Strategies of Remembrance: The Rhetorical Dimensions of National Identity.

• Author: West, Emily
• Position: Book Review

Strategies of Remembrance: The Rhetorical Dimensions of National Identity. By M. Lane Bruner. Columbia, SC: South Carolina Press, 2002; pp. xv + 143. $29.95.

In this book, author M. Lane Bruner offers case studies of pivotal speeches made by political leaders in pre-unification West Germany, during Quebec's 1995 referendum, and in 1993 Russia during the turmoil accompanying the adoption of a new constitution. Strategies of Remembrance will be of interest to scholars of collective memory, political rhetoric, and nationalism. Its strengths lie in its close analysis of the speeches and in the concise yet illuminating background provided to make each case study come to life, even for readers unfamiliar with the specifics of the national contexts.

Bruner's analysis takes us beyond the boundaries of the speeches themselves, and even the immediate responses to them, by contextualizing them against their respective national discourses. By contrasting "successful" versus "failed" examples of rhetorical national identity construction, particularly in the West German case study, Bruner illustrates how speakers necessarily operate within constraints set by the structure of the past and the climate of public opinion, but how nevertheless artful speakers work within these constraints to turn national collective memory to their political advantage. In each case, Bruner draws out the dimensions of the existing acceptable narratives about the past, and then demonstrates how the different speeches accommodate or violate these familiar representations.

Strategies of Remembrance sets out to respond to the calls for more cross-cultural research that abound across the academy, and in so doing illustrates the challenges of doing comparative work across national boundaries. Bruner frames the three case studies as all illustrating how the past is invoked by political speakers to turn national identification to their advantage. Some of the case studies fit this description better than others, with the West German case study most clearly doing so, and the Russian example the least. Overall, the strength of the volume seems to lie more in each individual case study rather than in the synthesis in the introduction and conclusion.

The West German case study most clearly features speeches that attempt to address the past, specifically the horrors of 1930s and 1940s National Socialism, while articulating a workable contemporary German identity. By contrasting the...