Historical Parallels, Commemoration and Icons

Andreas Leutzsch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138579484
• eBook ISBN: 9780429018992
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Enseñanza de historia

Historical parallels, analogies, anachronisms and metaphors to the past play a crucial role in political speeches, historical narratives, iconography, movies and newspapers on a daily basis. They frame, articulate and represent a specific understanding of history and can be used not only to construct but also to rethink historical continuity. Almost-forgotten or sleeping history can be revived to legitimize an imagined future in a political discourse today.

History can hardly be neutral or factual because it depends on the historian's, as well the people's, perspective as to what kind of events and sources they combine to make history meaningful. Analysing historical analogies – as embedded in narratives and images of the past – enables us to understand how history and collective memory are managed and used for political purposes and to provide social orientation in time and space.

To rethink theories of history, iconology and collective memory, the authors of this volume discuss a variety of cases from Hong Kong, China and Europe.

1 Introduction

Prefiguring future by constructing history

Andreas Leutzsch

De donde sabe que es noble si Clio no le lo ha dicho?¹

This collection is about the deliberate construction of relationships between past and future for political and educational purposes. The authors deal with analogies and historical parallels drawn between past, present and future as well as re-arrangements of history and collective memory with help of (visual) media (techniques) and monuments. All contributions discuss the influence of the current or generational discourse on the construction of history and collective memory. Orientation in time and space is closely linked with the legitimacy of social and political order: Governments invest in museums and monuments to link sacrifices of the past with those required in the future; politicians make use of historical parallels to reduce contingency in decision-making processes or to claim legitimacy for their acts; and historians support or criticize governments by drawing historical parallels. All these ways of dealing with history, myths or invented traditions are interrelating experiences and expectations in different but meaningful ways² – thus, the constructing and making of history are somehow intertwisted.³ What is accepted as meaningful history depends largely on what can and cannot be said, but even more important for a working historical analogy or prefiguration is that the past still has to be virulent:

The phenomenon of prefiguration pre-requires that mythical ways of thinking as a disposition regarding a specific functionality is still or anew virulent. In a prefiguration the mystification reaches the border to magic or even crosses it in case that the expectation of an identical effect might be connected with the expressive act of a re-enactment.⁴

Although the authors make use of different heuristic concepts, Blumenberg’s idea of prefiguration points rightly to the fact that any bridge between past and present is a construction that crosses the magic – no matter how carefully the pillars are based on science and sources. And it matters in all cases what can and cannot be said, commemorated or discussed in public. We can call this discourse in the broad sense that representation and speaking about the past are restricted due to certain proposals or shared goals of a society. Values and norms as well as legality and legitimacy of domination are empowered by the modern discourse and history as a collective-singular is constructed based on it.⁵ The authors deal with this problem from different angles and in an interdisciplinary way to explore how historical consciousness and meaning are constructed under specific political circumstances. Some of the articles deal with the way historians and politicians construct linkages between past, present and future to master contemporary political problems, whereas some authors focus on reasons and problems of revitalizing history in different media. All case studies deal with modern history and include examples from East and West but especially from China and Hong Kong.

The authors share the point of view that history and the (re-)presentation of it are somehow pre-shaped and pre-figured⁶ by academic, political, social or cultural standards so that people are guided through history and by historiography. Despite their plurality, history and historiography are always reducing contingency by connecting experiences and expectations in a meaningful way. This is why history became a collective-singular in the modern age. There is a close connection to the political discourse although historians usually pretend to be objective and non-biased. This is not meant as criticism of the discipline but to remind us of the limits of our profession and the fact that we are citizens and usually do have opinions or ideas about what a better future should be like. The paradox is that we want to learn from history therefore we connect, compare and draw parallels between past and present and repeat history to avoid its repetition. It also seems paradoxical that history and its writing are always shaped by discourse and vice versa. Namely, experiences and expectations are permanently changing and historiography is guiding historical change, which in turn causes not just the updating but also the rewriting of historiography. “It is written” – but the new experiences might not match the old expectations regarding the future that turned into past in the present.

