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On the Role of Myths and History in the Construction of National Identity in

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Article  in  European History Quarterly · June 2009

DOI: 10.1177/0265691409105063

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european history quarterly 

On the Role of Myths and History in the

Construction of National Identity in Modern
Europe
Stefan Berger
University of Manchester

Ever since Herodotus and Thucydides, historians have, time and again, stressed
the critical role of history in the debunking of myths. History was supposed to be
different from memory precisely because it did not mythologize but, through a criti-
cal re-examination of all available sources, arrived at a truthful approximation of
‘what actually happened’, in Leopold von Ranke’s famous phrase. True, during the
Middle Ages, writers were far less sure about the precise boundary between ‘history’
and ‘mythology’; yet, medieval historians would also criticize each other for being
untruthful and for peddling myths.1 For the most part, then, myth and history have
been constructed as binary opposites – in the famous phrase of the Irish historian
T.W. Moody: ‘good history . . . is a matter of facing the facts and myth . . . is a way of
refusing to face [them]’.2
As Pål Kolstø has argued, historians have tended to belong to the Enlightenment
tradition, which perceived myths as dangerous distortions of the truth and distrusted
those who championed myths as necessary for properly functioning human soci-
eties.3 However, historians have rarely been naïve positivists. While aware that they
could at best try and get at an approximation of the truth and that a subjective
element in their historical writing was unavoidable, they have not drawn the
conclusion that they should abandon the search for truthfulness. Debunking myths
became the foremost characteristic of good ‘scientific’ history. As the historical
sciences professionalized themselves and as history writing became institutionalized
in the course of the long nineteenth century, the various national myths surrounding
ethnogenesis, the Middle Ages, and the multitude of national heroes were all scruti-
nized against the available ‘historical evidence’.4 The philological method of source
criticism was employed to implode a great many of those national mythologies that
had been put forward in the Romantic period, as indicated by the example of three

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Berger: Myths and History in the Construction of National Identity 

important national historians of Poland, the Czech lands and Hungary, Michal
Bobrzyvski, Josef PekaÑ and Gyula Szekfö.5
Yet, any neat delineation of history and myth was fraught with problems. Even the
self-consciously professional writing of history contributed to the construction of
myths which came to underpin assumptions of national character and national
identity.6 If the Irish case is one of the best to underline the potency of myths in
historical culture, including historical writing,7 it was by no means exceptional. As
Guy P. Marchal’s penetrating analysis of the interplay between historical conscious-
ness and myths in Switzerland shows, the public uses of history relied on mytholo-
gization.8 In what follows, I would like to demonstrate the proximity of myth and
history by discussing: firstly, historical myths of origin; secondly, myth-making in
the treatment of the Middle Ages; thirdly, mythologies of golden ages and their
counterpart, stories of decadence and national decline; fourthly, mythologies of
religion; and, finally, spatial mythologies to do with borders and borderlands. These
are by no means the only areas in which mythologies and history writing inter-
mingled, but they are among the more prominent and they underline the impossibility
of neatly delineating myths from history.
Before we review some of the diverse myths transported through national history
writing, we should for a moment reflect on the relationship between myths and history.
A good starting point is an essay by Chris Lorenz which challenges theoretical
assumptions about any clear-cut demarcations between history writing and myth
making, as they were paradigmatically formulated by William McNeill.9 Lorenz
demonstrates that myths and histories fulfil very similar functions when it comes to
providing guidance for actions in the present and, in particular, when it comes to
attempts to construct national identities and solidarities. Lorenz shows that historians
played a major role in making the nation into one of the ‘self-validating’ types of
myths at the centre of McNeill’s analysis. Drawing on Georg Iggers’s and Konrad
von Moltke’s analysis of Ranke’s famous dictum and on Wilhelm von Humboldt’s
theoretical writings on history, Lorenz holds that religious myths are inscribed into
the very beginnings of German ‘scientific’ writing on history.10
The blurred borders between history, myth and fiction have already been high-
lighted by the writings of Hayden White and Michel de Certeau, who have shown
how closely intertwined historiography was with rhetorical and literary strategies.11
One can go even further back: the juxtaposition between history as ‘science’ and
myths as ‘fictitious’ and ‘false’ was one already doubted by the Romantics in the
early nineteenth century. They argued that myths were capable of expressing the
inner truth about peoples and nations and were in some respects more truthful and
revealing than the study of the past.12 But arguably the Romantics’ rehabilitation of
myths passed historiography by. As Ernst Schulin remarked, very few historians in
the German-speaking lands can be called true Romantics.13 German historiography
became professionalized and institutionalized relatively early, and for much of the
nineteenth century, historians in the rest of Europe regarded German historiography
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as the benchmark for professionalism and ‘scientificity’. Most German historians

