Postwar Narratives Research Articles

Postwar pictorial narratives: from Daghani to Kitaj

Living in exile, isolated and belonging to no group or school, Daghani created an idiosyncratic oeuvre that does not readily fit into any tradition. His books and albums may recall the format of the livre d'artiste and the artist's book, while further aspects of his work can be related to Holocaust Art, Modernism and Pop Art. However, his output is so varied and these categories are so broad that such contexts have limited application. It may be more helpful to examine his work in relation to similar practices by other artists of the postwar period who have used albums and pictorial narratives to engage with political crises and traumatic events. Such combinations of words and images, as components in an art of crisis, raise questions of enduring significance, as can be seen from the furore provoked the work of R.B. Kitaj.

The Fantasy Men

The remarkable success of the Anglo-American legal system in establishing stable, democratic societies throughout the globe contrasts with the catastrophic failure, over the centuries, of the legal systems of continental Europe. Nevertheless, nationalistic sentiment in South Africa and Scotland reacted to increasing Common Law influence with a paradoxical idealisation of the Civil Law system. The various discourses of europaische Rechtsgeschichte behind the ideology are set in their historical and cultural contexts. The nationalistic discourse of Savigny, which reduced the whole of European legal history to a translatio studii of Roman law from Italy to France to Holland to German apotheosis, gave way in the wake of two world wars and the Holocaust to the new discourse of the ius commune, a legal paradigm for a future European Union based not on the historical reality of three centuries of religious, political and juridical conflict, but on a fantasy world of European legal unity from the beginning of the modern period until the 19th century national codifications. This was the post-war narrative of Helmut Coing, which, failing to anticipate the eclipse of the British Empire, steadfastly contrasted the shared legal tradition of continental Europe with the opposing system of the Anglo-American Common Law.With England now in the European Union the discourse has had to be modified. By exaggerating the importance of some minor and longrecognised continental influences on the Common Law, the contemporary discourse of the ius commune europaeum propagated by Reinhard Zimmermann succeeds in trumping the historical fantasy of a uniform continental legal past with the even more remote fantasy of a uniform continental and English legal culture. The old nationalist programme of a return to the 17th–18th century Roman-Dutch law, imbibed by Zimmermann as a law professor in Apartheid South Africa, can thus be presented as an appeal to the pan-European legal inheritance. This discourse currently enjoys great success both as an authentic picture of the European legal past and as an attractive blueprint for the European legal future.

Audible in the Silence: Douglas Lockwood, Waipuldanya, and the postwar Aboriginal life narrative

During the period between the end of the Second World War and the appearance in the 1970s of the first indigenous autobiographical narratives, a significant number of texts that attempted to imagine what Australian society looked like through indigenous eyes were published and attained popularity. The majority of these were fictional works; several, however, were ostensible memoirs or autobiographies that claimed to be based closely on reminiscences transmitted orally by their Aboriginal subjects. They were all but entirely ignored by contemporary literary critics, historians, and even by most anthropologists. Through an examination of the most popular of the texts under consideration, Douglas Lockwood’s I, the Aboriginal, this discussion argues that it should be understood as an indicator of an important phase of Australian society’s dialogue with itself. The life story of Waipuldanya—the “I” of the title—while on one level clearly supportive of an assimilationist ethos that reinforces Western cultural norms and assumptions, is construed by the text on another level as an empowering vantage point from which to recuperate Aboriginal values and conceptions. Though he is seen to have attained the state of individualist selfhood valorised by the Western autobiographical tradition, he is also shown to be resistant to full deracination; he exercises his culturally inflected sense of autonomy to choose to remain faithful to his birth culture’s more communal conception of selfhood.

Grief and memory. On the postwar narrative in El Salvador

No abstract available. ECA Estudios Centroamericanos, Vol. 59, No. 672, 2004: 1089-1095.

The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust (review)

