The conviction that “history matters” unites many scholars of comparative politics. From the rekindled fascination with massive panoramas, pioneered by Barrington Moore and Theda Skocpol, to the more finely grained work on specific path-dependent developments favored by historical institutonalists, history has returned to the field that has always been uneasy with data abstracted from the “real” flow of time (e.g., see James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds., Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, 2003). The task has been to find regularities in the actors' actions as they unfold through time (Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis, 2004). David Laitin reminded us that the narrative is one of the three methods a comparativist should use, in addition to theoretical modeling and statistical analysis. But in the research program, he envisions the narrative as a tool for reconstructing history by a “detached” social scientist qua “objective” historian, aided by an “external” theoretical frame. What has received less attention among the comparativists so far is the “past” encapsulated in the narratives that actors share among themselves when they develop often-competing versions of collective memory.

This is a curious imbalance, for the narratives people produce about their pasts are potent political forces, as we are reminded when we study postconflict reconciliation, democratic consolidation, or even more mundane politicking over social programs. Historians, sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists have been investigating collective memory for a long time and have produced both important empirical results and fresh theoretical insights. Political scientists, whose contributions are slimmer, should enter this field more forcefully as much of the debate is organized under the heading of “politics of memory/history.”

The two volumes under review here are exceptionally well-crafted entry points to the multifaceted and sophisticated literature on the politics of history and collective memory. The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe deals with the politics of historical justice, with the commemorating, history writing, and remembering (individual and collective) of World War II and particularly the Holocaust, in seven European countries, including Austria, France, Germany (the Federal Republic), Italy, Poland, Switzerland, and Russia. The volume is framed by two excellent synthetic essays that set up a common analytical frame, outline a unifying set of themes, and summarize the conclusions. The second book, After the Massacre, is a pathbreaking ethnographic study of the political and social complexities that characterize postwar Vietnam. The victims of foreign invasions are commemorated and remembered at two levels: official/state-controlled and familial. The existence of two levels, each regulated by a different cultural idiom, imposes complex constraints on the people who try to resurrect their communities after decades of military conflicts and the massacre of civilians.

Ned Lebow opens The Politics of Memory with a thoughtful review of the relevant literature. Memory is conceptualized as a phenomenon existing simultaneously at three levels: individual, collective, and institutional. Individual and collective memories are not homologous and may develop along separate tracks, but there exists “a dense net of switches connecting them” (p. 3). The study of the collective level is traced to Maurice Halbwachs's seminal work that has brought to the study of memory a distinct sociological approach originated by Emile Durkheim and has helped to initiate the study of social determinants of individual memory. The volume focuses, however, on the institutional level. This is where the bulk of political action is located and where the direct links between cultural and political mechanisms can be discovered. This political approach is understood in a sophisticated fashion as a study of complex contexts in which people, collectively and agonistically, attempt to create coherent visions of the past and thus shape their collective identity.

Country studies are united by their authors' disciplined adherence to the conceptual apparatus proposed in the introduction. Each demonstrates that the way complex societies remember their past is influenced by several factors, including the institutional nature of political regimes and the class position, ethnic background, and political interests of the producers of memory, as well as the generational changes. The re-writing of history and reconstruction of collective memory has been particularly vigorous since the fall of state socialism, as the postwar balance between the Left and Right collapsed in the West, preventive censorship was dismantled in the East, and the new generation attempting to make its mark on history engaged in its revision. The collective and institutional memory of World War II has been constructed through distinct phases, closely corresponding to the social, political and cultural evolution of the situation in each country and on the whole continent.

Lebow is able to distill a typology of various strategies of memory construction that roughly corresponds to the phases of the 1945–89 period. The first dominant strategy is “quarantine” (infamous French les années noir). Later, “denial” is preferred, particularly when it comes to investigating any complicity in the Holocaust (West Germany was an exception here; East Germany, by contrast, was in complete denial). Finally, myths of “resistance” are fashioned to become the principal frame of remembrance, trumping all other possible interpretations. Since 1989, the politics of memory has become volatile again as the “postcommunist” generation, but also some old warriors, have begun fashioning new versions of the “past” (including the memories of World War II) and using them as political weapons.

The book deals with three groups of countries: the winners (Russia), the losers (Germany), and the countries “in between” that hold multiple roles of “loser, occupied country, collaborator, resistor, victor—some of them simultaneously” (p. 19). France, Italy, Austria, and Yugoslavia belong to this latter category. The volume's focus on the production of memory at the “national level” is justified and consequently retained throughout the case studies. The omission of other dimensions of interest to students of the politics of memory is, therefore, justifiable. One yearns, however, for at least two more angles: a picture of the “reception” side of memory/history production (e.g., public opinion surveys on “historical memory”) and the elucidation of the tension between mechanisms of “official” remembering at the national level and their various subnational (regional, local, familial) counterparts.

The politics involved in the multilevel formation of collective memory are studied by Heonik Kwon in his gripping ethnography of Ha My and My Lai in Vietnam. The Vietnamese, whose society had been ripped apart by devastating wars, have recently engaged in the rebuilding of their country's social and cultural tissue. In a society whose order rests on a scaffolding of multigenerational kinship regulated by elaborate rituals, this is a particularly demanding task. The ritual reconstruction of lineages that were destroyed by “bad deaths” that occurred “in the streets,” while the proper location for dying is “at home,” is fraught with difficulties. Death outside of the culturally legitimated locations disrupts the viability of family units grounded in the cult of ancestors. And since the family units are the key building blocs of social order, a society that lost hundreds of thousands of its members in ritually uncontrolled conditions, either as soldiers on battlefields or victims of killing fields, is unbalanced. The main task of the reconstruction is, therefore, reburying under the “proper” conditions that can “refit” ancestors into their “rightful” ritual locations and thus restore social order.

And this is exactly where state politics and the culture of lineage and community clash. The communist authorities of Vietnam, though reluctantly supportive of the society's self-healing efforts, are also interested in the victims of the foreign invasions. Reburying can become a political ritual that promotes the interests of the state; the dead are splendid candidates for hero worship. But the cultural logics of hero worship, championed by the state, and cults of the ancestors, needed by the families, are at odds with each other. Actually, engaging in the latter can undermine the regime's claims to legitimacy and weaken the nation-building potential of official heroism.

Kwon's book offers a fine-grained and analytically sophisticated portrayal of the relationship between politics and culture. Two of its many accomplishments are particularly important. First, the author demonstrates that collective memory is always formulated according to the specific cultural rules in concrete social locations and that the analysis of the political dimension of memory-formation is seriously flawed when cultural mechanisms involved in this process are abstracted away. Second, he shows that collective memory is constructed on several levels, at different scales, often simultaneously. The political and cultural logic that governs this construction at the national level, where it contributes to the state's self-legitimizing efforts, can be undermined or annulled by the local, regional, or familial processes of collective memory formation.

Both volumes are brilliant justifications for the claim that the study of collective memory formation constitutes an indispensable part of the broader efforts to understand the politics of culture and, particularly, the politics of collective identity.