After the Event: The Transmission of Grievous Loss in Germany, China and Taiwan 9780857450876

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After the Event

After the Event The Transmission of Grievous Loss in Germany, China and Taiwan

Stephan Feuchtwang

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

First published in 2011 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2011 Stephan Feuchtwang All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Feuchtwang, Stephan. After the event : the transmission of grievous loss in Germany, China and Taiwan / Stephan Feuchtwang. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-85745-086-9 (alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-85745-087-6 (ebook) 1. Loss (Psychology)--Case studies. I. Title. BF575.D35.F48 2011 909.82–dc22 2011003628

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN 978-0-85745-086-9 (hardback) E-ISBN 978-0-85745-087-6

Contents Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction   1 Transmitting Loss   2 Comparing the Incomparable: The Third Reich and a Phase of Maoism    3 ‘Communism’ in Mainland China and Taiwan: Official transmission of the Great Leap Famine and of the White Terror

20

Part I The Great Leap Famine   4 Moral and Political Dilemmas from the Great Leap Famine   5 Implicit Transmission: The Generation Gap after the Great Leap Famine

71

Part II The Luku Incident of the White Terror   6 Disruption, Commemoration and Family Repair in Taiwan   7 Gesture and Monument in a Tourist Landscape: The Generation Gap in Taiwan Part III The Third Reich   8 Acknowledgement of the Third Reich in Postwar Germany   9 Disruption, Commemoration and Family Repair: Some Jewish German Families 10 Recalling the Third Reich and the Holocaust after Two Generations: Some German German Families

3

43

92 113 136 153 174 190

Conclusion 11 Beyond Bad Death

209

References

228

Index

235

Acknowledgements Very many people have helped with providing details and criticisms. They are mentioned in the appropriate places in endnotes. Others have helped me even more. I have been entirely dependent on my co-researchers, Wang Mingming, Tsypylma Darieva, and Shih Fang-long. They have given me a lease of intellectual life and good companionship for which I cannot thank them enough. Their capacity for establishing trust brought to us the people with their moving stories to whom this book is devoted, people to whom I am grateful in a quite different way, for letting me into their realities, different from my own and yet enhancing them. Finally, I thank Hans Steinmüller, who read through the whole of the penultimate draft with his own personal expertise on China and experience in Germany, making invaluable comments and offering telling additions, which I have accepted with alacrity. I am solely responsible for this book. Parts of it have been tried out in earlier publications, since much revised. Chapter 2 is an improvement of ‘Images of Subhumanity and their Realisation’ in a special issue of Critique of Anthropology on State Violence, guest edited by Tobias Kelly and Alpa Shah, 2006, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 259–78; Chapter 3, ‘History and the Transmission of Shared Loss: the Great Leap Famine in China and the Luku Incident in Taiwan’ in Eric Sautede (ed.) History and Memory, Macao: Matteo Ricci Institute, 2008, pp. 163–89; Chapter 6, ‘Disruption, Commemoration and Family Repair’ in Goncalo Duro dos Santos and Susanne Brandtstädter (eds) Chinese Kinship: Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives, London and New York: Routledge, 2008, pp. 223–45; Chapter 9, ‘Belonging to What? Jewish Mixed Kinship and Historical Disruption’ in Janet Carsten (ed.) Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness, Blackwell, 2007, pp. 150–71.

Introduction

Chapter 1

Transmitting Loss This book is about the transmission of massive loss over two or three generations. The loss in each of the three cases that will be described was caused by state violence, which has also been responsible for all the worst cases of human loss in the twentieth century. Since the loss transmitted was massive, it was to some extent shared. But of course, the loss was also personal and individual. So this book is about the interplay between personal transmission, including full and felt silence, and more public forms of transmission, commemoration and teaching, including omission that is partly registered.1 It will be a comparison of three cases. Comparison of these events is a risky undertaking. It risks reducing the transmission of each unique and intensely personal experience to common denominators when finding in them processes that are similar. Conversely it risks finding features in each that by comparison are so contrasting that the similarities upon which the contrasts are drawn are reduced to banality. Nevertheless, those risks have been taken because the analogy each provides for the other does suggest questions worth asking and answers from each that say something new and important about them. The three events and locations that I have chosen to compare are determined by the pattern of my own life, not for any more rational suitability. I was an infant refugee from Berlin from where my parents fled in 1938 arriving, after a year in Rotterdam, in London in April 1939. Later, as a student and then as an academic, my life was spent studying Chinese and then as an anthropologist visiting Taiwan and Mainland China, partly to get away from my European heritage. But I have also, as an academic and as a citizen, been driven to study European imperialism, racism and nationalism. So this book and the project of research on which it is based, binds these strands together. What I have undertaken may be of interest to a reader precisely because the cases are so arbitrarily chosen, yet passionately known. In any case, twentiethcentury instances of great state violence are so numerous and so specific that there is probably no way to have represented them all. To have chosen such very different histories and instances risks incomparability, but it also stretches the limits of imagination to see whether concepts

4   Introduction

and issues arise in all three of them. To many among the European readership, and even more so those who count themselves Jewish, one of the three events of state violence being brought into comparative perspective is unique, not to be compared. To insist on drawing it into a comparison, rather than to treat it as a unique horror, is, for some, including some of those with whom I spoke in Berlin, a sacrilegious mistake. But at the same time even for them, as well as for many others, it is a paradigm of genocide, and therefore has the contrary claim to be both unique and comparable. It is, of course, the Nazi Third Reich, installed in 1933 and committing Germany to a war of expansion and acts of racial hygiene including the annihilation of Jews in Germany and in the countries invaded between 1938 and 1944. This was an act of massive dislocation as well as ruin and death. I chose the city of Berlin, then and recently again the capital of Germany, to find families to visit and interview about the transmission of their losses down three generations. The event of state violence in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that I have chosen is the famine of 1958–61, the most lethal event of the twentieth century and the greatest famine ever recorded in terms of the number of deaths attributable to it – well over thirty million, 5 per cent of the population of China at the time. It was caused by the Great Leap Forward campaign of collectivised living and work to increase production of grain and steel with the aim of achieving abundance within a few years. It caused severe malnutrition, premature death for the old, infertility among women and in many areas starvation to death. But unlike the Third Reich it did not involve massive and severe dislocation unless (as in some parts of China, but not in our field site) it coincided with state projects of water control. For the most part, only two generations were involved in this study, the generation of those who had lived through the famine as adults or as children, and their children, though we were able also to talk to some schoolchildren who are the third generation from the event. The third event of state violence is much smaller but it did involve severe hardship, death, and dislocation. It was a military operation starting in December 1952 to wipe out what the Nationalist (Guomindang) martial-law government claimed was a planned insurrection from an armed Communist base in the Luku mountains of northern Taiwan. The hamlets near which some anti-Nationalist activists had hidden, and were conducting political education secretly among some of the families there, were decimated. This event has now been included as the largest single incident in a period, designated the White Terror, of military suppression of all opposition to the regime (1947–86). The operation removed up to half the economically active population of the upper Luku hamlets, very few of whom had any idea what ‘Communism’ or the Guomindang stood for, and caused the migration of many families to find work elsewhere in conditions of extreme hardship. It was, for the families of

Transmitting Loss   5

the affected area, as harsh and severe a loss as was the Great Leap famine in China and the Second World War in Germany, but not shared with the rest of the population. In this case we were able to interview victims and close family members of those who were executed or imprisoned for the political crime of insurrection and of being ‘Communist spies’, as well as the next generation, but, as on the mainland site, far fewer of the third generation. The Luku Incident has a memorial, as part of a state acknowledgement of grievous loss that each family has suffered. In this, it is much more like the acknowledgement and apology so conscientiously conducted by the German government for the annihilation of the Jews by the Third Reich, and unlike the Great Leap famine, of which there is no commemoration. From there, and from other similarities between each event, the contrasts come thick and fast, as will be seen in the course of reading, or sampling, the chapters of this book.

How the Research was Conducted As the references will show, I have consulted others’ research on each event in the languages of each country as well as in English. Alongside their research is the first-hand research conducted for this study. It was conducted in each case with a different colleague. We asked similar questions of those we selected for conversation and interview. The questions always started with contextually prompted or very general questions about their lives, but then reached by indirect means the event in question, how they knew about it, and in the case of Berlin and Luku, what they thought about the public memorials and institutions of commemoration. Because the topic was an event that was sensitive in all senses, personally painful and of high political significance, trust was important; so we chose people with whom we were already familiar and had established a bond, and through them found others. There is no clear start and end date to the research, for the same reason. We had already begun to learn about the events from some of the people involved before I designed this project, the field research for which began in 2002. And we have kept contact with some people in each place until the present day, asking further questions. The most concentrated field research took place in the years 2002 and 2004, over periods of several weeks. Beside conversations and interviews, it involved direct observation, adding to previous direct observations of the people and institutions concerned. We interviewed judgemental samples (not a representative sample, rather one that maximised contrasts across a number of variables that I judged to be significant) of people of different ages, positions or statuses. In Berlin, my research colleague was Dr Tsypylma Darieva. She received her Ph.D. from Humboldt University of Berlin. She had conducted her

6   Introduction

doctoral field work in Berlin, focusing on migration, media and social memory. The result is ‘Russkij Berlin. Migranten und Medien in Berlin und London’ (Münster 2004). After research with me she became a post-doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology before taking a position as research fellow and teacher at the Department for European Ethnology, Humboldt University, moving from there to the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences in the University of Tsukuba, Japan, as Associate Professor in 2010. Some but not all of those she and I interviewed for this project had already been involved in her first research. Tsypylma conducted most of the interviews either jointly with me or on her own, while I conducted a few on my own. Between us we interviewed thirty-four people, half of them women. Thirteen were Russian Jews, eight were German Jews of mixed birth, and thirteen were German with no Jewish background. Most of these interviews were recorded, transcribed and translated into English, a painstaking process that required close attention to what they had said. During this process and in subsequent repeated readings, the themes that now organise my descriptions emerged. Field research on the Great Leap famine was conducted in the Quanzhou area of southern Fujian province. There my research colleague was Professor Wang Mingming, a native of Quanzhou and a teacher and researcher in social and cultural anthropology at Peking University. We started doing research and writing on various topics together in 1991 and continue to this day. For this project we interviewed thirty-four people in the Quanzhou region of southern Fujian, not a severely affected area but one in which people nevertheless suffered acute malnutrition to the point of oedema for the only time in their lives. Many of those we spoke to lived in a village to which we have been returning since 1991. Others to whom we spoke were in two rural townships of the same County, some in the County capital, and a few in Quanzhou city itself. We conducted most of our interviews in March 2004. Their practical circumstances varied greatly. Very few were one-to-one intimate conversations on the topic, which was in contrast to those in Berlin. Most were with other people present, including even less directable conversations in gatherings of more than two, beside Wang Mingming and me. This had the distinct advantage of revealing something like the way people referred to the famine among themselves. Most of the people we talked to were selected through previous acquaintance in field research on other topics, so that we had established a relation of trust with them. Even so, the subject of the famine is still surrounded by fear. In most, but not all cases, we will not have heard what those with whom we spoke might have said to close and trusted intimates. One further important observation about our interviews is that of the thirty-four people only six were women. This was probably because Wang

Transmitting Loss   7

Mingming and I are men. It was also because, as we experienced when we were prevented by one of our interviewees from interviewing his mother, men thought that women are not reliable as informants. It may also be because women are less involved in governmental politics. I shall say more about this when discussing what one woman of the famine generation told us. A small minority of the interviews were recorded. But my citations will come from close paraphrases based on detailed notes made during the interviews and my observations recalled very soon after. In Luku my co-researcher was Dr Shih Fang-long, a native Taiwanese with copious research experience and a doctorate in religious studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. The field site, to which I introduced her, was in a township to which I have been returning since my first fieldwork there in 1966–68. Fang-long conducted most of the interviews on her own, most of them with the same people for a second or third time during which I had the chance to join her. In total we interviewed fifty-four people. The main period of interviewing was September–October 2004. But there have been subsequent interviews every year since then. Only eleven interviewees (under a quarter) were female, despite the fact that the main interviewer was female. The male bias may be due to the fact that women of the younger generation were more inclined to say they had nothing to add. Many of the interviews were conducted on social occasions, such as a family feast, or just in the presence of other members of close family or with close friends. Others were conducted one-to-one but in public places such as cafés or restaurants. One joint interview of victims was filmed, some others were audio recorded. But most were not recorded. In these cases, notes taken during the interviews and expanded immediately afterwards provide some direct verbatim quotations. Fang-long and I worked together producing what are close to transcripts and translations of every interview. In Berlin, Tsypylma Darieva and I chose families to cover the range of different kinds of violence and its transmission to include German Germans and German Jews who had remained in Germany, plus Russian Jews – involved in the east European invasion by Nazi Germany and now living in Berlin as the main replacements of the annihilated Berlin Jews. All the German and Russian Jews in Berlin are, whatever their economic status (which was unemployment for many Russian Jews), identifiable as ‘intelligentsia’ in their own self-designation. The comparable German Germans selected were similarly well educated. This meant that the selection of families in the two Chinese sites had, in order to be comparable, to include some who were also well educated. One of the points of the investigation became the capacity and willingness of our subjects to engage in the public documentation of the history of the respective events, assuming correctly that the more they are educated the

8   Introduction

more engaged they would be in composing archives and narratives of the event. But the Chinese and Taiwanese sites included a far greater range across class. They were from largely rural locations, with a wide range of occupations and class positions, including non-agricultural occupations such as teaching, factory management, coal mining and recruiting of coalminers. In these two cases, but not in the Berlin case, it has therefore been possible to draw out class differences. Another variable in each situation is the difference in transmission and recognition between those who held positions of responsibility for the event and those who did not. Most of our interviews in all three sites were with those who would, in European languages, be called victims, and with their children or grandchildren. For information about those responsible for the violence, in the German case I have relied on interviews by others published in a number of books on perpetrators and the children of perpetrators. In the case of the Taiwan incident I have relied on an extensive set of unpublished interviews with the main perpetrator. In the Mainland China case we interviewed a number of people who were local cadres at the time and I have added the documentation of the Great Leap Forward in Fujian published by the Party History Press (2001). For translation of excerpts from this and other sources I employed another long-term research colleague, Dr Chang Xiangqun, a research fellow in the London School of Economics. One finding of this research has been that the language of perpetrator, bystander and victim, which is so prevalent in the transmission of the experience of Third Reich violence, is absent in the Mainland case, and only partly used in the Taiwanese. But this is not just a difference in political cultures. It is also due to the difference between the events, a difference to be explored in the next two chapters.

Initial Directions and Common Themes More of the research was conducted by my research colleagues than by me, and I am deeply indebted to them. They will, if so inclined, write their own accounts. But the comparison, the design of the project and the final responsibility for the contents of this book are all mine. Some of the theoretical perspectives I entertained in designing the research that resulted in this book are set out in Feuchtwang (2000) as a problem of grievance in terms derived from Sigmund Freud and from Jacques Derrida. From Freud I took the concept of melancholia as the pathology of mourning and reformulated it as a source of emotional drive and energy for grievance, which is a social motive made out of but going beyond grief and grieving. From Derrida I took the idea of ‘archive’ as an activity of disposition, of cen-

Transmitting Loss   9

sorship and of storage, true of both social and individual commemoration. I also grappled with the copious literature on memory and on social memory, and the next section will include what happened to that. Here I want to set out what occurred during, and as a result of, the research in practice and in the exercise of comparison, namely what happened to these theoretical orientations and what emerged from them or despite them. The three events of state violence are, as mentioned already, highly unlike each other. But their triangulation offers a set of contrasts and their great differences are a test bed for topics and concepts that were not in the original design but that emerged from each study separately and through comparison. The biggest and most basic contrast is between two histories, of Germany in Europe and of China as a subcontinental polity (chapter 2). They are both histories of self-strengthening, culminating in two different kinds of dictatorial rule in each of which two kinds of extreme violence were committed against their populations. I have named these two ‘targeted violence’ against designated population categories and ‘aggravated indifference’ to the population that the dictatorship professed to represent. The two histories are conceivable as contrasting cases of a political leadership whose people obeyed its command of self-strengthening sacrifice, in Germany by a war of expansion, and in China by an internal war of economic and military redemption from humiliation and civil war. The Nazis used a discourse of race-nation, and the Chinese Communists a discourse of people-class, even though China is also defined as race-people, a united people of several linked races (minzu). In Taiwan, the state violence was entirely targeted, at those labelled ‘Communist’. The Nationalist Communist civil war in China spread briefly to Taiwan after the defeat of the Japanese occupiers of the mainland in 1945. Taiwan had for fifty years before 1945 been a Japanese colony and was then caught in the Cold War stand off that divided both Taiwan from China and West from East Germany. ‘Communist’ is still a potent but transformed word in both Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China (chapter 3), carrying different loads, but in each case is a continuation of some sense of the civil war victory and defeat. Another major point of contrast is in the comparison of the revisions of history and changes of the regimes in which the events of state violence have been reformulated out of their originating political and historical rhetorics. Defeat and occupation by the victors in Germany inaugurated a complete repudiation of the Nazi past and a contrast between the eventual commemoration of the targeted populations and the difficulty of commemorating those who were briefly beneficiaries and often complicit in Nazi self-glorification and demands for self-sacrifice, and were then victims of bombardment, wartime extremes and defeat. There was in this case a sharp discontinuity, ending one and building an entirely different political regime (chapter 8).

10   Introduction

By contrast, the two histories of the PRC and Taiwan can be conceived as different cases of discontinuity within continuity of rule by the same regime that committed the act of extreme violence. In the case of the PRC, apology and removal of the stigma of the targeted political category of Rightists occurred very early and the capacity of the regime to demand self-sacrifice has been seriously reduced, but the same Party and much of its political discourse remains. In Taiwan, those who confessed to being Communist and turned informer were not imprisoned, yet anyone now found to have been Communist is not entitled to apology or compensation. This duplicity continues, but all those imprisoned and the families of the executed and imprisoned villagers have been given ample, ceremonial apology, recognition and some financial compensation by a regime in which the Guomindang has split into three parties, and in which they and several other parties now form an electoral civil society. Nevertheless, the Guomindang is again the ruling party, though it has been changed in the course of official apology for its past of severe repression. This makes the Taiwan case more like that of Germany than of the People’s Republic of China. But in Taiwan’s case, apology occurred as part of a surging Taiwanese nationalism, whereas Germany’s apology occurred as part of a merging into European Unity. All three cases involve major political revisions in historiography. But the final comparable condition is the fact that in all three cases there has also been a radical economic transformation reinforcing generation gaps between those who experienced the event of state violence and their children and children’s children. Each economy, at different times but most recently in the PRC, has had what in Germany was called an ‘economic miracle’ of fast and sustained growth, becoming a prominent world economy. Economic reconstruction after war, civil war, and semi-civil war in the case of the Cultural Revolution in the PRC, has itself been a way of obliterating as well as recovering from the violent past. It has increased the generation gap most in the two Chinese case studies. A curious and poignant paradox emerges from this generation gap. It is greatest between the third and the first generation. Within families, the third generation is the generation that, as grandchildren, is most receptive to transmission. Victims in their old age often break the silence they have hitherto preserved. On the other hand there are the transformations and discontinuities marked and idiomatically known as ‘generations’ of recent history that make the experiences of the first and third generations so different that there can be third-generation incomprehension. Discontinuities marked by major events, principally those of mass dislocation and major changes of political regime, I shall call ‘caesurae’, cutting-off points in chronology. Family generations are mapped onto caesurae, generations of familial reproduction, disrupted or ended

Transmitting Loss   11

by violence. For survivors and their children, or the children of their brothers and sisters or more distant collateral descendants, there are attempts to maintain continuity over disruption. Those attempts are what I shall call ‘family repair’. Family repair is one of the main themes in this book. But family repair occurs at a time when the younger generations have, because of vast changes in either economy and regime, turned their back on their grandparents’ past. The caesurae of immediate concern are simply the most recent in a series of before/after moments by which generations can be dated. In my aim to compare these very different cases, the main feature to be considered is the variation between the political conditions of reappraisal that created the caesura, putting the transmitted event into a recent past. In the case of Berlin, there are two caesurae. One is the end of the Soviet Union for the Russian Jews. For them and for the German Jews the earlier caesura is the end of Nazism and the birth of Israel, and for the German Germans the end of the Third Reich. For the Chinese the caesura is the end of Maoism in 1978. For the Taiwanese it is the end of Nationalist martial law in 1987. All of them herald the abandonment of the past and the promises of a brighter future that were a part of that past. They all bring about attempts to know and acknowledge the abandoned past, but within a new political context, such as the Neo-Nazism of some Germans, but also a gentler nostalgia for a previous past of Heimat and of family, or the nostalgia for Maoism in China but also the revitalisation of genealogical memory and local temples stretching into the pre-Maoist past. This occurs even while political and personal effort to abandon the past behind the caesura continues, for instance in commemorations and reminders that it must never happen again and in historical and other kinds of academic research and writing devoted to that past and its repercussions. This book is a contribution to that body of work. All these terms, targeted violence and aggravated indifference, caesurae, and family repair, occurred in the course of writing as a result of the comparative triangulation or simply in trying to understand each case of interplay between different kinds of transmission, the more personal and the more public. The main variable of the conditions of reappraisal is the power of official governmental authorities over the writing and teaching of history, and in the politics of commemorating and explaining the event: this power of disposal is a power of authorising archives and of authorising stories. That is something from the original research design that the actual research has reinforced. It has been found that where such power is least dogmatically exerted and where there is most possibility of forming archives and contributing to the way the event is known (as in Germany), personal transmission is most involved in institutional transmission. Where the power of disposal is most dogmatically exerted (as in the PRC), personal transmission is most muted but, when expressed, is surpris-

12   Introduction

ingly similar in many particulars with the official version, though there is little participation in the writing and documenting of history. Where the originating situation was most politically confusing (PRC and Taiwan) there is most caution. Even the doctors, teachers, and other so-called (in China) ‘intellectuals’ (zhishi fenzi) in the generation of those who lived through the famine were not interested in, or they avoided being interested in, the rewriting of the history of the famine. They leave it to the professional historians, journalists and demographers, who have slowly moved towards further reappraisal by a gradual testing and stretching of the boundaries of tolerance held by Party-led publishers and censors (chapter 3). By contrast, a few of the ex-coalminers who were victims of the Taiwanese event, without any pretensions to being intellectuals, wanted there to be a museum about the event, to which they could contribute the few documents and photographs that they possessed and with their own contributions say what had happened then and since. They said that a museum would be more alive and changing than the memorial erected by the County government. Some of them also indicated that they agree with the opinion of the authors of the two volumes of interviews with them, published by the County, that the story as told so far has been politicised by the two main coalitions of parties in Taiwan and this has put them off (chapter 6). They are inclined to keep to themselves their more confused and politically sensitive memories of the event and what they had learned about it and about politics while they were in prison. Even the Berlin families, in the most welcoming context and indeed while being the most active in taking records, held back a sense of their own relation to Russian history, German history, and Jewish history, commemoration, heroes and God (chapter 9). In sum, in all three cases, interpersonal transmission and family archives are strongly affected by the different politics, both of the time of the event and of its reappraisal. But in all three cases also, the most interesting finding is that some quite strong reservations are held about both, which provides a potential for other narratives about the event and its consequences. I have called this potential resource a ‘reserve’, using both its senses, one of holding something back in reservation, the other of being a resource for another historical narrative.