increasingly drew a firm line between history and myth, blissfully unaware of the
mythical basis of their own ‘scientific’ undertaking. In his famous theory of histori-
ography, Johann Gustav Droysen summed up what can be described as the state of
the art in the understanding of professional history writing. It included a firm
demarcation between history and myth.14 Myth became increasingly associated with
memory, whereas truthfulness was the sign of history.
Memory is different from history in that it necessitates presence in, and experience
of, an event; or, at least, this is true for individual memory. Collective memory, by
contrast, includes many elements or events which individuals did not directly experi-
ence. Nevertheless, they have internalized a memory that is presented to them
through a mixture of public and private narratives as a collective memory with the
assumption that individuals should partake in it. Collective memory is thus, like
history, always contested, and the result of attempts to give meaning to the past
through interpretation. History writing is in fact one form of public discourse about
the past which participates in debates over what should become part of the collective
memory. Hence, collective memory and history writing cannot easily be delineated
from one another. Any hard and fast distinction between collective memory and
history, as we find, for example, in Maurice Halbwachs and, following Halbwachs,
Pierre Nora, is therefore spurious.15 Their assumption that memory is group-specific
whilst history is universal, cannot be maintained. As Alon Confino has pointed out,
their all-too-neat distinction is rooted in Halbwachs’s belief in nineteenth-century
scientificity and Nora’s nostalgia for the past.16 Instead, it looks as though we will
have to be satisfied with the close interrelationship between history, collective
memory and myth.
This can be demonstrated in relation to national history writing by discussing a
range of myths constructed and upheld by ‘scientific’ historians in their attempts to
legitimate diverse forms of nationalism and feelings of national belonging. Their
desire to be ‘truthful’ and their willingness to let their work be guided by a set of
disciplinary and methodological rules did not protect them from maintaining a wide
array of historical myths, many of which became important in national collective
memory. Arguably, the most powerful of these myths and the most crucial for
national histories were myths of origin. Most of these trace the roots of the nation
back a very long time, because the longer the continuity that could be constructed in
the name of the nation, the more ancient and the more valuable, that is, the higher
standing the nation was. It was important to demonstrate that the people who
constituted the nation had been living on the same territory, had spoken the same
language and transported an original culture down the ages. However, losing the
nation’s origins in the mist of time also posed a major problem for historians: it
became a near impossible task to distinguish clearly between what ‘scientific’ history
could establish and what mythologies suggested. Hence, ‘scientific’ historians often
found it extremely difficult to come up with a credible ‘beginning’ of their national
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Berger: Myths and History in the Construction of National Identity 

