OA

Wie zijn ‘wij’? Breuklijnen in een nationaal verhaal

Who are ‘we’? Fracture lines within a national narrative: the flood of 1926.

The emotional responses elicited by moments of crisis have attracted recent and increasingly interdisciplinary attention. When emotional discourses and practices during crisis are investigated in relation to ideas of national identity, however, one method is critically overlooked. This article argues for the value of the history of emotions in this discussion. The fact that emotions are time and culture specific suggests the need for a thorough and nuanced analysis of their presence and function in different times and contexts. In this paper the framework of emotional communities is used to explain how emotions that were expressed in 1926 – and evaluated by others – influenced social and political relationships within the Netherlands. This shows communities that sometimes clashed but often overlapped without merging, making fracture lines within Dutch society dynamic. There was no single national ‘we’, but rather a patchwork of interlocking and competing emotional norms.