Book Reviews 157 theologians that the Americans who had the most fIrst-hand experience ofsuffering and oppression identify with the Jewish message of hope and justice while those who had the least proclaimed, whatever it might have meant, that God had "died." Clark Williamson Theology Department Christian Theological Seminary The Language ofSilence: West German Literature and the Holocaust, by Ernestine Schlant. New York & London: Routledge, 1999. 277 pp. $20.99. Ernestine Schlant'shighly focused study about West German fIctional narratives is a well written resource that raises signifIcant questions and challenges. Because she contextualizes authors and their narratives historically, culturally, sociologically, and psychologically, the reader gains a comprehensive image ofthe evolution ofthe central post-war issue in West German literature: the destruction ofthe European Jews and the always more or less defensive strategies authors employ over and against the horrendous crimes committed by their civilization. In covering the period from 1945 to 1990, Schlant demonstrates how German authors have reflected the collective consciousness of Germans in regard to the Holocaust while contributing through subtexts to the collective unconscious where Germany's atrocious history has by no means been "mastered."Auschwitz, as historical fact and as trope, remains for Germans botha point ofreference and a vanishing point. Schlant distinguishes the silence ofthe Holocaust-a silence over the horror of direct experience-from the silence about the Holocaust-the silence ofperpetrators and the succeeding generations that attempted to address that silence. Those attempts have been undermined for decades by Germany's "inability to mourn," even as our knowledge, interpretations, and understanding of Nazism and the Holocaust have increased since 1945. Schlant argues that "corning to terms" with the past is not equivalent to "working through," fOf "it leaves the victims and the crimes as unmourned as they have always been" (p. 14). She accepts Margarethe and Alexander Mitscherlichs' contention that Germans were unable to mourn the loss oftheir emotional investment in the Third Reich as they redefIned the Hitler era by perceiving themselves as deceived and victimized by the Nazis. This self-victimization is a major defense mechanism in post-war narratives and represses the victimization ofJews. Schlant argues that the ability ofauthors and their fIctional characters to connect affectively with the victims ofthe Holocaust is necessary for any genuine mourning that "works through" to an authentic "restitution ofpersonal identity." Some readers may take issue with this argument. It is very possible that private grief can eventually mature into the restitution of a mature personal identity, but I seriously doubt if such an ideal grieving process is ever effected by the collective 158 SHOFAR Winter 2001 Vol. 19, No.2 consciousness of an entire people, especially in mass societies. Schlant could have challenged the Mitscherlichs' paradigm ofmourning, useful as it has been since 1967 as a frictional device in our questioning of Germany's post-war attitudes towards Nazism and the Holocaust. As German narratives reveal through their rhetorical strategies, it is impossible to grieve over the Third Reich; the Holocaust, on the other hand, demands a mourning for which closure would be highly problematical. Schlant's discussion ofrepresentative German authors is most insightful when she discusses the subtexts, points ofambiguity, blanks, or over-determined narratives since 1945. The mythic Nul/punkt (zero hour) was no new beginning because "knowledge of the Nazi past was channeled into denial and repression" along with "the most heavily charged and tabooed word of all-'Jew'" (pp. 24-25). Even authors such as Boll and Grass rely on stereotypes and sentimentality towards Jews and Jewish suffering. This repression continues in the "generational discord" evident in the autobiographical fictions of the next generation which experienced itself as victimized by the fascist child-rearing of their politically and ethically compromised parents (p. 82). Her discussion ofHanns-JosefOrtheil's autobiographical novels about his parents reveals that by the late 1970s German authors, acutely aware ofthe complexities ofa corrupted language, had begun to probe more profoundly into the past of their parents. Although Schlant's discussion is chronological, each chapter traces the thematic progression from silence to articulation, from "ruptures and displacements" to the question of personal restitution. She sees Gert Hofmann's Veilchenfeld (1986) as an empathic attempt to...

The Way of Efficiency: Ueno Yoichi and Scientific Management in Twentieth-Century Japan

The profound influence of American management thought on Japanese industrial practice has generally been considered a postwar phenomenon. Stressing the contributions of Deming, Drucker and other American experts, both popular wisdom and scholarly opinion have embraced the notion that ‘the managerial revolution that occurred in Japan after World War II was made in the United States’. Prewar Japanese management, however, has seldom been figured in terms of American inspiration. Historians have commonly conceived prewar Japanese practice as somehow impervious to American theories and techniques, emphasizing instead the importance of indigenous patterns of familialism, German influences, or a capital-labor dynamic largely detached from external stimuli. Thus, in industrial management—as in so many facets of modern Japanese history—the prewar narrative and the postwar narrative have remained separate and unreconciled. Despite recent interest in establishing a fuller genealogy of Japanese management, the question of how American models could thrive in postwar Japan without a prewar legacy of integration has yet to be answered or even seriously addressed.

