Joep Leerssen is an Emeritus Professor of Modern European Literature at the University of Amsterdam and a part-time appointed research professor at the Sociaal Historisch Centrum Limburg / Maastricht University. He is an author and editor of eleven books and multiple articles on European cultural history, nationalism woo, I am a footnote, and imaginology. We had a chance to talk with Professor Leerssen about the recent development in the studies of history and its potential nationalization, the role of memory studies in history, and the attempts to deal with historic traumas in the time of war.
Yevhen Yashchuk
Considering the transformation that has happened in the studies of history in the past 40 years, what do you think about the field of national history after all these decades of it being considered questionable? Is it still somehow valid nowadays to talk about this as a potential way in which historical knowledge may be developed?
Joep Leerssen
That is a very complex question. In some respects, national history has been heavily questioned and deconstructed. We have had transnational and comparative turns in historical studies, and books like [Hobsbawm and Ranger’s] The Invention of Tradition. At the same time, despite those changes, we are still faced with a lot of methodological nationalism. Somehow, the recognition of the nation as a questionable or problematic concept has not led to a real realignment of how we approach our sources. This is because historians use archives. In the historical profession, a real historian is somebody who uses archives, and the archives are almost always organized on a national basis. So methodological nationalism is already pre-inscribed from the fact that our archives are usually gravitating towards single nation studies.
Secondly, there is an ongoing prioritization in the historical profession of social history and political history. Other forms of history like cultural history, art history, literary history, history of mentalities, they tend to be “hyphenated history.” That means that you’re looking at a sociopolitical framework, which in the 19th century pretty much prefigures the states as they emerge in the 20th. Thus, there are two very deep seated reasons in the professional ethos of the historian why they gravitate towards methodological nationalism.
If we see comparative history, it is very often presented by putting cases side by side and only in the third instance by looking at transnational patterns. The search for transnational patterns and cultural transfers are much stronger in the non-social, non-political histories. So, it depends on what sort of historian you are. I now notice that in the West, there certainly is a definite return of the nation as the natural unit of what it is the historian wants to explain. There is a new nationalization, at least, that is my impression.
Yevhen Yashchuk
If we look at the post-Second World War development of history studies, we may observe turns that went beyond the national borders, questioning the previous positions and bringing into history people who were marginalized previously. However, nowadays we may face this new turn towards national history. Why do you think this new nationalization of history has happened recently?
Joep Leerssen
I think one of the reasons is that historians feel an ongoing need to make themselves relevant and appeal to a general audience, which is very often interested in the nation. I find it extraordinary that we have the war in Ukraine, and 90% of the people are saying “what is Ukraine anyway?” and nobody is asking, “where does Putin get his ideas from?” That is all problematization. What sort of a country is this that instead of asking what is the ideology that drives the war, [they are asking] “where does Putin stand between old-school Slavophilia and new Eurasianism?” and all the deterritorialized ideological currents that are around there. I think it is an ongoing need for social relevance because people outside the universities who ask historians questions and who give historians time on the television are interested in the nation.
In the very early beginnings, from 1800 to 1850, history writing was a branch of literature. A historian was like a writer, an intelligent, a man of letters. Jules Michelet or Nikolay Karamzin studied the past and wrote books around it, which became very popular. However, later in the century, historians said that the first romantic generation were not very good historians. But if you look now at whom we remember in the 19th century as historians, these are the old guys who wrote the exciting books and not the scholarly positivist scientists of the 1880s and the 1890s. So, somehow the national paradigm still appeals to the imagination, most of all, and I think nowadays also with grant money being very scarce, historians are doing what the public is asking from them. Most of the big successful books are about national conflicts.
Yevhen Yashchuk
Сonsidering this shift in history, do you see that there is some effect of what is called the “memory boom” that has been observed since the 1990s?
Joep Leerssen
The memory boom is a much more important development than many people realize because the importance of the past for the present is something that is experienced by all of society, not just by professional historians. If you want to study historicism in culture in general, you have to turn to memory studies. A lot of it is about traumas and a lot of that trauma memory is about the Holocaust, but also the Holodomor and the war in former Yugoslavia. For some reason, a lot of these memory studies see the most powerful memories as traumatic because they do not go away. Very often it tends to have a certain methodological nationalism, although there are interesting comparisons between the memory of the Holodomor and the Irish famine, but again, this is a comparison of cases rather than transnational or cultural transfer studies.
