Public Ritual and Remembrance: Beyond the Nation-State?

Abstract

In an illuminating essay on remembrance Joep Leerssen draws on Friedrich Nietzsche to distinguish between monumental and traumatic modes of remembrance. The first belongs to triumphalist states and their governing elites, and it is marked by a strong collective consensus about the nation that canonizes the acts of individuals as part of a heroic and progressive telos which is objectified in stone, official histories and a high public culture. The second is the submerged culture of the subaltern that, without access to a public sphere, is perpetuated by iterative performances, by familial, kinship or informal networks that return endlessly to long-cherished humiliations.¹ Leerssen observes that Ernest Renan predicted that, with the progress of the historical sciences, the unsavoury facts previously purged from the official records would be revealed, triggering resentments among long-marginalized groups and threatening the solidarity of nation-states. Leerssen suggests that this has come to pass, and historical investigation has turned from victors and glory to the victimized and defeated — to women, homosexuals, ethnic minorities and colonized peoples.² Even the monuments of dominant groups have incorporated traumatic experiences into their history, and this is exemplified in the Vietnam Wall in Washington that opts for a funereal register of mourning rather than of celebration.³