histories.17 Many historians criticized the medieval and early modern pseudo-
histories which talked about origins in a way that was simply unsustainable when
scrutinized with the modern tools of source criticism. However, in their desire to
serve the nation, historians were unwilling to let go of myths of origin. Instead, they
tried hard to establish them on a ‘scientific’ basis, thereby making them all the harder
to question. Overall, it would therefore be better not to speak of the rejection of older
‘mythistory’ by the new generation of ‘scientific’ historians in the nineteenth century,
but rather to speak of the assimilation of mythistory to the paradigm of ‘scientific’
history writing.
At the same time, myths of origin did not have to hark back to the dim and distant
past. They also referred to more recent foundational and re-foundational moments in
national history. Not infrequently, revolutions marked those re-foundations, where
the nation, according to the historians’ interpretative axis, either lost its way or found
itself. The French revolution of 1789 and the Russian revolution of 1917 are the most
obvious examples of such re-foundations, in whose light whole national histories
were re-written, but change could also come about through a new dynasty or through
evolutionary reforms. English Whig historiography, epitomized by Thomas
Babington Macauley, is the best example of the latter, in which foundational myths
are replaced by the equally mythical notion of continual progress towards liberty
through a succession of peaceful reforms.18 Portuguese historiography, by contrast,
has stressed that changes in the fate of the nation coincided with dynastic changes.
Thus, the dynasty of Bragança was often identified with a long period of decadence
and decline in Portuguese national history.19
In the histories of revolution and in dynastic history, ‘scientific’ history writing has
not so much ended mythistory as contributed to it. After all, historians did not give up
writing history as a ‘response to requirements of the present’, and presentism was a
feature of ‘scientific history’ just as much as of wider collective memory debates.20
Hence, historians were as keen as other participants in national identity discourses to
anchor the present in a viable past, thereby guaranteeing the future of the nation.
National histories across Europe thrived on stories of the rise and fall of the country’s
fortunes. Golden ages were followed by periods of decline, in which the nation was
weak, sometimes occupied by foreign forces and sometimes losing its independence
altogether.21 But, invariably, there was the story – or at least the prospect – of the
nation’s eventual rise to greatness again. These stories had heroes, who tragically
died in defence of the nation, or who facilitated the nation’s return to former glories
and they also had villains, who contributed to the nation’s demise.22 ‘Great men’ in
particular were favourite subjects for historians who were prone to create as many
legends about their ‘heroes’ as they debunked. The Polish politician Józef Pi!sudski is
just one of many examples of a key national hero who attracted hagiographies but also
‘black’ legends.23 Like the myths of origin, the rise and decline narratives served the
purpose of highlighting continuity – the continuity of the national being, of some kind
of national essence throughout all the good and the bad times.
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In the nineteenth century, this essence was mostly draped in the discourse of
culture, although ethnicity was frequently used as a synonym for culture, before
ethnicity became invested with more racial qualities towards the end of the nineteenth
century. Following Herder’s and Fichte’s concern with language, most national
histories contained sections demonstrating the particular authenticity, superiority
and purity of their respective national language vis-à-vis others. National literature,
theatre and opera were cited as proof of the maturity and quality of the nation. Many
of the ethno-cultural revivals in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe were
founded on ‘mythistory’.24 In fact, myths were often perceived by nation-builders as
being far more powerful in mobilizing people than history, so that the combination of
myths and history became an even more attractive amalgam to make sense of the
world, to provide a master key to explain the present and predict the future, to
integrate diverse social and political groups, to legitimate political regimes and also to
work towards the emancipation of groups suffering discrimination and persecution.25
In this respect it is also interesting to reflect on the way in which historians in their
national histories dealt with the issue of time. Which periods and events were
narrated at great length? And where did the author only use a couple of sentences to
cover decades of history? It is not at all the case that national historians necessarily
concentrated on the glorious moments in the nation’s history. Famously, some
national histories were plotted almost entirely in tragic mode – the Polish nation, for
example, is routinely depicted as the ‘Christ of nations’ for its suffering at the hands
of all the surrounding states and empires. In national histories, defeats count for as
much as victories. The battle of Mohács in 1526 marked the end of Hungarian
independence and was revered in Hungarian national history as a tragic turning
point just as the battles of Morgarten and Sempach in 1315 and 1386 freed the path to
national independence for Switzerland and thus became foundation stones for Swiss
national histories. Indeed, battles and wars take up a larger proportion of national
histories than any other subject, as the nation is forged, made and remade in and after
military conflict.
Creating and constructing long-term continuities is, as we have so far empha-
sized, one of the most important tasks of national historians. They have been most
effective in performing this task if they had recourse to the adoption, adaption and
reformulation of national myths. Many European nations, however, had a serious
problem in that they had no continuous state history. Historians had to explain this
in a way which would justify the renewed achievement of statehood – a goal that all
nineteenth-century nations aspired to. Here, notions of oppression, treason and exile
were most frequently used to explain the ending of independent statehood. Zionist
historiography is perhaps most famous for postulating the myth of a 2000-year
exile, after which a Jewish state was finally re-founded and the nation had at last re-
established independent statehood.26
Many other national historiographies shared the teleological construction of con-
necting the existing or future nation-state with a state that existed centuries ago.
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Nineteenth-century Greek historians were adamant that those revolutionaries who

