Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture
Ran Zwigenberg
Language: English
Pages: 348
ISBN: 1107416590
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In 1962, a Hiroshima peace delegation and an Auschwitz survivor's organization exchanged relics and testimonies, including the bones and ashes of Auschwitz victims. This symbolic encounter, in which the dead were literally conscripted in the service of the politics of the living, serves as a cornerstone of this volume, capturing how memory was utilized to rebuild and redefine a shattered world. This is a powerful study of the contentious history of remembrance and the commemoration of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima in the context of the global development of Holocaust and World War II memory. Emphasizing the importance of nuclear issues in the 1950s and 1960s, Zwigenberg traces the rise of global commemoration culture through the reconstruction of Hiroshima as a 'City of Bright Peace', memorials and museums, global tourism, developments in psychiatry, and the emergence of the figure of the survivor-witness and its consequences for global memory practices.
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“true victims” by pointing out that their own victimization is forgotten and obscured by the leftist media.18 German conservative historians would also play this game of “contextualization” during the Historikerstreit in the 1990s, and Israeli rightists even more recently brought forward the plight of Arab Jews forced to flee their homes in 1948 as a “counterweight” to the Palestinian “Nakhba.”19 The Katyn episode shows a similar inclination on the part of Japanese conservatives, and is quite
tourists, Hiroshima lives by the brewing of beer and the building of ships – and, ironically, by the manufacture of howitzers by Japan’s biggest gunmaker, Nihon Seiko, whose sales last year grossed $61 million and gave employment to more than 1,500 Hiroshima citizens.”5 These figures were relatively low in comparison with the numbers of the boom years during the Korean War. These were prosperous years in Hiroshima. Indeed, the city, and Japan as a whole, recovered in large degree thanks to the
past “is a cliché of fairly recent vintage and often predicated on Germany’s alleged success of acknowledging the crimes of Nazism.”161 As Japanese coverage of the Eichmann trial, examined below, demonstrated, up to the 1960s and beyond Japanese did not feel at the least that they were somehow inadequate in comparison with Germany. In both countries, the US role in projecting war guilt onto a small minority (Nazis and militarists) in the interest of postwar stability made for much denial and a
native Ainu psychology in Hokkaido. Like his counterparts in Taiwan and other colonial settings, Uchimura found Ainu to be “child-like,” and “prone to rage.”24 The same racial attitude also hindered previous research into trauma. Naka Shuzu, in Taiwan, did extensive study on reactions to earthquakes and found many to suffer from Emotionslähmung (emotional paralysis), which is characterized by an empty expression of the face and the inability to think.25 Naka compared these findings with
reparation debates 161 Doctors in Israel, the USA and across Europe responded to this state of affairs with outrage. It was these doctors’ mobilization that enabled the breaking of taboos and ended indifference to survivors. Although there was work done on camp survivors beforehand, the reparation debates expanded the fight beyond political prisoners and forced sympathizers to confront the issue of trauma and Jewish suffering head on.76 German sympathizer Ernst Kluge emphasized the unique