Urban Culture and National Identity

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A letter from the editor on History Today's first special edition of the 1990s and its synergy with the recent fall of the Berlin Wall.

Gordon Marsden | Published in History Today Volume 40 Issue 5 May 1990

A man from West Berlin uses a hammer and chisel to chip off a piece of the Berlin Wall as a souvenir in November 1989. US Military/Wiki Commons.

If someone a year ago, had said that within twelve months chunks of the Berlin Wall would be being sold off to Western tourists by a freely-elected East German government of the centre-right, committed to speedy union with West Germany within NATO, we would have said that he or she were worthy of a visit from the men in white coats. Similar sentiments, albeit on a more modest subject and a less dramatically-telescoped timescale, might have been expressed if a decade ago it had been suggested that History Today’s first special issue of the nineties be focused on Glasgow’s nomination as European City of Culture for 1990. That both have come about underlines not just the unpredictability of the future, but also of the past.

Déjà vu

What are the flags and banners openly, even triumphantly, being waved from the Baltic to Moscow as the permafrost of Soviet empire cracks up? They are emblems from the world before television – but it is the latter’s catalytic impact in speeding up history that has reinvested them with power and meaning. What are the political parties and slogans that the citizens of Hungary and Romania are hearing as they prepare for their first free and democratic elections in forty years?

Many are names from that dream-time of mittelEuropa between the wars that Patrick Leigh Fermor has so vividly captured in his travel autobiography, A Time of Gifts. In the Soviet Union itself, incredible though it may seem, the blue St Andrew’s cross of the Tsarist empire has re-emerged in the streets as President Gorbachev attempts to ride the tiger that history and his own bold initiatives have given him. But if the ghost of Nicholas II may not feel vindicated from the grave, those of Kerensky and his Revolution’s moderates may well be about to be. It was Mao-Tse Tung who, when asked what he thought the significance of the French Revolution had been, is supposed to have remarked that it was too early to tell. Did he imagine this historical insight might be turned on the account of Communism’s successes since 1917?

The events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union have been a singularly dramatic and possibly unique demonstration of ‘back to the future’ history which would have left Arnold Toynbee with his cyclical view of the centuries well content. They do underline though that history is descriptive, not prescriptive – and that we attempt to set its contours in cement at our peril. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis still continues to be our most fruitful model for uncovering history’s significances. The Japanese commentator, Fukuyama, has announced that the upheavals in the East signal the ‘end of history’, and envisages a de-ideologised world where the triumph of a liberal economic and intellectual value system will smother future conflict and upheaval. But it may be more appropriate to say they merely demonstrate that the ‘chain of being’ between generations past and present that Edmund Burke described is a much more vigorous transmitter of the dialectic (one Marxist term that retains its validity) of change than we had recognised.

Black and White Legends

That is why it is timely to take Glasgow in this issue as a case study of how ideas about urban history and identity change and take on new perspectives. The view of Glasgow since the Reformation that our authors here present is less stark in its black and white contrasts than the traditional images of Gorbals slums and Red Clydeside associated with the city. The Glasgow seen here has enterprise, energy, imperial grandeur, philosophy and learning as well as objects of beauty – whether they are the elegant architectural designs and rooms of Charles Rennie Mackintosh or the striking colours and patterns of stained glass which beautified the city’s public buildings and private mansions in its late Victorian industrial prosperity.

Does all this make light of the darker side of Glasgow's inheritance – poverty and disease brought about by inequity and exploitation, conflict engendered by the ‘apartheids’ of class and religion? It does not and it should not. It is perhaps not surprising in the run-up to the European City of Culture celebrations that concerns have been expressed by the custodians of Glasgow’s working-class culture and traditions that it should not be sanitised or yuppified.

Reinventing the Past

This is one of the reasons why looking at Glasgow’s history raises issues with relevance to industrial and urban history as a whole. How far do attempts to preserve, and in many places frankly to market, such a past when the particular spirit and social dynamics that inspired it have departed, leave it to be moulded by forces alien to that tradition?

There will always be controversy about the balance to be struck. Provided it is open, positive and academically sound. controversy is probably the best way to prevent our history becoming a succession of hollow theme-parks. It also recognises that, as with Eastern Europe, history is always capable of delivering a joker in the pack – that the immutable picture of the past can become extremely malleable in the light of sudden upheavals in the present.

History For All Seasons

Britain’s Education Secretary has now received the final report of the working group charged with defining how history should be taught in the national curriculum for schools. The lessons from Glasgow and Eastern Europe underline the report’s admirable insistence on the folly of trying to establish an authorised version of history with a body of facts uniformly taught – as opposed to the sensible striving for a consensus of what the objects of studying history are and the skills it should impart. They are right to hold firm, despite external pressures, to their original priorities ‘history generates speculation ... sharpens the mind and fosters intellectual sophistication ... disciplined enquiry, systematic analysis and evaluation, argument and logical vigour.’

Neither rote learning nor theme-parks can fulfil that role. Even if they could there will always exist the possibility of a future annus mirabilis like 1989 to stand past perspectives of history on their head. Better to accept that fact, embrace pluralism and the continuing merry-go-round of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, than to have the methodology of totalitarian history, where the facts have to be reshuffled and redefined à la Alice in Wonderland everytime there is a new political trend or party in power.