Why We Fight Over the Past

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

Why are we currently witnessing such intense political conflicts over history, over who gets to tell the national story and what that story should be? The specific topics may vary, depending on national contexts: In the U.S., these “history wars” have come in the form of escalating fights over the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” Confederate symbols and monuments, and racism as a topic in high school curricula. In the UK, Belgium, and other parts of Western Europe, the conflict has focused on the legacies of the colonial past and the present-day responsibilities of the former colonizers. Meanwhile, in Germany – and just when the German attempts to grapple with the Nazi crimes and integrate them in the nation’s collective imaginary are being lauded as a role model in the U.S. – a new fight over Holocaust history and memorialization has broken out, perhaps questioning the idea that there is something to be learned from the Germans. Everywhere, the legacies of racism, slavery, colonialism, and imperialism are being hotly contested. In this seminar, we examine the current politics of history: These conflicts over the past, over the stories we tell about it and the way we teach it, that have been catapulted to the top of the political agenda. We compare them to previous “history wars” in past decades and ask why they are escalating right at this moment; we explore their transnational character; and we will reflect on what the stakes are in these fights, why they matter, how they are part of a much larger struggle over who gets to define national identity and the way that either stabilizes or questions the status quo and the existing political, social, and cultural order across the “West.”