The German Sonderweg – Bismarck and his charismatic leadership, for instance – seemed only to be a good option to solve the German crisis until the Europeans suffered under another strong leader. Charismatic leadership lost its attraction after the Second World War, and especially Bielefeld’s historians started to deal with Bismarck and his politics in a far more critical way than before. Once the German Sonderweg from Luther through Frederic the Great, Bismarck to Hindenburg promised a better future. After Hitler, the Sonderweg was rather seen as a straight road to Auschwitz than a good model of governance. We won’t deal here with Bismarck or Hitler but this volume’s case studies from China and Hong Kong demonstrate that the way of perceiving history changed in so far that suppressions were transformed into liberations, defeats into sacrifices and excluded into included people in the post-heroic age after the Second World War.

It seems to be trivial that history has to be a (re-)construction and selection of events, processes and structures and that historian’s research is guided by specific ideas, interests and values.⁷ Furthermore, it is evident that historians can only deal with what remains from the past in preselected and preserved sources, which have not been swallowed by the change of time and the great forgetting. On the one hand, history is generous in so far that there are plenty of relics or leftovers historians can use to feed their stories, but, on the other hand, the sources are incomplete and, due to their sheer amount, overwhelming at the same time so that the historian has to select and to (re-)construct relationships between different sources and events. Hence, missing links and the search for relations and reasons mark the historian’s work as a detective of time, whose mandate for investigating is always rooted in the contemporaries’ “demand for orientation in time and space”.⁸

Umberto Eco’s idea that books communicate with each other and we can re- and deconstruct stories by taking intertextuality seriously matters for our project, too. In his novel The Name of The Rose, he provides a beautiful example for the silent communication between books and the restriction of access to the most outspoken ones.⁹ That is to say, historians are not just writing but also reading through a specific lens, and, in doing so, they ignore or address specific topics. Besides, this lens or view is shaped by the discourse and not all historians can see and say everything so that they have to use strategies to circle around formal and informal restrictions but have to be understood at the same time. Aesopian-language, historical analogies and anachronisms are some of the techniques historians use to circle around restrictions and to open new perspectives. All these narrative strategies are making use of common knowledge and traditional interpretations or connotations of history; that is why new historical narratives are also shaped by older ones, and why history of historiography, meta-history or theory of history – Historik – matter for any reflection of the past.

Authors produce and create; archives store and destroy; and historians select and ignore sources – sometimes accidentally, sometimes on purpose but always because all of them are embedded in a discourse and in a net of connotations, which tells them and us what matters and what does not. This does not mean that all historiography is somehow biased, but it means that all writing of history is based on selections and that these selections are linked with the historian’s specific Janus-faced standpoint between past and future. Whereas the contingency of the future compels us to consider what might come next, the past makes us reflect about why events transpired as they did and contributes to the reduction of the future’s contingency. Therefore, politicians and common citizens make use of history to understand where they come from and to learn what has to be done to make the future a better place. In sum: history, and in particular historical analogies, contributes to reducing the contingency that derives from an unknown future, and history serves as a yardstick for all human action because we do not want to repeat the mistakes of the past in the future.¹⁰

Reinhart Koselleck, whose Historik is one of the inspirations for many contributions to this volume, already pointed out that history should not be seen as a court for human action with the historian as a judge, and that reflecting a historian’s standpoint includes not just the way he or she deals (based on selective sources) with the past but also “possible histories”.¹¹ However, in the disorder of an overwhelming amount of information – the so-called “white noise” – it is always hard to filter out the most significant and possible histories; and historians, artists and politicians use different strategies to connect a selective past with an open future. Therefore, it is important to reflect and analyse the way information is filtered, selected and rearranged to support a single narrative. This reduction of history to a single narrative or collective-singular, in many cases of a meaningful continuity, is often based on comparisons and parallels, metaphors and analogies, and an active management of collective memory and of what can and cannot be said in public. Whereas Javier Fernández-Sebastián’s contribution deals with metaphors used to “interweave” past events to a continuous historical process, Peter Burke and Antoon De Baets develop typologies of the use of analogies by historians, and Roland Vogt provides examples of the use of historical analogies in politics. Already Carl Schmitt pointed out that prognosis, diagnosis and historical parallels, as well as the interplay between concepts and counter-concepts, matter for making sense of political thought and praxis.¹²