Why Transmission and Why Not ‘Memory’ I have preferred to describe the object of my inquiry the ‘transmission’ of state violence and grievous loss. My initial orientation was to describe the motivation to transmit as melancholic mourning turned into grievance. Others have gone further and attributed the vagaries of transmission, its silent effects as well as its compulsions, to trauma. But in the course of the research and com-

Transmitting Loss   13

parison both have been found to be inadequate or simply irrelevant. What survivors told their families and us was vivid. But what motivated the telling, some of it repetitions of oft-told stories, other stories told only rarely or just the once and for the first time, is too varied to identify in any one way. In addition, our research was not clinical. So while we can describe indications of strong feelings, what they were in each case – the mix in each case – was beyond analysis. Instead of guessing individual emotional states, I have concentrated on suggesting what social senses or feelings might have determined the telling: fear, shame, pride, avoidance, embarrassment, and others. Very few of the survivors to whom we spoke exhibited the symptoms of post-trauma syndrome, and none transmitted trauma. Nevertheless, in the discourses of commemoration it has become common, in Taiwan and Germany, to refer to ‘collective trauma’ and its transmission. I can find no evidence of this in any clinical sense. Instead, the usage is interesting as a rhetorical device, as an analogical appeal to a personal state of distress. It can further be argued that a predominant political culture of being a victim, with its accompanying mythic history of persecution, and its contrasting figures of identification – the downtrodden and the strong – does mobilise the capacity in everyone to imagine trauma out of their own experiences. Can we call this imagination and its public culture ‘memory’? Certainly, the subject of this book could be accurately described as public and interpersonal ‘memory’. But I have come to the conclusion that ‘transmission’ is better because it draws attention to the activity and stresses the social nature of both individual recall and public narrative and commemoration. ‘Transmission’ avoids the constant need to say that social (or public) memory is not a fixed social system, and the various strands of public memory are not necessarily cohesive, as the Durkheimian originators of the study of social memory assumed and then sought to demonstrate in their idea of ‘the social’. The strands of transmission are, rather, a number of linked activities and resources and occur in different modes. Memory proper is a capacity of human cognition and feeling. It is individual. But it is possible to understand individual human memory in more social terms, as the relation between learned habits (semantic memory) of telling stories, episodic (or autobiographical) memory, and public narratives. But this does not cover the fullness of the dynamic interaction between personal recall and various modes of transmission covered by the term ‘social’ or ‘public’ memory. The dynamic that interests me comes from two kinds of experience – of memory and of learning. On the one hand recalling something experienced, recalling it to oneself or for interpersonal transmission, can produce not just an interpretation but also possibly an alternative or more conflicted sense of what is transmitted much more simply in public memory. On the other hand recalling even personal experiences is strongly affected by

14   Introduction

what is learned through the transmission of public memory. We all learn habits of how to tell a story, in various registers and genres. So there is a dynamic between the experiences and the ways of sharing experiences that are learned in the process of remembering. Public and social memory are often used so broadly as to include all forms of transmission, including the documentation and issuing of histories. This can be justified by counting all modes of archiving and transmission as resources for official and non-official discourses and the narratives that can be learned and transmitted by a social group or the population of a country or any other social formation. But I prefer to reserve the word ‘memory’ for knowledge that is appropriated as a truth for that person and transmitted as such, and to do this without assuming congruence with a larger group – this has to be demonstrated empirically. I think it is necessary to distinguish history as a disputable attempt at factual reconstruction, for instance a history of memory or of a ritual. In addition, as will be elaborated later in this chapter and again in the conclusion to this book, personal and familial transmission may include what is learned from reading histories or from museums and other public media. But these public media cannot include the personal detail and naming that a memory includes. For what I have just called ‘memory’ I prefer and hope to demonstrate the validity of saying it is in a different temporality and a different mode of transmission.2 Biographical memory, including autobiographical, and the way another’s life is remembered, always contains many directions and details, often conflicting and chronologically unsorted. Public memory sorts. So does the removing of snippets of biographical memory triggered by this and that in everyday life into the contexts of lifestory interviews, and then sorting them into chronologically ordered stories, as has been done for this book. So, I and my research colleagues have participated in the simplification of personal memories. But I have also tried to convey some of the confusion and have held on to what has already been introduced as the reserve in intimate transmission, distinct from more public transmission, history and commemoration. Quite apart from exclusion or alternative versions of history and commemoration, interpersonal transmission may be publicly recognised in other modes of transmission than the ‘public memory’ of narrative historiography and commemoration altogether. Ritual forms of recognition of loss include many that are not state-organised and may have no direct reference to a state. All three cases contain examples of all three: interpersonal, public, and ritual transmission. In addition I have found most intriguing the non-verbal effects in the younger generations of the violence of aggravated indifference, starvation or the firebombing of cities. In Germany, the most evident effect was the energy that went into the rebuilding of cities and the economic miracle. Similarly, the Chinese expansion of cities and rebuilding and enlarging of homes with

Transmitting Loss   15

more expensive materials was a turning of their backs on the period before 1978. But more evident from our interviews is how the younger generation turn their backs on the generation that had lived through the famine despite their being constantly reminded as children to eat up because they should consider themselves lucky to have what is in their bowls. It is in the pursuit of material well-being and the negation of their parent generation’s hardship (acknowledging it without wanting to have anything more to do with it) that the famine is most commonly transmitted (chapter 5). There is also a Chinese and a German avoidance of nationalism in localism. In Germany, non-Jewish Germans tend to avoid nationalism in favour of pride in their region of belonging or of residence (chapter 10). In China, the resurgence of local temple cults and the refounding of ancestral halls and genealogies in the area of our fieldwork has accommodated the suffering of the past, without specifying it, in the course of reconstituting local identity and its history, which local authorities both encourage for tourist interest and income and try to incorporate into a new nationalism (chapter 5). German Lokalpatriotismus and Chinese revival of local temples and ancestral genealogies are thus distinct modes of the transmission of loss. In Taiwan we found its complementary opposite, the verbal transmission of the violent event was stressed most by the very few interested in local history. For the rest their concerns were even more specific; family repair, in particular death rituals and the refurbishment of tombs, were most important and urgent (chapters 6 and 7). Such modes of transmission are entirely devoid of any requirement for state recognition.

Different Temporalities at the Same ‘Time’ What is held in reserve from current public transmission does have a potential for the telling of other narratives and senses of past and future, but it is embroiled in family dynamics. Beyond visiting and communicating in other ways, such as eating together, joint budgeting, joint care for elders and children, and telephone calls, the longer-term ways out of which familial being is repaired and maintained are not the abstract concepts of blood or law, but stories, which I have called ‘family myths and vignettes’, and a number of loci that are a common reference or place of actual gathering: an old house, a recalled place-name, or simply named and shared places of residence and belonging, tombs and temples. In the original design of our inquiries, the problem of recognition was emphasised. It has already been alluded to: the relation between interpersonal – which was mainly familial – and more public transmission. I wanted to ask

16   Introduction

whether those who had suffered violence, or their children or grandchildren, had sought public recognition of their suffering, as a matter of justice or political history or both, and whether their interpersonal transmission was driven by grievance. In the course of the research, this question led to the possibility that we were dealing with two or more quite different ways of reckoning longterm time, each providing its own mode of recognition. The time of political history and of public commemoration is a time of events in a national narrative or in a narrative of chronological progress, development, setback and overcoming. Its revisions coincide with political change, but remain in the same mode, which I call ‘progressive time’. On the other hand, there is the time of family repair. It is what I call ‘reproductive time’, a time of repetition even if what is repeated is a reconstruction or a new version rather than a recovery of what was repeated before. Combined, the two kinds of narrative become one of family social achievement, failure and aspiration, and of nation as ‘family’ (chapter 11). The time of life stories, of the recalling of memory triggered by situation or by perceived objects or people met, can be chronologically ordered by the efforts of a biographer, or ethnographer, or a friend with whom the memories are shared. Life stories are like historical narrative in their references to events, and larger events can prompt the idea of shared fate, history and collective life, but in life stories they are complicated by mixtures with other events that are filtered out or separated in historical narratives. Family stories (in reproductive time) treat stories or events as repeated and shared mementoes that carry in their retelling passionate concern or on the other hand nostalgia, but chronology is only important in its reference to a shared past that is the material of a continued being. Family reproduction is a vulnerable, destructible, fragmentable but constantly renewed attempt to find fixed and physical coordinates (loci) and a changing but constant transmission of unifying objects (including letters, documents and photo albums), stories, pasts or origins in a place or a status in the past (of poverty, or of being part of the intelligentsia), and gatherings. Neither they nor more solid objects such as old homes and family tombs are permanent. But at any one moment in the constant repair and repetition of reproductive time they can be found again, after desecration and ruin, and serve as the fixed coordinates of family being. So the three studies became cases of the interaction between on one hand a social being recognised by state commemorative, monumental, ceremonial, museological, judicial, and written (documented) or visual (documentary) archives and case narratives, and on the other hand familial continuity and transmission recognised in rituals and family stories. Between the two there is a relation of recognition or reserve. However, in ritual archiving, the construction of tombs or the inclusion of lost ancestors in collective rites, and in the repeated

Transmitting Loss   17

liturgy of the year, there is another relation of recognition that cuts out the details of the family archive and the stories that the rites might trigger. The same emergent question of how two kinds of long-term time interact came from the observation in all three cases that civic commemoration and ceremony, museum and heritage were separated from death rituals and other kinds of ritual. Do they recognise and substantiate different social beings, even when both might refer to individuals and families? My answer is that they do. The individuals and families recognised in monuments and ceremonies of commemoration are recruited into a historical narrative as a general subject, such as ‘the Taiwanese’, or a locale, a city or Heimat of a larger entity such as ‘Germany’, or an event such as ‘the terror’ of the Nazi regime, or the White Terror, or ‘the three years of difficulty’ (the famine years). Whereas in the rituals of a religious calendar and death rituals they are absorbed into a ‘transcendent time’ of repetition, a third time distinct from both progressive historical narrative and family or reproductive time. The distinction between nation-narrative ceremony or commemoration and transcendent ritual time in the case of Jews is made between the newly added Holocaust commemoration and the old liturgical cycle (chapter 11). So, what will be traced through the following chapters are the conjunctions of these different temporalities and of the different forms of recognition they afford, or do not afford, to whatever is transmitted among intimates, close family and friends and trusted ethnographers, of events of state violence.

Events of State Violence The events will be described in a narrative of progressive time, with whatever evidential base we have been able to muster in order to verify the facts that will be recounted. Where facts are disputable, that too will be noted. In particular different possible narrations, each with a political charge relating past to present, will be noted, and so too will the political implications of what is reserved from these more public histories and commemorations. That they are ‘events’ in the many senses given to that word in political and moral philosophy and in anthropology I have no doubt, and this introduction will be finished by explaining this. Of course their significance for each person involved varies enormously, from an event about which they have learned but by which they have not been personally affected, like the Irish famine, which was not suffered by a good many Irish families but about which all knew and know and count in their various identifications with ‘Ireland’, to an event that has caused a major breach in what would have been familial transmission – the cousin of a family completely wiped out who nevertheless makes efforts, three generations on, to include that loss in his sense of ‘family’.

18   Introduction

They were events because they were profoundly disruptive to an order, which was a political order of government and of moral leadership. They are, as already stated, before/after moments for both familial and historical generations. They were more than disruptions; they were destructions during which a new order and moral leadership was at stake because the new order enthused some people who wanted it and fought for it, but the fight at the same time forced upon others moments of great and decisive action – to follow, to oppose, to save family, others, or just self from destruction. The Great Leap Forward was a renewal of Communist revolution, to create a new, collective identity and its future. The famine was a test and a reversal of that ambition and changed the relationship of the Chinese Communist Party and its leadership, locally if not also centrally, with its ‘people’ most of all in the countryside. The Third Reich was for many a welcome destruction of what they experienced as a failed order, in which they could not prosper, and a renewal of a wonderfully mystified order of German greatness. It was acted upon enthusiastically by very many ordinary Germans, finding the new person in themselves, while others who were not able to flee its construction were faced with decisions whether and how to oppose or to accept. These were not one-off decisions, but part of the conduct of everyday life. Everyday life, conversely, had the quality of a drawn out event. Performance of acceptance in both events was coerced by the very enthusiasm of the construction of a new order and person. But as their catastrophic consequences unfolded, equally life-changing moments were multiplied, in which ordinary people began to review their identifications with the political order and the greater object which it invoked. The denial of the regime to recognise the events of ordinary individual lives intensified the event and for many became a turning point of disillusion. There was massive and widespread destruction in China not just of lives but of trees and hillsides and home furnishings and stores, and in Germany of cities in the firestorms of allied bombings. The destruction and what had to be done to survive it were life-defining moments in both physical and moral senses. But the radical reordering and destruction are not to be confined to the terms in which many recall it, as chaos or as an external and fateful force. People acted and contributed to the event that other people, themselves included, suffered, so that it is important to use both the active and passive tenses in describing the events. War, civil war or wars of nations and alliances, and catastrophes such as the Shoah (the Hebrew word for ‘Holocaust’) are all too easily described as great events with some unknown and external agency that we can wonder about, wondering how they might have affected the people in their midst, who to blame as perpetrators, as if they brought about a wind of fire, with whom to empathise as their victims, how we might have responded to it. We may better wonder how they were brought about, in

Transmitting Loss   19

what social relations of action – for instance in what kind of followership and leadership, of what kind of political order. In any one location of the event there may indeed have been victims and perpetrators who came from outside, as Nazis and their willing anti-semites to Jews herded into ghettoes and then into labour and annihilation camps. In its emergence the event was the creation of an order that was surely a sequence of unpredictable consequences and improvisations but just as surely was ordered by and in a discourse out of which an ideology and a rhetoric were improvised. The Maoism of the Great Leap Forward and its later flowering in the Cultural Revolution was equally a fluctuation in the working out of a politics in conjunction and contrast with another, closely related politics in the same order, reaching the point of treating the other as an internal enemy. In other words, the events were in both cases structural, in that they occurred out of and within a political order, a point that should become more apparent in the next chapter. The events were an unfolding of historical tragedy, in which the actors were leaders and followers at every scale of a political order. They were also events in the order of family and kinship, of a certain affirmation but in racial and eugenic terms in the German event, and reduced to mere residence within a collective in the Chinese case. In both, the repair of familial order and reproduction became the improvisation of a new order of reference and belonging, but one that also recuperated and revised an older order that informed its innovation. The order of the catastrophic event itself is the subject which will now set the scene for how it was, in each case, turned into an abandoned past.

Notes   1. The research for this book was funded from 2002–2006 by the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK, reference number R000239521. I am truly grateful to the UK taxpayers who funded it, and to the Council for accepting my programme, giving me the chance to pursue such a personally rewarding and meaningful project, that I hope may, in return, provide some insights worth pondering.   2. For this clarification I am indebted to a conversation with Benedetta Rossi (31 Jan 10).

Chapter 2

Comparing the Incomparable: The Third Reich and a Phase of Maoism One balmy evening in Berlin I sat at a table in a garden café on Fasanenstrasse, waiting with Tsypylma for someone I had arranged to meet in this pleasant and neutral space. It became one of the most difficult and dramatic interviews in our project. The person for whom we were waiting was a therapist of first and second generation survivors of the attempted annihilation of Jews. I wanted to ask her view of the psychological transmission of loss. She arrived eventually, accompanied by another woman who she never fully introduced to us, but who seemed from what she eventually said to be the daughter of a survivor or a victim. As was our habit, I introduced myself and the whole project as an anthropologist asking about the transmission of massive loss, not just here in Germany but also in China. The therapist launched into an offended denial that the Shoah could be compared to anything else and went on into making a contrast between guilt and shame, claiming that China had a culture of shame but not guilt. We spent more than thirty minutes on the incomparability of the Shoah, during which I tried to convince her without success that I was interested in the contrast and that the grounds of similarity might indeed be very slim. ‘To be selected for extermination is just not comparable with starving. It is simply not comparable, about that I am rock certain.’ She was of course right to insist that the Shoah was a targeted annihilation, more comparable with the Cambodia genocide. This was her own comparison – even though the Cambodian ‘genocide’ was not ethnicised or targeted on racial grounds so much as on an ascription of class. After this unexpected, but with hindsight entirely expectable, blockage of the topic I wanted us to discuss, she tensely told us that she and her patients felt beleaguered by anti-Semitism, incidents of which were a daily occurrence. She and the other woman told us that in Germany anti-Semitic attacks are so rife that ‘we have to be very careful to whom we disclose our Jewishness. At the same time we cannot say we are Germans. That would be to say we are perpetrators as well as victims, an absurdity.’ They do not say they are German, just that they hold a German passport. The Shoah lives on in their minds as a possibility.

Comparing the Incomparable   21

The other woman then described how, in the small town where she had lived until three years before, she received three death threats in the post. Emotionally it feels like the possibility of a new Shoah, even though of course it is not state supported, she said. A swastika was scratched onto her car. Had she reported this to the police? It took a while to get the answer that she had, but that it was dangerous to report it because then your picture might appear in the local press. Had she reported it to the local Jewish Community (Gemeinde)? Yes. But this did not raise in her any expectations or hopes. It is linked to the state and it was through the state that her residence was put in danger. Someone in the police registry where everyone in Germany has to register when they set up residence must have given her address to the local right-wing youth. Another incident she recalled for us was on the way to synagogue on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement, a major holy day in the Jewish liturgical calendar). She and the other Jews of the community had to pass through a phalanx of parked cars with Palestinian flags draped over them. Finally she moved to Berlin to get away from this terror. In Berlin one can be anonymous and the Gemeinde does offer some protection. But even here you are in danger of being attacked if your Star of David amulet is visible, and she showed us how the high-necked vest she was wearing covered it. You have to keep it hidden, she said, using the same word versteckt that was used for Jews hiding in Berlin during the war. Another time, in another place, a lecture hall in the University of Xiamen, the hilly city on the sea in Southern Fujian, I was presenting a sketchy version of what follows in this chapter. There were polite questions afterwards and then from high up in the back of the hall, a young man stood up and readied himself in something like the pose of revolutionary heroes. He wore a red and black jersey with a Chinese flag in its pattern above his left breast. Glaring from under his beetle brows he said the comparison was imposing a Western perspective. The genocide of the Jews is not comparable with the Great Leap famine. The starvation during the Great Leap Forward was an acknowledged mistake of the government, which has remained our government. Those who suffered the famine were not victims. I reflected afterwards that unconsciously I had been expecting the usual Euro–American frisson of respect at the mention of the Judeocide. Instead, for him it is a faraway and incomparable event and he is right that I am in danger of expecting the Judeocide to be the centre of incomparability, whereas for him the famine or rather the now somewhat distant event in the corrected project of China is the centre of incomparability. Others objected to my comparing Mao with Hitler. To them I replied that I had not been likening them. Rather, I had contrasted them. Mao had no racist agenda. Much of what his leadership had achieved was of lasting good. But again I felt chastised because I had risked offence by the comparison.

22   Introduction

Should I persist in the comparison? I had already criticised (1999) the analogy drawn by Vera Schwartz between recalling the killing and torture of intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution with recalling the Holocaust. Not only is there no similarity in the scale – the proportion of intellectuals, let alone the actual number – of those killed to the number and proportion of Jews killed. There is also no similarity between the industrially organised annihilation of Jews and others with the mobilised and personal persecution of teachers, cadres and officials or the civil war between factions of Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. But also the ritual and other traditions in which these losses are recalled are quite different and therefore so is the significance given to them. Beside all this, the tragic event of the Cultural Revolution is in both scale and number far less than the Great Leap famine that preceded it. After all these reservations I do persist in the juxtaposition of the Third Reich with a phase of Maoism that links the Great Leap Forward with the Cultural Revolution because the contrasting natures of the histories in which the Third Reich could occur and the Maoist revolution could occur are instructive. Also, by introducing some more anthropological themes it can be suggested how these two events became imaginable and were realised. The rest of this book will be about recovery from these events and from one of the last acts of the civil war between Maoist Communists and the Nationalists in government, which took place in Taiwan in 1952 to where the defeated Nationalists had retreated. They are all recoveries from situations of stark bipolarisation within a country into friends and internal enemies.

Imagining and Realising Subhumanity: The State of Being between Death and Life My first anthropological premise: I do not suppose it is controversial to assume that every human being has the capacity to hate and fear and that every cultural environment provides imagery for such hate and fear. The images are often of monstrous, semi-human forms of life. They are always between death and life, but some can be fierce and full of energetic if malign life, others a form of death in life. The two are combined in the extraordinary threat of the subhuman. The hated and feared are often also imagined as causes of extreme forms of imbalance or blockage of bodily intakes and flows. Such imagery is the stuff of rumour. Malign forces are causing blockages, poisoning us. Their transmission and institutionalisation are the starting point for an anthropological contribution to political theory, which asks ‘in what circumstances are such images of subhumanity acted upon and realised?’.

Comparing the Incomparable   23

Take rites of exorcism as a key example of realisation. Exorcism is peculiar in that it treats individual cases but also conjures a mass imagery of ghosts and demons. At the most benevolent and ambivalent end of the imagery, rites perform a combination of pity and care as well as extraction and expulsion of an invading spirit, restoring it to its proper place. Then there is accusation, humiliation and degradation of a person or people identified with invasion. What is much more concerning is the same on a large scale, more in conformity with the imagery of a mass of demons and ghosts: expulsion or extermination of the objects of fear and hatred and of those with whom they are identified. When these objects are identified as a mass and with a population category, exorcism becomes what has been called pogrom, after the way Jewish populations in the Pale of the Russian empire in the nineteenth century were attacked and expelled from their settlements. The twentieth century produced a further extreme: programmatic extinction of the population category condemned by rumour of conspiracy and invasion. But this is a model for only one of the two kinds of state violence I seek to consider, targeted violence. I want also to include the contrasting violence of indifference to a population’s life-threatened condition, its being close to death. For that, further anthropological models will be needed. But the point for now is that both targeted and untargeted violence occurred in both the Chinese and the German states. In juxtaposing two instances of a government of a modern state taking its subjects into a massively lethal project it is hoped to understand both as realisations of images of subhumanity, many of which have been transmitted from ritually performed acts of exorcism, but extended both in their scale and their imagery by modern political conditions and mass media. I shall also have recourse to images of sovereignty, another long-established anthropological topic. In this juxtaposition and with such anthropological themes, answers will be sought to the following question: what social and cultural circumstances provide the urge to realise ghosts and demons, a threatening form of life between life and death and the means to act on it? Part of the answer is intolerance of ambiguity, in other words a splitting from a double that is an othered and despised self.

Doubling and Splitting Half of the political condition is an ideologically propagated splitting of what is ambivalent into a ‘projected’ and repugnant other self and an idealised mission in which the ‘owned’ self is involved. The other half is a mobilisation of the means, including force, to realise that ideology alongside the indubitably positive support for it.

24   Introduction

In his Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, a fictional portrait of the conditions of anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism in central Europe, Gregor von Rezzori (1979, 2008) describes the memoir writer making and breaking friendships and love affairs with Jews whom he also despises. He despises them as petty bourgeois imposters chronically and justifiably jittery about their perennial fate. The ‘I’ of the memoir describes himself as schizophrenically split in his own anxiety, which is to have the ambition to be great and not living up to his models of greatness. He also mockingly describes the disguises of aristocratic lineage hiding mixtures with despised others, although he at the same time inherits just such a line. He makes fun of the grotesque pretensions of both Jews and Nazis to be other than their petty selves, although he respects and loves some of those who become Nazi officers and some of the Jewish intellectuals he once knew. His saving grace is the heightened sense of absurdity in which this ambivalence is conveyed. In an essay entitled Bruder Hitler (1938) Thomas Mann portrays Hitler himself similarly full of failed longings and ambivalence.1 Hitler is a failed fellow artist, lazy, effeminate, impotent, incapable, and dreaming of greatness and manliness; the only thing he has is his eloquence. With this, in his ‘insulted greatness’ (beleidigte Grösse) he wants to subdue the entire world (sich die ganze Welt unterwerfen). And it is this eloquence, in contrast to bureaucracy and its distancing complications, that draws people to him, identifying with his rhetoric and person out of a longing for strong leadership. The very inconsistency and caprice of his speech, its switches of tone between beguiling and bullying, is convincing. It induces a trust that he must know the right manoeuvres. A combination of attraction and fear binds followers in their identification with each other through him. In ‘The other question’, Homi Bhabha (1994) describes stereotyped images in colonial discourse as a doubling, dividing the self to serve the fantastic desire to be pure in origin and projecting everything else into the colonial other. Doubling entails disavowal. In fact there are two disavowals. One is the refusal to see in the other a replica of the (mixed) self. The second disavowal is a refusal to see the other as the same but different, such as the great mixture that no ‘true’ German can admit. The repetition of the projection is compelled by disavowal, by the unrelenting pressure to refuse to see, a refusal that seeks security in the assertion of the stereotype as the real. Once the stereotype has been used, offering realisation of the desire for purity, it produces it own dynamic of compulsive repetition. Disavowal of the human in the subhuman involves a compulsive refusal of similarity. The fantasy of being pure in origin is obviously not confined to colonial discourse and this account of racist imagery and discourse is indispensable for understanding state-mobilised violence in post-colonial conditions. But there is a need for greater precision in order to identify the point where ambivalence

Comparing the Incomparable   25

becomes doubling, or where doubling is still ambivalent and then where it becomes a more severely split disavowal. For this we are aided and instructed by what Lifton (1986) calls ‘a moment of technological inertia’. The moment of inertia (his metaphor) of a contradictory logic splits all reality into polar opposites, such as into good and evil. His examples of contradictory logic, driven on by problem-solving inventiveness of organisation and technique, are Nazi bio-ideology and the Cold War ideology of nuclear deterrence, of mutually assured destruction. The Nazi logic is that of a biology for enhancing the life of the (German) people by removing from it both the people who are a cancer that is weakening it and the German lives that are not worthy of life. The deterrence logic is readiness to use weapons of mass destruction to prevent use of weapons of mass destruction. Both contemplate self-destruction, the Nazi as the deserved failure of the German people to revive themselves. The German people becomes an object of indifference to its leaders when it is split away as a failure, unworthy of itself, in the purification and strengthening project. The moment of inertia in both is a techno-logic of strategists (military and political) and their scientists, both inflated by the potency and the grandeur of their schemes. Such contradictory logic involves, according to Lifton, a psychological splitting and doubling in the primary agents of the politics and the implementation of that logic. He points out that ‘splitting’ involves dissociation of ideas from emotions. It is accompanied by disavowal of the consequences of a task, which separates technique from ethics and withdraws empathy with those who will suffer the consequences or who are intended victims. Dissociation that has become normal in the life of a person results in what Lifton calls ‘doubling’. Two key examples of the dissociation between the norms of a task and the ethics of a profession in which the same person is engaged are doctors Wirth and Gerstein in Auschwitz. Dr Wirth as a good doctor did what he could to improve conditions for prisoners in Auschwitz while as a good Nazi he organised selections for the gas chambers. Dr Gerstein as a good Nazi helped to develop the Zyklon-B gas and its use in Auschwitz, but as a good doctor he risked his life by informing Catholic officials and a Swedish diplomat of the horrors he was perpetrating (Lifton and Markusen 1990: 195ff ). Applying these concepts to China under Mao’s leadership, the doubling and the split is in the Party and its leader, who claimed to have sacrificed themselves for the people they professed to serve and righteously expected of them sacrifice of life as repayment of the boundless debt they owed to the Party. As will be argued, doubling and splitting in Maoist China is not just the people identifying themselves as such through the iconic figure of Mao. It is also the Party from the top down substituting itself for the sovereign people and proclaiming indifference to the suffering of the people with which it iden-

26   Introduction

tifies itself, occasioned by scientific policies of advance toward Communist abundance via class struggle.