threw off the ‘Turkish yoke’ and re-founded the Greek nation-state were the direct
descendants of the glorious ancient Greeks who had stood at the cradle of European
civilization. Little wonder then, that Greek historians reacted harshly against the
theories of Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer (1790–1861), who argued that this link had
been broken and that contemporary Greeks were, to all intents and purposes, Slavs
who had moved to the peninsula during the eighth century. In response, ‘scientific’
Greek historians came to concentrate on the history of Byzantium as the chain which
linked the ancient Greek city-states with the contemporary Greek nation-state. If the
Byzantine empire was Greek, then the all-important continuity was restored.27
It is revealing that those nations with no prior claim to independent statehood,
such as Wales, found it much more difficult to justify their claims to independent
statehood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – pointing to the crucial impor-
tance of history for legitimizing such claims.28 The absence of continuous state
histories led many historians to seek refuge in an allegedly timeless and unchanging
peasantry representing the incorruptible soul of the nation. It is not by chance that
peasants stand at the very heart of many national history museums in Europe – from
Wales to Finland to Romania, where the latest and perhaps purest example of such
national mythologization of peasant life can be examined.29
If there are grand myths linking the nation to particular social strata, there is an
equally strong ‘mythistory’ connecting the nation to the ideas of freedom and liberty.
It is testimony to the birth of modern nationalism in the American and French revolu-
tions of the late eighteenth century. The one national history which made the
narrative of freedom its guiding light and became, in turn, a model for other national
narratives to emulate, was, of course, English national history. The sheer strength of
the Whig interpretation of national history, connecting the soul of England to ideas
of freedom, is unsurpassed in Europe in the modern age and had long-lasting
implications for the English national master narrative well into the second half of the
twentieth century.30 However, this should not lead us to the conclusion that English
national history escaped the prevalence of ethnic myths in the nineteenth century.
The concern with English ‘stock’ and the depiction of the hybrid character of the
English (made of the Norman and the Germanic ‘races’) was an almost constant topic
in English national histories.31 Linking ancient tribes to notions of freedom, later
robbed by foreign oppressors, also became a popular topic among historians of the
smaller nation-states with strong traditions of a free peasantry across Europe.
Next to social groups and ideas, mythical founding figures of nations, defending
and saving the nation from its ‘enemies’ or being tragically defeated in trying to do so,
abounded in national historiographies – one only needs to think about the
Portuguese Viriato, the German Hermann, the French Vercingétorix, the English
Boadicea and many more. However, given that origins of the nation often posed a
difficulty for historians in terms of sources, it was, for most national histories, the
Middle Ages, which served as the backdrop for the most colourful and uplifting
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stories of nineteenth-century national histories. In Italy, for example, the medieval

city republics served historians as example of how strife and conflict prevented
Italian unity, while also being celebrated as examples of the allegedly strong link
between Italianness and freedom. As such the republics foreshadowed the unified
Italian nation-state.32 As a recent comparison of national mythologies in visual art
across 18 countries emphasizes, freedom, faith and war have been the key myths
structuring views of the national self in nineteenth-century Europe. Most of these
were rooted in the Middle Ages.33
Tightly linked to the importance of the Middle Ages in national mythologies is the
strong fit between national mythologies and Christianity. It is testimony to the
degree to which religion was nationalized and the nation sacralized in nineteenth-
century Europe.34 Historians contributed in a major way to this process. Religion
provided key symbols, rituals and collective practices underpinning national move-
ments and national master narratives. National saints and religious festivals fostered
expressions of national sentiment and ambition. In Hungary, for example, the devout
St Stephen became the very incarnation of the nation and its civilizing mission
towards other peoples. Religious identity was also closely linked to linguistic identity,
as the Latin script came to be identified with Roman Catholicism and the Cyrillic
script with Orthodoxy. Especially where the ruler of the state was at the same time the
ex officio head of the church, like in Russia and in Prussia, a dynastic historiography
could merge with a religious one to produce powerful national narratives. Just as the
Christian religion softened the barbarian, pagan cultures of Europe and introduced
more femininity into national narratives, so nations, such as Hungary, Slovakia or
Poland, adopted cults of Mary in which the sacrifice of the mother of God and of Jesus
himself were likened to the suffering of the nation. Just as suffering and death in the
New Testament was followed by resurrection, so would the nation one day rise like
the phoenix from the ashes.
It was not only in the context of the sacralization of the nation that women became
prominent players in national narratives, for they also became secular martyrs in
liberal, anti-absolutist national narratives. For example, Marianna Pineda, executed
by the Spanish monarchical government of Fernando VII in 1831, became a symbol
of liberal Spain in many national narratives. Generally speaking, many national
histories know mythical founding mothers, such as Libuåe in the Czech lands,
Wanda in Poland and Princess Olga in Ukraine, who sacrificed themselves and
worked tirelessly for the nation. In fact, as Regina Schulte has shown, historical
depictions of royalty by nineteenth-century historians tended to emplot their
storylines as middle-class tragedies, thereby contributing to the accommodation of
monarchy to a middle-class world and gender order.35 In addition, stories of victim-
hood were also frequently gendered. The victim nations, for example, Slovaks and
Czechs in the Habsburg empire, portrayed themselves with feminine virtues in con-
trast to the male aggressor nations (for example, Germans and Hungarians in the
Habsburg context). However, it is intriguing to observe that such self-depictions
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were entirely situational, as the German-dominated Habsburg empire was also