There is also a tendency for the memory boom to play into Pierre Nora’s model of lieux de memoire [Places of Memory], and that is a very national thing((Pierre Nora introduced the idea of lieux de memoire, sites “where memory crystallizes and secretes itself” to present a shift in the perception of memory happening worldwide, but focused primarily on the case of France in their famous edited three volumes about the sites of memory in the country. See Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations, no. 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring, 1989): 7–24.)). The whole lieux de memoire project was intensely French nationalist, and it has been replicated by national lieux de memoire projects elsewhere in Europe. It is difficult enough to do that at a transnational level, and I think in memory studies people are becoming aware of these restrictions. There are people who genuinely try to look at transnational memories, the migration of memories, memories on the move, but on the whole, memory studies, like history writing itself, has been part of the new nationalization. I do not think one caused the other.
Yevhen Yashchuk
In the book National Stereotyping, Identity Politics, European Crises,((Jürgen Barkhoff, Joep Leerssen, eds, National Stereotyping, Identity Politics, European Crises (Leiden: Brill, 2021).)) you and your colleagues also argue that the whole focus on memory studies came into play in the past 10 years, when a new crisis emerged in Europe. Who are the main actors behind the promotion of these particular types of memories and these particular types of politics?
Joep Leerssen
Who is driving the memory boom? It comes from two factors, rather intra-academic than political. One is that the study of culture has in recent decades become very anti-historicist. People just do critical theory. They look at texts, at paintings, at music, and they ask questions about gender, about power, about colonialism. It is all about, “what does this text mean for us now?” This is a form of cultural criticism, and it is not historical at all. But there are a lot of people who study culture and who are interested in the historicity of culture, and they needed an alternative. They started to look at the way in which culture is a form of cultural memory and in which books and paintings and music are vehicles, platforms, media of cultural memory. It has to do with the tension between historical and anti-historical approaches in the cultural sciences.
Additionally, this has to do with another intellectual trend, which is a new type of sociology. In old school sociology, which is also still used in social history, the real explanation for events is always infrastructural. Within this approach, if you want to understand something, for example, Tchaikovsky, Proust, or Joyce, you have to understand the socioeconomic parameters within which they wrote, the audience at the time. Culture has to be explained by something that is not culture – society or politics. It is a materialist approach inspired by Marx which tends to reduce culture to something that is only a mirror to society, something that only reflects reality but is not a part of it. Culture is something that people do in their spare time when they read a book or go to a ballet performance. Culture is not an agency, it is only an effect. This is an unfortunate way to look at culture because it has agency. Culture has inspired and mobilized people, and has set an agenda.
If you want to look at the agency of culture, you look at the way it functions in a complex of social dynamics as an individual actor, and you take a lot from the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. He has done the most to put intellectuals and artists on the agenda as independent cultural actors and not just as barometers of the socioeconomic situation. I cannot stress enough how very important, certainly in the West, Bourdieu has been for the studies of cultural transfers, the studies of intellectuals and artists, and the status of art in society.
There has been a hidden cultural turn in the historical sciences. Everybody talks about the cultural turn of the 1990s, referring basically to the studies of everyday culture, anthropology, and mentality. Now we have another cultural turn, which is not so obvious, and a lot of it comes from Bourdieu and the cultural historians who do cultural studies. The issue is how this happens exactly at the moment when we get new international conflicts and when the nation becomes a hot item. It could just be a coincidence. If we follow Michael Billig((Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995).)), there seems to be a certain periodicity of nationalism going banal and then going hot again, and it just happens that two waves are coming together now: one in academia and the other in national conflicts. But maybe that is a facile response. Certainly, what has been very important is identity history. The word identity is everywhere. At the beginning, people just deconstructed it as a construct against the older essentialists, but I think the construction of identity in history and the assertion of identity in international politics come together. We are living in an identity paradigm. We are as obsessed with identity as the Middle Ages were obsessed with religion.
Yevhen Yashchuk
May this obsession with identity be somehow connected to post-colonial legacy?
