Air War Legacies: From Dresden to Baghdad

Abstract

In the months leading up to the Anglo-American war against Saddam Hussein's regime, the legacies of the 60-year-old air war against German cities infused the German peace movement and its growing opposition to Washington's unilateralism. While all over Europe the massive opposition to the war was politically justified, the German case displays a curious mix of memory and forgetting that sets it apart. The use of treacherous and facile historical analogies was ubiquitous in Germany, and it seemed to point to a new paradigm of thinking temporality and space in our post-utopian times. Contemporary media culture generates uses of the past that tend to blur temporal and spatial boundaries in deeply problematic ways. The fast pace of change and anticipations of the future so characteristic of an earlier modernity have radically slowed down in recent years. In a world in which visions of the future are largely discredited, the present comes to be ever more expanded, and the past looms large, partly as a result of a wave of transnational memory politics, but also because of new media technologies of cultural recycling. We are now witnessing a kind of time-space expansion in the imaginary that stands in tension with the very real time-space compression of modernity that David Harvey has described so well.1 But what precisely is the nature of this time-space expansion? Are we exposed to substantive historical narratives, or are these mediated pasts