This paper is about the historical memory in today's Lithuanian territory during World War I and its relation to postcolonial discourse. World War I is a very important period if we want to see many different interpretations of one base of collective memory: we can see here many completely different positions towards the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. On the one hand, there was developed nationalism discourse, promoted by Lithuanian elites, on the other hand, there were at least three groups of people with different historical memories – Lithuanian neighbors Poles, Belarusians, and Jews. Thirdly, during World War I, Lithuanian was incorporated into two completely different empires - Russian and German. Both of them tried to promote the slightly different discourse of politics of history and manipulated the nation's self-image and mythical enemies as well as historical friends. At last, we can see communist-socialist discourse, developed during this time as a counterweight to the nationalist and imperialist interpretation of the so-called Lithuanian past. The main problem of this paper is twofold - firstly, to show how ideologies (different nationalisms and communism) and empires (Russian and German) manipulated on state historical memory and what was the main consequence of this unprecedented convergence of historical narratives. Secondly, to show, what we can learn from this Lithuanian case of memories during the war today. These lessons are related to post-colonial studies – I will try to show how the nation's historical self-image and historical image created by other groups and ideologies, shaped its identity and how it is similar to many colonial nations. The main theories used in this paper are Anthony D. Smith and his historical nation myths, Edward Said with his cultural representations, and Homi K. Bhabha with his theory of the development of cultural identities. This paper is related to the theme of Historical Convergences it tries to show one historical memories convergence in the past and its probable importance to today's multicultural post-colonial society. Paper also related to the theme of Political Discursive Convergences, it shows a few different types of historical politics in the past.
