Prof. Dr. Sebastian Conrad of the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, FreieUniversität Berlin, one of the leading historians in Global History Studies in Germany, gave a lecture at the Tobunken-seminar on October 4th, 2010. The theme of the seminar drewon his first monograph, The Quest for the Lost Nation(University of California Press, 2010), which has been highly prized by European and American academics as a brilliant and unprecedented comparative study of historiographies in Germany and Japan of the early postwar period (1945 – 1960). The lecture was based on a summary of the book’s main arguments as well as of the lecturer’s additional observations about the recent developments of German and Japanese historiographies on the present theme. The comparative analysis demonstrated by him thus covered the period from the immediate postwar period to the ecent decades of the 1990s and 2000s, handling topics ranging from the analyses of fascism and war by Friedrich Meinecke and Masao Maruyama in the late 1940s to the early 1950s, to more recent events such as the book by Nobel-prize winning German novelist Günter Grass and the ransformations of public memory in Japan in the 2000s, etc. The notable feature of the lecture was the lecturer’s conscious transnational approach, that is, the attempt to analyze the German and Japanese cases, their differences and commonalities, by situating them especially in the global Cold War structure of the postwar period and its reorganization process after the 1990s. Overall, the lecture was of highly interesting and stimulating content, and it was followed by lively discussions between the floor and the lecturer.
Date：4th(Thu) October, 2012. 16:00-17:30
Venue：Conference Room (Daikaigishitsu), Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, University of Tokyo
Speaker：Univ. -Prof. Dr. Sebastian Conrad (Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin)
Title：“Rewriting the National Past: Germany and Japan after World War II”
Language: English (without interpretation)
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