Aggravated Indifference and Targeted Violence in Two Different Histories Each of the two instances of state violence juxtaposed and improbably compared here, contains both indifference to and targeting of masses of victims. Nazi state violence is on one hand the act of indifferently taking its people into a war that did them immense harm and on the other hand eugenic euthanasia building up to an eventual programme of extermination of targeted, pariah populations. The Chinese state violence is a sequence of first targeting Rightists, then creating undifferentiated victims of starvation in an enthusiasm of revolutionary change underlain with fear of being labelled Rightist, and then nine years later targeted violence again. The Maoist state of China in 1957–8 speeded up collectivisation and the close direction of agricultural and industrial production. In something close to a state of emergency, it suspended the norms of the First Five-Year Plan and began mobilising labour on military lines to accelerate grain and steel production. This was called the Great Leap Forward (Dayuejin). The Chinese Communist Party had created the apparatuses of a command economy and the means to mobilise the labouring population through mass organisations. Cadres at the lowest levels of command obeyed what seemed to them to be superior revolutionary authority and its scientific credentials despite knowing as farmers that the close cropping dictated from above to increase production would not work. The result was nationwide famine. At the same time, China’s departure from the Soviet model of management and its insistence on revolutionary transformation worldwide, not just domestically, gave occasion to sharp Chinese criticisms of Soviet departures from Stalin’s leadership. Chinese leaders treated the USSR leadership as hostile, and subsequently blamed the famine on its demanding repayment in grain for the industrial and military equipment it had supplied to the PRC. In fact insistence upon repaying the debt in grain was a political choice, made by Premier Zhou Enlai, despite knowing large areas of the country were in a state of famine. The Party-State’s partial responsibility for the famine was acknowledged twice, in 1959 and then in 1961, after the famine had been prolonged by a decision to continue with the Great Leap Forward. But the three acknowledged causes of the famine (natural disaster, state directives, and having to repay the USSR) were held apart. Perhaps nature or political chance are invoked and kept apart from state responsibility in any political reality that cannot take into account the long-term consequences of policy decisions. But

Comparing the Incomparable   27

if it is flexible, the state’s leadership adjusts quickly. Flexibility of response to consequential conditions is therefore the main issue. Will it be responsive, or is state leadership so rigidly fixed or dogmatically set that it will not respond or take consequences into account, even when its ‘own’ population is affected? In this case the decision to continue the Great Leap Forward despite knowledge of famine conditions and natural (but not severe) disaster, and withholding grain stocks from relief, exporting them instead to the USSR, indicates rigidity. Such rigidity is the political equivalent of splitting. There is another rigidity, namely preoccupation with internal Party politics and consequent indifference to outside realities. Mao’s insistence on collectivisation had been opposed by a number of senior Politburo members, including Liu Shaoqi and Bo Yibo advocating investment in agriculture to increase production. Now in 1959 they sided with Mao, having been scorched in the fire of his rhetoric and manoeuvres, agreeing to his advocacy of a Great Leap of further collectivisation and reliance on mass mobilisation alone to increase agricultural production and the reaping of its surplus to supply the costs of industrialisation. So the Chinese Party-State took two years to respond to the disastrous consequences of the Great Leap Forward. In spring 1959, Mao had managed to isolate his main critic, Peng Dehuai, who had pointed out what Mao also knew, that people were already starving. Instead of reducing the production targets as he had intended when he first received reports of starvation, Mao with the collusion of most of the other leaders, including those that Mao later denounced in the Cultural Revolution, attacked Peng Dehuai as a class enemy and increased the campaign for higher production figures and enforced it with a campaign against critics at all levels, labelled Right-Opportunists. Eventually in 1960 starvation was so prevalent and obvious that in 1961 the Party reversed the policy and decollectivised agricultural production. As Yang Dali (1996) has argued, this was the precursor to the economic reforms that occurred after Mao’s death in 1976. But in the meantime, those who had led the divesting of collective to household production were accused, with some justification, of building a great state bureaucracy and encouraging a restoration of capitalism and were subjected to ‘great proletarian cultural revolution’. Eventually they, in turn and with some justification too, accused revolutionary collectivisers of slowing production and engaging in a dogma of class struggle. Those who suffered famine were not given labels. They were not victims of a purge, as were those accused of opposing Party-led advance. The sick and the dead were the known but unheeded victims of political enthusiasm. What remains from the time of the starvation and of the Cultural Revolution, however, is an imagery of subhuman horror: of self-consumption, cannibalism and excess. Cannibalism and excess will be the third anthropological example

28   Introduction

of the realisation of subhumanity, after exorcism and sovereignty. But here the distinction as well as the links between indifference to people dying and hateful attacks on targeted people will be enlarged upon. Two things demand our attention:the aggravated indifference to the starving and the excessive violence perpetrated on the targeted populations. Wars of defence and the commemoration of soldiers fallen in battle are prominent in every culture. But we are dealing here with the much more problematic domestic victims of their own state’s violence. The main modern political condition that induces or reinforces a propensity to project and label a population sanctioned for indifference or on the other hand as a threat is first of all the declaration of a state of emergency. Such a declaration abolishes procedures of accountability to the people it leads and instead encourages mass reprisal by patriotic force. It is a declaration of measures to make visible a half-visible enemy, which can reside in anybody, and to expel it – render it really invisible. The most powerfully assertive declaration of emergency (often using the word ‘war’), which introduces what the political philosopher Carl Schmitt called ‘a state of exception’,2 is by the most territorial and the most populist or mass-based authority, namely that of a state but in the name of a people that transcends the state. An enemy of this people and claim to statehood is most thoroughly to be deterritorialised, dislocated, extracted, flushed out, made visible and then eliminated from its sovereign territory. It is subjected to excessive violence. On the other hand, those who are deemed not to have performed with sufficient self-sacrifice in expelling them and achieving the declared aim of the emergency are subject to disowned identification or aggravated indifference. For aggravated indifference to its own people, it will be argued that the prime condition is a splitting of the self-professed leadership of the people, steeling and sacrificing itself for the people but splitting itself from the people and treating it as those who owe their lives and must repay the leadership with total, active and heroic loyalty.

Humanity and Scientific Civilisation The notion of a state’s sovereignty, as distinct from a monarch’s claim of divine right over loyal subjects, has as its subject a population of citizens and as its object a population as a resource to be managed. Excluded categories are just objects, but the people are both object and subject. Beside the human propensity to fear and hate and the imagery for that combination of fear and hatred, this kind of state will bring into consideration scientific and philosophical notions of humanity. These are notions more specifically historical, inherent in the politics of the European Enlightenment that also gave birth

Comparing the Incomparable   29

to anthropology, philosophical and empirical, and to Marxism. They add to ideas that were already there (in folk tales, myths, and rituals) the positive idea of a natural nation, which is that of a relativised but universal humanity. The negative complement of this positive idea is a newly scientised subhumanity, the forms of which proliferated in Europe and America during mercantile enslavement of Africans and the centuries of colonial and imperial capitalist states. In the states of Europe and the settler states of their empires the result was the categorising of peoples in the context of a rivalry among nations for sovereign territory that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was described as a race war in the struggle for survival and supremacy. It was also described in terms of manifest destiny. The categorisation had religious loyalties attached to it and these had their origins in the religious wars that gave rise to the Treaty of Westphalia that is said to be a foundation of the international system. Each nation was multinational in that it had more than one religious confession and histories of ‘minorities’ within it, each potentially an outsider within. This is as true of China as it is of Europe, but here we come upon a contrast. Even though its civilisational influence has become part of the traditions of neighbours, such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam, the Chinese state, unlike Germany, is not close to nations on its borders that are equally strong rivals for the same civilisational and religious visions. Germany was the inheritor, as were its neighbour states, to the wars of religion – in particular the nearly fifty years of war between Catholics and Protestants called the Thirty Years War that ended in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, but was then followed by continuing wars and civil wars that combined religious affiliation with the rivalry of monarchs and their narrowly privileged electorates (Davies 1996: 563–69). But Germany was an inheritor with the particular circumstance that it was the rump of the Holy Roman Empire, now a ragbag of principalities and dukedoms, from which eventually a Prussian empire emerged much later than the absolutist monarchies of Spain, Austria, France and England. Out of these rival empires and the rival confessions of Christianity, rival nations were born. Out of the Prussian empire under Bismarck and its wars with France in 1870–71 and 1914–18, a German nation and nationalism grew, overcoming internal Protestant–Catholic mutual hatreds, just as it had in the other nations of warring Europe. The sovereignty of states to declare their people’s religious confession soon became the division of those states, internally as well as from each other, according to an explosive mix of confession and nationality, the various national denominations of Protestant churches and the various national and sub-national populations of Roman Catholics, and later the various nationalities of the eastern Orthodox church, and of all these from various denominations of Islam.

30   Introduction

Wars of religion on Chinese lands were either wars to establish a new Chinese emperor, such as the Taiping war for its brief empire in the nineteenth century, or else rebellions against imperial rule, such as Muslim rebellions in the far west also in the nineteenth century. But the reformers of the late imperial Chinese state concentrated on self-strengthening. The imperial state had only sought incorporation into its civilisational sphere and its world economic system, centred on the political capital of a land-based empire. Now as a nation that inclusion has become a fierce retention of what is taken to be an inherited territorial integrity. Its disasters as an empire-becoming-a-nation and then as a republican nation have been of three kinds. One is the disaster of neglect, corruption and weakness. The other is the disaster of overzealous self-strengthening and suppression of anything taken to threaten territorial integrity, exacerbated by incursion and invasion by other imperial occupiers. The third is the disaster of enforced inclusion of the last provinces to be added to the empire when they, or their autonomous minority peoples, seek greater autonomy. Hitler and his party were certainly self-strengtheners too. For ‘self ’ they picked up an already nationalistic mythology of the German volk, a mix of yearning for a post-Roman Empire of feudal hierachy, the Holy Roman Empire, and the messianic traditions of Protestant peasant rebellions, combining the traditions and distancing their rhetoric and action from both by a science of racialisation. On one hand the Nazi Party staged great ceremonies and stirring oratory, a militarisation and celebration of leadership and action. On the other hand it began a programme of eugenics to strengthen the race by purifying it. It did this by heightening the sense of a people threatened by internal as well as external enemies plotting against it, identical but opposite: the finance capitalism of Jews and the opposite threat of Jewish Bolsheviks, as well as the threat of under-classes and sub-peoples that were pictured as inferior, parasitic, degenerate, and lumpen.3 Hitler’s Nazi Party combined some of the ideological elements of a failed but very powerful socialist revolutionary movement with German nationalism that had been humiliated in the First World War. Furthermore, it incorporated the bureaucracies of what had been, under Bismarck, the first welfare state. Hitler’s state became a Party-State that protected its industries, took on huge public works and the industries of armament and military recruitment and training, continuing the process that had already begun of ending inflation and restoring full employment. At the same time it enslaved the labour of millions of the populations it conquered in central Europe to feed and provide for the German industrial economy. Most distinctively, Hitler’s self-strengthening was exalted as the purification and self-realisation of a race, threatened by the poisons of weakening agents. Mao’s Communist Party led a successful socialist revolution. Like Hitler’s Nazi Party it took an extremely vulnerable economy and mass misery into security of employment and income. It did this through building an entirely

Comparing the Incomparable   31

new state, based on the Soviet example but with the crucial addition of a policy of popular mobilisation through mass organisations. In sharp contrast to Hitler’s programmes, restoration of employment and income was achieved without a programme of exterminating or enslaving whole, racialised, populations. Instead there was and is a gulag of ‘reform through labour’ (laodong gaizuo), a proportionally much smaller slave-labour force of criminals including those held to be opposed to the state for acts of political opposition. The Chinese Communist Party won a prolonged civil war interrupted by a war against Japanese invasion and occupation. The threats to the Chinese Communist Party-State were deemed to be those of class enemies. What in Germany were different races were in China simply backward nationalities in a history of class struggle. Leaving aside the scale of horror suffered by both peoples, the contrasting predispositions go some way to explaining the emergency states that committed such different kinds of state violence in Germany and in China. In Germany the prehistory of the Third Reich was of nationalist rivalry for civilisational scope and its racialised self-strengthening. In China the prehistory of Maoism was one of self-strengthening for civilisational renewal taking on a national cloak and under the Chinese Communist Party emphasising class and anti-imperialism.

The Inside Outsider and Sovereignty This difference, and how it panned out through states of emergency in each case, will be further elucidated by turning again to the question of sovereignty and its capacity to declare an exception to normal government. An anthropologically and philosophically informed thesis by Giorgio Agamben (1998 and 1999) on sovereignty bases itself on the notion of bare life and Western ontology. It is a philological thesis on the Roman root of a form of sovereignty and its capacity for demonisation. He treats it as if it were universal, but I will treat it, like the national rivalries for the truths of European civilisations, as a marking out of the nature of state violence among the states of Europe and what were its colonial states, while remaining sceptically alert to its claim to be a universal theory of state sovereignty. For anthropology the subject of sovereignty appears most often in the study of kingship and rituals of succession. These rituals pivot on similar and crucial dualities, between the person or role of kingship and the person ruling, the throne and the body, or the figure of twins mobilised in rites of succession in which a king is killed and at the same time persists in another body or a replica of the body. A similar conception of kingship – the king is dead, long live the king – was current in medieval Europe, as Agamben notes from the famous study by Kantorowicz of the political theology of the king’s

32   Introduction

two bodies (1957). The point to draw from these studies is the close association of sacred authority with the gift of life that transcends the actual lives of bodies.4 The doubling, upon which Agamben rightly dwells, is the doubling of the king into the gift of life and the dying body or the corpse. But to these images are added the condition of the modern state that has succeeded the divine sovereign, which is to say the transfer of sovereignty from a monarch’s divine sanction to that of a state’s claim to represent popular will. Michel Foucault had good reason to name the politics of the modern state ‘bio-politics’ or the politics of life. Its institutions are a tracery of knowledge and social capacity concerned with the management of reproducing the life (bodies and subjectivities) of a population in a territory, regulated by a state and its laws. This is where Agamben makes his intervention. Foucault never considered the concentration camp as a key institution of bio-politics. Agamben remedies that omission by evoking a classical, Roman conception of sovereignty as the power to declare internal enemies to be non-persons. In this conception, sovereignty is the exceptional power to banish what was inside to an externalised space that is still within the territory of sovereign power. Sovereignty is the awful asymmetry of two figures, each one of which is both outside and within. One is the sovereign, doubled into life-provider and a body that dies, the other is a figure of bare life without any political entitlement whatsoever. According to Agamben the most primitive sovereignty, in the sense of first and foremost, logically and probably historically, long before the formation of the modern state in Europe, is this power to ban a subject. Like so many philosophers, when he writes of apparent universals he is referring only to the philology of European civilisation. The Roman tradition that, he claims, has become the basis for modern sovereignty is the asymmetry of supreme power and abysmal powerlessness. In Roman law someone cast into the condition of utter vulnerability by the emperor was homo sacer. Here sacer precisely did not specify a sacrificial object. It did not refer to a holy person. Neither did it point to a person to be punished by one of the ceremonies of execution. Homo sacer was one who could be killed at will without the perpetrator being considered guilty of the crime of murder, and whose killing was not a sacrifice. Agamben claims that the sacer in homo sacer refers to bare life, but not to the ambivalence of both taboo and breach of taboo that is the power and the danger of the sacred that he learned from anthropology, in particular from Mary Douglas’s Purity and Pollution (1966), in which pollution and uncanny power are both matter out of place. But he could have noted that sacred in this powerful sense serves well as a concept of precisely the sovereign authority that has the power to ban, which is to make someone homo sacer. The sovereign is powerfully and dangerously above rules of law. More crucially, there remains a similar ambivalence in the homo sacer. I do not think that he can

Comparing the Incomparable   33

deny that the handling of homo sacer, a figure of complete vulnerability and debasement, is polluting and frightening, precisely the figure of death in life. But I hold onto his main point that the asymmetry between the sovereign and homo sacer is much more extreme than the sacred mix of purity and pollution. It is more like that of the king at death: the asymmetry between the power of life and the powerlessness of the body that is almost a corpse. Sovereignty is power over life and the power to abandon life to death. This may be true of all sovereignties, but of course they will differ according to their different cosmologies of ‘life’. With the addition of the monotheistic stresses of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation the asymmetry becomes a doubling between the Godly and the Satanic, or between the Truthful and the betrayers and enemies of the Truth. Turned into secularity this becomes a polarisation between true (human) Being and the rootless polluters of Being. For many Nazi ideologues, Jews were not even a race, since races belong somewhere, and belonging was everything. Jews had no place.5 Or, as Supreme Party Judge Walther Buch wrote in Deutsche Justiz (German Justice), 21 Oct 1938: ‘The Jew is not a human being. He is an appearance of putrescence [in the German people].’6 The imagery of the parasite – the rat, the cockroach, the excrescence – is the preferred subhumanity in anti-Semitic cartoons and stories, realised in the brutal confinement of the rounded-up Jewish populations and their starvation. Agamben’s concept of sovereignty is valuable as a key to thinking about the modern state’s capacity for both aggravated indifference and targeted violence. It is already there potentially in the modern state’s prime object, which is the realisation of the life of a population that counts as its people and its legitimacy. Its powers of exception are lethally based on a notion of human life. They are powers of advancement for the sake of the people in their own future, for which they may be expendable, and they include purification, ridding the people of hindrance or threat to their advancement. The exception to normal order declared for the sake of a population’s life can be a marginal condition but it is one that can also be generalised to making anyone in a population a threat to its life. The global dissemination of the nation state will in each case have bred a different politics out of different political, religious and philosophical traditions of sovereignty and images of life and humanity. For instance, banishment and internal exile under the Chinese imperial dynasties meant hard labour in frontier regions (Waley-Cohen 1991). There was nothing equivalent to homo sacer. Neither is there a justification of God or a preoccupation with ontology in Chinese philosophy before translations into Chinese of the philosophy written in European languages. Chinese conceptions of humanity and of life are, to cut a very long discourse very short, based on responsive relations, not on intrinsic being.

34   Introduction

Instead, the imagery of inhumanity and of subhumanity in China mixes ritual categories of monstrosity – demonic monsters of great power – with ritual categories of pitiable but predatory ghosts, and their animal equivalents, not Satanic but something much more like werewolves and vampires. Among the animal equivalents are dogs, turtles, goats and snakes, all of them images of vile sexual propensities; monstrously inhuman animals such as wolves and tigers who turn humans into slave-like domestic animals, such as cows and horses; parasites, such as the five toxic insects; and most ambivalent of all, fox-spirits nurturing themselves on human breath, skulls, and effusions and appearing as beautiful women. Fox-spirits could also be worshipped as protectors, as could tigers and predatory ghosts.7

Sacrifice and Excess Out of the imagery they inherited, official propaganda in both countries realised demands for sacrifice and excesses of self-strengthening conduct. To draw together all that has now been introduced, on sovereignty and splitting and the state of emergency against an enemy within, the two different trajectories of realisation will now be elaborated on the basis of a theme of sacrifice and excess, common to them both. Chinese imagery was transposed into an emergency of declared class warfare. In that transposition, counter-revolutionaries and the remnants of defeated classes were turned into the living dead. But they were made visible by political rituals of humiliation, not by the more benign rituals of exorcism. The Party newspaper urged red youth to ‘sweep away all ox-monsters and snake-demons’ and in Fujian province the Great Leap campaign to increase production included the urge to treat farm tools as swords and spears to frighten the Earth god and startle the Dragon King to death (Fujian 2001: 152–54). Farmers responded in kind. Forced off the land by beatings to build a reservoir in the poorest part of the Province and lacking food they described the reservoir they were building as ‘the King of Purgatory’s Commune’ (Fujian 2001: 195–98). In the temporality of ritual life such images were between the historical and the eternal, cosmological monsters, protector gods with individuated stories of their past lives as well as their deeds after death, and demons who are monsters or the ghosts of past lives. In official propaganda they were turned from the eternity of death and of the dead in life into a teleology, in which something from the past, a survival, threatens to reverse or block a historical destiny and mission, the creation of socialist modernity. Michael Schoenhals (1994) has traced the phrase ‘ox-monsters and snakedemons’ to a speech Mao addressed to a propaganda conference in 1957, referring to the critics of the Party. He likened them to evil characters in opera,

Comparing the Incomparable   35

tempted on stage by the campaign to let a Hundred Flowers (of opinion and criticism) bloom, only to be denounced and labelled as Rightists the next year, exposed in order to be destroyed as ‘poisonous weeds’ by a shocked people. They were not to be treated as human, but as obstacles to the progress of humanity in general and the Chinese people in particular. Campaigns to wipe out such obstacles, categories of targeted violence, had been conducted from the first years of Communist enclaves before the establishing of total Party state power on the mainland, and they culminated in the Cultural Revolution. In a different teleology, the project of bringing about the German race from its potential, of uniting it as a destiny of action and vitality, transposed the imagery of anti-Semitism and of the brutality and tyranny associated with the East of the Slavs to a science of racial hygiene in which Jews were at once without true Being and a threat to it, and in the case of Russians and other Slavs backward and dispensable but a formidable and threatening force. The principles of Leadership and Will had already been remarked by Hermann Rauschning (1939) as the project of creating a German super-race. The project knowingly risked the German people.8 Immediately upon winning power electorally in 1933, the Nazi government issued an emergency decree for the protection of the people and state, suspending normal procedures of legislation, and proceeded to do two things simultaneously. It prepared for war. At the same time it began a programme of protection of the people. Two parts of this programme stand out as examples of the modern condition of homo sacer. One was eugenic killing and sterilisation. The other was internment or ghettoisation of enemies of the German people that it represented as a racial body, including the reduction of Jewry to the pauperised parasites and criminals portrayed in the imagery of virulent anti-Semitism. Gypsies were already kept out and reduced some distance away into a despised appearance, and would now suffer the same extreme debasement. The imagery of pauper and menace long preceded its Nazi elaboration and realisation. The Nazi propagators of such imagery acted upon it so as to produce in reality the social state of subhumanity that it pictures: animal categories of disease, threat or brute strength and stupidity, of great ugliness but also of seductive and deceptive beauty. It is an imagery that was available and used in polite as well as in beer-hall society, and it has its equivalents now in contrasts between high and low forms of human life that feed the racisms of the world. But in this extreme case it was realised first in confinement and starvation, then in extermination and labour camps. In China, the Great Leap Forward of 1958–61 and the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76 came within a regime that had relied on mass mobilisation campaigns for the implementation of policy. It was a regime that had placed little reliance on due procedures of law since the Great Leap Forward began. Revolution from above was renewed in that campaign, but had to be toned

36   Introduction

down in 1961. Then in 1966 the ministries of state, the administration of a command economy, and the main central apparatus of planning and of mass mobilisation, the Communist Party, all became objects of rivalrous mass mobilisation of school and university students, workers and eventually even peasant farmers under the inspiration of the ultimate leader and iconic figure of Mao Zedong surrounded by a small group intent on renewing the revolutionary impetus of social and personal transformation, suspending what rule of law there had been but maintaining the armed forces intact and unassailed. Under Mao, Revolution and the discovery and humiliation of its enemies became routinised into political rituals. This was not genocide, it was a classhistorical not a racial demonisation. But it was a split within a people. Such a split could be generalised, not just targeted. Members of the people, including the revolutionary classes, were to make sacrifices to their own future and to purge the bad parts of themselves. Claude Lefort (1986, chapter 9) describes this ‘totalitarianism’ as a denial of a division, a disavowal (as I would put it) that needs constant renewal because the division constantly recurs. The division is between a class of what he calls Egocrats (Party bureaucrats) and people. The disavowal is put into effect by means of the image of the social body and its division between People and Enemy within, to be externalised or purged (pp. 297–98). The totality breaks into its three parts: firstly the Leader, representative of the whole People and demanding sacrifice by the people (subdivided into class categories), which are the second part, and third is the purged parasitical part (also subdivided). In Maoist China, the leadership declared historical class enemies to be a danger to a (dogmatically declared) state of near Communism, which is near realisation, looking forward soon to a time beyond history, the time of a new universality of humanity concentrated in one, territorially bounded people. Revolution is historical, but to declare it to be on the verge of a state beyond history is possible only by denial of continuity, a splitting of the past from the present and ultimately a splitting away from all history. Racial and national–ethnic categories are available and used in defining the Chinese people as at once cultural and advanced, minorities as backward. Chinese usage includes many of the tropes of romanticisation of the natural and on the other hand of low social, technical and educational quality that the civilising missions of European empires also propagated. But in China, ethnic and racial categories were not mobilised in defining the enemies of the people. The conspiracy of capitalist exploitation and counter-revolution was not identified with a racial category of world conspirators (the modern anti-Semite’s Jew) but an internal and external conspiracy of counter-revolutionaries and revisionists (the post-Stalin Soviet Union and its allies). Where Nazism was a reaction to the crisis of capitalism, particularly acute in Germany, by identifying the powers of international finance capitalism as a racial conspiracy, Maoism attacked capitalist imperialism as a class hegemonic conspiracy.

Comparing the Incomparable   37

During the Cultural Revolution, so-called ‘bad elements’ of enemy classes, counter-revolutionaries and revisionists, were kept in a visible and constant state of degradation and bowed humiliation in every village. There seems to be a parallel here with Jews stigmatised with yellow stars, reduced to misery and rags, visions of debasement in the cities of the Third Reich. But the difference is that Chinese political prisoners were debased as, at least nominally, part of a treatment for reform: the possibility that deeds could overcome the counter-revolutionary and bad-class past and its bloodline. They were worked to death in many instances, but not with the ultimate licence to exterminate them as lives, only as a force or a class. During the Cultural Revolution there was a strange reprise of the worst scenes of famine: the eating of humans. In the factional battles of 1967 and 1968 into which the Cultural Revolutionary attack on capitalist revision and bureaucracy collapsed, several cases of cannibalism occurred in the southwestern province of Guangxi (Yue 1999: 229–37 assessing the reports of Zheng Yi 1993). Elsewhere, beatings and humiliations killed obstacles to the people’s future, or drove them to suicide. Here, in Guangxi, the zealous violence went to a further extreme: open feasting on their flesh. The cases were few in number within the total of those killed. But they are illustrative, as an extreme illustrates that out of which it extends, the extreme of a self-strengthening movement to ultimate advancement. In China, as in Europe, cannibalism is a sign of extreme barbarity, attributed to the ‘raw’ savages at the borders of civilisation. But in military actions against the savages, the Chinese, like the Europeans (Taussig 1987), could be as savage as their projections upon others. In Taiwan in 1892–93, there are factual reports in Chinese sources of military men selling the flesh of the ‘savages’ they had killed in markets, where it was bought and eaten in the belief that savage flesh is medicinal for strength and courage (Davidson, 1903: 254– 55). A similar story is now told of markets in human flesh during the Great Leap famine (Yang 2008). But its complementary opposite, self-sacrifice, in China is not the self-sacrifice of Christ for Mankind or of the soldier elite for his race or country but the feeding of the flesh by a son or daughter to save a father’s life – self-sacrifice for filial loyalty, for the reproduction of a line. The most popular image of these is Guanyin, the most popular salvation god, a bodhisattva. In her legend as the princess Miaoshan, she is the paragon of fleshly self-sacrifice, putting out her eyes and cutting off her arms to make the only medicine that will cure her father of a life-threatening illness (Dudbridge 1978). With this willing sacrifice as a ‘person without anger’, even though her father had disowned her because she refused to marry and have children in favour of Buddhist renunciation, she left the world. She is deified and worshipped as a continuation of her filial sacrifice in service to humanity. She is portrayed as having a thousand eyes to see suffering and a thousand arms for alleviating it.

