Fulbrook stresses the extreme political sensitivity to the impact on public opinion of historical writing on both sides of the Berlin wall, where national identity and nazism were central issues in the cultural cold war. What they have to say is pertinent, perhaps would have gained in depth by discussing more fully not just the production but the consumption of history, the relationship, that is, between historians and their readers. It is surely of prime importance for academic historians today to reflect on why, in recent decades, they have lost their hegemony as narrators of the national past. What they have in common is to place in doubt the importance today of the influence of professional historians on the formation of ideas. There can be little doubt that writing national history today is a different cup of tea than it used to be.
Few historians have the self-confidence of our prolific predecessors of the last century.
The direct pressures of dictatorial regimes are too recent to ignore and have unquestionably created profound and structural problems for their historians related to the dangers of too unmediated a vicinity to the sirens of political control and patronage. Presumably, as professional historians, we have been at least partially inoculated against such dangers. But, at the same time, it would be an illusion to imagine that we are now beyond national myth creating and that, in the brave new world of postmodernist subjectivity and the crisis of identities, historians have become blas about the implicit political messages that have always formed part of the writing of national histories. In the new nation-states of Europe that have emerged since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and outside Europe, national foundation myths and narratives are actively being constructed and written. Narrative histories, to legitimate both the former and the latter are being written and taught in schools, in the traditional mould of nation-state histories.