Halil Berktay: National 'Memories': Understanding the Other, Taming your Own
ABSTRACT

Greek and Turkish nationalism have been antagonistically locked into one another in a very small historical space, each with its own grand narrative of presenting (only) itself as the victim while demonizing the "other". At the same time, nationalism has a mass (popular) character in Greece, whereas it has been more of a state ideology in Turkey. Though the latter aspect could be changing (along the Turkish-Kurdish dimension), insofar as it survives it has to do with the official acts of "unremembering" of the 1930s vis-a-vis the traumas of the 1910s and 20s. What these did was to de-link Turkish nationalist sentiment from its realms of memory in the Balkans, thereby rendering it somewhat shapeless and abstract. Nevertheless, what appear like concrete "repetitions" of the past (over Cyprus, etc) can resonate dangerously with that kind of national memory. What is needed is not to unremember it but to tame it through understanding the other (and vice versa), i.e. to confront it and to come to terms with it.

Halil Berktay: Biographical Note