Based on historical case studies, the planned project aims to comparatively research and systematise the perception and interpretation of concrete enemy actors as aggressors. It examines the aggressor not as an (international-) legal actor, but as an ideal type and social figure who represents the hostile group in collective memory as an individual. Aggressors serve not only to demarcate between sovereign nation-states (as in the case of Serbia/Croatia Gödl 2007), but also within a country as an indicator of past-political fault lines (as in the case of Spain/Catalonia García Agustín 2021). Their discursive construction and changing significance in the politics of memory are the subject of the project, which does not have to pass final judgement on aggressors in the sense of courts or truth commissions. Rather, the continuing potential for subjective outrage, demarcation and integration is a reason for the planned research project.
Against this background, the project title “The Aggressor: Self-Perception and External Perception of an Actor Between Nations” is deliberately ambiguous.
1. Naming the aggressor and successfully defending against him has always been the legitimate goal of individuals as well as collectives threatened and inflicted with violence. Accordingly, the threat to one’s freedom by per se illegitimate aggressors, the (temporary) defeat and ultimately the victory over them form a fundamental historiographical narrative for all nations in their state development.
2. The planned studies are to analyse and expose historical images and patterns of argumentation that hide or gloss over aggressions of one’s own nation. This is particularly important at a 3 time when populists want to make their homeland great (again), identifying the greatness projected into the past with foreign policy power.
3. Last but not least, the project wants to show empirically tangible as well as future, both theoretical and practical ways to “overcome” the aggressor in terms of memory politics. Conflict-suitable dialogical and agonistic forms of remembering are to replace a past-political fixation on external images of the enemy. The research results will be made accessible to a broad public and thus contribute to European integration.
DFG Research Training Group 2840 “Ambivalent Enmity”, Heidelberg
House of European History, Brussels
International Council of Museums (ICOM)
Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Research (ZZF), Potsdam
Leibniz Research Network “Wert der Vergangenheit” (Value of the Past)
Das Forschungsprojekt wurde mit Mitteln der Daimler und Benz Stiftung gefördert. / The research project was funded by the Daimler and Benz Foundation.