38   Introduction

A much more male heroism is the story of the deified and fierce protector, a general, Xu Yuan, loyal to his emperor as he would be filial to his father, holding out in one of the last cities of the empire, besieged by a rebel general. The loyal troops are reduced to killing and eating their own children in order to survive and to continue the fight. The general is so ashamed of still maintaining a concubine while his soldiers eat their children that he kills her to feed the loyal troops and they all follow his example by killing and eating women, followed by old men. But even after this extreme act of heroic survival they have to surrender (Feuchtwang 2001: 196–97). With this story, recorded in the official history of the Later Tang Dynasty, and simplified in the stories of the god protecting territories in southern Fujian and northern Taiwan to this day, self-sacrifice and self-devouring degeneracy come very close. But they are still divided by the difference between heroism and shame. The condition in the siege is that of starvation, but the eating of children is still portrayed as the last resort of those defending order, not as a shameful manifestation of extreme disorder manifest in a famine. In the politicised language of the Chinese Communist Party under Mao, sacrifice was widely used to describe the relationship between the Party and the people for whom it acted, the people owing loyalty to the Party whose cadre had made great sacrifices for the people. But in the Great Leap famine, indifference to the actual people by the leadership of the people who deem themselves to have made sacrifices for the people became indifference to the shame among the people, including the shame of survivors swapping and eating their dead children (Becker 1996: 139). These in turn are the complementary opposite of stories of cadres going round to houses to dig out hidden stores of food for the collective canteens and further rumours of the same cadres in charge of granaries feasting secretly. Shame and secrecy keeps them separate. In the case of Cultural Revolution cannibalism, self-devouring shame is turned into heroic cannibalism in the eating of the enemy: victorious factions steeling themselves in heroic and self-sacrificial efforts for the Revolution in defeating and then eating members of the opposite faction labelled ‘bad elements’ or ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Hearts, livers and penises were eaten as acts of boldness and as a means of becoming even bolder. I do not know whether there is an imaginable precedent for this in Chinese myth and ritual, but it seems in any case to be a perverse, reversed, acting out of monstrosity. The monstrosity projected onto the opponent is turned into a self-strengthening prophylactic and monstrous heroism. Cultural Revolution cannibalism took to an extreme the pathology of self-strengthening. Borderlands of ambiguity are split into an amplification of small differences (factions); petty rivalries turned into revolutionary class differences in which the other is an already defeated but at the same time monstrous danger. This occurred in China as a country known to its Communist

Comparing the Incomparable   39

historians as a country of famine to be rescued through Revolutionary selfsacrifice speeding to abundance. What was kept apart by secrecy and shame – heroic self-sacrifice at the expense of children, women and the elderly on one hand and the shameful cannibalism of the starving on the other – here becomes brazen and open cannibalistic self-strengthening. A German equivalent but quite different self-sacrifice was the task of racial cleansing assigned to ordinary Germans who had to conduct shameful acts of enslavement, guarding slave labour and slaughtering dangerous, polluting races. They were shameful at the time, not just afterwards in the postwar German republics. In a speech to the Higher SS (State Security forces) and Police in Posen on 4 October 1943, to mark his taking over the Ministry of the Interior, Heinrich Himmler, Commissar for the Strengthening of Ethnic Germandom, said: ‘Most of you men know what it is like to see 100 corpses, side by side, or 500 or 1,000. To have stood fast through this and – except for cases of human weakness – to have stayed decent, that has made us hard. This is an unwritten and never-to-be written page of glory in our history, for we know how difficult it would be for us if today – under bombing raids and the hardships and deprivations of war – we were still to have the Jews in every city as secret saboteurs, agitators and inciters … We had the moral right, we had the duty towards our people to destroy this people that wanted to destroy us … We have carried out this most difficult of tasks in a spirit of love for our people. And we have suffered no harm to our inner being, our soul, our character’ (in Burleigh, 2000: 660–61). The unpleasant, hardening task for heroes of human decency included the driving to death of other living corpses than those of Jews. But the mass killing of Jews was the particularly gruesome task of racial hygiene that Himmler singled out, because of the particularly polluting danger that Jews constituted. In this case self-strengthening did not include self-sacrifice that could devour the enemy: pollution could not be turned into occult strength. It was the same split, only in this case that of steeling through revulsion. Another suffering, of the hardships of food and other shortages in the last years of the war into which the Nazi Party had taken its people, was also to be endured. Complaint and distrust of the news and the lies of leaders were policed, hiding the truth from a people already in danger of failing its heroic mission of racial self-realisation in war (Fest 2005).

40   Introduction

Conclusion This chapter has put forward an anthropological theory of the mass realisation of subhumanity, of a state reducing much of its population to a state of bare life, by the political condition for splitting in two very different cases and two very different traditions of demonisation. But in both, the most vivid images of subhumanity and their realisation were applied to populations targeted for exclusion, internal objects of fear and hatred. To see how they worked, anthropological theories of sovereignty and exorcism helped, though they are not sufficient in themselves. They require in addition the political conditions of inducement and splitting, by a state of emergency that pits people against their internal enemy. Crises of political economy are induced by a political leadership that declares a state of exception in a modern state that has as its project the improvement of life. Attention has also been drawn, in the same political conditions, to what I have called ‘aggravated indifference’ to the population upon which a state relies as its subjects. For this, another split in ideology was required, of political self-sacrifice by a leadership for its subjects from the demanded self-sacrifice of the subjects for its leadership. The political and economic conditions for both aggravated indifference and targeted demonisation are processes of crisis and social movement that lead to political splitting, in which the ambiguity of pity and fear, life and bare life entertained at the same time through the same imagery, its places and its realisation, is abolished and turned into a purifying or self-strengthening self and that which threatens it. But in the European case it is a secularised and scientised Christianity and Satanism, whereas in the Chinese case it is historicised and secularised with a science of revolution transforming an imagery of filial and patriotic sacrifice and of demons and ghosts. Nazi Germany’s project was the territorial unification, purification and realisation of the German people as a heroic race. Maoist China’s was the revolutionary advancement of humanity in general and the Chinese people in particular. For Nazi Germany, the targeted population was what threatened the German race with degeneration. For Maoist China, the targeted population was that of remnants of the class enemies of a past being surpassed by the revolutionary force of the Chinese people. The aggravated indifference of the leadership for its own population was, in the case of Nazi Germany, the Party leading its people to fight for its heroic mission and in its failure not deserving to be spared the death, destruction and humiliation of defeat. In the case of Maoist China, the people was a resource wastable in its own salvation, its own future. The precondition for both was a split between the representer, the leadership, and the represented. The leadership was itself split between ideological self-idealisation and cynical pragmatism in the use of force and terror to ensure its population’s assumed loyalty. In the case of

Comparing the Incomparable   41

Maoist China, self-sacrifice for revolutionary victory turned into starvation, becoming the monstrous images of hungry ghosts and shameful cannibalism for survival among the led population. In the case of Nazi Germany, the most self-sacrificial heroism of the leadership was kept secret and reserved for the repulsive task of eliminating Jews. However different are the available imageries for demonisation of the enemy within, certain characteristics of demonisation are widespread. One is the double of life, which is of death in life, bodies that look human but are monstrous or are like animals, microbes or machines without souls. Another is the sexualising and desecrating of organs and substances that debase and pollute and are selected for violation. When these images are realised in a modern state and its declaration of emergency, a dynamic of violence ensues, applied to an enemy within, and a terrible escalation occurs. It starts from a graded withdrawal of social opportunity, goes on to confinement and deprivation, and so to slaughter. It starts from the state of emergency, of a war on the enemy within, causing the split, moving from ambiguity to a more fearful and violent projection. In its course new images and their realisation are produced, the creation in reality of new figures of life in death and death in life. Whatever ends it, defeat in war in the case of Nazi Germany, in China a return to power of the leaders who had engineered the recovery from famine, returns emergency and the power of exception to the margins of the restored states. Normal if uneasy ambiguities and ambivalences are restored at the centres. The rest of this book will cover in greater detail what is recorded and recalled about these contrasting events. Some elements of the discourse that sustained the events, such as the very idea of Communism and the civil war in the case of China (to be expounded in the next chapter) and the idea of Heimat in the case of Germany (to be expounded in chapter 10), continue to be referents but under much changed interpretations. Throughout, reference will be made to the ghosts and demons that were the objects and images of state violence to see how they were ritually treated in the return to ambivalence. Then the concluding chapter, will suggest how they might be welcomed instead of expelled.

Notes   1. It was published in German as an essay in pamphlet number 25 of Das Neue Tag, March 1939, and ‘That man is my brother’ in Esquire, Chicago at the same time. A summary can be found in de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruder_Hitler. Many thanks to Hans Steinmueller for drawing it to my attention.   2. Carl Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty, put forward during the Weimar republic, is that ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception’ (1922, trans Schwab 1985 p. 5). Sovereignty, in other words, is the power to declare an exception or emer-

42   Introduction

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.   7.   8.

gency, in which the normal rules of law and representation are suspended for the sake of their restoration. That power has been conferred legitimately. Every constitution has in it the capacity in specified conditions to declare an emergency or a state of war. And even without a complete suspension of normal law, there are in every state areas of exceptional power, such as those governed by an anti-terrorism act and the powers for dealing with illegal immigrants. For Carl Schmitt, for a government to declare an emergency that excepts the law is the essence and the best part of sovereignty. It epitomises the principle of leadership, or Führung, which later, hailing the Nazi regime, he called ‘a concept of the immediate present and of real presence’ as against what he described as ‘the formalistic superstition of law’ (cited in Agamben 1998: 172). To decide that there is a crisis of public order and security is a decision to restore order and security. But the decision is necessarily above and beyond the norms of order and security. The subsequent decisions are also political decisions upon which the restored order will rely. The Nazi decree of 28 Feb 1933 dissolving the legislative assembly went beyond the Weimar Republic’s Constitution’s article 48 that defined the conditions for declaring a state of exception, despite the fact that they had by then been considerably broadened. It was what Schmitt theorised as a state of willed exception. Dan Diner (2003: 78): ‘What makes the Holocaust so exceptional is the fact that in a very dense period of time [its culmination being 1942–44], three or four different historical currents – anti-Semitism, ethnic cleansing, racial warfare [including the racialisation of class] and the practices of euthanasia, were fused..’. Maurice Bloch (1989) has theorised these dualities as on one hand eternal order and fertility that is a gift of sacred power held to be a natural virtue and a treasure, and on the other hand the conferring of that power on the king by tribute. The gift of life is already there, precious and indispensable, in the production of fruits, animals, crops and manfactures. Yet at the same time it has ritually to be found and recognised in the king in order to exist, and in the gifts of tribute made to him out of its production. His point is that the gift of life is an ideology because it disavows the gift that confers and constitutes its legitimacy. ‘Within this racialised imaginary, the Jews are not so much an inferior race as an anti-race, responsible for historical processes that are profoundly dangerous and destructive to the social “health” of other peoples – a threat to life itself ’ (Postone 2003: 89; his italics). From the collection by George L. Mosse, 1966: 336–37. For this menagerie I have relied on Kang (2006: chapter 2) and Wasserstrom and Wang (1996). For instance, Rauschning (1939: 95) notes a passage from Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf, deleted from later editions, in which he writes: ‘the German has not the faintest notion of the way the nation has to be swindled if one wants mass support’. J.P. Stern concludes his study of Hitler and the Nazi leadership principle of will (1975: 222–23) with a high-level witness to Hitler’s suicidal devotion to ‘brutal struggle to the uttermost’. The speeches of high Nazi leaders during the last weeks of the war repeat the same combination of willingness to sacrifice the glorified German people and themselves in their failure to live up to their chosen destiny (Fest 2005: 55–56).

Chapter 3

‘Communism’ in Mainland China and Taiwan: Official Transmission of the Great Leap Famine and of the White Terror Whatever the character of the political change that induces apology and recognition, public memory remains hierarchical. It is established and amended by an honouring and a denigrating power of authoritative recognition. As a result, narratives that are interpersonally transmitted, whether habitually or consciously, have a ranked or even completely excluded possibility of recognition in public memory. This is the thrust of what Jacques Derrida (1996) has described as ‘archive’. Exclusion can give rise to the demand for inclusion, which is to demand a new establishment of public memory. The feeling of such a demand can be long-lasting and a version of the feeling can be transmitted, either by those whose experience it was or by others on their behalf, as grievance, for instance about shared harm caused by the powers that control public memory. It may be transmitted as a painful feeling of social injustice and make or imply demands for recognition. But its demands and any resolution of them will be determined by the political and legal culture in which it is transmitted and by the surrounding authorities to which it can appeal. Groups of sufferers of shared harm can form into something like cults of affliction, finding solace in others who can be expected to know from experience what cannot be adequately expressed, and at the same time finding articulation in making a joint case for recognition and often also restitution. They can be continued over more than one generation from the original sufferers – prisoners of war from a particular camp, veterans’ organisations, or victims of Japanese chemical and biological wartime experimentation are examples. It is usual that the formation of a political will to organise such groups takes a generation. On the other hand, it can happen that shared experience does not have the means, the precedent, the motivation or the external

44   Introduction

agency and politics for a righting of wrongs. In the two cases that concern us, in the People’s Republic of China no such movement has emerged, and in Taiwan, as we shall see, the movement for recognition came to the ‘victims’ rather than from them. This chapter will compare and contrast official transmission of the Great Leap famine with official transmission of an act of state violence in Taiwan, quite another political and legal culture, in which not only have most of the victims been named and recognised, but a memorial to their suffering has been erected and they have received some financial compensation. The event in Taiwan was an act of targeted violence, against people demonised as being themselves or being in league with ‘Communist bandits’ (‘gongfei’). The government was one of military command, an extended state of exception that lasted until 1987, a state at war with an enemy across the straits of Taiwan and its agents within the island. The event started with an encirclement campaign by Nationalist (Guomindang) troops and armed police of some hamlets in the mountains of Luku in northern Taiwan at the turn of the year 1952/53. It has been established without dispute that the whole young and middle-aged male and much of the female population of the upper parts of Luku were rounded up and confined in the local temple, the branch school and a local hall where they were interrogated and beaten into identifying who were the leaders and participants in what was claimed by the police and the military court to have been an armed Communist base. In the end 35 were executed, 97 imprisoned, and 32 went into hiding or were kept under surveillance but not sentenced. In all, 164 of the economically active men were thus removed from the mountain area, which was most of the male working population of the worst affected parts of Luku village.1 The operation is now seen as part of the period called the White Terror. Most of the jailed and the close families of the executed and jailed have been named and brought together in two volumes of testimonial interviews by Professor Zhang Yanxian and two co-researchers (1998 and 2000). But the victims were never organised as a group. My research colleague Dr Shih Fang-long and I later interviewed many of those who had been imprisoned, many of them already interviewed by Professor Zhang, as well as others of the same generation who are also from the area, and a younger generation of people, both from outside who have come to live in the area and from local families near the area affected. A closer, more personal account of the event will be retold on the basis of these interviews in chapter 6. But first, this chapter will compare two establishments of public memory and their effects in political–legal contexts.

Communism in Mainland China and Taiwan   45

The Importance for Transmission of a Major Shift in Politics In the People’s Republic of China there were reversals of verdicts for many of those accused and condemned for being Right-Opportunists as early as 1961, when there was a mass amnesty of 70 per cent of cadres and all the ordinary people who had been so labelled (MacFarquhar 1997: 61; Bernstein 2006). As much as 2.5 billion rmb (renminbi, the Chinese currency; a worker’s basic monthly wage was around 60 rmb at this time) was set aside for payments through banks and communes in the worst affected areas to compensate for losses, and millions of tonnes of grain were purchased for emergency distribution (MacFarquhar 1997: 13, 27 and 61). At a hugely expanded work conference called ‘the conference of the seven thousand cadres’ in January–February 1962 in Beijing, a work report was agreed saying that in most areas the ratio of achievement to mistakes was 70:30, and that although the famine was partly caused by natural disaster, most of the responsibility was human and that the centre bore that responsibility. Mao said he accepted ‘indirect blame’ and that ‘the person primarily responsible should (sic) be me’. This prompted self-criticisms from the rest of the most central cadres and several provincial leaders, for not having investigated the realities behind the reports of achievements of raising production and procurement of grain. But all of them also upheld the correctness of the Great Leap Forward (MacFarquhar 1997: 137ff.). In 1981 there was a partial condemnation of the leaders responsible for the policies that led to the famine and a further bout of reversals of verdicts. The state of exception, which had been general, namely the mobilised politicisation of all into a class struggle of friend against enemy, was repudiated. Exception remained as a way to deal with the legal category of ‘counter-revolutionary’ but it was part of a slowly growing legal apparatus, a rule by law if not yet rule of law with the Communist Party in command of policy and of the police, but putting economics rather than politics in command. The Great Leap Forward was repudiated as part of the rejected politics of class struggle. But there has been no designation of the famine itself as a period of culpable disaster, such as the decade labelled Cultural Revolution. There has been no judicial sentencing of those responsible for it, as there was for the so-called Gang of Four held responsible for the Cultural Revolution. By contrast, in Taiwan, as in Germany since the Second World War, there has been an acknowledgement and an apology by the government of the same country for its past guilt. And as in Germany, what has made this possible is a more dramatic change in politics and in the writing of a past and its trajectory to a future than there has been in the People’s Republic of China. In Taiwan and Germany, there has been compensation and ceremonial commemoration for the families of victims. Common to both Taiwan and Germany are notions of the state’s guilt.

46   Introduction

The state of exception in Taiwan, rule by military command, was lifted in 1987. Underground dissidence could surface as political organisation outside and beside the single party of rule. The government of the Guomindang was induced by its first native Taiwanese President, Li Denghui, in 1995 to acknowledge its guilt for the massacre of civilians by Guomindang troops in 1947. Later, when those who had organised themselves into an opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party, won the Presidency, compensation and commemoration of the victims of the White Terror were added to this state apology.2 Not only has the secret name ‘White Terror’ been officially authenticated as history, so has its largest single operation been named the ‘Luku Incident’. On the other hand, in contrast to Germany, in Taiwan like the PRC perpetrators have not been tried. And there is a contrast to be made between the new histories in Germany and in Taiwan. German history now favours German pride in unification of the territories of the defeated Germany, in having performed a miracle of economic reconstruction and in becoming an economic powerhouse in the European Union, but not in the fulfilment of a single national historic destiny. In contrast, instead of being a part of a nation that is also a subcontinental civilisation, such as Europe or China, the history of Taiwan is being rewritten as the story of an island people treated as its own autonomous subject. On either side of the Taiwan Straits, both the PRC and Taiwan’s Republic of China have been able to maintain a teleology of progressive history, of a people in a modernising project. Whereas in Germany the caesura from a past of guilt has created a much more troublesome period of rupture, and a peculiar problem of temporality, which will be described in chapter 8. In Taiwan the same temporality is invoked without a problem. Instead the problems are those of disputable narratives. The accusation of being a ‘Communist spy’ was one weapon in an armoury used by the Guomindang military command of Taiwan to censor and eliminate political opposition to its rule. Ending this coercive regime by relatively peaceful but determined opposition makes The White Terror a period of Taiwanese suffering and humiliation before rising triumphantly towards freedom. The context of the commemoration of the Luku Incident is Taiwan’s burgeoning self-identification against the threat from the Mainland. But it is also possible and justifiable to understand the Luku Incident as a continuation of the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists, even though most of the villagers involved were not aware of the ideologies and politics of the China-wide conflict. Indeed, it could be said that the very name White Terror (Baise Kongbu) sanctions this, referring back to the slaughter of Communists by the Guomindang Republican government between 1927 and 1931. There could be an identification of Taiwanese compatriots with Communists as fellow sufferers of the Guomindang government, but, as will

Communism in Mainland China and Taiwan   47

be seen, this understanding is marginalised because the spread of the Civil War between Communists and Nationalists to Taiwan in the years from 1945 to 1953 does not suit the new history of Taiwan, nor does it suit the dominant politics of rival ways of opposing and at the same time negotiating with the PRC. The rule of exception that identifies Communists as an enemy within has been placed at the margin of a rule of law and electoral democracy. But ‘Communist’ is retained as an exceptional, still dangerous category. Even in her memoir about a childhood during which her father and other relatives, including her uncle Chen Dachuan, were imprisoned during the White Terror period, Chang Kang-I Sun (2006: chapter 11), a professor at Yale University, does not mention the possibility that her uncle, who took responsibility for the formation and leadership of the base in Luku, was sympathetic to the Communist leadership on the Mainland. She does record the fact that as soon as he returned from Beijing to Taiwan in 1948 he began secretly to publish books on socialism (pp. 77 and 80). The evidence is there, but the fact is not part of her narrative. There are two quite different uncertainties about the public memory of the Great Leap famine on the one hand and the Luku Incident on the other. In the case of the famine, with the change of regime after the death of Mao and change of the way history at the time was written, public memory has concentrated on the Cultural Revolution and its link to the Great Leap Forward as a leftist trend and error called ‘the Communist wind’ (Gongchan feng). The fear of being labelled ‘Rightist’ has been removed, but the subject of the famine is still censored. The verdicts ‘Rightist’ and ‘Anti-Rightist’ have been removed from most of those stigmatised by them, but they have been promised no compensation. In the case of the Luku Incident however, by being included in the White Terror, the victims have been commemorated and compensated; but there is still a political problem, even a taboo, on the question of being sympathetic to what was at the time labelled ‘Communist’. How these two exclusions are exercised in public memory, including the writing and teaching of history, and how they affect interpersonal transmission of the memory will be one of the two subjects of this chapter. The other is the effect of economic changes coincident with the political change of context.

Comparative Recalling of ‘Communism’ ‘Communism’ figures in both, but in quite different ways. For the Mainland, ‘Communist’ is not a scare word, as it is in Taiwan. Instead, it is in the name of the ruling Party. Yet, as already mentioned, one of the reasons now given for the excesses that caused the famine is the ‘Communist wind’. In Taiwan, ‘Communism’ still bears many if not all of the connotations of the Chinese

48   Introduction

civil war as seen from the perspective of the Guomindang. For the almost forty years of what is now named ‘White Terror’, from 1949 to 1987, the problem of true or false accusations of being a ‘Communist spy’ (‘feidie’) and the threat of being accused of panluan, subverting the Guomindang’s Republic of China, was constant. Added to that, the uprising against the Korean government and the US and UK decision to help that government, through the UN, and of the PRC to help the uprising, divided the Korean peninsula and determined the US to protect Taiwan from the victors of the Chinese civil war. In short, the Cold ‘hot’ War of the Free World against Communism added new weight to the threat and demonization of ‘Communism’. On the Mainland, ‘Communism’ is still in power but in charge of a change of politics and an even faster change of economics than in Taiwan. This change in policy has postponed to an indifferently distant future the era of Communist abundance. Instead it has sped up the appearance of capitalist inequality and prosperity, complicated by the fact that the leaders of the capitalist reform, including Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun, were complicit in the Great Leap Forward. In Taiwan, anti-Communism has been overlain by fear of a Chinese Communist Party-led threat to Taiwan. The existence of a Taiwanese Communist Party has been acknowledged in a few, but rare, publications and does not appear in any mainstream text. In the far freer electoral politics of Taiwan, there is a left movement that includes a vision of unification with the Mainland. The Nationalist Party, back in government in 2009, has been pursuing a long-term strategy of increased contact and reconciliation with the Mainland while maintaining Taiwanese sovereignty. The new politics, shared throughout the political spectra, stresses Taiwan’s distinctive and democratic political culture. Compensation for White Terror state violence against those accused of being Communist spies excluded those who were found actually to have been Communists. Just as in the People’s Republic of China, reversal of the verdict of having been a Rightist is subject to testing for having actually been a counterrevolutionary. The clarity of the issue in Taiwan is muddied by the fact that two prominent ex-Communists ran the Red-labelling terror – Gu Zhengwen, head of investigation and surveillance, and his boss Mao Renfeng, head of the Ministry of Defense Internal Security Bureau (Guofang bu baomi ju).3

History is ‘Useless’: New Realities and their Effects Mainland China One of our informants in a rural town on the Mainland told us that younger people, when hearing about what happened in the famine, observe that their elders had been ‘useless’ (meiyou yong – South Fujianese: bou lou ieng).

Communism in Mainland China and Taiwan   49

The same phrase, ‘useless’ (in the same language) was often on the lips of our interviewees in Taiwan as well. But there it always referred to the irrelevance of the history and the commemoration of the Luku Incident to current concerns of surviving and prospering. In our Mainland interviews it also refers to current circumstances, but only as a reason for the young not being able to understand how the older generation had put up with the commands of cadres that were obviously impractical and dangerous. It expresses incomprehension, rather than a context of what is useful. But the issue of the relevance of the past to the present is common to both. Across this gap between generations made by the great political and economic changes that followed the death of Mao and the trial of the Gang of Four, the young think that their elders must have been stupid to follow the commands of the Great Leap Forward. Apart from finding it incomprehensible in their own contexts, the young appear to reject the past of their elders, saying that it is not their own past. For their part, members of senior generations experience from the young a disowning of their pasts. Some idea of what the post-Mao generation say comes from a 31-year-old tea businessman in the main village of our Quanzhou research. We asked him: From whom did you hear (about the difficult years)? From my father’s generation. Why did they talk about them? It was ‘whip talk’ (bianci), to teach children ‘remember bitterness to think of sweetness’ (yikusitian). Did you learn about them at school? No Should it be taught at school? It’s in the past. Teaching about it is useless. But he did acknowledge a debt to Mao. He said that a fanshen, a turning about (using the term Mao had used for the Communist victory in 1949), had occurred because Deng Xiaoping took power. He added that Mao had created the foundation of enterprise (qiye), and then Deng had harnessed it. His wife agreed but had a different attitude to what young people should learn. She was the cadre in charge of women’s affairs in the village. She said that children should be taught about the years of hardship, including the years of hard toil under the leadership of Mao: ‘Now we have the single child system and a very high standard of living. We are very happy. It is important children know that lai zhe bu yi – to have reached this point was not easy.’

50   Introduction

The continuation of terms and genres coined during the Mao era is worth remarking in another instance from the young man’s response. ‘To remember bitterness to think of [present] sweetness’ (yikusitian) became a regular feature of ritualised meetings in which, during the Mao years 1949–1976, memories of suffering before the Chinese Communist Party took state power in 1949 were recounted in order to highlight Liberation (Jiefang – which also names the year 1949) from that suffering. Remembering a time after Liberation as bitterness was still felt as a very recent taboo on remembering bitterness by some of our informants, and during the seventies it had indeed to be kept hidden. Then we asked two middle school students who had been listening to this: Have you learned about the hardship years? No Have you been told about them by older people? No 4 The first ‘no’ is an effect of not bothering or not noticing, or not having them brought to their attention because, as we shall see, the three difficult years are in fact mentioned in school textbooks. If they had in the last few days been learning about it, they would have been able to repeat from their schoolbooks. These two at least had apparently not retained what they could or should have read. Among the abrupt changes occurring as an unintended result of market reforms has been the rebuilding of local temples, ancestral halls, and the refurbishing of the great houses of what in the pre-Communist past had been the local elite. One other result has been that the time of the Mao years, which had put all such institutions into a bitter and rejected past, are now in a framework in which they themselves appear as a time of past hardship. This diminishes the Mao years, making them one turning point among others that preceded the prosperity after the Mao years for those who look back from the present. The point to stress here is how the great changes and the generation gap have created a barrier to the transmission of the memories of those who lived through the famine. Although they are far freer to talk about it, few people in the next generation are interested.