Joep Leerssen
I have witnessed the rise of post-colonialism, and I remember when Edward Said’s Orientalism came out in 1978. I was a student for 10 years before that, before anybody had heard of orientalism. We did know at the time that there was such a strong process as decolonization. The real dynamics of world history was now taking place in the emancipated colonies in Asia, Africa, and South America. The politics played out very much at the level of the United Nations and, for the non-aligned nations, through the Bandung Declaration. Pan-Africanism was very strong in the 1970s: it was a form of post-colonialism, except there was no such word. Then Edward Said comes and crystallizes a lot of feelings that are all over the place. His book is the first in cultural studies that is very aesthetic and interpretive in raising the issue of power. It was a huge gust of something revolutionary. In the beginning, it was all about the colonies of the Orient, power and discourse, and the notion of empire. What has happened in the last 15–20 years is that orientalism has become anything in cultural studies that wants to deconstruct power, and thus it has become a very generalized idea. People look for a method or a theory that also gives you a procedure, a modus operandi. Once you’ve learned the vocabulary, you can apply it. You can take anything you like. You can take any book from the 19th or 20th century and do the post-colonial analysis. This is really attractive to students, but it is also a bit predictable. As a result, it has become less and less about Europe and the Orient, and more and more about a new ethics and a new moralism in literary studies that basically is all about blaming people in power and vindicating the people who were powerless.
At the moment, it is an extremely attractive and popular approach in cultural and historical studies, but I am afraid that its moment of creativity has passed, and it is not really generating new insights anymore. It is applying the theory rather than developing it. Once you know that six 19th-century Russian authors were sexist and imperialist, and you take number seven, you see he was also sexist and imperial. I suppose Ramses II and Attila the Hun were also sexist. Where is the surprise in this? So, I am afraid it is a theory that was very innovative and refreshing in the seventies and eighties, and it is a bit stale now.
Yevhen Yashchuk
In this case, what is more fruitful in terms of development of theory and methodology? After the cultural turn became slightly out of fashion, there became a kind of search for new frames to look at history among other disciplines in the humanities. What is your impression about the new search to develop new theories and new approaches?
Joep Leerssen
There is always an attempt to develop new theories, and I am a little worried by that. I do not think academic sciences should be driven by theoretical innovation. I think innovation in the sciences should come from unlocking new sources rather than thinking of new theories. What you see in the human sciences is that we have moved from orientalism to the new feminism, the non-binary gender studies, post-humanist studies, and animal-centered studies. These are all variations on the same theory – center the thoughts around things that were first decentered and considered marginal and put them in the middle for a bit.
We can also think of new themes. To give you one idea, my wife, Ann Rigney, whom I admire very much as a scholar, is doing the cultural memory of activism. She goes from the Paris Commune to the suffragettes, from the Occupy movement to the various movements on the squares, like Taksim Square, and she tries to see how every activist movement remembers previous movements. It is a truly transnational form of memory studies, and you have to unlock very interesting sources. For the latest movements, you have to study blogs, study things that are lodged by people who have been repressed in Turkey or in Egypt, but that is what historians have always been doing, trying to get new archives. That is where the innovation comes from.
At the same time, you have to ask yourself if history is a science or a field of culture. It’s in between. It is hybrid. If it is science, it has a linear progress. We constantly falsify the wrong knowledge of the past, and we get better ways of understanding us. That is what we are doing with physics and in chemistry, and that is how science works. To some extent, history works like that, but culture does not work like that. In culture, the past is not abolished, it always comes back. If you get new forms of music, people still keep on listening to Bach and to Tchaikovsky, even though you now listen to Nine Inch Nails or Wu-Tang Clan. The old is added to the old and does not replace the old.
Sometimes it strikes me that history is a bit like fashion. You want to be new, you want to be fashionable, you want to be hip. It functions like the marketplace of cultural rather than scientific innovation. All these people are trying to see what is the next wave, and how they can be cool and become celebrities if they are the early adopters. That is like being a Twitter sort of personality. That is not scholarship, and you have to watch out for that.
Yevhen Yashchuk
Giving all new source materials, can you see any kind of shift toward more contemporary history?
Joep Leerssen
Again, a very thought-provoking question. From memory studies, I have learned that there is an ongoing shifting demarcation between what belongs to memory and what belongs to history. It is usually around 30 to 40 years after the events. When you are of my age, you realize that what I considered contemporary is now becoming historical. The 1970s, 1980s, 1990s were just either contemporary or recent. Now I realize that was a different world. The sensation is with us all the time, but if you look back 30 years ago from nowadays, you come into a very problematic situation. The Cold War is not that long ago and that is about the age when communism fell. And I think, at the moment, we see an ongoing tendency in Central and Eastern Europe that people are still trying to come to terms with split memories of history before 1989.
