1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern by Al Filreis

Abstract

Reviewed by: 1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern by Al Filreis Abigail Moreshead Al Filreis. 1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern. Columbia UP, 2021, ix + 332 pp. The year 1960 is a crucial moment for the art and literary world, and Al Filreis thoroughly explicates why this is the case. Filreis crafts an argument for the importance of 1960 as a year in which many factors—conversations among artist and intellectuals, publications, and artwork—coalesce to produce a moment (or series of moments) that revisits prewar modernism in light of traumas following the Second World War. Filreis characterizes this work as "the special convergence of modernism and radicalism as a belated response to World War II" (3). To create this narrative about 1960, Filreis weaves together writing, artwork, and dialogue between authors and artists to show a world reckoning with the impact of genocide. This weaving makes the centrality of Jewish authors Paul Celan, Jerome Rothenberg, and Hannah Arendt all the more prescient as they ask questions through poetry, essays, and other forms about what language and writing mean in the context of the devastation wrought by fascist authoritarianism. [End Page 176] Filreis frames 1960 by opening with a first chapter that begins near the end of the year—on an October day when James Baldwin and Celan both, on separate continents, address the role of writing in their present age. The year 1960 is crucial because of both its distance from and proximity to the war's end. Among other factors, Filreis explains that during this period genocide comes under consideration by artists, writers, and literary critics as no longer just the "purview of diplomatic and regime historians" (45). This conceptualization of genocide for cultural study raises questions about the role of the survivor and witness. Other contemporary factors that bring the past war into the present, for intellectuals in 1960, include the trial of Adolf Eichmann. In the book's first section, "Emerging from the Night of the Word," Filreis combines historical context with close readings of both the texts and biographies of several mid-century American and European authors. Filreis focuses heavily on the lives, works, and perspectives of Celan, Rothenberg, and Baldwin, although many others (such as Amiri Baraka, Frantz Fanon, and Ingeborg Bachmann) also appear. The first three chapters in section 1 deal with how these authors grapple with the war's trauma, directly inflicted on Holocaust survivors such as Celan. Examples of the key works examined include Celan's 1960 poem "Wolfesbohne," a poem which in, Filreis's words, "was virtually [Celan's] only direct expression" (33) of his Holocaust experience. The second section, "The End of the End of Ideology," focuses on more specific groups and movements, such as the legacy of absurdism and the Zero art movement. Chapter 4 is a good exemplar of Filreis's analysis in section 2, as Filreis examines how the idea of the absurd—especially as it relates to the work of Kafka—is recycled among mid-century writers, as W. H. Auden and Arendt debate the meaning of forgiveness amid the trial of Eichmann. Readers will do well to heed Filreis's comment in the preface that "few of the chapters present discrete material; the analysis is typically additive, conjoined, and complementary" (x). This being the case, to appreciate the book to its fullest, opening to any particular chapter in 1960 requires looking back at the narrative threads established in earlier chapters, such as the stage set in chapter 1's focus on 22 October 1960. While not a chronologically linear narrative, it is an intricately woven one in which characters appear, disappear, and reappear. And yet, the book's structure is, I believe, one of its greatest assets. The form of Filreis's narrative impresses on the reader the timeliness of 1960 by continually looking back to set the stage for the [End Page 177] various dialogues and events that occur. How Filreis studies the various literary and historical threads coming together here is as important as the fact that he does: approaching a single...