1 Introduction
Standing on Gianicolo Hill overlooking Rome one is confronted with the monument to Giuseppe Garibaldi, unveiled in 1895. Garibaldi was, of course, one of the central heroes of the Risorgimento – an archetypal romantic figure fighting the cause of national unity and liberty not just in Italy but also in Latin America. He sits alongside a whole range of other romantic liberators of allegedly unfinished or repressed nations in the pantheon of nineteenth-century national movements. The nation states they were striving for and that, in many cases, were eventually to emerge from history took great care to present their heroes,
Statue of Garibaldi on the Gianicolo hill in Rome
This may seem an extreme case of an adverse relationship between national historiographies and national stereotypes in twentieth-century Europe, and in
2. Some Preliminary Thoughts on Stereotypes and on National Histories
Katy Greenland has defined stereotypes as “probabilistic, generalised representations of any social group”.3 They play an important role in social cognition, as they allow people to categorize and thereby simplify the world around them. Their effects on perception, thought and behaviour is considerable. Bias and prejudice are an integral part of stereotyping leading to the frequent denigration of ‘others’. The more social groups suffer from anxiety about other groups, the more they will practice negative stereotyping. These stereotypes are often highly abstract, which helps to make their cores more durable, as they are very difficult to destabilise with specific counter-examples. At the level of abstraction at which stereotypes operate, specific examples can always be dismissed as the exception to the rule.
A close analysis of national histories leads to the conclusion that they are often characterised by positive auto-stereotypes and negative stereotypes
The relationship between victimhood and violence is embedded in most national historiographies […]. [The national idea, S.B.] is first conjured up as being under threat. And it is this state of alarm that produces the energy to override competing identities, often violently. Violence is inscribed in the national narrative because the nation imagines itself first and foremost as a collective good that is incomplete and imperilled. In many ways, the national narrative must sustain itself by reproducing its own state of jeopardy. National histories tremble as a result.5
To take the example of Germany after unification of 1871, here national histories contributed to constructing a whole string of internal and external enemies in order to strengthen an altogether insecure national ‘we’ group that could not even produce a majority for unification in the first all-German parliament. Hence the Catholics and the Socialists were picked upon as two groups whose primary loyalty did not lie with the German fatherland, but rather with the Pope in Rome and with international socialism respectively. They were denounced as ‘fellows without a fatherland’ and the national ‘we’ group could define itself more strongly against those ‘out’ groups. Alongside the internal enemies, German nationalism after 1871 had many external enemies, especially the so-called ‘hereditary enemy ‘ of France, regarded as a country that wanted to weaken, dismember and humiliate Germany for many centuries. Britain was stereotyped as ‘perfidious Albion’ that was double-faced and could not be trusted. Its economistic mentality only looked for profit and was allegedly unable to produce any true culture (Kultur). Russia and many of the East European peoples were denounced as Slavs, who allegedly were culturally much inferior to the Germans and whose civilisation depended partly on medieval German colonisation eastwards. Again, the external enemies also served the purpose of re-assuring an insecure German ‘we’ against its immediate surroundings.6
In fact I would like to use the following five case studies to demonstrate that academic national history writing could and did transport national stereotypes more often than it questioned and destroyed them. It could do both, of course, but there are famous examples of the dangers of destroying those stereotypes – dangers to the historians’ career and sometimes life. Take the example of the young Gyula Szekfü in Hungary who was in the middle of the so-called Rákóczi controversy of 1913. Szekfü had published a book that demolished the national hero Francis II. Rákóczi and presented him as a rejected and bitter politician who, towards the end of his life, recognised his own failures. This interpretation was itself driven by the political sentiments of Szekfü, who was pro-Habsburg at the time. Yet the Hungarian nationalists criticised this interpretation viciously and almost destroyed the promising young career of the historian who would later become one of the most distinguished among his profession in Hungary.11
3 Historians as Purveyors of Stereotypes in Twentieth-Century Historiography
Our first case study relates to the historians’ agency in and around the First World War. British historians before 1914 were divided between those holding pro-German and those holding anti-German sentiments. Their positions were often based on stereotypes of what was the essence of the German nation: whereas the pro-German camp argued that the German Mensch was modern, progressive and educated (gebildet), the anti-German camp held that the German was born with a Pickelhaube and was inherently militarist, aggressive and authoritarian. These traits were then often historicised, i.e. history became an argument to bolster particular stereotypes of Germany. At the outbreak of the First World War, many pro-German historians were hugely disappointed as their particular vision of what ‘the German’ was, seemed to be drowned out by their opponents’ vision of ‘the Hun’. British historians during the First World War repeatedly came out with stereotypical accusations of Prussianism and posited Prussian militarism against English liberty, i.e. they juxtaposed a negative stereotype of the other with a positive auto-stereotype.13 A particularly interesting and after 1918 influential position was taken by William Harbutt Dawson. Like many of his fellow pro-German historians he was deeply shocked by the nationalist pro-war sentiments in Germany, and he came up with an ingenious solution to the problem, i.e. the theory of the two Germanies. A
