Abstract

ExcerptUses and Abuses of Criticism The memorialization of past events and persons as part of a shared cultural heritage was a fundamental obsession of nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalist historians. Historical memory always involves a certain imaginary component; however, as Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out, fictional constructs are all the more prevalent in depictions of the past that gravitate to the monumental or heroic. Writing in the midst of German unification in the early 1870s, Nietzsche critiqued oversimplified narratives that foreground exceptional national-historical events. This “monumentalist” mode of history narrates a “chain … [of] great moments in the struggle…