I am not sure about history that is younger than 30 years. Maybe I am too old for that. Maybe when you say the early 2000s, I consider that basically as sociology with the rear-view mirror. There is something like contemporary history, but I do not see any paradigms that are panning out there.
Yevhen Yashchuk
Do you see any ways how the problematized past can be rethought or maybe even reflected in a way that is less restrictive, less exclusive, and more sensitive toward the nuances that existed at the time?
Joep Leerssen
I am not optimistic. I am very pessimistic. I have seen things only going from bad to worse. The growth of illiberalism and anti-democratic movements is everywhere, and it is getting more dangerous. Erdogan, Putin, Modi, Trump. The world will enter into a very dark phase and there will be a lot of suffering on the part of people who want to resist this new fascism. We will need a lot of courage. The fascism of the interwar years was getting dressed up in military uniforms, it was paramilitary. Nowadays it is dressed up in baseball hats. It is a libertarian fascism, but it is in every bit as intolerant, as violent, and as dangerous as the old style.We have a war going on. It is every bit as bad as anything in the 1930s – concentration camps, extermination camps, displaced persons, people driven out of their cities and being transported into the interior of Russia. What is the difference?
The curve leads into darkness rather than into light. The new fascism is characterized by two things that always come together: anti-cosmopolitanism and anti-elitism. If you are an academic, you are wrong because you are a cosmopolitan and because you belong to the elite, as they call it. That means we must unify internationally, because everyone within their single nation is powerless. That is why Central European University is such a beacon, and its exile from Budapest is both a tragedy or such a sign of the times.
Yevhen Yashchuk
Could you name any particular reasons that led to this kind of shift? I am not talking about the political changes, but changes on the part of academia. What went wrong with the role of academics and the place that academia had?
Joep Leerssen
A number of things went wrong, and they all went wrong at the same time, so it is a perfect storm. First, I think there has been a long-term neoliberal assault on academic values. At schools, the learning of foreign languages and history have been disinvested for decades. People have always been taught that true science is technological science, and this is what gets the money. The disproportion between grant money for technological sciences and for the humanities is eye-watering, and this has created a spiral. It was absolutely driven by neoliberalism, certainly in the West.
What they wanted to invest in was technology and economics. That meant that both the demand for teachers and university funding declined. This went together with a new way of measuring research output in which monographs were no longer counted and all was counted by the H-impact factor in rated journals – a totally technological way of measuring the humanities. The humanities were devalorized in almost a deliberate, structural way from the 1970s onwards. And if you don’t teach kids to speak foreign languages, you rob them of the ability to see the world from somebody else’s point of view. This is like not having vitamin C or calcium in your food. You do not notice it, but you need to have it. So, this is a political drive.
Secondly, within academia, there was postmodernism. Bruno Latour has pointed out that thanks to postmodernism and post-colonialism, we have worked on a deep epistemic relativism and a deep paradigm of what Rita Felski also calls “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” There is no essential truth, we can deconstruct everything. People who pretend they tell the truth are hegemonic, and we get this notion that everything is subjective. This paved the way for alternate realities and fake news. People began to realize that epistemic relativism has been picked up specifically by climate deniers, the Holocaust deniers, and people at the extreme right. It is not for nothing that Putin’s internet trolls have been pushing this radical mistrust in scientific authority, whether it is vaccination or whatever else.
The humanities themselves have done their bit to pave the way for these paradigms. For 150 years, the humanities were funded by the fact that we trained teachers, and then society decided we do not need the teachers anymore. I would say that this has contributed to the crisis. We have something called the Discovery Channel on television, but we do not have a “deconstruction channel.”
Yevhen Yashchuk
The criticism towards relativism in academia is also present in the Ukrainian public space: for instance, when it comes to the question of how we should put ourselves in dialogue with Western academia. Because of this relativism, it’s hard to enter Western academia and establish hard points that are not relative and may be seen as essentialist: starting with the memory of the Holodomor and the Second World War, and ending with the history of Ukraine as a particular entity. How can we then leave relativism in academia behind and enter the world of certainty that would not consist of a priori assumptions about how things existed in history or in other fields of knowledge?
