history writing. Contemporary European history was thus either nation-centric or, more commonly, took the form of histories of European integration. In those stories, the grey civil servants of Brussels, Luxembourg and the various national governments replaced the charismatic politicians of earlier eras as historical heroes: bureaucracy had finally replaced charisma, and readers were made to feel that. In its more popular, albeit equally boring, incarnations, European history has been a quarry for myths, in which great old men, beginning with Charlemagne in 800 and ending with Helmut Kohl, Jacques Delors and François Mitterrand, have helped to forge Europe and Europeans. All this tended to be underpinned by views of Europe that were pronouncedly Western and neglected much of what happened beyond the Elbe, Danube and Vistula

Archaeology · Bureaucracy · Charisma · Economic history · Enthusiasm · German · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · State (computer science · Central European national history · European history and politics · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · History · Law

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