This recent translation of Sebastian Conrad's book, originally published in Germany in 1999, is a welcome addition to the scholarship on the history and memory of World War II. Adopting a transnational and comparative perspective, Conrad examines historical scholarship in postwar Germany and Japan, focusing on the period between 1945 and 1960, and finds that historians embarked on a “quest for the lost nation” (p. 122), despite an emphatic rejection of the nation as a category of historical research in the wake of World War II.

Conrad explores four major themes in postwar German and Japanese historiography: the origin of the modern nation-state (Bismarck's unification of Germany and the Meiji Restoration); the interpretation of fascism as a catastrophe and the people as victims; the invention of contemporary history and the adoption of structural history; and the “temporalization” of space (the connection of historical “progress” with geographical location) and the adoption of a latter-day “Orientalism.” In doing so, Conrad significantly broadens his scope beyond the examination of historical methodologies to include the political and social contexts in which historians wrote, what historians actually wrote, and the interpretive strategies they used when they wrote. In doing so, he emphasizes historians’ efforts to rehabilitate their nation in the postwar period.

Conrad's detailed examination of German and Japanese historical writing emphasizes both the similarities and the differences between the two countries. Although both countries faced defeat, loss of empire, and occupation, prompting the desire to find the “lost” nation, the historical circumstances of the two resulted in an emphasis on different methodologies. In Japan, the postwar purge of nationalist historians from the profession left the field open to the dominance of Marxist historians, previously suppressed during the imperial period. In Germany, a similar resurgence of suppressed historians came to the fore, but instead of Marxism, this group of often conservative historians used historism as their interpretive framework. Nevertheless, in both cases, historians turned to similar topics—the founding of the empire, for example, and its significance as either a moment of national fulfillment or the moment of the decline into fascism—and similar methodologies. Whether historians adopted modernization theory or Marxism, they tended to view the history of their nation as one of progress, begging the question of where exactly their country abandoned its “true” culture and diverged into fascism and imperialism. In addition, both historist German scholars and their Marxist counterparts in Japan found structuralism to be a convenient interpretive framework, allowing them to explain the catastrophe of World War II as the result of the structural weaknesses of modernity (in the case of Germany) or capitalism (in the case of Japan). In both Germany and Japan, historians tended to conclude that the people were the victims of fascism and war.

Conrad's study offers many interesting insights into the nature of historical scholarship in postwar Germany and Japan, only a few of which can be examined here. Significantly, Conrad confronts the notion that while Germany has been very successful in coming to terms with the shortcomings of its national past, Japan has not. In fact, Conrad's exposition of historical scholarship in the 1950s demonstrates almost the opposite: German scholars often found it more difficult to produce a critical history of their nation's past while Marxist historians in Japan were very critical of the imperial state. To some extent, it was only after 1960 (after the Fischer controversy in Germany and the debate over the renewal of the Security Treaty in Japan) that these general trends reversed themselves. As Conrad is careful to point out, however, this is an oversimplification, and in fact, there was a great deal of debate in both Germany and Japan over the character of the nation's past.

Conrad often draws connections to broader issues in his work, to public memory, for example, or the development of historical methodologies in France (the Annales) and the United States (modernization theory). These forays are sometimes a little disappointing, often only mentioning an event such as the Lucky Dragon incident or briefly discussing Ienaga Saburō's trials. Readers seeking more information on these issues would be better advised to look elsewhere. Fortunately, there are several good sources (such as Robert Moeller's War Stories and Franziska Seraphim's War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005) that complement Conrad's work, and these issues are not the focus of Conrad's study. The one area where some expansion of the material might be useful would be an exploration of East German historical scholarship in the same period. Conrad does not examine this topic because he is interested in the similarities between West Germany and Japan in the postwar period, not least of which was the occupation of the defeated countries by the United States. As he notes, this occupation played a significant role in shaping historical understanding through censorship, war-crimes trials, and social reform, all of which presented a particularly American version of the past. The exclusion of East German scholarship is regrettable, however. It might be argued that East Germany faced a similar influence from the Soviet Union, and the inclusion of German Marxist historians might have offered an interesting comparison with Japanese Marxist historians. As Conrad notes at one point, since “Marxist thought was banned to the territory of the GDR . . . a[n interpretive] conflict [between historians and their government] that was worked out within Japanese society was, so to speak, sourced out to a different state within the framework of the East-West rivalry” (p. 120). This seems like a significant difference worth exploring in greater detail.

Nevertheless, such complaints are relatively minor. Although Conrad's book is intended for the knowledgeable scholar and assumes a certain basic knowledge of historiography, close reading of the text is rewarding. Conrad has written an important examination of the context and the content of historical scholarship in postwar Germany and Japan, and The Quest for the Lost Nation is a splendid example of comparative history.