Het verzet in de publieke herinnering in Vlaanderen

The Resistance hardly features within public memory in Flanders and no descriptive catalogue of monuments, stereotypes, or stories can help explain the reasons for this absence. This contribution puts forward three factors that helped shape public memory. The first part deals with the main protagonists in the creation of memory. After the war, the Resistance did not possess many tools to help them attract public attention. Not only was the number of former Resistance fighters considerably lower in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium than in the Francophone part, the Resistance in Flanders also did not have status or intellectual weight at its disposal. Ideological divisions, further fuelled by the Cold War and the Question Royale, were detrimental to the development of a single unified collective memory of the Resistance. These divisions are important for the second stage of the authors' analysis : the conquest of public space through the tools of opinion formation and forms of representation. Internally divided, the Resistance had to acknowledge the superiority of the much stronger cultural and symbolic production of the Flemish-nationalist groups, which incorporated the legacy of the collaborators into the Flemish struggle for emancipation. The Belgian patriotic identity of Resistance veterans found it difficult to connect with the reality of Flanders' growing political autonomy. Moreover, identification with a Resistance memory was hindered by a lack of political and governmental support to make any durable claims within the public arena. The third part of the authors' contribution shows the passive attitude of the government in creating policy regarding the memory of resistance. There was at best the illusion of a policy, a policy that aimed to sell unpopular measures in support of collaborators with vague promises of future favours. When finally the government, whether Belgian or Flemish, took a firmer grip on this area of memory policy, it was simply a reaction to the extreme-right as well as to the so-called 'Holocaust memory boom'. The focus drifted more towards a general narrative on human rights, aimed at legitimizing national identity. It remains to be seen whether the memory of resistance will be able to use this renewed focus to reinvigorate the debate