The Obsession to Destroy Monuments: Mishima and Boll

Abstract

In Japan and in Germany aftermath of World War II brought a preoccupation with destruction of monuments (both real and fictional) by fire. In 1950, in city of Kyoto in Japan, a famous Zen temple that was more than five hundred years old was burned down in an act of arson by a Zen acolyte named Hayashi Yoken, who said that his motive was antipathy against beauty (Tasaka 105).(1) This event became subject of Mishima Yukio's 1956 novel Kinkakuji (The Temple of Golden Pavilion, hereafter Temple), which retells destruction of temple from retrospective viewpoint of an invented arsonist named Mizoguchi, who is pursued by idee fixe of beauty (Nakamura 306).(2) In 1959, three years after Mishima's sensational work, Heinrich Boll published a novel called Billard um Halbzehn Billiard,s at Half Past Nine, hereafter Billiards) in which central act is deliberate burning of St. Anthony's Abbey, a fictitious structure that, as book explains, was built at beginning of twentieth century by an architect named Heinrich Fahmel and destroyed by his son Robert at end of war.(3) In Japanese and German postwar literature destruction of buildings or entire cities is a commonly shared experience. In Germany first attempts of several coming home writers, including Boll, have been called Trummerliteratur (rubble literature), i.e., literature whose setting is a battlefield or a bomb-ravaged city, usually presented with an immediacy of perspective and a lack of detachment. Similarly, in japan genbakubungaku (atomic-bomb literature) portrays hellish pictures of devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The uniqueness of two novels by Mishima and Boll lies not in their subject matter, but in their attitude toward their protagonists' deliberate violence against historical monuments. Both authors seem to justify act of destruction, or at least to find such conduct inevitable in dehumanized postwar society in which they live: striking similarity of these novels lies in ostensible endorsement of violence as a tool of aesthetic, political, and ideological expression. The symbol of destroyed monument constitutes what Neil H. Donahue calls a primary nexus (58), demonstrating, as Ernestine Schlant suggests, that literary truth often goes deeper than political or economic analysis, and [that] it reflects conditions and values of society under which it was created (1). The similarities between two novels can be related, in part, to fact that Japan and Germany have similar recent political and histories. They become modern states at almost same time. After an approximately three-hundred-year isolation under feudal Tokugawa shogunate, Japan opened her door to West during Meiji Restoration or Revolution of 1868, embarking, as Oda Makoto puts it, upon the path leading to status of a modern nation, under strong and autocratic rule of ten'no (emperor) system, a path that led to World War II, and Japan's total defeat (264). Mishima's ideal image of emperor centers on this period, that of Meiji (1867-1912), Taisho (1912-1926), and Showa (1926-1945) emperors, in which concept of kokutatai (the national polity) or the sacred nature of Japanese nation (Tasker 138), placed great emphasis on emperor's divinity as a descendant of Sun Goddess, and on nobility of Japanese people as children (sekishi) of emperor God. Similarly, German peoples' dream of unification of their numerous small states came true in 1871, when Prussian Count Bismarck established Second Reich under Kaiser (Emperor) Wilhelm I, head of an authoritarian, conservative, |military-bureaucratic power state' (Spielvogel 5) with policies which would lead Germany into World War I during reign of Wilhelm II. Like Japanese kokutai ideology, German focus on Kaiser reinforced ideology of Volk (nation, people, or race), asserting superiority of German culture and the idea of a universal mission for German people. …