Since the early nineteenth century, nationalism has united distant populations into imagined communities. Making commemoration a key tool of its trade, it has trained people to worship in synchrony as followers of a massive sacred cult. It has turned their past into its scripture, their monuments into holy relics, and their celebrations of shared heritage or performances of collective mourning into devotional rituals. The politics of national memory generated sites and practices that were spectacular and conspicuous but also coordinated, confined, and controllable. And despite the twentieth century’s ideological ferment, these basic contours of national commemoration largely endured. In the 1980s, however, a collection of new practices began to challenge the norms of national memory. This mnemonic unrest first gained momentum inWest Germany, where activists increasingly judged these conventions unable to address the most urgent demand placed onmodern memory, namely, the task of commemoratingmass catastrophes: human catastrophes like genocide but also environmental catastrophes like deforestation and social catastrophes like the atomization of individuals from one another. These problems resonated in nationally particular

中文翻译：

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跨国主义时代的民族纪念活动

自 19 世纪初以来，民族主义将遥远的人群联合成想象的社区。它使纪念成为其贸易的关键工具，它训练人们作为一个大规模神圣崇拜的追随者同步崇拜。它把他们的过去变成了圣经，他们的纪念碑变成了圣物，他们对共同遗产的庆祝或集体哀悼的表演变成了虔诚的仪式。国家记忆的政治产生了壮观、显眼但又协调、局限和可控的场所和实践。尽管 20 世纪出现了意识形态的动荡，但这些国家纪念活动的基本轮廓在很大程度上得以延续。然而，在 1980 年代，一系列新实践开始挑战国家记忆的规范。这种助记性的骚乱首先在西德获得动力，积极分子越来越认为这些公约无法满足现代记忆中最紧迫的需求，即纪念大规模灾难的任务：人类灾难如种族灭绝，还有环境灾难，如森林砍伐和社会灾难，如个人彼此原子化。这些问题在全国引起了共鸣