The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945-1965

"This is probably my most serious historical choice. This is me trying to point to the fact that I am a historian and that the history of Belgium in the 20th century is really rather important. This is a book about the way in which Belgium and neighbouring states sought to recover a sense of national identity after 1944. It’s a very successful book and one that’s often referred to by other historians. It shows the way in which the capacity in Belgium to create a national myth about World War II was really quite limited. In contrast to France or the Netherlands, where there was a really quite determined attempt by the state, by educational institutions and social bodies, to provide a particular narrative about what had happened during the war, in Belgium this was rarely the case. Perhaps it was because the state was less powerful, less generally accepted and more contested because of Leopold. And, therefore, the different sections of Belgian society set about creating their own memories of the war. Consequently, the memory of the war in Belgium therefore became very contested, particularly about whether the decision taken by some Flemish elites to get involved in collaboration with the Nazi regime had been the correct choice. “People don’t know how many famous Belgians there are because they don’t remember that people actually were Belgian” So, this is a book that tries to analyse the different forms of memory of the war that emerged in Belgium after 1944. The most striking feature was the emergence of a whole range of views from communist resistance through to various forms of neo-right rhetoric being voiced by some of those people who had been collaborators. It’s a complicated book but a very rich book for understanding, I would suggest, any European society in terms of the difficulties that it experienced in recovering from national defeat and occupation. Above all, it gives a good sense of how complicated Belgium was and is, but in a good way. Yes, I would say so. In a sense, it’s been left for each section of Belgian society to create their own myths about the war rather than having a central Gaullist myth, as in France. It’s much more the sense of different sections of Belgian society providing different versions of what the war experience had been. But Belgium is also a society that puts a great deal of emphasis and value on private or family memory. What’s very striking about Belgium is the extent to which family memories of which side they had been on, and what the nature of their war experience had been, is carried forward into the present day. You now have people in their third generation who still want to talk about this. One of the big features of Belgian history in the last couple of years has been a large public history project that goes under the rather jokey title of ‘Was Grandpa a Nazi?’ This is really an attempt by the Belgian authorities to open up the archives and make it possible for people to discover their own family history. The authorities are quite rightly aware that a lot of grandchildren are keen to understand the choices their grandparents may have made during the war—not necessarily about having been a fascist, but perhaps about being a resistor, or a deported person. There are all different versions of war experience. But that sense that wartime memories are still quite central to family history and family debates about who we are lies at the heart of this. Again, for a historian, there’s a really rather gratifying sense that history matters in Belgium. It’s a pun on the Hugo Claus book, but I hope it’s also a book in its own right, which tries to understand why it was so difficult to put Belgium back together again at the end of the war. In the end, there was quite a successful politics of reconstruction based around the Socialist Party and others, which looked as though it had created a new Belgian state to go forward into the post-war period. But what’s different about the Belgian experience of the post-war era—compared to most other states of western Europe—is that, essentially, within twenty or thirty years, Belgium was suffering from a whole series of linguistic and socioeconomic arguments which have led to the federalisation of the state and an emptying out of any sense of central Belgian national identity. My book is an attempt to try to understand why that was so. It aims to look at the war years but also the processes that followed the war, and perhaps some of the choices that weren’t made, for instance: the decision not to change the constitution, the decision not to carry out widespread social reform, and the decision not to devolve power to regions. These forms of immobility created some of the problems which then came back to haunt Belgium from the 1960s onwards. No, and I don’t think any Belgian would be surprised either. Belgium almost had a monarchy before it had a country, in the sense that Leopold I was imposed as monarch in 1831. He came from the Saxe-Coburg/Hanoverian stock of underemployed princes, but, once he arrived, the issue of Belgium having its identity as a monarchy became really quite central to the project of being Belgian. It’s very difficult to think of Belgium as being anything other than a monarchy. In 1951, the president of the Belgian Communist Party—a man called Julien Lahaut— stood up in parliament at the peak of the disputes about Leopold III and said “Vive la République!” (“Long Live the Republic!”). He’s almost the only person ever to have uttered those words in Belgium. What happened to him was that he was murdered by some former resistance activists a few days later in circumstances that still remain rather unclear. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The project of a Belgian republic would be a very difficult one because it would, for example, raise all sorts of questions about where power should reside—in the regions or at the centre—and so on. In particular, it would require a compromise between the different versions of Belgium which can all hide under the protective cloak of monarchy: a more Catholic version, a more socialist version, a more working-class version, a more middle-class version. These are real divisions in terms of what Belgium means and, somehow, the monarchy provides the means of reconciling those divisions. The monarchs have not always been popular. Everybody always said that when Albert II abdicated in favour of his son Philippe, that that would be the end of the monarchy. But, in fact, Philippe has proved to be a reasonably popular Belgian king. And it helps if the football team is winning too."