depicted in feminine terms as victim of the male and aggressive Prussia – especially
after 1866.36
For those countries which had come into contact with Islam, such as in the Balkans
and Spain, national histories depicted Islam and the powers upholding Islam as the
nation’s negative ‘other’. Christian nations lying on the borders of Europe often
portrayed themselves as shielding Europe from the infidels, and this brings us to
another area in which ‘mythistory’ has traditionally been widespread – the area of
borders.37 Borders as lines on a map are frequently contested between different
regions and nations. If two nations claim the same territory, the question of who was
there first often gained huge importance. Polish and German historians competed
with each other to prove that pre-German or pre-Polish tribes were the first occupants
of the contested territories. Pre-history thus became a highly ethnicized narrative.38
Within national histories, borderlands play an important role, as it is at the border
that the nation defines itself most rigorously. Borderlands might have one and the
same name, but this name might mean very different things in diverse regional and
national narratives. A good example is Karelia, where we have ‘ancient Karelia’,
‘White Sea Karelia’, the Karelian Republic, Aunus Karelia, Finland’s Karelia, Tver’s
Karelia and the Karelian Isthmus. Depending on which national history one invokes,
different conceptualizations of Karelia come into play. In the Russian understanding
of Karelia, the story was about the Karelian Republic as part of Russia/the Soviet
Union, whereas other Karelias were largely ignored. In the Finnish national narra-
tive, Karelia appeared as a Finnish borderland which had to be defended against an
over-mighty Russian neighbour. From a regionalist perspective, the ancient province
of Karelia appeared for centuries as a victim of nationalist and imperialist geopolitics.
Overall, the multiple Karelias indicate that the region has been ‘an uncomfortable
“land between”, often portrayed as a battlefield, a myth, a springboard, a gateway, a
corridor and a frontier for war and peace’.39 Moreover, like other stories of victim-
hood, the story of Karelia as victim tended to emphasize the moral superiority of the
victim, that is, Karelia defending its identity in the face of an oppressive enemy.
The historiographies of borderlands very often contain notions of the borderland
being a ‘civilizational bridge’ between different cultures at different ‘civilizational
stages’. Typical examples are the German-speaking minorities in East-Central and
Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Whether
we think of the Baltic Germans, the Sudeten Germans or the Transylvanian Saxons,
their dominant narratives all hark back to them being the bearers of German civiliza-
tion in the midst of Slav barbarity. Hence their identification with a particular nation,
which was far away, turned these minorities into bridgeheads for expansion, as was
most clearly demonstrated by National Socialism in the context of the Second World
War. Indeed, the Nazi regime often found historians most useful in justifying their
politics of ethnic cleansing and murder.40 The example of the Sudeten German
historian Joseph Pfitzner was telling: well-respected for his astute knowledge of the
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history of the region and the people, he willingly let himself be used by the National
Socialist occupation regime in Czechoslovakia, justifying their reign of terror.41 If
borderland regions have been particularly important for the construction of national
histories and the making of national myths, it is worthwhile pointing out that national
history almost everywhere in Europe appears in regional variations. Because
regional identities were often older than national ones, they frequently became
building blocks of national history, and the combination of regional and national
mythologies made for slightly different inflections of the national master narrative in
one and the same nation-state.42
Regarding bigger, transnational entities, such as Europe or the European empires,
it has been extremely difficult to say where its borders lie. Multi-national states, such
as Spain or the United Kingdom, or empires, such as the Romanov or Habsburg
empires were keen to develop a mythistory which could appeal to the component
parts of the respective regions of the empire.43 Debates surrounding the exact border-
ing of spatial entities have therefore given rise to a range of spatial myths. These
legitimized claims over territory, which have often been defended violently and by
means of war and civil war. The history of the past 200 years is littered with instances
where contested borders and the ‘mythistories’ connected to them have produced
terrible bloodshed and genocidal tendencies. In cases where new nation-states
emerged and laid claim not only to territory but also to histories of adjacent nation-
states, this could easily produce tensions. The cases of Macedonia and Greece and
Moldova and Romania are only the most recent examples.44 Post-Soviet studies have
been particularly concerned with demonstrating how closely intertwined myths and
history have been in the diverse national revivals that characterized the post-Soviet
era.45
By way of conclusion – given the impossibility of distinguishing neatly between
myth and history and the prevalence of mythistory in national histories, historians of
historiography would be well advised to follow Ann Rigney’s plea for more inter-
textual approaches to national identity studies. Writers of fiction and writers of
history have produced stories of the nation alongside composers, architects, film-
makers and theatre directors. Other academic subjects, notably ethnology, anthro-
pology, geography and sociology have also been influential in writing the nation.46
An interdisciplinary and intertextual dialogue on the writing of national histories is
long overdue. Only such a dialogue promises progress on the road to understanding
the diverse ways in which mythistories have shaped Europeans’ understanding of
their respective nations. And only such understanding will in turn provide the basis
for a pedagogical project which aims to increase the distance between identity myths
and their intended audience, in order to prevent the mobilization of such ‘mythistory’
for purposes of aggression and oppression. That history can be mobilized for the
most vicious of purposes has recently been demonstrated in Europe in the context of
the Yugoslav civil wars. In a different way, the reception of Lucian Boia’s study on
the relationship between myth and Romanian national history shows that the
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Berger: Myths and History in the Construction of National Identity 