Taiwan There is not the same sharpness of a generation gap, nor the same coincidence of political and economic change in Taiwan. The changes in politics marked by the lifting of martial law in 1987 and the Presidential apology in 1995 were

Communism in Mainland China and Taiwan   51

preceded by economic growth that had many years before 1987 turned Taiwan from a predominantly agrarian into a predominantly industrial economy. In Taiwan, what is of greatest significance is that, for almost two decades following the lifting of martial law in 1987, rising incomes and increasing leisure time coincided with the political movement of indigenisation, placing emphasis on Taiwanese history and identity. Prosperity has generated tourism in Taiwan. The mountainous areas of the border between the three townships (xiang) of Shiding, Xizhe, and Nangang, where the Luku Incident took place, had been remote. Now they are within easy reach of the growing city of Taipei and have become a resort for day visits. The economy of the mountains had until the 1970s been bare subsistence farming and coalmining. The execution or imprisonment of so many of the men had forced the women of the Luku villages to seek work in the mines or elsewhere. Many moved away. Then when the coalmines closed for economic reasons, the area was further depopulated. Its main sources of income are now related to tourism and associated industries of special foods (ginger, bamboo shoots, soybean, lingzhe edible fungi, tea) and crafts (woodcarving, dyed textiles, painting). On this basis outsiders are repopulating the area.5 At the same time there has also been a return of the victims to claim their land for themselves and their families. They come to their old houses and spend the days there, doing odd jobs, before returning to the town or city home of the child who looks after them. Between them and the outsiders who have come to live in Luku, there is both a generation gap and the distance of a native from a newcomer. We interviewed one outsider, the cook at a teahouse his boss built during the 1990s just above the road that is a bus route that brings visitors to this picturesque mountain area. It is immediately above the memorial to the victims of the Luku Incident, to the side of the road coming up from Nangang. Just down the hill from the teahouse and the memorial is the Taipei Tea Museum. Both the memorial and the tea museum are stops on the route of a coach tour of this mountain area. He gave us a business card of one such tour organisation. We asked him ‘Do many tourists who come to the teahouse ask about the memorial?’ ‘Many do.’ But he later qualified this when he told us that his parents, who lived in Taipei city, knew about it and added that ‘anyone over the age of seventy’ would know about it and want to know more. A Taiwanese customer in that age group had told him that he had been in Japan at the time of the Incident and read about it in Japanese newspapers, and that was why he had come to visit. In other words the generation that was adult at the time is likely to know about it and to be curious to find out more or just to remind themselves. But younger people are not as interested, even when they live in the area. For them, as for him, the memorial is one spot on a tour.

52   Introduction

Compare this with a man intimately connected with the personal transmission of the Incident. He was born in Luku and remembered as a child seeing his father talking to others of that generation about the Incident. They would constantly look around in case anyone from another place was coming near, and would fall silent even when he, a child in the household, approached. Later, the family moved to Taipei for his father to find work. The son married and had children in Taipei, divorced and then after his father’s death returned in middle age to his old home and rebuilt it. His father had warned him never to get involved with politics and politicians. In fact, in the course of his work in Taipei city, before returning to Luku, he had gone against his father’s advice and made good contacts with a number of senior politicians of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), then the chief opposition party. When Shih Fang-long informed him that one of these contacts had written a book on Communism in Taiwan, the skin on his arms immediately roughened into goose pimples. Both of them noticed and he observed how the fear from the old days had become instinctual. He was deeply immersed in the history of Luku and the Incident as part of his devotion to his father, one of the reasons for his return to the mountains of his birthplace. He has made sure that his two daughters, in the local primary school, do know about the Incident. But none of the other children at the school, even the few others who come down from the Luku villages, know or care. Another man, a good friend of the same age from another part of Shiding, took a strong interest in our enquiries and helped us because he is a keen local historian and a businessman in the flourishing tourist economy, whose promotion he is leading. He takes tourists to visit the temple where the villagers were detained and tortured. But even he thinks historical knowledge for its own sake is ‘no use’. Economic reason vies with personal experience and interest for him, as it does for some of the victims, such as the wife of one of the executed, who cannot help recalling her terrified experience yet also asked what use is recording it. For her, it is no help in bringing her husband back or in alleviating what she had to endure to survive. She does talk about it, but at the same time it is no use. Her daughter therefore knows about it, but seeks to stop her mother from recalling it in a vain wish to stop her suffering. For interpersonal transmission to be recorded and for a version of it to cross this gap between generations and include people who are not local depends on such public institutions as schools. The same applies to the public memory of the Great Leap famine.

Communism in Mainland China and Taiwan   53

School History Schooling is an instrument of inculcating habits of learning and senses of belonging, of having a shared past with other citizens and subjects of the country whose government has the authority to oversee the coordination of a national curriculum. In all countries, advance through schooling into higher education brings greater opportunity to read and to choose relevant reading. But before middle school, infant and primary education teachers have the greatest freedom in the school system to choose and create their own teaching materials. Within these generalisations, which are true of all modern states, there is great variation in the extent to which states govern national curricula and allow teachers and students their initiative in following them, in particular the curriculum of modern history and within that the history of the peoples of their nation. School history teaching in Mainland China and until very recently in Taiwan has been very prescriptive.

Taiwan Until 1996 the government of Taiwan ran a school system with unified and standardised textbooks in Chinese, history, social studies, and geography at all levels of schooling. The Ministry of Education had a monopoly on the production of textbooks. It was not until 2002 that local culture, with materials developed by the teachers, became a compulsory and graded subject in all of the first nine years of schooling. For higher levels of schooling a rewriting of textbooks has been in preparation for a long time. In the early 1980s, members of the Institute of History and Philology and then of the Institute of Modern History in the central research institution, Academia Sinica, were commissioned by the Ministry of Education to form two groups to prepare for rewriting history books for junior, middle and high schools, using oral history to compile materials, so that the history of Taiwan as and for itself, as distinct from the history of China, could be better included.6 One of the best-known such set of textbooks, ‘Knowing Taiwan’ (Renshi Taiwan), was produced under the direction of the then head of the Institute of History and Philology in 1995. In 1997 three similarly compiled textbooks, on Taiwanese history, geography, and society, were used from grade 7 (from thirteen years old). Their original overseer became Minister of Education in 2004 and as Minister he oversaw the autonomy of schools and their teachers to choose their own textbooks from both government and non-government publishers. One effect of this freedom has ironically been that with changes in the party of local government, the three ‘Knowing Taiwan’ textbooks could be abandoned in favour of others. In 2001, knowledge of Taiwan was integrated into a more general field of social studies and ‘Knowing Taiwan’ was withdrawn

54   Introduction

from junior high school and a new version introduced for senior high school students in 2006.7 In any case, those textbooks for middle and high school in Taipei that we have seen include only very short sections on the White Terror period, less than one page long. The teachers’ handbooks accompanying them expand the information to naming a number of well-known intellectuals and organisers who were prosecuted. But they include nothing on Luku. The only way in which it might be included is in primary school materials for ‘studying the locality’ (xiangtu jiaoxue). The county, in this case Taipei County, issues the textbook for local studies. But it includes nothing on the White Terror, let alone Luku. So that leaves the extra materials that teachers in the local schools have the responsibility to compile. We interviewed the head teacher of the school that caters for children from the Luku area. We found that the only local person on the staff of the school was the caretaker. The rest were from other parts of Taiwan. Only she knew about the Incident, but she has not been included in the compilation of teaching materials. Inclusion of the Incident depends on outsiders taking an interest, but at the same time judging what are the priorities.8 In 2005 the school organised the first trip for the whole school to visit local sites. One was planned to happen every year. Individual teachers go first to prepare students for their work reports (xuexi dan) to be completed after the trip. The teachers had asked local older people about the Luku Incident, but they were not willing to talk. The headteacher had noted the importance of the Incident when he came to the job and had kept a newspaper cutting about it, which he had framed and hung on the wall of his office. But he had subsequently found that, as he put it to us: There are so many points about the Luku Incident that remain inexplicable (jie bukaide mi). The older generation are not willing to talk about it (bu yuanyi tiqi). Their minds are still constrained by terror (kongju). If you ask them about it they feel you are threatening them with something. So from the school’s point of view, the attitude of the old seems to be that they just want to forget. The school doesn’t want to cause them to feel terror. All the teachers are from outside and they do not understand what actually happened in Luku so whatever they might say would be without a basis in evidence (buyao luanjiang). Moreover, there are many other things to teach about, such as the local geography, environment, community, and local culture. As for an unclear and indistinct historical event (buming bubai lishi shijian), the school has marked it [the Memorial] on the local map (xiangtu ditu) and taken students to visit it. That is why the teachers do not teach about the Luku Incident in the classroom.

Communism in Mainland China and Taiwan   55

The Memorial itself contains some information. A plaque on one of its low walls describes the political situation after 1949 as unstable and autocratic. It goes on to give a brief factual summary of the event, set in tones of emotive sympathy: ‘In the encirclement of the mountainous area of Luku, villagers were detained under suspicion of being members of an armed base of Chinese Communist sympathisers’ … ‘This was the biggest political incident in Taiwan in the 1950s’. … ‘The villagers were detained in the Vegetarian Hall of Luku, now called the Buddhist temple of Broad Enlightenment (Guangmingsi)’ where they were ‘beaten into confession or charged on the basis of informants’ intelligence without any evidence being brought forward.’… ‘The result was countless wronged souls [of those killed] and suffering in prison. Families were broken, suffering torments of grief.’ The last paragraph then states the purpose of the monument. It is ‘not only to commemorate those who died unjustly but to learn the lesson from their arbitrary arrest and sentences that human rights were crushed and that we should today join hands to make Taiwan a democracy and a society in which rule of law and fair justice prevail’. But not even this memorial text is used in school lessons. So, the Luku Incident is not taught locally because it is, on the headteacher’s evidence, still too frightening for the witnesses to give teachers their testimonies. It seems he is latching on to the condition of teachers doing their own oral historical research when he could have used Professor Zhang’s two volumes of interviews. The memorial’s inscriptions are written in the same tone as Professor Zhang Yanxian’s introduction to the first of two volumes of testimony that he published. Those two volumes show that victims were willing to speak to some extent. But they spoke to Professor Zhang and his two assistants in circumstances in which they knew that they could claim compensation for having been wronged. Now that time has passed. They were subsequently willing to talk to us, because we came to them recommended by close local acquaintances or, in one instance, with Professor Zhang’s own endorsement. But we might with some confidence conclude that the testimony they gave him and us was partial and that much of what is transmitted within families and among close friends has been withheld from public memory by political confusion and caution. Which leaves the younger generations of even the County in which it occurred ignorant of the Luku Incident. It has been commemorated and forgotten, perhaps as the current Guomindang government of the County would want, to forget the past and attend to the present and future. By contrast, the famine in China is definitely an item in school textbooks. But the problem there is how it is played down. The famine is not a named event.

56   Introduction

Mainland China The Chinese Communist Party is still a master of history. Its decisions on Party history to a great extent determine how and what history is taught in schools. A resolution was adopted by the 6th plenum of the 11th central committee of the Chinese Communist Party on 27 June 1981 on the 60 years of advance from its foundation in 1921. Its revising stress was on the decade 1966–76 during which Proletarian Cultural Revolution was maintained as a Party aim. The resolution sealed a repudiation of mass mobilisation politics and turned it and its culmination in the Cultural Revolution into a regretted past. The Party’s judgement of history between 1921 and 1966, up to the Cultural Revolution, was a balancing of accounts, measuring the predominance of achievements – of economic construction and of strengthening the cause of socialism – against what it named ‘mistakes’ (cuowu). These were the mistakes ‘of enlarging the scope of class struggle and of impetuosity and rashness in economic construction’.9 The famine is buried in the Great Leap Forward and the errors of Mao ‘and many leading comrades’, which look forward to the Cultural Revolution. Mao’s contribution to Chinese socialism is given the same rating as he himself gave to Stalin, 70 per cent positive, 30 per cent negative (Short 1999: 452). This is also how the famine is mentioned in school history textbooks. It enters as a blip in the period of socialist construction and rising production figures until 1966.10 The three years of famine are named ‘the period of three years of difficulty’(sannian kunnan shiqi). ‘Years of difficulty’ amalgamates this, the greatest ever famine in China and the only one to be nationwide, easily with previous and subsequent ‘years of difficulty’. It is also frequently referred to as the three years of natural disaster, which also amalgamates it with a long history of floods and droughts. This popularly repeated explanation is not entirely in accordance with the Party decision on its history. Nor does it accord with schoolbook attribution of causes, which are only partially ‘natural’. But its currency indicates the playing down of political culpability. There is far less fictional and memoir literature by those who experienced the famine, compared to the great amount about the Cultural Revolution.11 Rather, there are interviews, like the published interviews with Luku victims, in other people’s reports and collections of testimony.12 Other than these, as a retired epidemiologist and local historian observed to us in Quanzhou, the Great Leap famine occurs in the context of other narratives, outside school and official histories, in television and printed biographies. Similarly the film Blue Kite (directed by Tian Zhuangzhuang, 1992) included both the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution as times of internal conflict and top-led attacks and hardship. So does the book To Live by Yu Hua and the film based on it by Zhang Yimou, focusing on the endless suffering of one family.

Communism in Mainland China and Taiwan   57

Open publications of estimates of abnormal deaths or deaths due to famine began in 1984 as part of far longer histories and under the cover of larger series of demographic statistics and chronologies, not on this famine alone. It was not until an article by Jin Hui appeared in Shehui (Society) in 1993 that a study of this famine, by name, was published and it was immediately censored.13 In 1997 an article by Li Chenghui was the first publication on Great Leap demographic statistics, alone and by name, not to be censored. Indeed, it was issued by a Party publisher and its author was a former head of the Bureau of Statistics.14 Then in 2001 the Press for Research on the History of the Party published two volumes on the Great Leap Forward, including death statistics, for the two provinces of Yunnan and Fujian. In 2005 two articles by Cao Shuji were published in Zhongguo Renkou Kexue (China’s Demographic Science) containing the most complete and detailed statistics yet available.15 In 2008, Cosmos Books, a publisher in Hong Kong, issued a meticulously researched set of testimonies of the famine entitled Tombstone, a Chronicle of the Great Famine in China in the Sixties (Mubei. Zhongguo liushiniandai da jihuang jishi). It was researched by a senior journalist of the official news agency Xinhua and member of the Party (Yang Jisheng 2008).16 The book is dedicated to the author’s father, a farmer who died of starvation, and to the rest of the ‘36 million who died in the famine’. Though only published in Hong Kong, it is read in the rest of China. And remarkably, a member of the Institute of Philosophy of the central Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, Xu Youyu, has reviewed the book in the Hong Kong French journal Perspectives Chinoises 2009/1 (Xu 2009). In it he praises the book as China’s equivalent to Solzhenitsyn’s exposure of Stalinism’s gulag in the Soviet Union. In particular he praises it for exposing the official version of the reasons for the famine as lies, including the claims that there were unusual meteorological conditions in the period 1958–60, that China repaid Soviet loans with grain, that the repayment was demanded at all, and for providing documentary evidence that the Ministry of Commerce in 1961 on the contrary was grateful for Soviet fraternal shipment of a million tons of grain, which were not accepted by the Chinese government, and a half million tons of sugar which were. He is particularly shocked by two other revelations made by Yang’s documentary evidence. One is that not only did the top leadership reject the grain offered by the Soviet Union, it even refused to release stored grain to the starving but instead exported grain. The other is that a report of statistics compiled from each province by the state bureau of statistics in 1961 showing the loss of population went only to Mao and to Zhou Enlai, who ordered that the report and the compiled statistics be destroyed. The pattern is of an opening out by editors and authors testing the boundaries of censorship, with Party publications taking the lead. But there is still censorship on this subject, and there is caution – if not fear – among some

58   Introduction

cadres, who are wary of citing the famine as the time of worst past hardship. Censorship and the dangers of testing the political waters of intolerance are known by a number of popular sayings that warn for instance that ‘humans are afraid of being famous (like) pigs fear being strong’ or ‘the bird who sticks its head up gets shot’.17 Take Fujian Province’s history of the Great Leap Forward as an example of current official discourse. First it must be noted that this was a very limited edition of something like one thousand copies only. It was probably intended for scholars and Party members. It ascribes the famine to ‘mistakes’, to subjective recklessness being endorsed by Mao, ruining the objective conditions, which were a ‘solid foundation’ for further development beyond land reform (2001: 3–4). Otherwise, its judgement is on the side of what it calls ‘democracy and the legal system’ (p. 3), which comes through the details of each prefecture’s accounts as a condemnation of using extra-legal force, or commandism. It offers no vocabulary of evaluation other than that which was used during the anti-Leftist campaigns in 1959 during the Great Leap Forward itself, according to this same volume. It does report abnormal deaths, oedema, gynaecological diseases and reduced birth rates, with occasional adjectival evaluations such as ‘heart breaking’ (p. 147). But usually death and disease are recorded alongside economic imbalances and losses, such as land and crops left to waste. In conversation, when we mentioned the ‘three difficult years’ few people under the age of thirty knew which three years were meant. For instance when we asked (25 March 2004) a 19-year-old woman who had been to a vocational high school in the county town, what she associated with ‘years of hardship’ were the years of her early childhood in the 1980s when her home area was designated a poverty county and when her family had only vegetables to eat, and rice was a treat at New Year. She had not heard of the Great Leap Forward, though it is mentioned in middle school history textbooks.18 Even those who can identify the correct years, also think of a number of such ‘periods of difficulty’ (kunnan shiqi). Another woman, 31 years old in 2004, vaguely recalled (30 March 2004) that the Great Leap Forward was in the 1960s and that there was hardship, but this was the generalised hardship suffered by the generation of her parents. The present is a time of plenty, to which the same Party has led ‘us’, the collective noun of all of China. Our witnesses, those who lived through the famine, link their privation to the collective canteens, the small smelters, and absurdly close cropping. For many it is also linked to the Anti-Right campaigns. Such political criminalisation and persecution can become a subject for juridical review and reversal of verdicts. It is then a separate issue. But for our interviewees the campaign is simply part of the general experience of the Great Leap Forward, an experience of shared suffering. Even when that suf-

Communism in Mainland China and Taiwan   59

fering rises in anguish to the loss of members of family and infertility caused by malnutrition, it does not qualify for any juridical process. Instead, shared privation is the general sense made of the famine years. Concern with hope in the future and with the hardship still evident in villages in some parts of Quanzhou (though nothing like famine malnutrition), is combined with a reluctance to rake up bitter pasts. A bitter past, as some young members of the audience to a lecture I gave on this project commented, is anyway the standard of Chinese history.19 Those of the generation that grew up before the reforms say they are used to ‘guo ku rizi’ (‘spending their days experiencing hardship’), that was all to be expected from life.20 This does not indicate much of a change in the moral evaluation of life in official discourse. But there have in fact been a series of marked changes in the political and moral evaluation of the Great Leap famine. During the Cultural Revolution itself, editorials and campaign directives blamed it on Rightist sabotage and in particular on Soviet withdrawal of technicians and demands for repayment of loans. Among the 1980s revisions of these assessments many blamed excessive Leftism (and therefore the famine) on the ‘agrarian socialism’ of ill-educated lower level peasant cadres (Joseph 1986: 430–32). This is highParty intellectuals blaming the victims for their own starvation. Now the capacity to enforce as well as to demand sacrifices on such a comprehensive scale is no longer there, since the disaggregation of collectivised production, distribution and domesticity. Even so, those who came out of high school in the 1990s still had the impression that the years of difficulty were caused by natural disaster and the repayment of debts to the Soviet Union.21 Experimentation with greater freedom of setting books and curricula in schools, which began in Shanghai in 2007, turned against teaching about pre-reform, Maoist China and towards teaching about the world looking to the future, even in history. In other words, it blanked the past even more. The language of verdicts and reversals of verdicts applicable to political criminalisation and the language of claims to compensation is applied by and on behalf of victims of the Japanese occupation and its atrocities. It is not applied or even mentioned by anyone speaking about the famine. Only in the most general terms, of the pitiful condition of the whole people, does the language of victimhood appear. For instance, Felix Wemheuer reported (8 April 2005, at a workshop in Brandeis University) that villagers he talked to in northern Henan would say to him ‘the condition of people was piteous (laobaixing hen kelian)’. In a more causal expression similar to what some of the cadres we met reported as their blindness induced by fear or terror, Felix Wemheuer was told that before the Anti-Rightist campaigns ‘Chinese people had human feeling (yijian Zhongguoren hen laoshi)’. The campaigns divided families and thus made them less human. But this is still not reported as making them victims.

60   Introduction

The term ‘victim’ is used. For instance in July 2008 a mother whose single child had been kidnapped in Kunming described herself as a victim of the single child policy. But this was not part of political or legal culture for mounting a case of grievance, a politically or historically specified claim to recognition of suffering as it is for the Luku victims (shounanzhe) in Taiwan.

Conclusion: Hidden Histories There is a generation gap in both China and Taiwan across which personal transmissions of the respective catastrophes are almost entirely filtered out. But there are now written records of some testimonies, and others are being and will be compiled. The population that starved in the famine was not a categorised and targeted population, as were the Luku villagers in Taiwan, who were listed participants in a ‘Communist’ base. In the case of Luku, the naming of the Incident as part of the White Terror has, as has the naming of the Cultural Revolution in China, released those who suffered to write, speak, and be represented. Even though the writing of full historical accounts of the Cultural Revolution is still forbidden, ways have been found to publish personal records, fictionalised, or accompanying old photographs, or in histories published in Hong Kong. The famine has far fewer such records. Naming is a political historical act, driven by many considerations, not just by the victims’ claims on recognition. The victims become an important part of the politics of history involved in the naming of the past. When there has been no naming, as in the case of the Great Leap famine, the fact that the victims are anyway not a category or group adds to this negative effect. Even so, one remarkable parallel is that despite the naming of the White Terror in Taiwan and the inclusion of the famine in schoolbooks, the official, school transmission neglects them both. On the other hand, written records and the politics of history and public memory could be the relatively exclusive concern of intelligentsia and government, while other forms of transmission such as ‘whip talk’ to get children to eat up are sufficient for those outside the political class and the intelligentsia. This will be the subject of chapter 5. In Taiwan, the Compensation Fund and Professor Zhang and his co-researchers use the term ‘victim’ (shounanzhe – literally recipients of difficulties). The victims are remembered by name in his two books and they were named in a service conducted for all victims of the White Terror, held at the instigation and expense of the Compensation Fund in 2004. But the Luku victims distanced themselves from these and from the politics of rectification. They keep a large distance between this public memory and what they can tell and probably do talk about among themselves.

Communism in Mainland China and Taiwan   61

This may be true of the majority of the victims of the White Terror, but not of the intellectuals who became known as dissidents and are celebrated in memoirs and whose families endorsed this special service.22 Stories of fatal privation in the famine might be told and shared in the most severely affected villages and regions. But even in the Gansu village about which the anthropologist Jing Jun (2001) writes so eloquently and where the famine was indeed severe, it is part of the experience of being dislocated by the completion of a water-control project. It is part of another story. In areas such as Quanzhou there were only a few, mountainous areas where starvation was a vivid and prominent part of the experience of the Great Leap Forward. Where we interviewed, starvation, as distinct from malnutrition, was not common or did not occur at all. In Quanzhou, it is much more likely therefore that the Great Leap Forward will merge into the past before Deng Xiaoping, into a past that is known both as hopeful and as disappointing in relation to a new state of a strong China. However they are recalled, one thing stands out: that the experience was itself saturated in a politics of promise and disappointment associated with ‘Communism’. We know in the case of the Great Leap Forward what were the promises of social justice and eventual prosperity, given out in Party campaigns. We also know that they were almost immediately dashed and that prosperity, although not social justice, came later, benefiting another generation. In the case of Luku we can tell less, though still something from what was said to us directly about the longer-term senses that the villagers had of their own lives, what aspirations they might have entertained when the schoolchildren of a few selected families were given secret, out-of-school moral and political education by the leadership of this rudimentary base area23 (see chapter 6). An example of the political sensitivity of the history of the Incident, despite far greater freedom to publish, was shown when we obtained a video recording of the fourth and most thorough television documentary on the Incident, made under Professor Zhang’s supervision and broadcast in May 2001 on Minjin Xinwentai, a channel associated with the Green coalition that includes the DPP. Interviews included in this broadcast suggest that there were two phases of outsiders coming to Luku. The first were seeking refuge from the massacres following the 1947 incident of 28 February. They were then joined by the Taiwanese novelist Lü Heruo, who brought socialist ideas, and was joined by people who had been studying Communism in Taipei. They organised what their accusers say was named ‘a Base for the Brigade to Defend and Protect the Taiwanese People’ – even though it had no firearms. Some of the same people we interviewed are shown saying that it was just an idea and that they knew nothing about it, they had just been asked to attend meetings. After their descriptions of the torture of detention and the stories of two people

62   Introduction

who afterwards killed themselves out of shame (the father of one prisoner and the daughter of another) the most dramatic story of the documentary is told by the man who was in charge of the military operation and the arrests: Gu Zhengwen. He smiles as he tells how he tried to find out about his soldiers plundering the houses they occupied in Luku. And he smiles as he tells how three days into the operation he received a message from his superior asking who is the head of the Communists in Luku and how he had answered ‘someone called Wang’, at which his smile breaks into a laugh because he knew it was not really an armed base and that there were no real Communists. When we informed the man in charge of the planning department in the Compensation Fund office for the White Terror about the documentary, he was most interested and phoned the television channel that broadcast it, to request a copy. He was put off once, rang again and was then told it was too sensitive even for him to have a copy. The question is this: what is there in the documentary that a channel associated with the Green coalition finds politically sensitive? I do not know. It just is politically sensitive, which makes the commemoration of Luku into something more than humanitarian concern. The personal stories are intertwined with the political confusion of the Chinese civil war and its aftermath, the current stand-off between the PRC and Taiwan. Compensation was not to be given to those who could be shown to have actually sympathised with or were openly affiliated to a Communist organisation.24 This in itself has had an effect on what the ex-prisoners can say. There is little doubt that their being sentenced for being engaged in armed rebellion (panluan) is wrong. General Gu Zhengwen has admitted as much and there was no evidence of arms beyond a couple of pistols. But the extent of participation is a subject of great ambiguity and fear. Everyone we interviewed used the Taiwanese word camka – ‘participate’ – to describe what they were accused of, under interrogation. Among those of the same generation but who were not implicated, many are convinced the prisoners and the executed must have been Communists. They stress that they received money, as well as having their names included on the list compiled by the leaders. That there were leaders of an organisation comes out in a number of interviews, in which the cover names and ranking of the leadership are detailed.25 On the other hand, the victim-prisoners all claim that their names were included on the list on false pretences or that they were named by other villagers under duress. After hearing about payments, I prompted Shih Fang-long to ask one of the victims whether he had received money. He immediately nodded and then quickly shook his head and said nothing. To admit it would have risked, even now, being too closely associated with the organisation.26 How much else has been kept back?