Joep Leerssen
I think you phrased the dilemma extremely well and in phrasing it, you already suggest an answer. The danger is that by rejecting the relativism people tend to counter that by falling back basically on romantic narratives, on the things they already think they know. The stuff was basically written down by the romantic historians of the 19th century about the cossacks or Khemelnytskyi, and it was mapped by the diaspora communities in Canada and elsewhere about the Holodomor, so they fall back on old knowledge. The dilemma is thus between total relativism and old knowledge, which is an a priori. If you want to avoid both, what you need is a powerful narrative that inspires people, and addresses the sort of horizon of expectations that they have, the things they already know without replicating it and adding the complexities. You go back to a strong narrative, but one which is not simplistic and not just replicating the black and white melodramatic narratives of 5,000 years ago. I think that should be possible.
I will give you one example. In the Netherlands, we were talking about the need for a National History Museum, and everybody was saying what should be in it and came with the stuff which could have been written in 1880. It was a 19th-century answer to a 21st century question. One colleague of mine said the key exhibit in the National History Museum should be the congratulations telegram that our Queen Wilhelmina in 1939 sent to Adolf Hitler because he had escaped an assassination attempt. This was just before the war, the Netherlands was still neutral. One year later, the Nazis invaded Holland. This irony which escapes the old-fashioned, ingrained melodramatic stories would really push people’s buttons. It would make them aware of the complexities of history. So, I think it is possible to give people “wow-stories” that are not facile and stereotypical.
Yevhen Yashchuk
Do you think that it is possible to deal with experience that is traumatic in an ironic way? It may be considered as questioning people’s suffering. Even the part of history that happened 78 years ago may still be recognized as a traumatic experience. Is it morally or academically acceptable?
Joep Leerssen
I think it is. If you showed that telegram from the Queen to Hitler, nobody would feel affronted or denigrated in their experience of how people suffered under the Nazis. People are fairly open and the well-known stories like that of Anne Frank are not melodramatic. They are traumatic and you cannot mock them. At the same time, people realize that these are not simple stories, there are many shades of gray and difficult choices between the good and the bad. I think people can accommodate that.
The strongest memories are the traumas. Trauma is the flavor of the decade. Of course, if you are traumatized, it gives you a tragic dignity. You do not want to mock people who are traumatized, but at the same time, I think we should not allow trauma to become melodramatic. I hate the way real traumas have been used for cheap melodramatic effects. The nature of trauma matters, as Freud said. People tend to return to it. It is the past that refuses to be laid to rest, you go back to it again and again. To some extent, the need to repeat is a part of the pathology. But at some point, you have to snap out – it is also part of the therapy. A lot of the most creative culture is about how people got out of traumas. The great thing about history is that traumas are always there, but the inspiring moments of history are how people move on from there. I hope that in culture there is a certain tendency to get away from melodrama and look at how you can actually move on. It is facile to just nod your head at the tragic dignity of the trauma and leave it at that. That’s only half the story. You have to move on from that.
Yevhen Yashchuk
Ukrainians are now living in a traumatic situation of war, which is still an ongoing experience. Does the process of moving out of this traumatic experience have to happen after the traumatic event? In other words, can we deal with this trauma during the war or would it be better to wait until it ends?
Joep Leerssen
I think both. The war is still developing and how we frame it depends on contingencies. There are a lot of possibilities that frame the war as a heroic thing with a happy end or a catastrophe with a sad end. As long as we are in this, it is very difficult to say anything about it. We haven’t been used to wars since 1945, if you discount Yugoslavia. But I would be interested in the experience of people from Serbia and Croatia, because I think they would have a lot of say about the 1990s. I know people in Novi Sad that were very bitter because they were robbed of their youth. You probably were a happy chappy in Kyiv before the full-scale invasion happened, you probably had a circle of friends and a nice student life. This is not good for you, but I saw people frame it in two ways: “my youth got robbed” or “they weren’t able to get me, I fought through.” Both are equally plausible.
Even during wars, there are incredibly inspiring stories of people who resist, whether these are partisans or dissidents. Those are types of stories that might end tragically for the individuals. These activist movements did not realize the political goals they had. In practical terms, they were failures, but they left a legacy that really inspired other movements. They were remembered not as failures, but as inspirations.