Der europäische Traum: Vier Lehren aus der Geschichte by Aleida Assmann

Der europäische Traum: Vier Lehren aus der Geschichte Reviews

• 
  Tim

  Gelungener Essay über die Vergangenheitsbewältigung und Erinnerungskultur eines Europa, welches nach zwei Weltkriegen und einer langen Ost-West-Spaltung nun erneut durch Flüchtlingskrisen und neuen Rechtsradikalen auf dem politischen und kulturellen Prüfstand steht.
• 
  Barnaby Thieme

  I don't believe Jan and Aleida Assmann are very well known outside of the German-speaking world. Before I started reading widely in contemporary German academic works, I had primarily thought of Jan Assmann as an Egyptologist, but now I regularly encounter his ideas and those of his wife.
  
  In a series of independently-published works, the authors have established a widely-cited intellectual framework for the analysis of how cultures and societies define themselves in relationship to the past - an approach to what they have memorably called "kulturelles Gedächtnis," or cultural memory. This useful and versatile set of ideas and interests has proved especially fruitful in the German-speaking world, where intellectual history is largely preoccupied with a sustained meditation on the disasters and crimes of the 20th century, and now with the migration influx of 2015.
  
  For their work in this area, the authors were recently awarded the Friedenpreis des Deutschen Buchhandels, and used the occasion of accepting the award to make a defense of what they regard as classical European liberal values. As a follow-up, Aleida Assmann quickly published this short book, which is a spirited and stimulating essay reviewing the history of the EU at a gallop.
  
  In the book's first half, she identifies four "lessons" from history that Europe has learned and imperfectly enshrined in the institutions of the EU: the mutual guarantee of peace, the development of constitutional democracies, a commitment to a comprehensive and multifaceted representation of historical truth, and a fundamental commitment to universal human rights. In the second helf of the book, Assmann analyzes these concepts through historical examples, with a strong emphasis on issues pertaining to her specialty of cultural strategies for remembering, and with a strong emphasis on issues directly relevant to Germany's history.
  
  It is incumbent upon all of those who believe in the European project to defend it now, in this hour when it is under fervent attack by populist and xenophobic nationalism from all quarters, and that is the spirit in which this book was written. In that light, I admired and appreciated this book for making such an argument, and making it well - if briefly - in the book's first half. I think this book is at its best as a review of the high points of the EU's history, and a spirited reminder of the values of international cooperation for which it stands.
  
  In the longer second half of the book, I think she rather loses the thread, and the book starts to meander. Her historical examples impress me primarily as a series of brief and loosely-connected vignettes analyzing various aspects of cultural memory in the EU, considering everything from how Germany remembers and talks about refugees to museums as a battleground for how Europe remembers its own history of colonial appropriation.
  
  It was stimulating to bound from big idea to big idea, but the pace is breathless, and each individual case is treated too briefly to do anything more than introduce some of the major features of the subject she treats, and to suggest her preferred approach. As a result, the book wavers between manifesto and intellectual history, and doesn't precisely satisfy the requirements of either.
  
  Seen from the light of historiography, for example, the book is too one-sided to adequately address the complexity of the issues she raises. She has a tendency to stack the deck in favor of her conclusions. For example, in her discussion of migration, Assmann claims that there are two types of migrant: people who move within the legal framework to pursue employment or a new life in another land, and people who are forced by upheaval to flee. Quite obviously there is at least a third category: people who would simply prefer to live somewhere else, and seek to move there by any means, legally or otherwise. To pretend that all illegal migrants are seeking asylum simply limits the degree to which we can take her analysis or conclusions seriously.
  
  In Assmann's view, history is either a monological construction by the dominant power, in which case it is used to validate the people who write it, or it is a dialogical conversation which invites many different points of view. I would submit that this work is largely monological, in the sense that it minimizes or excludes the point of view of conservative social thinkers.
  
  For example, it would have been interesting for her to note in her discussion of dialogical history that conservatives in Germany have accused the left for decades of patrolling the parameters of admissible social discourse, and acting as self-appointed censors. This has helped push the right into the position of antagonist-provocateurs, because many of their arguments and positions - some of which are important - have been declared inadmissible. The development of this style of taboo-violating rhetoric on the right is therefore, I think, in part a dialectical consequence of this interplay between left and right.
  
  An analysis of this kind would add nuance and a component of self-criticism to her consideration of dialogical memory. Any criticism that lacks self-criticism is by definition monological, and even as someone highly sympathetic to Assmann's political agenda, I found her argument one-sided. However, despite its limitations, this book bursts with useful and suggestive ideas and is well worth reading - especially the more focused and novel first half.
• 
  klarissa

  wir sollten das buch in der erasmus AG lesen
  hab’s nur bis zur dritten lehre gelesen weil es sich voll wiederholt hat und bisschen langweilig war aber man fühlt sich intellektuell 😌
• 
  Schopfi

  Learning from history is a tricky enterprise. The meaning of past events is always subject to framing and reframing and in light of recent developments in European memory politics on can easily see the possible divergence of narratives. the process of European unification, itself a historical process, is subject to strains not only by current events such as migration and economic crisis, but also because of a lack of a unifying vision of what the past was and how it relates to the present.
  The author tries to find and put into words potential building blocks for this vision that europeans could agree upon and use to develop the union in the future:
  
  Peace.
  legal principles.
  a critical culture of memory
  and human rights.