debunking of national myths remains controversial depending on place and con-

text.47Whilst Boia instigated the deconstructivist turn in Romanian national history
writing, and thereby contributed to the further Westernization of Romanian history
writing, there were many, such as Ioan-Aurel Pop, who fiercely criticized his
scholarship and sought to prove historically the existence of a heroic medieval
Romanian nation.48 It is unlikely that history will be entirely demythologized, but
historians should at least try to heighten the public awareness of the strong intercon-
nectedness between history and myth and thereby make European societies less
susceptible to the mythistorians.

Notes
A special thanks to Robert Gerwarth and Laurence Cole whose careful reading of the manuscript has
been very helpful. The publication of this article was made possible through my stay at FRIAS, School
of History, University of Freiburg in 2008/09. My thanks also to Jörn Leonhard and Ulrich Herbert,
the directors of the School, for making this stay so pleasant.
1. Peter G. Bietenholz, Historia and Fabula: Myths and Legends in Historical Thought from
Antiquity to the Modern Age (Leiden 1994).
2. Cf. Ciarán Brady, ‘“Constructive and Instrumental”: The Dilemma of Ireland’s First “New
Historians”’, in idem (ed.), Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism,
1938–1994 (Dublin 1994), 7 f.
3. Pål Kolstø (ed.), Myths and Boundaries in South-Eastern Europe (London 2005), 2–4.
4. On the professionalization and institutionalization of historical writing in Europe see Ilaria
Porciani and Lutz Raphael (eds), Writing History in Europe: An Atlas of National Institutions
(Basingstoke 2010 forthcoming), and Ilaria Porciani and Jo Tollebeek (eds), Setting the Standards:
Institutions, Communities and Networks of National Historiography (Basingstoke 2009
forthcoming).
5. Maciej Janowski, ‘Three Historians’, Central European University History Department
Yearbook, Vol. 1 (2001/02), 199–232.
6. Such a systematic and comprehensive comparison of national history writing in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries was the declared aim of a European Science Foundation programme entitled
‘Representations of the Past: The Writing of National Histories in Nineteenth and Twentieth
Century Europe’, which I had the pleasure of directing between 2003 and 2008. See
http://www.uni-leipzig.de/zhsesf
7. Joep Leersen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical Representation of
Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Notre Dame 1997); also Roy Foster, The Irish Story: Telling
Tales and Making it Up in Ireland (Oxford 2002) and Alvin Jackson, ‘Unionists’ Myths,
1912–1985’, Past and Present, Vol. 136 (1992), 164–85.
8. Guy P. Marchal, Schweizer Gebrauchsgeschichte. Geschichtsbilder, Mythenbildung und nationale
Identität (Basel 2006); see also Oliver Zimmer, A Contested Nation: History, Memory and
Nationalism in Switzerland, 1761–1891 (Cambridge 2003).
9. Chris Lorenz, ‘Drawing the Line: “Scientific History” Between Myth-Making and Myth-
Breaking’, in Stefan Berger, Linas Eriksonas and Andrew Mycock (eds), Narrating the Nation:
Representations in History, Media and the Arts (Oxford 2008), 35–55; William McNeill,
‘Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History and Historians’, in idem, Mythistory and Other Essays
(Chicago 1985).
10. Georg Iggers and Konrad von Moltke (eds), Leopold von Ranke: The Theory and Practice of
History (Indianapolis 1973).
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11. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe

