Postwar

nostalgia. The final decades of the century had seen an escalating public fascination with the past as a detached artifact, encapsulating not recent memories but lost memories: history not so much as a source of enlightenment about the present but rather as an illustration of how very different things had once been. History on television—whether narrated or performed; history in theme parks; history in museums: all emphasized not what bound people to the past but everything that separated them from it. The present was depicted not as heir to history but as its orphan: cut off from the way things were and the world we have lost.

In eastern Europe, nostalgia drew directly upon regret for the lost certainties of Communism, now purged of its darker side. In 2003 the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague mounted an exhibition of ‘pre-revolutionary clothing’: boots, underwear, dresses and the like from a world that had only ended fourteen years beforebut was already an object of detached fascination. The exhibition attracted many older people for whom the grey sameness of the shoddily-made items on display must have been a recent memory. And yet the response of visitors suggested a degree of affection and even regret that caught the curators quite by surprise.

Ostalgie, as it was known in Germany, drew on a similar vein of forgetful remembering. Considering that the GDR—to adapt Mirabeau’s description of Hohenzollern Prussia—was little more than a security service with a state, it demonstrated in the glow of retrospect a remarkable capacity to evoke affection and even longing. While Czechs were admiring their old clothes, Germans were flocking to Goodbye Lenin: a film whose ostensible mocking of the shortages, dogmas and general absurdity of life under Erich Honecker was knowingly offset by a certain sympathy for its subject and more than a little ambivalence at its sudden loss.

But Germans and Czechs, like other central Europeans, have had all too much experience of sudden, traumatic national re-starts. Their selective nostalgia for whatever might be retrieved from the detritus of lost pasts made a lot of sense—it was not by chance that Edgar Reitz’s Heimat: Eine Deutsche Chronik attracted an average of nine million West German viewers per episode when it was televised in 1984. The obsession with nostalgia that swept across the rest of Western Europe in the last years of the old century, giving rise to heritage industries, memorials, reconstructions, reenactments and renovations, is not so readily accounted for.

What the historian Eric Hobsbawm described in 1995 as ‘the great age of historical mythology’ was not of course unprecedented—Hobsbawm himself had written brilliantly about the ‘invention of tradition’ in nineteenth- century Europe, at the dawning of the national age: the sort of ersatz culture dismissed by Edwin Muir (writing of Burns and Scott in Scotland 1941) as ‘sham bards for a sham nation’. But the creative re-imagining of the national past in France and the UK at the end of the twentieth century was of another order altogether.

It was not by chance that history-as-nostalgia was so very pronounced in these two national settings in particular. Having entered the twentieth century as proud imperial powers, both countries had been stripped of territory and resources by war and decolonization. The confidence and security of global empire had been replaced by uneasy memories and uncertain future prospects. What it meant to be French, or British, had once been very clear, but no longer. The alternative, to become enthusiastically ‘European’, was far easier in small countries like Belgium or Portugal, or in places—like Italy or Spain—where the recent national past was best left in shadow.[401] But for nations reared within living memory on grandeur and glory, ‘Europe’ would always be an uncomfortable transition: a compromise, not a choice.

Institutionally speaking, the British turn to nostalgia began almost immediately after World War Two, when the Labour Minister Hugh Dalton established a ‘National Land Fund’ to acquire sites and buildings of ‘beauty and history’ for the nation, to be administered by a National Trust. Within a generation ‘NT’ properties—parks, castles, palaces and ‘areas of outstanding natural beauty’ had become prominent tourist attractions: some of them still occupied by their original owners, who had bequeathed their heirlooms to the nation in return for significant fiscal relief.

From the Fifties through the Seventies a reassuring version of the recent past surfaced and resurfaced in the form of war films, costume dramas and clothing: the recycling of Edwardian fashion, from teddy boys to hirsute facial ornaments, was a particular feature of this trend—culminating, in 1977, in a self-consciously ‘retro’ and nostalgic celebration of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee amid street parties, photographic exhibits and nationwide invocation of older and better times. But after the Thatcherite revolution of the Eighties even this element of continuity was lost. In the course of that decade the Britain—more precisely the England—that could feel a certain warm glow of recognition when looking back to the ’40s, or even to 1913, was quite swept away.