If we look at German historiography, it was strongly engulfed in the outbreak of hyper-nationalism at the beginning of the war, which engulfed almost all of the intellectuals in Germany.15 They again worked strongly with stereotypes, contrasting German discipline and Kultur with Western shallowness, Slav barbarity and French decadence. All of the tropes that were used in this negative stereotyping of the ‘enemy’ in the war had already been well established before 1914. It was easy to fall back on them in war-time. Thus, for example, Gerhard von Schulze Gaevernitz, an economist well known also for his historical work, among other topics on the British historian and writer Thomas Carlyle, argued in 1915: “The Anglo-Saxon, in his highest form, is a man as hard as steel and of the toughest constitution, kalt wie Hundeschnauze, completely lacking in artistic temperament, the type who aims to subordinate beauty and colour to brutal numbers […].”16 Endless other examples could be cited. Friedrich Meinecke published a book justifying the German declaration of war and using crude stereotypes to contrast an allegedly higher German form of humanity with the humanity of the West which he identified with uniformity, egotism and degeneracy.17 Overall, most German historians backed the war effort right up to the end, and it is no surprise that many of them even peddled the ‘stab-in-the-back’ myth after 1918 and supported an authoritarian redirection of German politics away from Weimar and its liberal foundations.
With our second example we stay with German historiography, as it saw the rise of so-called Volksgeschichte as a direct result of the lost war in the interwar period. Volksgeschichte was many things, but it essentially amounted to a racialisation and biologisation of history writing.18 The strong state-orientation of German historiography before 1914 was no longer seen as being sufficient to underpin a powerful sense of German national identity. Hence many younger
Our third case study looks at the recasting of national historical master narratives in many European nation states at the end of the Second World War.22 Stereotypes were once again crucial in allowing those narratives, many of which had been damaged in and by the war, to be revived after 1945. If we start with Germany, the defeated country had to reject almost everything that the National Socialists had stood for. The anti-fascism of the Communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) legitimated itself in total contradistinction to National Socialist rule. Yet underneath the anti-fascist gloss, sometimes
In the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) there was one very important ideological bridge that allowed many supporters of Nazism to cross over into the post-war camp of ‘the West’ and that ideological bridge was anti-Communism. From the perspective of many in the early FRG, if the National Socialists had been wrong about almost everything, they had been right in their anti-Communism. The Cold War confirmed this, and West German historians could use ideas around the Asianness of Russia and the Soviet Union to posit it as a negative other to the idea of the occident (Abendland) that became popular again with some West German historians in the late 1940s and 1950s. A good Germany, connected, above all, to the conservative military resistance to National Socialism associated with 20 July 1944 (almost all of those conservative military officers had excellent anti-Communist credentials), could be constructed against a stereotypical other – the one-dimensional communist who, through the theory of totalitarianism, was connected to the ultimate evil, National Socialism. Christianity, antiquity and humanism were seen as the defining features of Europe, and the Soviet Union and much of Eastern Europe were decidedly not part of it. Democratic anti-Communism merged with traditional anti-Slav and anti-Russian prejudices, and, in countries such as the FRG, some historians harked back to older stereotypical ideas about German superiority vis-à-vis Eastern Europe.25
If we turn to Britain we find that some of the most traditional stereotypes about its national history are retained and recast in the post-war period. The existing liberal historical master narrative depicting Britain as the land of liberty, freedom and constitutionalism, the mother of parliaments and progressive, evolutionary change was adapted by left-of-centre historians who
In post-war Italy, we find a very similar attempt to adapt what had been the dominant national historical master narrative to the situation after 1945. Ever since the second half of the nineteenth century the ‘beautiful myths’ of the Risorgimento had been the basis of Italian constructions of national identity. Fascism had also presented itself as the true inheritor of the Risorgimento as had anti-fascists, e.g. the brothers Roselli.28 In post-war Italy the Risorgimento was re-loaded once more. The resistance now inherited the mantle of the Risorgimento and became the key to continuing with positive national histories rooted in stereotypical depictions of the era of Italian unification.29