How prognoses, diagnoses and historical analogies are intertwined in historiography and political decision-making, and what kind of role history plays for representing the self-perception and understanding of continuity of a society, is the topic of the first chapters of this volume. Indeed, these deal with the way we re-create history to understand and find our way from the present and into the future. In particular, Javier Fernández-Sebastián emphasizes in his contribution that historiography tries to bridge the gap and ruptures between past and present by constructing – with help of historical metaphors – continuities, while Andreas Leutzsch analyses the role of semantic forms and iconographic pathos-forms in constructing an inclusive collective memory in the torn society of post-war and postcolonial Hong Kong. Most contributions deal with the fact that history is relative to the history of those who write it and their Janus-faced standpoint, which cannot be static at all. Reinhart Koselleck, Jörn Rüsen and Horst-Walter Blanke have dealt with this epistemological problem from different angles,¹³ but already Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy reflected upon the problem of rewriting and reordering periods of history in his theory of revolutions:

The revolutions of mankind create new time-spans for our life on earth. They give man’s soul a new relation between present, past and future; and by doing so they give us time to start our life on earth all over again, with a new rhythm and a new faith. For ordering the three dimensions of time, we need what St. Ambrose called the times of times, temporum tempora, standards for making the right distribution between past, future and present.¹⁴

Needless to say, all distinction between the three dimensions of time must be artificial because there is no point outside the universe of time and space where we can stop history just for a second or observe it without being embedded into it as mentioned above. We are all children of a revolution and part of a discourse on time and history. The power of this discourse might be best illustrated by the fact that history as a rational model, including the Western periodization of history, is used globally now – though Chinese scholars, for instance, traditionally used a periodization of dynasties (which has a spatial connotation that may differ from the Western concept of dynasties and their chronology), these dynasties are more and more clustered into major periods, too. The latter leads sometimes to a confusion of what might be considered as (global) ancient, pre-modern/medieval or modern history due to the different ruptures in Western and Chinese history. However, what we can observe is the way people – historians and politicians for instance – practically make use of historical analogies for various purposes in different times. In their contributions, Peter Burke and Antoon De Baets develop categories to analyse and understand what kind of role inter alia historical analogies, anachronisms, topoi and pre-figurations play not only for writing and constructing history but also for dealing with current affairs and censorship.

Historical analogies are an essential part of the discourse in modern societies. Reinhart Koselleck demonstrated this pretty well in his article “Historia magistra vitae” by giving the example of a Prussian minister who invented a historical analogy to undermine a political decision of his cabinet.¹⁵ The invention of an example from the ancient past that actually never occurred demonstrates the authority of history as a yardstick for politics and society. History replaced somehow the authority of the holy books and provides pseudo-secular and pseudo-objective examples for right decision-making as already Benedict Anderson noted in regard to nationalism¹⁶ – an ideology whose co-evolution with modern historiography is by no means accidental. In my chapter, I use Koselleck’s Historik and Iconology to provide a model for explaining the relationship between changing perceptions of Hong Kong’s society as represented by the administration’s updating of national and imperial memorials and managing of collective memory, whereas further contributions deal with the role of collective traumas – such as Mao’s Cultural Revolution – in China’s collective memory as represented by publishing projects (C. K. Martin Chung) and the ways different generations of Chinese directors have dealt with socio-political ruptures in their movies (Barbara von der Lühe). Here, again, the way authors and artis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: prefiguring future by constructing history
• 2. Analogy, allegory and anachronism
• 3. The subversive power of historical analogies
• 4. The tapestry of history: parallels, analogies, metaphors
• 5. Driving with the rearview mirror? Historical analogies and European foreign policy
• 6. Handing over memories: the transnationalization of memorials and the construction of collective memory in post-war and postcolonial Hong Kong
• 7. The sieve of memory: Chinese coming to terms with the past and parallels in European cultures of remembrance
• 8. Generational conflict in context of the Cultural Revolution in Chinese movies since 1990
• Index