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

Scholars of history and memory continue to be fascinated by the big questions of how to think through war and defeat and the ways in which people respond to the complete discrediting of an ideology that had only a short time earlier permeated their society. In the twentieth century, perhaps the most famous cases are Germany's and Japan's collapse in 1945 and their democratic reconstruction, although the two are rarely considered together. This book compares how professional historians in both countries dealt with these questions in the wake of defeat and the loss of empire, and under foreign military occupations that made their own policies regarding responsibility for the war. Sebastian Conrad posits that both in the Federal Republic of Germany and in Japan, the location of "the nation" both spatially (within shifting territorial boundaries) and temporally (in terms of historical continuity) informed the core of historical debates; hence the title, The Quest for the Lost Nation. At stake are historical writings between 1945 and 1960 (with a short excursion into subsequent decades) rather than "the American Century" of the book's subtitle.

Although the argument for postwar historians' preoccupation with the "lost nation" may originally be a Germano-centric idea, this study is a model for how to do comparative history successfully. The book is thematically organized around major interpretive commonalities, albeit at the expense of chronological integrity. This allows for a direct comparison of historical arguments and at the same time highlights contextual differences. The core of the book consists of four chapters, each of which discusses a particular "interpretive strategy"—rather than methodology per se—in talking about the history leading up to war and defeat. This approach evidences fascinating parallels between the two countries. First, historians in both countries fought a kind of "proxy battle" over the interpretation—offered in an effort to explain the historical roots of their recent catastrophes—of Bismarck and the Meiji Restoration, respectively, as the "origin of the nation." Second, interpretations of national socialism and Japanese fascism rested on a radical distancing from the wartime past not because of the regimes' criminal character, but because the post-1945 transnational context demanded a "fundamental interpretive shift" (p. 121).

Third, historians invented "contemporary history" via methodological debates about the recent past that posited "structure" and "agency" as diametrical opposites (p. 169). Fourth, historians and social scientists in both countries located their nations between "East and West," commensurate with their respective experiences of foreign occupation. The "temporalization of space" (see chapter 5) that characterized modernization theory in Japan was crucially informed by an orientalist East/West binary, whereas in Germany it was bound up with Cold War rivalries and the country's political division.

The first and last chapters of the volume under review frame this comparative analysis in uneven ways. The first chapter establishes Conrad's main argument, that early postwar historical debates owed as much to prewar historiography as to postwar contemporary context, by reviewing those earlier debates in both countries. The last chapter fast-forwards this discussion to the end of the century, but it is a broad discussion of memory in general rather than a focus on the pivotal historical debates, which would have been more consistent with the rest of the book. A close focus, instead, on the Historikerstreit of the mid-1980s and the conservative Tsukurukai challenge to the liberal war responsibility critique of the 1990s could have provided an opportunity to test out the early arguments in a different context. More interestingly, readers might be curious to know how the recent explosion of historical research on the old German Democratic Republic and on Japan in Asia has reframed the parameters of historiography in the past two decades. This clearly stood outside the scope of the book's German version, which was published as a dissertation in 1999...