In its place there emerged a country incapable of relating to its immediate past except through the unintentional irony of denial, or else as a sort of disinfected, disembodied ‘heritage’. The denial was well captured by the insecurities of the old educational establishment of Oxford and Cambridge, humiliatingly constrained in the new Blairite atmosphere of egalitarian opportunism to insist on their ‘anti-elitism’; or in the grotesque self- deprecation of cultural institutions like London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, reduced in the 1990s to marketing itself with wink and nod as ‘an ace caff’ with quite a nice museum attached’.

As for the nation’s heritage, it was quite avowedly transformed into a business proposition, the ‘heritage industry’: promoted and underwritten by a new government ‘Department of National Heritage’. Established in 1992 by a Conservative government but in conformity with plans originally drafted under Labour, the new ministry would later be absorbed under Tony Blair’s New Labour governments into a revealingly labeled ‘Department for Culture, Media and Sport’. The ecumenical background is significant: heritage was not a political-party project. The past was not abused or exploited; it was sanitized and given a happy face.

Barnsley, at the heart of the defunct South Yorkshire coalfield, was a case in point. Once an important mining hub, Barnsley in the post-Thatcher era had been transformed beyond recognition. Its town center was eviscerated, its civic core ripped up and replaced by tawdry pedestrian malls encased in concrete parking garages. All that remained were the town hall and a handful of neighbouring buildings, architectural relics of Barnsley’s nineteenth-century municipal glory, to which visitors were directed by fake-ancient, ‘olde-worlde’ signposts. Meanwhile, book-stalls in the local market now specialized in selling local nostalgia to the area’s own residents (Barnsley was not on any established tourist route)—sepia photos and prints and books with titles like The Golden Years of Barnsley or Memories of Old Doncaster (a neighbouring town): reminders of a world only recently lost and already half-forgotten.

A few miles from Barnsley, near the village of Orgreave, the ‘Battle of Orgreave’ was rerun for television in 2001. The June 1984 confrontation there between striking miners and police was the most violent and desperate of the clashes that marked Margaret Thatcher’s confrontation with the National Union of Miners that year. Since then many of the miners had been unemployed—some of them took part (for cash) in the re-enactment, dressed in appropriate ‘period’ clothing. This ‘performing’ of famous battles was an established English pastime. But that Orgreave should have been getting the ‘heritage’ treatment was illustrative of the accelerated historicizing now under way. After all, it took three hundred years before the English got around to re-enacting the Civil War Battle of Naseby a couple of hours to the south; Orgreave was being rerun for television just seventeen years after the fact.

The town of Barnsley figured prominently in The Road to Wigan Pier, where George Orwell wrote unforgettably of the tragedy of inter-war unemployment in Britain’s industrial working class. Seventy years on, in Wigan itself, there was now not only a pier (Orwell famously remarked upon its absence) but also a signpost on the nearby motorway encouraging people to visit it. Next to the cleaned-up canal there had been constructed ‘The Way We Were’ museum and ‘The Orwell at Wigan Pier’, a generic modern pub selling burgers and chips. Orwell’s fearful northern slums had indeed been erased—not only from the landscape but also from local memory: Memories of Wigan 1930-1970, a guide on sale at the museum, offered pretty sepia pictures of demure salesgirls and quaint, forgotten shops. But of the pits and the workers whose condition drew Orwell there and gave Wigan its dubious fame, there was not a word.

It was not just the North that had been given the Heritage treatment. In England’s West Midland potteries district, tourists and local schoolchildren were encouraged to learn how Josiah Wedgwood, the eighteenth-century ceramics manufacturer, fashioned his famous wares. But they would search in vain for evidence of how the pottery workers lived or why the region was called the Black Country (Orwell described how even the snow turned black from the belching smoke of a hundred chimneys). And such examples—where the way things ought to have been was substituted for the way they were (or are)—could be multiplied hundredfold.