(Baltimore 1973); Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (Columbia 1988).
12. Peter Burke, ‘History, Myth and Fiction, 1400–1800’, in José Rabasa, Masayuki Sato and
Edoardo Tortarolo (eds), Oxford History of Historiography, Vol. 3 (Oxford 2010 forthcoming).
13. Ernst Schulin, ‘Der Einfluss der Romantik auf die deutsche Geschichtsforschung’, in idem,
Traditionskritik und Rekonstruktionsversuch. Studien zur Entwicklung von
Geschichtswissenschaft und historischem Denken (Göttingen 1979), 24–43.
14. Wilfried Nippel, Johann Gustav Droysen. Ein Leben zwischen Wissenschaft und Politik (Munich
2008), 219–38.
15. Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de Memoire, 7 vols (Paris 1986 ff.); Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective
Memory (New York 1980; first published in French in 1941).
16. Alon Confino, ‘History and Memory’, in Daniel Woolf and Axel Schneider (eds), The Oxford
History of Historiography, Vol. 5: 1945 to the Present (Oxford 2010 forthcoming). On the
relationship between history and memory see also the intriguing thoughts of Amos Funkenstein,
‘Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness’, History and Memory, Vol. 1 (1989), 5–26.
17. Joep Leersen, ‘Setting the ‘Scene for National History’, in Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (eds),
Bloodties and Books: Historians as Nation Builders (Basingstoke 2009 forthcoming).
18. Keith Robbins, ‘Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender and “Island Story/ies”: Great Britain and
Ireland’, in Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (eds), The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class, Religion
and Gender in National Histories (Basingstoke 2008), 231–55.
19. Sérgio Campos Matos and David Mota Álvarez, ‘Portuguese and Spanish Historiographies:
Distance and Proximity’, in Berger and Lorenz (eds), The Contested Nation, 339–66.
20. Thomas H. Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism. Anthropological Perspectives (London 1993), 72.
21. Anthony D. Smith, ‘The “Golden Age” and National Renewal’, in Geoffrey Hosking and George
Schopflin (eds), Myths and Nationhood (London 1997), 36–59.
22. Linas Eriksonas, National Heroes and National Identities: Scotland, Norway and Lithuania
(Brussels 2004).
23. W!odzimierz Wójcik, ‘Józef Pi!sudski in History and Legend’, Acta Poloniae Historica, Vol. 65
(1992), 59–96.
24. Anthony D. Smith, ‘Ethnic Myths and Ethnic Revivals’, Journal of European Sociology 25 (1984),
283–305.
25. Yves Bizeul, ‘Theorien der politischen Mythen und Rituale’, in idem (ed.), Politische Mythen und
Rituale in Deutschland, Frankreich und Polen (Berlin 2000), 15–42; Matthew Levinger, ‘Myth
and Mobilisation: The Triadic Structure of Nationalist Rhetoric’, Nations and Nationalism, Vol. 7
(2001), 175–94.
26. Jakob Barnai, ‘Main Dilemmas in Israeli Historiography’, in Tibor Frank and Frank Hadler (eds),
Borders and Nations: Confrontations and (Re-)Conciliations (Basingstoke 2009 forthcoming).
27. Hercules Millas, ‘History Writing among Greeks and Turks: Imagining the Self and the Other’, in
Berger and Lorenz (eds), The Contested Nation, 490–510; Vera Sükora, ‘Debating Continuity: The
Fallmerayer Thesis and the Development of National History in Greece’, unpublished paper
delivered at the ESF NHIST summer school in Köszeg, Hungary, June 2008.
28. Miroslav Hroch, Das Europa der Nationen. Die moderne Nationsbildung im europäischen
Vergleich (Göttingen 2005), 149–170.
29. On the Romanian Peasants’ Museum, which was the European Museum of the Year in 1996, see
www.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro. The fascinating comparison of national history museums in
Europe is pursued by a research project headed by Peter Aronsson: for details, see www.namu.se
30. John Burrow, A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus
to the Twentieth Century (London 2007), 405–13; on English professional history after 1870 and its
engagement with the Whig master narrative see also Michael Bentley, Modernizing England’s
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Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism 1870–1970 (Cambridge 2006).