Communism in Mainland China and Taiwan   63

The accusation of having participated is a threatening mystery hovering around the victims of the Luku Incident. Even those wrongly imprisoned can believe one of the others was Communist. One man who was imprisoned for eight years told Shih Fang-long that ten men from his hamlet in Luku had been arrested and one of them was executed. He supposed that the fact of being executed must have meant that his neighbour was Communist. And then he added ‘But I did not know any Communists’. For a few, prison was a political education. But for him what he learned only added confusion. The most outright accusation of their being led by Communists came from the wife of a man who was 26 years old at the time, a labour recruiter for the Taiyang mine where a guesthouse now stands. Her husband had been arrested because his youth name, not his registered name, was the same as one of the names on the list. After a week of interrogation, the mistake was acknowledged and he was released. She told us that her husband knew some of the accused leaders, who had worked in the Shiding township administration. On his release her husband returned to his village to vote in the elections for representatives in the new Shiding Township assembly, at which he was a successful candidate. Indeed he remained an elected representative in the assembly for the next forty years, including all the years of Guomindang military rule. She said quietly, ‘They were Communists’. Shih Fang-long asked who were and she gave the names of several people. Shih Fang-long observed that people say, as does the memorial inscription, that they suffered an injustice, that they were wronged. ‘They were guilty, not wronged’, she answered. And then she added, ‘But since then they have been granted compensation money; they must have been innocent.’ In other words, even this knowledgeable and locally powerful woman swings with the decisions of the court and the Compensation Fund. We asked whether as a township representative her husband had tried to do anything for the families of the accused. ‘No. It was state policy. There was nothing we could do.’ What about doing something for them after the lifting of martial law? ‘It was not the responsibility of a representative. No one raised the issue or even mentioned it because it was on the central state level, not a matter for local affairs.’ Later, Shih Fang-long asked the husband whether he had helped the prisoners on their release. ‘No’ he said and broke into silent tears. After a pause he said, ‘When I think about this I get very upset.’ In fact, his second son, sitting next to us on the other side of the table, told us that his parents had helped the ex-prisoners who had got work in the mine by asking them in to eat before their long walk back up into the mountains. As a boy he had heard from his paternal grandmother that the organisation was Communist but that it had only just started and was not powerful enough to threaten the government. He said he thinks that the organisers

64   Introduction

were ‘spies’ who deceived the villagers. Then he asked me why I wanted to know more clearly about the nature of the Luku organisation. I answered that the Incident is complicated by the implication with Communism because nobody, even now, will openly say they have sympathised with Communism or are Communist. In response he remarked that the Luku Incident will not enter history because it is not important for the whole state of Taiwan, in which the massacres of 1947 stand out. I observed that the Luku Incident was part of the White Terror. His older brother intervened to contradict me: ‘The White Terror was about oppression. Luku was about Communists.’ Even in the far less oppressive politics of Taiwan in 2004, the lasting domination of Guomindang ideological terminology still haunts the Luku Incident. It may be that the careful records of Professor Zhang and others, including Shih Fang-long’s and mine, contain hints at another possible articulation of their history. It would include acknowledging the political indeterminacy of the time, the different directions of personal aspiration and government into which the Luku villagers were being introduced. For some of the prisoners, it would include what they learned from fellow prisoners about Communism. It would certainly include their identifications with a locality, which has been passed on to their children. Pride in their locality combines with and at the same is distanced from that locality as a tourist destination. It may happen that in a changed political situation, the possibilities of recalling the Luku Incident as part of the history of social movements in Taiwan, or as something distinct from the White Terror, or as a more social issue than one of Taiwanese self-identification, will release other ways of recalling the Incident, at least as one of local significance. Similarly, it may happen that in some political change the Great Leap famine will be named as a great and deplorable historical event. If that happens, whether or rather how that will change the way its victims and their descendants recall it personally and locally will be a matter of great interest. As in Taiwan, the accumulation of materials for such a history is taking place. The materials are there for some kind of reopening of a number of silenced issues: the frequent arbitrariness of Land Reform and pre-Cultural Revolution Anti-Rightist campaigns, the famine, and the massacres of June1989. Remnants still exist of the fear that had, at the time, silenced transmission outside the closest social circle of those that experienced these events. In both cases this is an effect of current politics, despite the changes undergone since the original event. Recalling an event over more than one generation can never be without some degree of politicisation. No history is apolitical. Personal stories are always and only of interest to an audience or readership for current reasons. Those reasons may be to do with family and filial loyalty, not political. But none of our informants were recluses from politics and many of them did care about current political situations, even as they avoided the

Communism in Mainland China and Taiwan   65

politicisation of their past. They have their own senses of history (as the following chapters will show). Their interpersonal transmission, divulged from the reserve in which it is kept from a current politicisation, can be stored in archives. Those archives are marginalised by currently dominant standards of significance in both Mainland China and in Taiwan. But the marginalised archives can in turn become a resource for new directions of historical signification, politics, moral appraisal and identification as the publication in 2008 of new testimony and documents in Yang Jisheng’s memorial to the 36 million who died in the famine shows (Yang 2008).

Notes   1. Zhang Yanxian and Gao Shuyuan (1998: 30–31).   2. Its government formed the Foundation for Compensating Improper Verdicts on Sedition and Espionage Cases during the Martial Law Period, which has carried out in full its statutory programme.   3. I am most grateful to Professor Chen Yungfa, a historian of the Chinese Communist Party at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, for this information, provided during discussion at a conference there, 4–5 November 2005, to which I presented some results of our research on Luku.   4. A man in his thirties, who I met in London in January 2006 in the course of presenting this research, was born in a poor village in northwestern China. He was frequently hungry as a child. But when he told his parents he was hungry, wanting to eat more and therefore depriving his younger sister of food, his parents would admonish him ‘do you think you were born in 1960?’, which was the middle of the famine. So, even subsequent severe shortage was nothing compared to the famine. Such reminders in everyday domestic life are a marker of the event, even without its being an official historical event. But it is not easily specifiable.   5. A restaurant and health resort using Lingzhe fungi has been built where the Taiyang coalmine clubhouse was until the mine was closed. The clubhouse was the venue of an initial rounding up of ‘Communist’ suspects in the Luku Incident.   6. Many thanks to Dr Hsiung Ping-chen, one of the members involved, for this information.   7. My source for this information is a lecture by the Minister of Education himself at the London School of Economics, 10 January 2007.   8. The school has a large catchment area, including pupils not only from Shiding but some from the neighbouring township of Shenkeng, and it is a model school pioneering the integration of nine years, of primary with junior middle school classes. According to the head teacher there are two types of book: popular (minjian), produced locally, and centralised (tongbian), issued by the state. Teachers are expected to produce their own materials to complement both. Taipei County’s book describes each of the County’s regions, including this one, Wenshan qu. In addition, the school is a centre for a view of local affairs and

66   Introduction

  9. 10.



11. 12.

events, providing the locality with a library, which for instance contains a report (baogao) about the area produced by staff of the Huafan Buddhist University in Shiding. It omits the Memorial and the Incident. More personal reports (qinzi gongbu) can also be included. It is only in such reports that the history of Luku might figure in the future. Reprinted from Beijing Review 1981 as an Appendix to Helmut Martin (1982) Cult and Canon, p. 188. Note e.g. the compulsory textbook Zhongguo Jindai Xiandaishi (Chinese Modern and Contemporary History) bought in Beijing, published by the People’s Education Press (Renmin Jiaoyue Chubanshe) in 2000 p. 115, including a table of falling grain production, but no figures of deaths. Or Duti yu Zuoti Gaozhong Lishi (Reading and answering problems in High School History) Shanghai: Huadong Shifan Daxue Chubanshe 2003, p. 117, bought in Quanzhou’s Xinhua bookshop: ‘1st In 1957 the extension of anti-Rightist struggle was seriously overdone. To an extremely large extent, it harmed the activism of the broad mass of cadres, the masses and especially intellectuals. 2nd The problem of the speed and size of economic construction. In 1958, at the second congress of the 8th Plenary of the Party, the General Guideline was raised. The Guideline ignored objective regularities. It was biased in favour of and exaggerated the agency of the subject. In actual implementation [we were] blind to reality and pursued only speed … In 1958 the Great Leap Forward was launched heedlessly. The result was high indicators, blind instructions, boasting wind and ‘Communist’ wind, which became the chief manifestations of a Leftist tendency and the mistake seriously overwhelmed the whole country. It induced imbalance of national economic ratios. In addition natural disasters had a lot of influence. The Soviet government did not keep its promises. It tore up its contract of economic and technical cooperation. All this induced serious difficulties (yanzhong kunnan) in the national economy between 1959 and 1961.’ The exception is Mo Yan (1997). For instance: Chen Jiyuan et al (eds) Zhongguo shehui jingji bianqian (Social Economic Change in China) 1949–1989 Shansi Jingji Chubanshe 1993: pp. 321–22. ‘In Hebei province 8–10 US billions of jin of crops were damaged and in addition there was great waste in the big canteens. So in the beginning of the spring of 1959, shortage in grain farming had already shown itself. The CCP committee in Hebei province reported to the centre on May 3rd saying that: “currently the situation of our province’s crops is tense. There are thirty counties in our province which are short of food. The most serious include 10 counties.”’ ‘In Hubei the provincial Party Committee also reported: “the condition of crops is becoming more and more tense. From last year to this year the trend of nao liang – grain riots – has emerged here and there. Those places that were awarded red flags reported even more seriously that the spring farming is severe because of the difficulty in transporting grains from place to place. So we estimate that in some places there will be some famine.” “In Wuhan [city] more than two million people had experienced the condition of supply shortage….” In February of 1959 people in some places suffered from oedema because of serious shortage of food and some places suffered from the problem of abnormal deaths.’ And

Communism in Mainland China and Taiwan   67

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

Zhang Letian, Gaobie Lixiang – Renmin gongshi zhidu yanjiu (Farewell to Ideals; Research into the institution of People’s Communes) Shanghai: Dongfang Chuban Zhongxin,1996, p. 77: ‘The government publicly advocated that the bad results of the People’s Commune is because of natural disaster. And the government also described the difficult period as three years of natural disaster. In fact this conclusion does not fit the reality of Yan’guan and Haining areas (diqu). A middle-aged woman said she had four children and because of shortage of food she had to go to the canteen to get gruel for the children and she herself had to eat what they did not finish plus bark, and had suffered from oedema. In her village the skin of several people shone because of oedema stretching it.’ The most extensive collection of testimonies is by Li Rui (ed.) (1999). Jin Hui (1993) ‘“Sannian ziran zaihai” beiwanglu’ (Memorandum on the ‘Three years of natural calamity’) Shehui 1993: 4–5, Shanghai University. Li Chengrui (1997) ‘“Dayuejin” yinqi de renkou biandong’ (Population fluctuations arising from the ‘Great Leap Forward’) Zhonggong dangshi Yanjiu (CCP Historical Studies) 97–110, 1997: 2. Cai Shuji (2005) ‘“1958–1962” nian Sichuan renkou siwang yanjiu’ (A study of deaths in Sichuan in the years 1958–1962) Zhongguo Renkou Kexue 2005; and ‘“1959–1961” nian Zhongguo de Renkou Siwang ji qi chengyin’ (The 1959–61 death rate in China’s population and some contributing factors) Zhongguo Renkou Kexue 2005. He compiles his China-wide figures from County records. In his calculation there were 32.6 million deaths due directly to starvation and up to 12.4 million indirectly from related illnesses, bringing a total of 45 million. Many thanks to Chris Hughes for first drawing my attention to this book. Thanks to Chang Xiangqun, both for these sayings and for help in compiling the list of publications. Our talk, not an interview, was very relaxed but it was our first and only meeting. It may be that if we had known her better, we may have discovered that she could remember school and something more from her history lessons. Thanks to Maurizio Marinelli (10 October 2005) for drawing my attention to the standard phrase for this idea of China’s history: ‘eating bitterness’ (chiku). Personal communication from Yan Yunxiang, with thanks and respect (May 2009). These were what five PRC students recalled in a class for a Masters course that I teach at the London School of Economics (November 2006). One recalled that he learned more about possible causes – though not the actual figures of deaths – from a high school (gao zhong) class on the Great Leap famine organised by his history teacher. The teacher was dismissed from the school soon after. ‘In the same year [1952], there were more “subversives” from the ranks of civil servants (140) than professors and students combined (110). Workers (166) and farmers (166) comprised the two largest occupational groups, with shopkeepers and businessmen (114) coming in just after civil servants. Nor were soldiers immune (58), coming in right after the unemployed (65).’ Julia Strauss (2009) ‘Traitors, Terror, and Regime Consolidation on the Two Sides of the Taiwan Straits, “Revolutionaries” and “Reactionaries” from 1949 to 1956’ in Tobias Kelly and Sharika Thiranagama (eds) Traitors.

68   Introduction 23. According to interviews with two who received this political education and another whose elder brother did. 24. The head of the planning section of the White Terror office of the Compensation Corporation told us that if anyone claiming is found to have actually been a Communist, they are excluded. By October 2004, 57 out of 7,084 applications had been refused and 1,052 treated as mistaken applications (compensation sought just because a family member is in jail) or fraudulent. 25. They figure in the interviews conducted by the first historian to have documented the Incident, Lan Bozhuo, in the first television documentary about it. 26. Our friend with the goose pimples on his arm observed to us that now the accused sigh, saying that just for a bit of money I nearly lost my life.

PART I The Great Leap Famine

Chapter 4

Moral and Political Dilemmas from the Great Leap Famine In the course of the First Five-Year Plan (1953–57) all residence, production, distribution and exchange in the People’s Republic of China had been brought into a single organisational system. The Great Leap Forward then added domestic life, the raising of domestic animals and vegetables and the cooking and consumption of food, into this system in a further collectivisation. Domesticity and therefore the distribution of cooked food itself was collectivised into dining halls instead of home kitchens and eating was according to want, not according to work. People were urged to eat their fill. The organisation of production was directed according to instructions from above that offered the possibility through militarised and revolutionary enthusiasm and sustained hard work of reaching a state of abundance in grain and steel and therefore in everything else in a few years. Some responded to being able to eat meat and grain as if it were a festival, such as a wedding or a temple festival, which were the traditional realisations of generosity and abundance. Eric Mueggler describes women of the Lolop’o (Yi) minority in Yunnan province remembering ‘with a kind of astonished nostalgia’ how they had daily dressed in their festive finery to eat in the dining halls while the meat and grain taken from their households by their schoolchildren lasted (2001: 178). They believed, for a couple of months, that the new organisation and instruction would make this abundance last. In other parts of China, eating plenty had recently been a response to collectivisation of all property into Communes, when many villagers preferred to eat their livestock, poultry and stores than give them up to the collective (Dikötter 2010: 52 and 194). For them, canteen feasting could have been shaded by this recent memory. But in either case, soon meat and grain turned to gruel of boiled roots. Nevertheless, the idea that present hardship would eventually bring abundance was sustained. In Shaanxi province, speaking forty years later, people considered the current prosperity to be precisely the abundance promised, in the less

72   The Great Leap Famine

frenzied prospects that eventually prevailed, to come after they had endured twenty years of hardship and hard work (Guo Yuhua 2003). In addition to this description of the Great Leap Forward as mobilisation of a vision of Communist abundance, it is useful to think of it in a longer historical perspective as an instance of state-organised self-strengthening. Its aim was to make China as strong as its most powerful past humiliators, the UK and the USA, by the measures of development promoted at the time by UN economists: namely production of staple food and of the chief industrial material, steel. The backyard furnaces to create iron ingots from melted down iron utensils for steel production is often what is most vividly remembered about the Leap Forward and its futility. The achievement was to be driven by China’s own means, by its own kind of Communism, namely that of Maoist mobilisation. From mass callisthenics, organised in schools, workplaces and barracks, to the Party’s mass line through which the Party leads by publicising what its leadership considers to be the most advanced examples of mass organisation for food production and for military industrial strength, the Great Leap Forward was a Communist elaboration of the movement for a strengthening of the national essence (guo cui) that had started in the last decades of the nineteenth century. What was unique, rather than continuous with previous versions of Chinese self-strengthening, was the singular organisation of all life into ‘the great Me’ (da Wo) of the political and domestic body. The powers of coercion that the single organisation of production and consumption provided the Party and its leadership were unprecedented. It is tempting to conclude that the politics of the Great Leap Forward were those of coercive terror. There were indeed many cases in which brute force was used to discover and confiscate the tiny amounts of grain or sweet potatoes villagers kept in their houses. In some areas the scale and brutality of such searches were horrifically large, such as the notorious case of Xinyang prefecture, Henan province (Felix Wemheuer, 2005 and forthcoming). What was later condemned as ‘commandism’ was indeed a reign of coercion. But in most places, including Quanzhou, where Wang Mingming and I conducted research on the transmission of the Great Leap event, the main threat was that of shame for lack of enthusiasm. In any case, what needs explanation is the zeal or enthusiasm to which the death of millions was a matter of indifference. The ground for the shame was competitive manifestation (biaoxian bisai) of revolutionary ardour (Lü Xiaobo 2000: 84–85). We have to understand a politics in which the shame of being found wanting in that competition was enough for people to give, not just to risk, their lives without any threat of force or coercion. It was a politics of what Michael Dutton calls ‘intensity’, in which China was mobilised in a state of permanent exception, in which law and state administration were subordinated to revolutionary war and in which

Moral and Political Dilemmas   73

the people and their future were put at stake and their leadership acted not only to defend but also to represent itself as giving life to the people.1 Liberation, the revolutionary seizure of state power in 1949, was the moment in which a new life was given to the people. Of course this was the Party’s ideology, constantly repeated. But the ideology had been absorbed, and calling it ‘ideology’ is no more or less than naming the ‘freedom’ of liberal democracy an ideology. We cannot live without ideology, though we can certainly question any ideology. The absorbed ideology of revolutionary enthusiasm and gratitude for self-strengthening had to withstand bewildering switches of policy. But as we shall see, somehow it did.

Switches of Direction: Bewilderment with the Two Sides of Party Rule In the politicised language of the Chinese Communist Party under Mao, the word sacrifice (xisheng) was widely used to describe the relationship between the Party and the people for whom it acted. The people owe loyalty to the Party whose cadre and armed forces had made great sacrifices for the people. They can enjoy the benefits for which these sacrifices have been made and they must reciprocate – particularly when those benefits are in the future – by sacrificing themselves in order to bring about the promised future. The relationship is both like and unlike that of parental and godlike benevolence (en) which can never be reciprocated. The same word is also used to indicate the gratitude that responds to benevolence. Gratitude induces a willing sense of obligation to reciprocate by honouring parents and providing them with nurturing care and offerings. The political gift is like this reciprocation because the state official is a father and mother of the people (fumu guan). In revolutionary songs of praise to Chairman Mao he is often addressed as the father of China. A state official or cadre of the Party under the PRC could be expected to be close to the people (qinmin), not a distant benefactor. Filial virtue, a son’s duty, is here shared by all, including cadres, in the name of what the Party has already done for the people as a self-sacrificing parent. By this time, the Party had directed the control of inflation, created conditions of full employment, conducted the redistribution of land that gave basic security to all farmers, with Soviet loans embarked on heavy industrialisation, and raised hope of universal well-being in the near future through agricultural extension and collectivisation. Closeness to the people is the kind side of Party leadership, stressed when the mistake of use of force, which is the other side, is being criticised as ‘commandism’ (qiangpo mingling feng). This was the vocabulary used during the Great Leap Forward, and it still is. ‘Dayuejing’ Yundong (Fujian Juan) [‘Great Leap Forward’ Campaign (Fujian Volume)] issued by the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) History Research

74   The Great Leap Famine

Office of Fujian Province, Beijing: CCP History Publishing House, 2001 records that eighteen months after the launch in September 1957 of the Great Leap Forward, and fifteen months after its implementation at base level, in March 1959, following reports of famine, Mao Zedong wrote letters to the first secretary of the Chinese Communist Party of every province, major city, and autonomous region, in which he repeatedly stressed ‘caring for the benefit of the masses all the time’ (Fujian 2001: 55). During this time of halting the Great Leap Forward, Chen Boda, Mao’s main secretary, visited Jinjiang in his home province of Fujian and said that though the collective organisation of production should be kept, income should be according to work and officials should be kind and close to the people (qinmin guan) (Fujian 2001: 136–37). In the words of the Fujian 2001 record, the Jinjiang prefectural party committee (that included Quanzhou) ‘earnestly listened to the masses’. For example, some ‘masses’ said that ‘when they remembered what the Communist Party gave to them in the last eight or nine years they burst out in tears of gratitude, whereas when they thought about the last half year’s loss, tears ran from their eyes with sadness’ (pp. 132–33). In April 1959, the Central Disaster Relief Office in Beijing included Fujian among fifteen provinces with a severe shortage of grain. Not only was grain short; pork and egg production was half what it was at the same time the previous year and there was an acute lack of cooking utensils and farm tools. Shortages to the point of starvation had in fact already been reported from many parts of China to the centre from April 1958 onwards (Dikötter 2010: 67ff ), but there was no change in the implementation of the Great Leap Forward until 1959, when Mao in March blamed over-zealous local cadres and praised villagers’ evasions of their demands (Dikötter 2010: 86). Dikötter (2010) does not register this as heralding a major change, instead stressing Mao’s insistence on the Great Leap as good. But the Fujian (2001) compilation shows that a dramatic change did in fact occur in March 1989. It was a rectification campaign to correct Leftism. Complaints and criticisms were allowed on big character posters (pp. 67–68). A wave of retractions of policy followed, no longer insisting on public dining halls, loosening controls of distribution and the organisation of production so that households could again cultivate private plots. Production targets on collective land were lowered. These changes were heralded by apologies from cadres at all levels. Fujian province’s Party Secretary Ye Fei, who had personally met Mao, apologised to an enlarged meeting of fourteen thousand officials (pp. 55–56). This was the start of a campaign of rectification, of cadres giving accounts and apologising. For instance, in Anxi County 2,254 cadres apologized to the masses. Animals and plots were returned to households, cases of cadre embezzlement were uncovered and some of what had been confiscated was returned.

Moral and Political Dilemmas   75

But a reversal occurred just a few months later at the Party conference assembled at Lushan, a resort city in Jiangxi province. At this conference Marshal Peng Dehuai, one of the top leaders who had, like the others, visited his home and received reports of famine there and from elsewhere, criticised the policy of the Great Leap for bringing about disaster. Despite the reports of shortages known well by the top leadership, 2 Mao and the others present at the Lushan conference treated Peng Dehuai’s criticism as an anti-party movement. In July 1959 the Party reversed direction and launched a rectification campaign against Right Opportunists and relaunched the Great Leap Forward.3 This switching was frequent and must have been confusing, not just for the ordinary population of the political body but also for the local cadres who had to implement the campaigns. In the seven years between 1956 and 1963 there were 6 campaigns, each a reversal of the previous (anti-Leftist then anti-Rightist – 1956 and 1957; anti-Leftist then anti-Right-Opportunist – May 1959 and August 1959; anti-Leftist – 1960/61; then anti-Rightist in the Socialist Education Campaign – 1963). The language switched from having to be close to the people to having to use force to hunt out counterrevolutionary Rightists, from exposing officials and cadres who had hoarded the people’s grain to hunting ordinary peasant hoarders of grain. After August 1959, local cadres in Fujian were criticised for removing public dining halls and lowering targets of production; the proportion of households eating in public canteens was raised again from 50 per cent to over 80 per cent. Household plots were requisitioned again. The confusion of basic-level cadres is expressed in rhymes remembered from those times. Unfortunately we were not able to collect any from Quanzhou, but two Chinese colleagues have provided very similar rhymes, one from a village in central Jiangsu province, the other from a village in Hebei province. The rhyme from the Jiangsu village was: ‘rectification, rectification, the more cadres are rectified the more they go crazy’ (zhengfeng, zhengfeng, ganbu yue zheng yue feng); and from the Hebei village: ‘every year has a winter, every winter has a rectification, on spring days we are cadres, on winter days we are rectified’ (nian nian you yi dong, dong dong gao zheng feng, chuntian dang ganbu, dongtian jiu ai zheng).4 Rectification by closeness to the people made it the duty of cadres to apologise to the local people, investigate the extra-legal use of force and the abuse of privilege, and settle accounts. This was and still is known in the discourse of the Party and of democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and poor peasants as supervision by the people, even though such outwardfacing rectification was unusual. The anti-Leftist rectifications surrounding the Great Leap Forward, namely the 1956–57 Hundred Flowers campaign, the apology for commandism in March–April 1959 and the repeated apology in 1961, were of this unusual kind. Most other rectification campaigns were conducted by and within the Party with the help of the Public Security police forces (Dutton 2005).