While we can find the retention of traditional stereotypes in the recasting of national historical master narratives after 1945 in large parts of Europe, we can identify no such re-orientation on the Iberian peninsula, as the authoritarian right-wing dictatorships survived the end of fascism in Europe, despite the fact that they had strongly sympathised with fascism in the 1930s and 1940s. Here the occidentalist, Catholic, and familial stereotypes were still shaping the authoritarian historical narratives emanating from those countries until the 1980s.30
Our fifth and final case study considers the renationalisation of historical master narratives after the end of Communism. In post-Communist states we can observe that national historians harked back to positive auto-stereotypes and negative othering – a story all-too familiar from the interwar period. Strong anti-Communism found expression in public history ventures such as
The growth of stereotypical images in historical master narratives cannot only be observed in post-Communist East European societies. It is equally true for separatist movements from western multinational states such as Scotland in the UK or Catalonia in Spain, or, indeed, Flanders in Belgium. The civic left-wing nationalism in Scotland often prides itself in being primarily political, but it nevertheless constantly appeals to and mobilises the cultural heritage and the cultural roots of Scotland. A collection on Scottish history from 1992, aimed not just at an academic audience, starts: “Scotland’s history is important. It gives us as individuals and as members of Scottish society a vital sense of where we are and how we got here.”36 The Catalan National History Museum in Barcelona is full of positive auto-stereotypes about the country and its people, whilst the rest of Spain is the absent ‘other’ in the museum. The Flemish nationalists around Bart de Wever, himself a trained historian, are championing an autonomous history of Flanders building on all the stereotypical Flemish myths, whilst Henri Pirenne’s vision of a Belgium as a bridge between the Romanesque and Germanic cultures has long been out of print in Belgium.37
4 Conclusion
Scientific history can break stereotypes and it can rely on stereotypes. The susceptibility of historians to stereotypes is certainly crucial to the myth-making aspects of national histories that have been at the centre of attention in this article. As the above case studies have sought to demonstrate, time and again, throughout the twentieth century, national historians used narrative frames that were deeply indebted to stereotypes. The binary construction of positive auto-images with negative images of the ‘other’ contributed to the construction of national historical master narratives that owed much to stereotypes. If national histories have been an important part of constructions of national character, then stereotypes have been an essential ingredient of notions of national character. We have observed above that stereotypical images of the ‘other’ were most strongly mobilised at times of conflict, including wars, incidents of ethnic cleansing and post-war reconstruction periods.
History and social psychology share interests in the social sphere, the arts of persuasion and the formation of attitudes. As a result, both disciplines are interested in the construction, manipulation, dissemination and evolution of stereotypes and the prejudices on which they feed.41
We thus would need to examine the language of the historian with the tools from social psychology in order to arrive at a better understanding of how and with what purpose those stereotypes are manipulated and disseminated, and how they have evolved over time. Those teaching rhetoric in ancient Greece and Rome had already been well aware of the usefulness of negative stereotyping to put down an adversary. It is about time for the history of historiography to buckle down and examine historical narrative closely to find out about the subtle and not-so-subtle use of stereotypes in historical writing.
Notes
Massimo d’Azeglio, another pioneer of Italian unification is credited with saying: “We have made Italy. Now we have to make Italians.” See Hom (2013).
Cited in Laven (2006), p. 270.
Greenland (2000), p. 15.
This observation is based on the European Science Foundation project about the writing of national histories in modern Europe which ran between 2003 and 2008 and involved more than 250 scholars from 29 European countries. It was the basis for a nine-volume ‘Writing the Nation’ series with Palgrave MacMillan, the last volume of which attempts a synthesis. See Berger with Conrad (2015).
Peter Fritzsche, ‘National Narrative and Untimely Death’, keynote address to the final conference of the NHIST programme, Manchester, 23–25 October 2008.
This is discussed at length in Berger (2005a), chap. 4.
See Feldner (2010).
See Porciani, Tollebeek (2012).
See Levine (1986).
For a range of case studies see Berger, Lorenz (2011).
See Dénes (1976). I am grateful to Tibor Frank for pointing this out to me.
See Ullrich (2005).
See Wallace (1988).
See Berger (2001).
Cited in Stibbe (2003), p. 249. See also, more generally, Stibbe (2001).
See Meinecke (1915).
See Harvey (2003), chap. 6.
See Heim, Aly (1991); Schönwalder (1992); Haar, Fahlbusch (2005).
See Berger (2005b).
See Iggers (1989).
See Schulze (1989), pp. 211f., 266ff. For Schnabel’s history writing more generally see Hertfelder (1998).
See Berger (2014).
See Morgan (1999).
See Seixas (1993).
See Apor (2010).
See Kuzio (2005).
See Must (2010).
See Trencsényi, Apor (2008), p. 45.
In May 2008, on a visit to the Ukranian national history museum in Kiev, the author was surprised to see such a positive depiction of Petljura.
Donnachie, Whatley (1992), p. 1.
I am grateful to Jo Tollebeek for pointing this out to me.
See Berger (2003).
See Berger (2010b).
See Starkey (2001).
Knights (2014), p. 242.
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