Content area
Full Text
The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945-1965. By Pieter Lagrou. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-521-65180-8. Illustrations. Charts. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xiii, 327. $59.95.
Victims make for awkward heroes. That is the conclusion of this remarkably well-researched and rigorously comparative book about the way resisters, deportees, and forced laborers were or were not incorporated into the political landscape of postwar France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
Each of the nations discussed here attempted to create a usable national memory about the war years. The Netherlands had the most success in doing so. The German occupation was so complete and so humiliating that the postwar state decided to use the totality of that defeat to create a hegemonic war-myth that implied consensus and unity in the wake of trauma. Lagrou shows that the state actively opposed the creation of pressure...