Whiteness and the Rejected Other in The Sun Also Rises

Work in the field of studies commonly treats white racial identity in terms of its constructed quality and the privileges unfairly rewarded to white people. The prevalent critical standpoint is thus that whites work to protect whiteness. In contrast, this essay will focus on a white literary character--authored, perhaps surprisingly, by Ernest Hemingway--who rejects particular dominant versions of whiteness. In The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes has often, and rightly, been treated as a conflicted protagonist attempting to strike a balance between pre- and postwar narratives to endure a meaningless world. In this light, he can be read as a figure of hybridity who mixes identities to avoid claiming allegiance to any one totalizing narrative. Ultimately, it is the Basque peasants, situated sufficiently outside and within the center, to whom Hemingway has Jake turn as a viable Other to give his world meaning. But rather than concentrate on how this Spanish Other is represented in the novel, I wish to interrogate those forms of marginality Jake withdraws from, specifically Jews and homosexuals. Jake is easily read as anti-Semitic and homophobic, but by examining how whiteness is used to denote a privileged economic and social class we can move closer to a more nuanced understanding of Hemingway's intentions as subversive, though hardly without paradox. What follows is not necessarily to be taken as an apologia intent on clearing Hemingway, or Jake, of charges of homophobia or racism; however, I do intend to complicate the way Hemingway is today so easily written off in American literary studies--put on exhibit as a fossilized exemplar of all that is wrong with the canon. Hemingway's evaluation and fictional treatment of forms of otherness according to a rejected notion of centered reveals a complicated critical politics existing simultaneously with prejudice. Jake's convoluted identity quest allows us to see how marginality is deployed by Hemingway, and Jake's refusal of particular othered identities exposes something other than a facile bigotry. Michael Harper argues that Hemingway has a preoccupation with characters who exist on the fringes of society ... [and] it is among the outcast and the despised, the incompletely or unsuccessfully `socialized,' that an alternative has the best chance of flourishing.(1) In the relationship Hemingway has with various marginal identities and the enter this idea is both tree and untrue. As a character in transition and exploring options of subjectivity, Jake's beliefs and practices are underpinned by politics. The anti-Semitism voiced in the novel has always been problematic for readers, and recent critical interest in Jake's homophobia has reopened the issue of how forms of otherness--women, Jews, gays, and blacks--are approached by Hemingway. But Robert Stephens' rationale for the plot's exclusion of certain characters calls attention to the fact that white, Christian, heterosexual men and women are equally guilty of breaking the Hemingway code: The outsiders are those like Robert Cohn, Mrs. Braddocks, Robert Prentiss, the artist Zizi, the bal musette homosexuals, and the Paris and Pamplona tourists who are unhaunted by nada, have no real cause for rebellion against their societies, and are messy and undisciplined as they imitate without comprehension the actions of the insiders.(2) Of course, these are specific characters with specific narrative functions--to express ideas through word and action--but it is a mistake to disregard how some social types are given more degrading duties than others. The narrative snipes directed at those occupying certain socially marginal subject positions exhibit a bias more attuned to a mindset of the past than any supposed freedom of progressive modern thought. To understand the criterion Jake uses to determine the forms of marginality worth appropriating it is necessary to analyze the groups chosen to portray the negative side of the Lost Generation. …

Four Years in the Stonewall Brigade

From his looting of farmhouses during the Gettysburg campaign and robbing of fallen Union soldiers as opportunity allowed to his five arrests for infractions of military discipline and numerous unapproved leaves, John O. Casler’s actions during the Civil War made him as much a rogue as a Rebel. Though he was no model soldier, his forthright confessions of his service years in the Army of Northern Virginia stand among the most sought after and cited accounts by a Confederate soldier. First published in 1893 and significantly revised and expanded in 1906, Casler’s Four Years in the Stonewall Brigade recounts the truths of camp life, marches, and combat. Moreover, Casler’s recollections provide an unapologetic view of the effects of the harsh life in Stonewall’s ranks on an average foot soldier and his fellows. A native of Gainesboro, Virginia, with an inherent wanderlust and thirst for adventure, Casler enlisted in June 1861 in what became Company A, 33rd Virginia Infantry, and participated in major campaigns throughout the conflict, including Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. Captured in February 1865, he spent the final months of the war as a prisoner at Fort McHenry, Maryland. His postwar narrative recalls the realities of warfare for the private soldier, the moral ambiguities of thievery and survival at the front, and the deliberate cruelties of capture and imprisonment with the vivid detail, straightforward candor, and irreverent flair for storytelling that have earned Four Years in the Stonewall Brigade its place in the first rank of primary literature of the Confederacy. This edition features a new introduction by Robert K. Krick chronicling Casler’s origins and his careers after the war as a writer and organizer of Confederate veterans groups.

Möten med krigsgravar i konflikternas periferi. Materialitet och bruk av betydelse

During the great wars, the remains of hundreds of killed soldiers ended up on Swedish territory. They were either sailors, killed in battles at sea and taken by currents to the Swedish coast, or shot down pilots. When discovered, the remains were buried at local cemeteries. During the 1960s a process of re-burial was initiated, and close to 500 bodies was moved to a cemetery at Kviberg in the city of Gothenburg. Two war cemeteries were created, separating German soldiers from soldiers that served in the Commonwealth.In this paper we address the materiality and spatiality of the two war cemeteries in order to understand how these war graves take part in commemoration practices, and also how they create and manifest post-war narratives of the area of the great wars. Starting at the perceived differences in the setting and design of the two cemeteries, we argue that visitors of the war graves encounter a feeling of being close to global historic events. The war graves materialize abstract narratives of great histories at a micro-level in a place far away from the actual conflicts. Simultaneously, the war graves manifest post-war national identities that has very little to do with the individuals buried in the graves or the geographical context of their setting.