76   The Great Leap Famine

A peculiar feature of the 1957 anti-Rightist campaign had been the targeting of localists. Jinjiang Prefecture CCP from its headquarters in Quanzhou sent up a report to the provincial Party committee of Fujian that in the Hundred Flowers campaign of 1956–57 Fujian cadres who had founded the old liberated areas in the province had criticised cadres of the army that had come south and had remained in office.5 Yang Dali (1996: 59) makes one of the key variables for the severity of the famine the local leadership of old area cadres, who were willing to mitigate centre-down instructions or were less eager to prove themselves to superiors than were new cadres. But Fujian was an area that combined both conditions – of being an old liberated area but with ‘new’ cadres from the north. Fujian was in the middle range of severity, but it was riven by factionalism. The cadres from the north recommended that localism be included as a target in this new rectification campaign. They accused localists of feeling that the Party owed a debt of gratitude to the people of the old liberated areas. This feeling, they said, was anti-Party, and its promotion a manifestation of class struggle in the Party, not an inner-Party struggle (Fujian 2001: 122–24).6 Localists were enemies. This insistence upon top-down self-sacrifice and the demand for selfsacrifice in return requires further elaboration.

The Demand for Self-Sacrifice: Aggravated Indifference These switches between being close to the people and having to use force against backsliding members of the people are evidence of a constitutive splitting process in the Party’s ideology and procedures. The Party from the top down substitutes itself for the sovereign people and, as in many of Mao’s speeches, from the top down the Party can act with and indeed proclaim indifference to the suffering of the people with which it identifies itself. 7 In China an extraordinary Party-State monolith was ruled by campaign directives. We can distinguish it from normal bureaucracy and the normal indifference of bureaucracy. To make this distinction, as previously explained I have coined the term ‘aggravated indifference’, which I distinguish from the ‘targeted violence’ that the Maoist Party-State produced. Targetted violence singled out and named those who were found to be unenthusiastic or to have plotted against the Party. They were actually or potentially ‘enemy’. The enemy is named and labelled. But aggravated indifference to the masses represented by the Party is the expected sacrifice of their lives by those who are friends. Herzfeld (1992) has argued that Western bureaucracy and by implication all other state bureaucracies modelled on it produce indifference. Bureaucrats perform an appearance of indifference to personal preference, even while operating relations of patronage or of prejudicial exclusion, in the name of universal rules of procedure and classification. Even when not acting on personal

Moral and Political Dilemmas   77

preference, bureaucrats practice a necessary irony born from the impossibility of implementing the ideals of bureaucratic and legal rationality. They grimly and ironically implement rationality as a template of tiny procedures of form filling and signature, which are the gateways to permits. Let us extend this account in two further steps. The first step is to include the police. In normal circumstances, as I found in analysing police violence in the UK (Feuchtwang 1992) the bureaucrat or the violent wing of bureaucratic enforcement, the police, is provoked into extra violence when something (someone) does not fit its template of expectations and is considered to be powerless but bothersome. Dealing with such a bothersome object often induces extra rudeness or physical force, which is the opposite pole of the person who knows how to cultivate personal relations and is able to reach a person senior enough to bend the rules. When such bothersome anomalies are named by a political command, as occurred constantly in Maoist campaigns, the Rightist or Leftist becomes the open target for rudeness and force exercised by a low-level cadre or aspiring cadre, seeking approval and promotion and so referring and needing to refer only to superiors in one or other of the Party-State hierarchies. This is targeted violence. It is not the same as the aggravated indifference of the Party bureaucracy to those it claims to represent. To reach aggravated indifference a further step is needed. In this step, we are concerned with the ordinary subjects of bureaucracy, neither those who are troublesome nor those with privileged access. The necessary condition for lethal indifference to ordinary subjects is the demand for self-sacrifice that accompanied substitution in place of representation by the Party of self-strengthening. Two substitutions were made. One was substitution of the Party for those it represented. The other was substitution of the Party hierarchy for all other regular bureaucratic hierarchies of state. Party documents (wenjian) replaced state planning and state experts. Economists and scientists were replaced by political will and competitive tests of political performance (pingbi biaoxian), using the markers of white and red flags (Lü Xiaobo 2000: 84–92). This is a bureaucracy of ideological superiors. To the idea that the more advanced, namely the substitute (the Party), can be disappointed in the ideological quality of those it represents, is added the idea that those it represents owe it their lives. Baselevel cadres look up out of enthusiasm and fear to those who are measuring their political performance and sideways at those who might by outshining them turn their performance into political disgrace.

Response to the Demand for Self-Sacrifice Among base-level cadres and in very many of those they mobilised the response was both ironic and fearful, as in the rhymes, and at the same time there was a strong element of trust that the Party’s revolutionary project is good and is

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necessary. An example of irony verging on cynicism is what several old cadres reported to us about how they met the inflated targets of production and avoided being labelled on lists with the white flag that signified ‘Rightist’ and ‘Right-Opportunist’. For the inspection of the Commune accountant and for the work teams sent down from higher levels in the ideological administration to measure production at harvest time, they would move the same crop from field to field to create the appearance of the crop yield the Party desired. For instance one retired cadre told us (19 March 2004): We cheated by moving the crop from field to field. We had to do this for two reasons. There was competition between teams and between brigades. We would have suffered if we had not cheated, if we had nothing to report. A team got a white flag instead of a red flag if you did not reach the advanced figure. Who gave out the white flags? The Commune and Brigade levels organised the competition. They made lists of the contestants and put little red or white flags against each of them. To begin with everyone cared a lot about this. But gradually people felt less until they felt nothing about getting a white flag. It was the same in the Cultural Revolution. In the end people did not care at all although they were at first enthusiastic. Most striking is the initial enthusiasm for the competition, despite cheating. Enthusiasm soon turned into feeling nothing. Even so it could be rekindled. The boosting of production yields by this kind of cheating was known by the work teams and accountants. Indeed, they demanded it in the North China village of Wugong (Friedman et al. 2005: 9) where local cadres obeyed even when they knew it would mean remitting grain and the other crops that they sorely needed for the next planting and to eat. In Wugong, villagers recall that they expressed their anger and disgust openly. In the Quanzhou village on the other hand, according to the memory of the cadre quoted above, what was more evident than open anger was irony. But the extraordinary point here is the acceptance of risk to his own and others’ lives in which the cadre engaged, simply to avoid humiliation.8 In other parts of China, quite senior cadres could protect local cadres who reduced the competition to out-perform each other. One of the most senior was the leader of Hunan province who ‘rarely lost an opportunity to put a damper on the enthusiasm of local cadres during [his] inspection trips’ (Dikötter 2010: 101). Even there, however, many local cadres ‘forged ahead’ – an excellent example of uncoerced enthusiasm. Later, in summer 1959, after the switch to the left, the head of Hunan province was removed (Dikötter 2010: 102).

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The party secretary of a village in northern Henan province who told his story to Peter J. Seybolt risked mitigating Great Leap demands but recalls the peculiar combination of enthusiasm and scepticism in a passage that is emblematic: “I still didn’t have any doubts about the Party’s general policy, but I knew in my heart that that was not the way to plant the crops” (Seybolt 1996: 54). A farmer and teacher, who would eventually in later years be labelled one of the five bad classes because of his previous association with the Guomindang Youth Corps, told us: To increase production, we were told to sew seeds just 2 cun (Chinese inches) apart. The soil was not fertile enough. As they grew the plants drooped. So we were sent into the mountains to cut wood to prop them up. Those who did not plant densely were forced to wear on their back a piece of paper with a black turtle drawn on it and paraded by the brigade cadres through the whole village banging a gong. So nothing was produced and there was nothing to eat. I knew not to sew so densely, but did as I was told … I know that one should stand by what one knows, but if you suffer for it you don’t. In other places, a cadre who refused to cheat or who reported that there was starvation was ‘struggled against’ in public meetings, a humiliation that included severe beating. In the Quanzhou village, we heard of one case of a farmer being beaten for accusing a cadre of getting grain while ordinary farmers ate gruel. But the most widespread sanction, mentioned by everyone who had been an adult during the campaign, was simply humiliation. The punishment of a cadre for being labelled Rightist was, in addition, removal from the Party and being given the most menial tasks. Most cadres were only a little better fed and shared the general condition of malnutrition. And they knew that their exaggeration would lead to shortages that had already created famine conditions.

Responsibility Remembered Here is what we were told by a retired cadre who had been in the Public Security department of Quanzhou city, then was put in charge of a factory during the Great Leap Forward. We were very well acquainted with him from previous years: In the city there was steel production. In the countryside there were Communes and communal dining halls and [the raising of ] produc-

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tivity from 300 or 400 jin per mu to 1,000 jin per mu. The call from the Centre was that raised productivity resulted from boldness. People would move crop harvests from one field to the next for the workteams that came down to inspect and report. This was part of the ‘wind of boastfulness’ (fukua feng). If a task was not fulfilled, the leader would be removed. Another trend was the ‘communist wind’ (gongchan feng). There were not sufficient crops, but everyone was told to eat steamed rice instead of gruel. Everything was free of charge, including haircuts. This was done according to the communist principle of ‘to each according to need’. Soon the granaries were empty all over the country. Mao Zedong realised there was a problem. He wanted to launch an anti-Leftist campaign but he reversed it when he received Peng Dehuai’s 10,000-character letter. What did you think at the time? We all knew it was fake but did not dare say so because in every unit there was an anti-Rightist campaign. There was a well-known chief nurse who did tell the truth and was sent to the countryside. You could easily get labelled ‘rightist’, just for making a joke. For instance, the work team inspected hygiene every day, looking at all eight sides. An eccentric colleague joked ‘does gengguang (8 sides) mean we must clean all night to first light (geng guang)?’ He was labelled ‘rightist’. The campaign affected everyone, so everyone was careful. If you did not perform, the shape of a turtle (wang gua – meaning you cannot get your penis up) was pinned to your back and you were put out to clean the streets. All this ‘communist wind’ resulted in 1959 in replacing food with melon seeds and leaves, including the leaves of sweet potatoes and the stalks of rice. [By that time] I was manager of a factory and had to eat this substitute for food publicly in front of everyone. In the communal dining hall? Yes. The central government said the dining hall is the front line of class struggle. I was assigned to lead the masses to gather leaves to eat. Soon the result was terrible. All of us suffered from food poisoning. The whole factory had diarrhoea. We should have gone to the clinic but we could not for fear of being labelled ‘rightist’. Because of the terrible shortage of grain the whole work unit was sent to the mountains to grow vegetables. Mine went to the Eastern Hills. Many of us swelled up with oedema. Those who did were given sugar.

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Did this include the people who handed out the label ‘rightist’? Many people were superstitious about the Centre. They trusted that present suffering would bring Communism in the promised twenty years. On one hand there was adoration of the Centre. On the other hand there was severe discipline. Intellectuals wrote reports on the new directions of class struggle. Class struggle was everywhere. There were so many jokes at the time. For instance, some school teachers were really poor. One of them stole rice from a student. He was fired. Another stole from peasants. He was fired. I know one who committed suicide after he was struggled against. This is a joke because it reverses the teacher as model, when a teacher becomes a thief. 1 jin of rice, sold by farmers at the time, was priced 8 yuan. Now it is only 3. Was there a free market? There was a secret market near the bus station for things and for food brought in by the drivers. A straw mat cost three times more than it does today. Everything was too expensive. We could not buy cigarettes. It became a fashion to pick up cigarette ends. People would also pick up bits of coal and dust and resell it … Women who gave birth did not even have rice gruel. Their husbands got animal fodder and mixed in some sugar to make it more nutritious. If a household had overseas connections they would be better off. They were sent pig fat, powdered milk and tobacco … The government at first provided material incentives to get supplies from overseas by giving coupons to families with overseas connections. But people were so poor they sold the coupons instead of using them for buying food rations. Senior cadres got special provisions. Ordinary people had increasingly to resort to the private market, which expanded. In mountain areas there was cannibalism. People found human fingernails in dumplings. People taking their food coupons to the mountains were robbed. Cannibalism and robbery! The voice in which he describes the famine is sardonic – it was a joke – and his account ends with appalled exclamation, even while he repeats the official discourse of condemnation, such as the communist wind. The story of fingernails in dumplings was told of previous Chinese famines, one of many stories of cannibalism, including the eating of children, as in stories of the so-called Incredible Famine caused by drought in four provinces of northern China 1876–79 (Edgerton-Tarpley 2008: 211). As Edgerton-Tarpley remarks, cannibalism was by far the most frequent subject of the recollections transmitted verbally over two generations and recorded in stone inscriptions shortly after

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the event. It also had precedents in the literature of strange stories and sections of local records devoted to the abnormal (2008: 212 and 222–25). But we should not think these were just horror stories heard from other people. Dikötter (2010: 322-3) reports systematic and direct investigations, whose records he finds in local archives, listing the names and other details of individuals who had committed acts of cannibalism, the greatest number of which are of scavenging dead bodies, cooking and eating parts of them. The retired cadre in Quanzhou was expressing the same mixture of sympathy and horror that was used to describe the pre-Communist weakness of imperial China, and of China’s sickness conveyed in China famine relief literature published abroad during this North China famine of 1876–79. But of course, such an equation with pre-Communist China was against all official presentations of the three-years-hardship of 1959–61 and officials in northern China made sure that the distinction between the earlier famine and the Great Leap famine was maintained, stressing how quickly the Party had taken action to alleviate the natural disaster (2008: 228), while here in Fujian the old cadres were equally aware that this was a famine brought about at least partly by revolutionary mobilisation. What is most remarkable is that the same enthusiasm, or political intensity, of the Great Leap Forward could be revived again in subsequent campaigns, including those of the Cultural Revolution. Almost as remarkable is that the sardonic remove is peppered with the explanatory rationale (shuofa) used at the time and is continued until now in official historiography for the political ‘mistakes’ (cuowu) of the Great Leap Forward. They are evident in a conversation with another witness of the famine in Quanzhou, a man who was a doctor at the time and went into the mountains in northern Fujian to administer to the starving. He does not think there was starvation to death, let alone cannibalism, in the mountains to the north of Quanzhou that were, according to him too, more severely affected. In his retirement, he has written a detailed history of the city of Quanzhou, using his ample collection of documents and statistics, in the form of a handwritten gazetteer (difangzhi), but it stops at 1949. What were the general conditions at the time of the famine in Quanzhou? Natural disaster was secondary. The primary causes were blind instructions, like the instructions to plant seeds too closely. Plus the creation of fake statistics, plus the blowing of the communist wind, plus the sharing of food, plus the pushing up of higher-level cooperatives into communes … For my generation the comparison is between the times of the Nationalist (Guomindang) and the Communist governments. For the younger generations it is between the hard years and now.

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How is the comparison for you? Under the Nationalists there was hardship in everything, for instance there were no clothes. Everything was very difficult. In ‘the hardship years’ (the Great Leap famine) there was just a shortage of food. Shortage of grain meant that people could not raise poultry or pigs. Did you become ill? I was a doctor, sent to the north of Fujian province to treat oedema. I lost 30 jin weight, out of 110 jin [i.e. over a quarter of his body weight]…. In the northern townships of Quanzhou did families lose members, who starved to death? No. The time of hardship was relatively short. Children always got food first, so there was less child malnutrition. It was old people who died first because they gave the children their food. [Note that he discounts the death of the old as cases of starvation to death]. The fact that the famine occurred during the years of the most stringent collective organisation is crucial, in contradictory ways. The ways in which it is recalled inevitably brings up self-reproach, especially among people who had been in positions of power, about not having done something that might have prevented illness and death by disobeying the ‘Communist wind’. Fear of disobedience is part of that self-reproach. But so is the recalling of the political intensity of the time, which silenced intuition that the instructions were economically and scientifically disastrous. The present is therefore contrasted as a time in which one’s own knowledge, whether expert or common sense, can at least be spoken. Even then, however, it is recalled that the disaster did not last long before the Party leadership took action. This is what a close friend of the cadre who had been head of a factory told us. It is a poignant admission of responsibility. He had been a vice-chief of a Brigade outside the city in a rural, agricultural suburb of Quanzhou. Is it true that people could eat as much as they liked in the dining halls [at first]? There was over estimation of production. For instance, it was imagined that one thousand jin of rice could be produced on 1 mu. Those willing to eat white rice were awarded a red flag, whereas those only eating gruel were given white flags. Some villages saw that the grain would not be sufficient and did not dare to eat so much. It would all be finished in ten days. They were given white flags. Who gave the white flags? I was one. So I was one of those responsible.

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Soon some villages reported that there was insufficient grain. So officials moved grain and sweet potatoes to those villages from other villages. Villagers were instructed to plant only 4 cun apart, which was very close. The masses did not believe it would be productive. How could it be? Some of them raised the point that it was not scientific and some cadres accepted and tried to relax the rule a bit while others accused the critics of being Rightist. Did you? I implemented the policies, blind to what the peasants said. Was this because you were not a peasant? No. I had been living in the countryside since 1951 [aged 20], when I began work for the government (zhengfu). Some local cadres did report up to the centre. But their superiors acted subjectively and did not treat their opinions properly. In reality, 1959 was worse than 1958 because of the Anti-Right campaign to criticise cadres who had reported up. Then, later in 1959, the Centre declared that the Great Leap Forward had gone too fast. ……….. How did these times of difficulty compare with the Anti-Japanese wartime? [which he had already mentioned] The Anti-Japanese times were worse. Struggle meetings had good outcomes. The masses were still friendly, even to cadres who had had to apologise. Was there an adequate explanation (shuofa) for the Great Leap Forward? The government’s shuofa was right – an admission of mistakes and responsibilities. We cadres also admitted our mistakes in central and local documents. [This could have been either in 1959 before the relaunching of the Great Leap Forward, or in 1960–61]. The city cadre added: Some cadres who had made serious mistakes were selected to apologise to their work units. His friend continued: The masses in China are really kind (hen hao). There is no reason to doubt his view about wartime misery exceeding that of the famine, recalled in biographical detail as a personal experience, which has been omitted here. He is equally sincere when he speaks the same language of responsibility and apology that he must have used during the periods of being close to the masses. Both of these retired local cadres tell of the strange mix of adoration and fear of the centre. Both also speak sincerely of their respect for

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‘the masses’. The substitutional splitting of the Party was particularly hard on local cadres who looked outwards as well as upwards.

Outside the Party Others, not cadres then or now, of the generation that lived through the famine merged the experience of famine with the hardship of all the years under Mao. Here is what we heard from a very lively village neighbourhood group of friends, all in their seventies, who met in the house of the retired teacher quoted above. We steered the conversation to the hard years and the Great Leap Forward. One particularly vigorous old woman gesturing with her arm above her head said: ‘In the land reform I held up flags … I also worked hard in the steel furnace pumping the bellows.’ An old man who had worked as a boatman:  ‘Everyone worked hard, like cooking and slicing in the canteen.’ Woman:  ‘You had to be quite strong to work the bellows’. She pumped her arms forward and back. She seemed to have associated the campaigns of land redistribution to poor peasants (1950–53), the collectivisation of land and the effort to industrialise fast during the Great Leap Forward (1957–58). In relation to the subject of ‘hardship’ she remarked: ‘I had three children but only two pairs of trousers for them.’ I asked when that was. ‘We women haven’t studied. We can’t give dates.’ Boatman:  ‘Perhaps 1975.’ Woman:  ‘Now we even refuse meat. When I was 40 it was very hard. We made clothes from sacks. My husband died when he was 50 years old.’ She has a definite sense of biographical time but not chronological dates, and has associated with hardship the years when she was about 40, which was around 1973, not singling out the years of famine during the Great Leap Forward for special recall. This is surely significant. There was a similar response from outcaste musicians in Shaanxi, studied by Steve Jones, a sinologist and musician. They told him that until after Deng Xiaoping’s reforms they were always close to starvation, and did not single out the famine. Anna Lora-Wainwright found that people often referred to the whole period until the Deng reforms as ‘the time of the great collective’ (da jiti de shihou) and that the daughter of a mother who had lived through the famine compared her own hardship throughout her childhood and well into the 1980s with that of her mother. Both had to eat bran (draft Ph.D. dissertation, chapter 2).

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What the vigorous old woman says about ‘we women’ repeats what oral historians elsewhere in China have found. Collectivisation brought women into public life for the first time, not just exceptionally but as a matter of course, together with men, and they rejoiced in this opportunity to socialise despite arduously hard work.9 But far fewer women than men were cadres or officials. Not knowing dates might well reflect a relative lack of interest in political events among women unless they were officials or Party members. Self-diagnosis of a lack of attention to dates as a lack of education reinforces this, mimicking male opinion about women.10 Most important is the gendered difference in the experience of famine and the death of infants. Women suffered the responsibility for reproducing the family, personally bearing the threat of malnutrition to the capacity to give birth and the tragedy of feeding small children who are dying.11 Gail Hershatter (2000: 16) observes in a part of Shaanxi province in northern China, an area relatively less affected by the famine, like Quanzhou, that unless they were labour models or in some other way central to what she nicely calls ‘campaign time’, women did not refer to the Great Leap Forward by name or as a single event. Instead they recalled eating in dining halls or taking part in special kinds of work – such as steel smelting, or panning for iron ore. To all these women, as much as to all the men we spoke to, whether or not they compare it with the famine, some other past, or just an unspecified past of hardship and endemic famine, the present is a time when they are no longer threatened by hunger. Hunger is something they recall well along with the promises of the Party that hunger would be put into the past.

Fear, Shame, and Pride Another dimension in the retelling, personally, of the experience of the Great Leap famine, is the sense of shame, collective and personal that is evident in the factory manager’s exclamation: ‘Cannibalism and robbery!’ Some of the same social emotions are conveyed in other people’s recalling the famine in current circumstances of comparative prosperity and leadership by the same Party that was in charge of the Great Leap Forward. Severe shortage is recalled along with a time when the orthodoxy was that the history of a China of famine and weakness had been a bitter past, in a history of building strength and prosperity, a progressive history whose achievement is the present and its future. How did that translate into personal retelling? Humiliation as punishment is the negative of expected and internalised enthusiasm. Both are so strong because of the intensity of the politics of revolutionary declarations of who is friend: who enemy. In the Great Leap’s famine

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conditions, fearful enthusiasm put local cadres into a position where they could in addition suffer an older shame, associated with home and family. Revolutionary commitment had meant acting for the greater good of political life, even if secretly also acting for family and friends. White flags were a symbol of newly forged political humiliation, but as in the political rituals of the Cultural Revolution later, older symbols of humiliation were added: the turtle as a symbol of impotence. Then, failed enthusiasm brought cadres and their fellow villagers back to another, homely shame, and this was one to which the leadership was indifferent. It was the shame of not being able to keep children and the elderly alive. The extreme shame was an occurrence found during previous famines, as well as this one: cannibalism. Survivors swapped and ate each other’s dead children.12 In the Quanzhou area, starvation did not reach such extremes. Nevertheless, shame and fear were felt and are still transmitted. A man in the village who knew us well from many previous interviews and meals was 10 years old at the time of the famine and later became a long-standing village head: Were the hard years (of the famine) worse [than the pre-Liberation poverty of your family]? Yes, a bit. ………….. Did anyone in the village become very ill or die? No one starved to death. But some people got ill and died from illness. I’m not sure who. Have you ever talked to anyone about this time before now? Never to outsiders. I have talked to my children. It was the rule that people should only talk about suffering before Liberation and therefore that only older people could ‘remember bitterness’. Even now he carries some of the fear of a political taboo. He brings to bear the effect of the discipline of ‘speaking bitterness’ (suku) and that it was only supposed to refer to the time before Liberation.13 At the same time he seems to be keeping another, tactful silence to spare the shame of families that did not manage to protect their old and weak from starving or sickening to death. There is pride in having had the social resources and skills to find ways to survive. The opposite is the shame in not having been able to prevent an old person from a premature death, or an infant from dying of malnutrition, or a woman from being rendered infertile.14 Tact prevents other people from identifying families in which this occurred. Pride is reinforced by the idea that the hardship was shared and that it did not take long for the Party leadership to find effective policy remedies.

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On the other hand, in a village in the mountainous borderland with Tibet in the west of Sichuan province, where half the population starved to death according to the village accountant’s figures, so that no family was untouched by the catastrophe, there was no disguising of families whose members had died in the famine. Here the story of survival is touched by another kind of shame. People say that the cunning (jiaohua) survived, whereas the honest and straightforward (laoshi) died.15 Our Quanzhou interviews alternated less between pride and shame, possibly because the famine was less harsh there. But still, a saving of face could have been at work to prevent disclosure to us of families in which old people had died during or immediately after the famine. In any case, whether it is called social capacity (shehui caineng) or cunning (jiaohua), being able to make and maintain relations of reciprocity (wanglai) on which to rely for social support in an emergency is also the condition of success now in times of greater prosperity. Shame and secrecy indicate an awareness of norms of moral decency, even while being driven to flout them. On the other hand (in the case of secret feasting, or acting in obedience to directives that cause such shame) the separation maintains aggravated indifference to the shame, passed down the ideological bureaucracy of the Party. Recalling this indifference to familial shame easily leads to the sardonic, bitter irony shown by the ex-factory director disillusioned with the enthusiasm of obedience to scientific revolutionary leadership. Political shame has been pitted against familial shame. Moral leadership, expected of Party leadership, has been shaken. When the leadership from the very top leads its followers to catastrophe, the expectation of morally upright leadership is dealt a blow and gives rise to reflections on whether and how to follow a monopoly of political rule. I think this began to occur during the Great Leap famine itself. Quandaries of followership and of loyalty caused ethical reflection. They have become endemic in the post-Mao era of Party rule through enormous bureaucratic enlargement and an economy of growth by ruthless opportunism, to which we now turn.

Notes   1. Michael Dutton (2005) convincingly argues that at the core of Maoist politics is the question ‘who is our friend and who our enemy’ where the collective first person is the People. This is the question that Carl Schmitt argued to be at the core of sovereignty and politics (see Paul Q. Hirst (1999)). Dutton presents Maoist politics as a case study of Schmitt’s theory. And the philosopher Agamben, whose genealogy of sovereignty was expounded in chapter 2, makes much of Schmitt’s theory of the exception as the real exercise of sovereignty.

