The Quest for the Lost Nation. Writing History in Germany and Japan in the American Century (review)

This book, which is a revised translation of a 1999 publication, examines historiographical trajectories in Japan and West Germany in the aftermath of World War II. Sebastian Conrad, who is a key protagonist on the frontier of global and transnational historiography, tackles the methodological nationalism that permeates the historical (and by extension the sociological) profession in a convincing manner. It is an important contribution to a conversation sociologists ought to have. What tangible connections are there between methodological controversies about historical interpretations among historians of post-war Germany and Japan and the sociological discipline? They are plentiful and Social Forces should be commended for choosing to review a book that seems to squarely fall outside the usual purview of sociologists. My comments will, therefore, direct attention to those theoretical and conceptual aspects that are relevant for the sociological introspections that the book provokes. Accordingly, I will be less concerned with the details of the respective cases, but focus on the social, cultural and political possibilities circumscribing how historiographical debates are entwined with methodological choices and the epistemological conditions underwriting them.

Conrad is primarily interested in the "political and discursive conditions of historiography."(8) He demonstrates that even in a context where nationhood was delegitimized (as was officially the case in postwar Germany and Japan) and historians often sought recourse in structural (and social scientific) models of explanation, the preoccupation with the nation nevertheless persisted. Even more, he claims that it was precisely because of these toxic pasts that historians in both countries "were engaged in a quest for what they perceived as the lost nation."(2) This aspect of continuities and their discontinuation, so to speak, is of particular conceptual value insofar as remembered continuities are a fundamental aspect of collective self-understanding. This is especially pertinent for Germany and Japan as their postwar identities have been predicated on critical breaks with their recent pasts. Both keep reassessing the ways in which democratic (universal) values, now integral facets of their political cultures, relate to specific traditions in their histories. Conrad makes a persuasive case for how paradigms of knowledge are reflective of, and contribute to, the kind of political-cultural attention that extends beyond the narrow confines of academia. One distinctive quality is the ability of historical debates to thematize methodological issues as public problems. When they resonate with the broader public, shifts in the understanding and thus judgments of historical phenomena can materialize. Debates about the uniqueness or comparability of a historical phenomenon reveal a contest over whether the nation should articulate itself through universal criteria or a particularistic vocabulary.

Conrad provides a rich historical tapestry and a plethora of case-specific arguments. Let me illustrate with one example how methodological decisions and theoretical choices inform moral and political standards of public debates. Paradoxically the search for the lost nation and its rehabilitation was accomplished not with reference to the kind of historicism focusing on political history but through the allegedly neutral move toward a more social scientific practice of historiography. Relying on a more structural vocabulary and universalistic paradigms (e.g., modernization theory), historians replaced agency with a focus on social structures, which in turn was conceived on a developmental scale. On this view, the unique features of a nation (a perspective that ironically is marginalized as essentialist in our age of culturalism) were now residual categories whose interpretive significance was second to a presumed developmental path. Negative national pasts were explained as a function of aberrations, delays or setbacks from an array of prescribed developmental trajectories. Conrad addresses this methodological teleology as a "temporalization of space," which "refers to a mode of explanation that conceives of the difference between two phenomena as a temporal gap. In this way, historiography reduces the problem of space to the category of time.... It was usually provided with a temporal index, making it possible...