The Quest for the Lost Nation

"Extraordinarily compelling. The Quest for the Lost Nation is a model for comparative history-and should serve as an incentive for a new generation to do more of this kind of work."-Michael Geyer, University of Chicago

"The Quest for the Lost Nation brilliantly illuminates the predicaments of postwar historical thinking in the aftermath of what was for Germany and Japan an unmitigated catastrophe. A timely and original work."-Helmut Walser Smith, author of the Continuities of German History.

"Conrad demolishes the frequently invoked contrast between an active German confrontation with the Nazi past and an ostensible Japanese hesitancy to face history in the decade and a half following 1945. The Quest for the Lost Nation is a probing and highly significant study."-Andrew Barshay, author of the Social Sciences in Modern Japan: The Marxian and Modernist Traditions

The Quest for the Lost Nation is a brilliant chronicle of Germany's and Japan's struggles to reclaim a defeated national past. Sebastian Conrad compares the ways German and Japanese scholars revised national history after World War II in the shadows of fascism, surrender, and American occupation. Defeat in 1945 marked the death of the national past in both countries, yet, as Conrad proves, historians did not abandon national perspectives during reconstruction. Quite the opposite-the nation remained hidden at the center of texts as scholars tried to make sense of the past and searched for fragments of the nations they had lost. Conrad explores the striking similarities in discourse between Germany and Japan, from portrayals of the nation as the victim of modernity to the invention of contemporary history and attempts to locate Germany and Japan between East and west. By situating both countries in the global Cold War, Conrad shows that the focus on the nation can be understood only within a transnational context

Sebastian Conrad is Professor of History at the European University Institute in Florence.