31. H. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History (Montreal 1982).
32. Ilaria Porciani and Mauro Moretti, ‘Italy’s Various Middle Ages’, in Robert Evans and Guy
Marchal (eds), Medievalism in the Writing of National Histories (Basingstoke 2009 forthcoming);
David Laven, ‘The Lombard League in Nineteenth-Century Italian Historiography, c.1800–1850’,
in Berger and Lorenz (eds), Bloodties and Books.
33. Monika Flacke (ed.), Mythen der Nationen. Ein europäisches Panorama, second edition (Munich
2001).
34. Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples. Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford 2003); Adrian
Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge
1997); Michael Geyer and Hartmut Lehmann (eds), Religion und Nation – Nation und Religion.
Beiträge zu einer unbewältigten Geschichte (Göttingen 2000); Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Dieter
Langewiesche (eds), Nation und Religion in Europe. Mehrkonfessionelle Gesellschaften im 19.
und 20.Jahrhundert (Frankfurt/Main 2004).
35. Regina Schulte, ‘The Queen – a Middle-Class Tragedy: The Writing of History and the Creation
of Myths in Nineteenth-Century France and Germany’, Gender and History, Vol. 14 (2002),
266–93.
36. J. Malecková, ‘Nationalizing Women and Engendering the Nation: The Czech National
Movement, in I. Blom, K. Hagemann, and C. Hall (eds), Gendered Nations: Nationalism and
Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford 2000), 293–310; Gernot Heiss, Árpád von
Klimó, Pavel KoláÑ and Duåan KováO, ‘Habsburg’s Difficult Legacy: Comparing and Relating
Austrian, Czech, Magyar and Slovak National Historical Master-Narratives’, in Berger and
Lorenz (eds), The Contested Nation.
37. Guy P. Marchal (ed.), Grenzen und Raumvorstellungen (Zurich 1996).
38. For details see Jörg Hackmann, ‘Preußische Ursprungsmythen. Entstehung und
Transformationen vom 15. bis ins 20. Jahrhundert’, in Matthias Weber (ed.), Preußen in
Ostmitteleuropa. Geschehensgeschichte und Verstehensgeschichte (Munich 2003), 143–71.
39. Tibor Frank and Frank Hadler, ‘Overlapping National Histories: Confrontations and (Re-
)Conciliations’, in Stefan Berger and Andrew Mycock (eds), Europe and its National Histories,
special issue of Storia della Storiografia, Vol. 50 (2006), 124–7; also Ilkka Liikanen, ‘The Origins
of the Eastern Border as the Grand Controversy of Finnish National History Writing’ and Ilya
Solomesh, ‘Karelia in Russian/Soviet National History Writing’, both in Frank and Hadler (eds),
Borders and Nations.
40. Ingo Haar, Historiker im Nationalsozialismus. Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft und der
‘Volkstumskampf’ im Osten (Göttingen 2000).
41. Frank Hadler and Vojtech àustek, ‘Josef Pfitzner (1901–1945). Geschichtsprofessor und
Geschichtspolitiker’, in Monika Glettler and Alena Míåková, Prager Professoren 1938–1948:
Zwischen Wissenschaft und Politik (Essen 2001), 105–37.
42. Celia Applegate, ‘A Europe of Regions: Reflections on the Historiography of Subnational Spaces
in Modern Times’, American Historical Review, Vol. 104, no. 4 (1999), 1157–82.
43. Matthias Middell and Lluis Roura (eds), Transnational Challenges to National History Writing:
World, Global, European and Imperial Histories in Europe from 1850 to the Present (Basingstoke
2009 forthcoming).
44. Loring M. Danforth, ‘Claims to Macedonian Identity: The Macedonian Question and the Break-
up of Yugoslavia’, Anthropology Today, Vol. 9 (1993), 3–10.
45. For Ukraine see, Catherine Wanner, Burden of Dreams: History and Identity in Post-Soviet
Ukraine (University Park, PA 1998); Taras Kuzio, ‘Nation-Building, History Writing and
Competition over the Legacy of Kyiv Rus in Ukraine’, Nationalities Papers, Vol. 33 (2005),
29–58.
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46. Ann Rigney, ‘Fiction as a Mediator in National Remembrance’ in Berger, Eriksonas and Mycock
(eds), op. cit., 79–96.
47. Lucian Boia, History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness (Budapest 2001).
48. On these debates see Cristina and Dragoç Petrescu, ‘Mastering vs. Coming to Terms with the
Past: A Critical Analysis of Post-Communist Romanian Historiography’, in Sorin Antohi, Balázs
Trencsényi and Péter Apor (eds), Narratives Unbound. Historical Studies in Post-Communist
Eastern Europe (Budapest 2007), 323–6.

stefan berger is Professor of Modern German and Comparative European History at the
University of Manchester, where he is also Director of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence. Between
2003 and 2008 he directed the European Science Foundation Programme ‘Representations of the Past.
The Writing of National Histories in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe’, and he is currently
writing the last volume in a Palgrave Macmillan six-volume book series entitled ‘Writing the Nation.
National Historiographies and the Making of Nation States in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century
Europe’.

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