Moral and Political Dilemmas   89   2. As indicated in the Fujian history, but see also Bernstein (2006).   3. Deng Xiaoping and Deng Liqun accepted collective responsibility for the Great Leap Forward in their retrospective political appraisals in the 1980s, though the latter pointed out that at Lushan Mao’s thoughts ‘turned to class struggle’, an expression through which the author distances himself from the ‘turn’ (Joseph 1986, pp. 438 and 442).   4. Thanks to Chang Xiangqun for the rhyme from Jiangsu and to Hu Zongze for the Hebei rhyme.   5. The conflict between local powerholders who became Communists and cadres sent from elsewhere to be cadres or officials is found everywhere in China.   6. The attack on localists included those the local Communist fighters had recommended to be interpreters for the northerners, educated members of local elites that had taken the side of the Communist forces and who by the mid-1950s had been promoted to quite important positions in government. They were accused of plotting to overthrow the Party in a local version of the Hungarian uprising of 1956.   7. For instance, knowing there was a shortage of food and having read reports of peasants having to eat roots, in February 1959 Mao said the peasants were eating rice at night and ordered the use of force to search their households for secret grain stores saying ‘There is no Communist spirit in them! Peasants are after all peasants. That’s the only way they can behave.’ (Chang and Halliday 2005: 446 quoting from Centre for Chinese Research Materials (comp). Maozhu weikangao; ‘Mao Zedong sixiang wansui’ bianji ji qita (Unofficially published works of Mao Zedong, Additional volumes of ‘Long Live Mao Zedong Thought’ and other secret speeches of Mao), 15 vols. Virginia, USA, vol. 13, pp. 240 and 253–54). Yet, as has already been pointed out, in the next month he wrote letters of instruction to look after the masses. Even in March 1959, while in one speech siding with villagers who evaded the demands of zealous cadres, in the same month in another meeting Mao could also say that the situation was like a war for the future of China and in this war ‘When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half the people die so that the other half can eat their fill’ (Dikötter 2010: 88). What better example of splitting could there be?   8. Thanks to Michael Dutton for bringing this out.   9. This was what for instance Guo Yuhua found in her interviews with women in a village in northern Shaanxi (2003). 10. A young woman, a Hakka Masters student at Normal University in Beijing, who was writing a dissertation on gender differences in family history, including genealogical memory and other memories of her home place in Guangxi, remarked to me that there is a great difference between the educated and the uneducated in memories of social disaster. The educated speak in terms of official history of events. Uneducated women tend to relate personal experiences of a particular case. For instance one woman told her of how there was so little to eat that she had to feed her child cassava, which is poisonous if eaten in too great a quantity, and the child died. Later I asked the student if it had been difficult to elicit this story. She said yes (and I note that this was in her home area). Was it shameful? No. Just very painful.

90   The Great Leap Famine 11. Another take on female memory is provided by a rare novel about the famine, Ji E de Shancun (Remembering A Mountain Village of Hunger) by Wang Liang (1999), set in Anhui. It tells of a starving woman offering her body to a well-fed professor sent down to the village, judging that from him she will beget a healthy child and one that will be looked after. Many thanks to Susanne WeigelinSchwiedrzik for telling me about this novel and this episode, among other stories of sex and degradation in its portrayal of the famine. 12. Writing of his home province Anhui, Tang Degang, a Chinese American revisiting for the first time since his childhood, describes how this same horror was revealed when he was enquiring after a close paternal cousin and found that his cousin’s whole family had starved to death while whole villages were wiped out in the Great Leap famine. ‘Most unbearable to hear was that when young children were fast asleep their parents suffocated them with pillows or quilts and exchanged them with their neighbours to steam. This is the vivid contemporary version of what was told of past [famines], that “people swapped children to eat”’. Tang Degang, Anhui esirende shili (Concrete examples of death from starvation in Anhui) www.boxun.com downloaded and sent to me by Zhang Ning, 31 June 2005. Many thanks to Zhang Ning for drawing it to my attention and to Shih Fang-long for help with the translation. The first widely published story by China’s great writer of the twentieth century, Lu Xun, was ‘Diary of a Madman’ (New Youth, 1918). Its constantly repeated phrase ‘Eating people’ was a metaphor for the classical past that must be shed. Famine and cannibalism were the shame of the past that Revolutionary liberation in 1949 was supposed to have put behind the Communist-led present. Any child who died in infancy, before celebration of their first month – which could not be done in such times of dire want – was considered less than human, not yet human. I think it would have been even more shameful to have had to resort to eating adults. Thanks to Pan Jie (November 2006) for prompting this comment. Western sentiment over childhood would reverse this order of horror. 13. The taboo was far greater in earlier years. Elsewhere, when an educated youth sent to the countryside in the years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) asked peasants to remember times of bitterness and think of sweetness (yikusitian), they started to talk about the Great Leap famine until a passing cadre stopped them. Many thanks to Michel Bonnin and Jean-Philippe Beja for this information from their interview with Chen Yize. Chang Xiangqun remembers, from her school years in Jiangxi province, a Workers’ propaganda team of Mao Zedong Thought organising meetings in 1968 and then again in the anti-Lin Biao, anti-Confucius Campaign in 1973 to hear testimonies of bitterness in which local ‘peasants’ spoke bitterness to think of sweetness. They recounted sifting through the earth to find white clay (kaolin) to eat and of eating the bitter plant gaicai (a kind of herb). The schoolchild audiences also ate the bitter plant as a sharing of the experience. They asked the peasants when this happened. It turned out that they were talking about 1959–61. The same caution was met by another researcher, Anna Lora-Wainwright, when her questions touched on the famine in a village in Sichuan 2004–05 (personal communication 10 May 06).

Moral and Political Dilemmas   91 14. Laurel Bossen (2002: 285) quotes a story reported to her by a woman who was a child in the famine, in a village in Yunnan in which several old people and infants died of starvation. The woman describes how a father and a grandmother gave all their food to the children of their families and as a result died of starvation. But Bossen was not able to gather stories from other people in the village systematically because, as she writes: ‘in 1996 people were still uncomfortable about openly admitting their losses’. 15. Many thanks to John Flower for this information (Oxford, 1 July 2005).

Chapter 5

Implicit Transmission: The Generation Gap after the Great Leap Famine Possibly because of the shame, possibly because of the prevalent sense of its being a shared past, our inquiries into the personal transmission of Great Leap famine losses did not include long individual interviews, as the research in Berlin and Taiwan did. So we have none of the individuated cases of family repair that will be the subject of chapters on those other two places. Instead, what has been impressive is the number of implicit, sometimes historically allegorical, references to the times of hardship across the gap between the Mao and post-Mao generations. They include the basic act of feeding children and grandchildren, the generalised care for forgotten ancestors, and festivals of abundance. They are implicit because of two things. One is that there has been no commemoration of the event of the famine, indeed it has only recently become an acknowledged subject of official historical investigation, which has already been elaborated on in chapter 3. The other is that the young are uncomprehending or wish not to think about it. It is to this incomprehension that we now turn. We went to visit Mr Li, a lively septuagenarian who had been a ‘bad element’ in Mao’s time because he is descended from a great imperial official and landlord whose house is now being promoted as a tourist site in a rural township in the Quanzhou region. We spoke with him in the great house, where he works as a custodian (22 March 2004). He told us that during the famine a few people had died in his township. He spoke quite openly about this and blamed Mao. This may indicate a variation of transmission: those who were cadres at the time, or have been since, tend to repeat the official reasons for the famine even when they give vivid and condemnatory accounts of what happened. They may even rejoice in the idea that the top leadership suffered along with everyone else, or at least, as many ordinary villagers do, express gratitude to Mao and the Party for having accepted some blame and

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apologising; those who were not cadres at the time or since seem more prepared simply and openly to blame the top leadership. But turning from this speculation to what Mr Li said about the younger generation, he was asked if he told his children or grandchildren about his experience. He replied, ‘Yes. But they just comment on how “useless” (meiyou yong – Southern Fujianese: bou lou ieng) we were.’ The comment indicates the younger generation not being able to understand how the older generation had put up with the commands of cadres that were obviously impractical and dangerous. Even less comprehensible would have been the enthusiasm with which they took part in such campaigns. Across this gap between generations, made by the great political and economic changes that followed the death of Mao, the young think that their elders must have been stupid to follow the commands of the Great Leap Forward. A retired cadre, who at the time was vice-chief of a brigade, was asked if he told his children about those times. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘Some ask why we worked so hard. Others say “you were so stupid”.’ A middle-aged companion added: ‘My 20-year-old son said “you must have been lazy not to have enough food”.’1 The period of the famine is associated with a past that is not worth dwelling on. There are other, less verbal and datable, manifestations of a response to those times of shortage entirely consistent with wanting to turn one’s back on those times. Preoccupation with making money and with consumption is a negation of the experience of shortage, an emphasis on not wanting to know about it. Living in the work-unit housing of her husband, this is what Mrs X, the wife of the retired doctor and epidemiologist who lost a quarter of his body weight during the famine, observed (26 May 2004): ‘Our grandson is 3 years old. When I clean his face with an ordinary paper handkerchief he wants a better, softer one. Children say you cannot make the comparison. The past is your past. The present is ours. Our daughter in the USA calculates what she spends and saves, whereas our daughter here just buys what she wants.’ The comparison of her two daughters, the one in the US being more frugal than the one remaining in China, was made in another family, in Guangdong province where the Chinese American anthropologist Willa Zhen conducted fieldwork near her ancestral village. Her relatives told her that by comparison with her Chinese cousins she knew how to be frugal, and the term for ‘frugal’ was chiku, literally translatable as ‘eating bitterness’, the very phrase used to describe the Chinese past.2 The comparison hints at a Chinese context in which the younger generation refuses to own the stories their parents and elders tell them as warnings not to waste food and is indeed indulged by grandparents and parents with all the best things money can buy in the years of growing prosperity. ‘Being drowned in love’, the very young tell their elders what the latest television-advertised sweet or soft drink is, getting it from them while mocking them for not being up to date (Guo Yuhua 2000:

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106–7 and 111–12). Compared to her American daughter, Mrs X describes her Chinese daughter as a careless materialist.3 We asked the epidemiologist himself: Did you tell your children? They don’t want to hear about it. Not about the Long March, nor about the hardship – they are not interested. And grandchildren? They are the same. …. In the countryside we have heard how they use the hardship years to tell off their children … When young people see an apartment like this one, they complain. I say, ‘but we used to have far less’. And they exclaim ‘that is what you always say’. Young people compare only with the best. For instance, the children were taken to school by motorbike, now they want to be taken by car. My son and his wife have a car each, while I still go around by bicycle. It is of course quite likely that in other circumstances and at an older age these same children will become more curious to know about the experiences of their grandparents. But in their current interaction, members of senior generations experience from the young a disowning of their pasts. Then, when they die, the young remember their suffering with gratitude. In Shandong, during the rather simple and secularised mortuary rituals he saw performed in 2000, adult children told Andrew Kipnis with great feeling that their parents had suffered so much for them, feeding them while going hungry. This was a general sentiment, without specifying the Great Leap famine.4 Put together the fond indulgence of children and grandchildren, their own exaggerated materialism and their reciprocal regard for the sacrifices their elders once made for them in an undifferentiated time of hardship, and you have a consumer preoccupation with family reproduction as a moral valuation of the continuity of life. It seems to have replaced the gift of life and abundance bestowed by the Party and its leadership.

The Turn to Lineage and Family ‘Family’ itself is changing to a more conjugal family unit, couples living apart from both sets of parents. But in southern Fujian it is still reinforced in town and country, if not in cities, by line and lineage. A young and active cadre, born in 1969, vice-director of a County Party propaganda department, takes

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a keen interest in what he understands to be the local culture of southern Fujian, a culture of lineage and of participation in rituals. He likes to emphasise continuity, but even then he has to acknowledge the gap between the generations. This interview took place on 23 May 2004: Is there incomprehension between the years of Mao and now? Of course, everyone’s experience influences his outlook. Life is contradictory. If the young stay in the village they will take part in the rituals and will find a different point of view out of that experience. Young people may seem to disagree with their elders and in cities follow new fashions. But in their bones they carry their elders’ traditions. The surface is not the whole story. Does knowledge of their elders’ sufferings get passed on? Although such things are talked about, they may not be taken seriously. We should also understand that there are great differences of detail. Some people treat suffering as the glory of their lives. Now in society there are people who treat past suffering as a kind of wealth (caifu) of experience. …………. How and why do people where you came from talk about the famine? Those who talk about it are those who have become wealthy. Those who have not succeeded, do not. Only when you are successful can your talk be influential. They boast that they have got over the hard times and of how different it is now, for them.5 Note that he was not following a line; he was not repeating official discourse on how the young should look to the future, have a scientific approach to life, or increase the quality of their civilisation. Instead, he described the young in the countryside as following transmitted rituals, or in the cities as following new fashions of consumption. The former are, in his rather idealistic view, signs of their moral evaluation of life, while the new fashions of consumption and the influence brought about by monetary success is a sign of current amorality and of a trading on the past, rather than finding moral roots. A poet and calligrapher friend from the same department added later that the worst thing about the fifties and sixties was the destruction of culture. ‘I do not mean what is visible. It was a destruction of human relations (ren yu ren guanxi). The revival of lineages is a replacement of the destroyed relations.’ This sets the theme of this chapter: the post-Mao generation’s mixture of unscrupulous activity for enrichment with restoration of humanity. Both are implicit responses, turning their backs on the Maoist past. But not all such responses are implicit. I shall rely on the more explicit articulations of turning the Maoist ‘mistakes’ and the famine into an abandoned past to give some sense to the silence of the implicit.

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Eat Up A young academic from western Fujian told me (July 2008) how when he was a child if he knocked his bowl of rice with his chopsticks or did not finish his food, he would be warned in either of two ways. One was that he should remember the time of starvation. The other was that he would scare the rice spirit (mishenzi) away. One of his aunts had died of starvation in the famine. The young tea businessman in the main Quanzhou village, mentioned in chapter 3, called this kind of reminder to eat up ‘whip talk’. Other triggers prompt reminders of the abandoned past. For instance, a Chinese university student interviewed in 2008 said: My grandparents often talked about the hardship when things came up. What were the coming-up “things” you just mentioned? What was the occasion? Every time I went to a fancy restaurant for my birthday. But everybody is doing it. Then, how do you think about the famine? It was almost fifty years ago, was it not? It is in the past, and I cannot see that it is important to us now. China is a strong and rich country today, there is nothing comparable in the past and certainly there is no chance that sort of chaos would reappear in China. Why not? Well, there is no Mao Zedong the second, is there? (he laughed).6 There are other, less frequent, triggers of recall that bring the generations together. For instance in one of the villages in Henan province studied by doctoral student Lili Lai, a woman and her daughter-in-law went to glean on village land soon to be bulldozed for a government project to build a plaza. The pity of it reminded the woman of the years of famine and their state projects.7 In another instance, a young woman, also a university student, was prompted by the height of her father to talk about the famine: ‘My father was as short as me. He suffered from insufficient nutrition because of the famine when he was a boy. Also when I wasted food or was choosy about food, they would always talk about the hardship during the famine.’ But her sense of distance from the past was more emphatically political, indicating a change in relation to the Party-State:

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What do you think about the famine? I think natural disaster was certainly one of the reasons. However, I think the government lacked the mechanism to deal with such urgent matters. The Great Leap Forward certainly contributed to the famine. I think the direct victims were the general public at the bottom of society. My relatives who worked in the army had subsidies so that they had relatively comfortable lives. What effects do you think the famine has on today’s life and society and younger generation people like you? China is a socialist country where the people have continuing trust in the Party. Therefore, in exchange, the Party should be more responsible for the masses. Also, when coming to a natural disaster like that, the government should certainly have called for aid from international sources once they realised that the incident was beyond their ability to deal with. I think the famine warned us of the flaws of collectivisation, that we should not have extensive centralised agricultural activities which would eventually end up with deficiency. For the new generation like us, as most of us are the only child, they (the parents) have great influence on us. However, we are not like our parents who had unquestionable faith in the government. Instead, we are critical of government decisions.8 Even without such articulation, the attention to food can itself be a vector of historical judgement. Judith Farquhar (2002: chapter 3) has proposed a political treatment of the everyday life of eating. The question that hangs over the nutritional code is whether there is balanced repletion, as in the everyday greeting ‘have you eaten your fill?’ (chibaole meiyou) or just whether you have eaten (chile fan meiyou). The moral and physical norm is balance. The pathology of imbalance is that of simultaneous or sequential depletion and excess, caused by blockages, instead of generosity and connectedness. In my extension of this code I would include among blockages those of secrecy and disguise, and the pathology of uncovering threats to Party projects in which the dangerous and hidden other is killed and eaten to strengthen the self (see chapter 2). A similar argument is pursued by Eric Mueggler in his account of local (Lolop’o) conceptions of balanced flows of substances in southwestern China: ‘the 1958 harvest flowed uselessly through commune members’ digestive tracts, Luo Lizhu said, leaving them only leaves and wild herbs to eat. Before the [domestic] granaries were burned [and the grain transferred to the dining halls] skilful female household managers had worked with their [granary spirits] to sustain a delicate regulative balance between the economies of bodies and granaries’ (2001: 85).

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The same generation responds to this past with excess in the present. Grandparents, the generation that experienced the Mao years, are frequently in charge of their few or single grandchildren. They, in lieu of the parents hard at work to earn enough to invest in the best possible upbringing, schooling, and if possible college education for their children, indulge their grandchildren in the most desired food. At the same time, parents also advise their pregnant daughters on a better balanced diet. This is a time of both imbalance and the wish and means to rebalance the circuits of life and its energies (qi). Children are told to eat up, indulged, and fattened to obesity, even while having a single child who is healthy is so important. The combination of anxieties and indulgences seems to convey without words a past of deprivation.

The Turn to Ritual During the height of the Maoist command system, during collectivisation, when burial grounds were to be cultivated, in some parts of China the wood from the coffins in the graves was used for fires or construction. This disturbance of the dead turned them into neglected ancestors, hungry ghosts, just as the famine turned the living into hungry ghosts. During subsequent campaigns against ‘the four olds’, ancestral halls and temples were torn down and burial rituals were forbidden. The famine came at the height and completion of collectivisation; it was the greatest accumulation of powers of the Party to command. In short, Mao’s supremacy was a time of the greatest number of unceremoniously buried dead, not because burial rites were forbidden during the Great Leap Forward but because so many people lacked the income to afford them. When asked about that time and the subsequent time of the greatest destruction of temples and ancestral halls, during the Cultural Revolution, in some parts of China people say that Mao was the supreme god then and that there were no ghosts. In some places, such as the village where Wang Mingming and I have conducted fieldwork, there was a reluctance to destroy the temple, indicating less confidence in the protection of Mao. Everywhere there were, of course, those who were labelled ‘monsters’ to be humiliated and expelled from history. Since Mao’s death there has been a revival of rituals for the dead, and of proper burials in the countryside, against Party urging of cremation. There has also been restoration of rituals addressed to local gods, sometimes with the addition of Mao but then only as one of many gods, not supreme. Ghosts and gods have been restored in people’s visualisation of responsive power. In the city of Quanzhou, there is a temple to Baosheng Dadi, the deification of a Daoist doctor whose spirit still cures. Now, as before collectivisation, people divine through the drawing of lots the god’s diagnosis of ills and the

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same lot draws a prescription of medicine. The medicine is provided by the templekeepers, charging no fee. The temple houses a charity, founded by overseas Chinese in 1878 with donations of property, the income from which maintained the charity to provide medicine to the poor. Collectivisation in the 1950s removed the property, but the charity continued on the basis of financial donations. The charity includes a traditional Chinese pharmacy and a rota of retired medical practitioners trained in both bio-medicine and traditional Chinese medicine to run clinics, in addition to the divine drawing of lots. The drawing of lots side of the charity was not allowed during the years of collectivisation. But during the famine the charity’s other help was eventually allowed, just as help from Chinese connections overseas with food parcels was encouraged. In March 2004 we asked the brother and sister, both doctors, who were organisers of the charity at the time and are now once more working in the rota of doctors, a number of questions: What did the charity do during the years of hardship? Many people had oedema. We applied to the government to provide us with sugar to dispense, but our request was refused. So we had to buy sugar, at high cost. Then we established a voluntary medical organisation and applied again, in the name of that organisation, and were successful, getting supplies not only of sugar but also of bean powder to give to patients. Did people die of starvation? Many. They were the older, weakened. We handed out coffins for them and created an area of 1 mou for those who died without descendants. Was ritual performed too? Yes, that is usual. We arranged for it to be performed for those without descendants. A record of all this was kept. But it was burned during the Cultural Revolution. Coffins were on offer, along with Daoists to perform the rites, in Shuimen xiang (Watergate Lane). It is possible that among those ‘without descendants’ were old people whose offspring could not bury them and were too ashamed, so that neighbours would have arranged to bring the bodies for charitable burial. Not only were the records burned during the Cultural Revolution, the temple building was turned into a factory. But in 1984 the temple was restored and its charity is active again, funded by donations of money from overseas and from Taiwan, and from the money paid for incense and fire by daily and festival followers of Baosheng Dadi.

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On one hand, personal stories of intense suffering and horror are told, with some reluctance. On the other hand, rituals and temples have been built or rebuilt or like the Quanzhou Baosheng Dadi temple they have become active again. They are, as Jing Jun has nicely put it, ‘saturated with memories of loss’ (2001: 215). Famine was a cause of infertility and death. Its worst horror story was cannibalism and the swapping of dead children to eat. So the building in Gansu province of a far greater number of temples than had existed before Liberation to Niang Niang, a fertility goddess, as Jing Jun (2001) reports, is a restoration of biological and social reproduction in the fraught time of the single-child policy and a way of silently recalling the demise of fertility at the time of and in the years after the famine. In the mountain village of the Lolop’o where Eric Mueggler lived, a woman sterilized during the birth control campaign dreamed of being possessed by the spirit of a domestic dog, a dream the diviner interpreted as requiring a ritual, which could again be performed, for removing a miscarried foetus. It would also be treatment of the ongoing sense of loss and anxiety affecting her husband’s dreams as well as her own. (Mueggler 2001: 27–29). In the Quanzhou village that Wang Mingming and I have studied, the ancestral hall had been damaged by flooding and left a ruin in the 1950s. But in 1961, the year of recovery from the famine, with the secret support of Chen Wansheng, a Commune-level cadre from the village, his fellow villagers rebuilt it as a way of serving the people, as he put it, in particular as a comfort to the elderly, including feeding them with scraps of meat on annual feast days. It was destroyed again in the Cultural Revolution. In the 1990s, now as an ex-cadre, Wansheng openly led and managed its rebuilding and later the re-compilation of the lineage genealogy. In April 2003 we asked him how the ‘hard times’ were commemorated. Wansheng changed the subject by recalling his being in charge of the building of the communal dining hall and other Great Leap activities. I pressed with further questions about ‘difficult’ deaths. But my promptings were to no avail, until we brought up the subject of the new genealogy of the lineage, and Wansheng said that at its inauguration a special kind of offering was made to ancestors who had ‘died without knowing their offspring’.9 In short, he could talk about the difficult times in general terms and recall the activities of the Great Leap, but would not talk about difficult deaths, whose commemoration was simply transferred to a traditional rite that did not specify those who died without children or could have no children because of the famine. They were included implicitly, as we ascertained two years later with Wansheng’s friend, a current village cadre, in a rite that has its equivalent in funerals and communal festivals all over China. We asked local ritual experts, a fashi (Daoist) and a heshang (Buddhist), whether they knew of any ritual specially adapted to the deaths from starvation during the hard years. They had conducted none and knew of none. As we shall see, this contrasts sharply with the invention of new rituals to commemorate

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those killed in the White Terror in Taiwan and those killed in the Holocaust in Germany. In 1998 I chanced upon another material transfer of the Great Leap to ritual practice at the temple fair in Fanzhuang, Hebei province. For this huge procession of the Dragon tablet, bands came from surrounding towns and villages and their hosts provided food for them, cooked in huge woks. One of the cooks described the wok as a daguofan and said it was just like the Great Leap dining hall woks. Indeed, so too were the drum bands like those that marshalled labour out to the Great Leap projects, but they had themselves been based on bands for temple fairs. Now the revitalised temple fair bears memories of the Great Leap’s promise of abundance but elides them into a ritual spectacle that preceded collectivisation, just as the lineage rituals in the villages hailed by the Quanzhou County propaganda chief do. Before the Great Leap Forward, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party expected of the Chinese masses that they endure hardship for a generation as their gift to a future generation that would enjoy greater prosperity. The Great Leap Forward fore-shortened the time until the time of hard work was simultaneously a time of abundance, eating your fill in communal dining halls. In recovery from the resulting famine and after the reorganisation of collective production, came another generation of hardship borne in the hope and expectation of the next generation’s prosperity. That prosperity, comparatively speaking, was achieved in the three decades after the collectives were dismantled, followed by the corporativisation and privatisation of most state-owned enterprises. For very many it is a time, by comparison with the years of hardship and sacrifice, of the promised abundance. Increasing income and savings have meant a growing capacity to convert monetary wealth to voluntary donations for public goods, the first and most popular of which have been, since the early eighties and continuing into the present, donations to the costs of annual festivals and the temples for the gods they celebrate, all over China and not just in the coastal provinces, in cities as well as the countryside, though not in every city or rural region. In the village of Ten Mile Inn in far western Hebei, in northern China, the Dragon god is deemed to have responded to prayers for rain, prompting donations for the building of a temple to house his tablet and statue (Hu 2009). Celebration of the god’s responsiveness, if not as regularly as the equivalent in Fujian and Guangdong provinces in the southeast, is equally the performance for all living in the festival’s territory of a time of abundance, lasting for the few days of feasting and theatre. In short, there has been a return to localities performing their own collective days of abundance, resulting from current economic prosperity but also in defiance of its policies of scientific advancement and policies against wasteful extravagance and superstition. As already mentioned (chapter 2), eating well in collective dining halls reminded people in the

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mountains of Yunnan, studied by Eric Mueggler, of just such festivals of abundance (Mueggler 2001: 178). Now festivals have returned to a normality of extravagance. Sometimes, as in Fanzhuang in 1998, explicit reminders of the Great Leap occur. But more generally, the past is implicitly negated by the turn to self-organised festivals of abundance that last between one and three days and are a kept promise by responsive gods (Feuchtwang 2008).

The Relocation of Pastoral Expectations and of Aggravated Indifference Since the death of Mao, the circuits and hierarchical organisations of domesticity, political command, policy-making and propaganda, government, production, distribution and exchange that were all joined as one have been disaggregated. This is much more than a turn away from direct planning to regulation and indirect government of the economy. It is the dismantling of a single hierarchy and its multiplication into hierarchies of quite different kinds of power and resource. The economies of knowledge, information, gift and ritual, not to mention the economies of contract of labour, production and sale of producer goods, and of finance may be interdependent with each other and with systems of state power, but they no longer coincide. The command regime that produced famine as an effect and made its middle and upper ranks indifferent to the consequences of their upward obedience has gone. It has instead become a more normal bureaucracy in its combination of administrative rationality and patronage through the cultivation of interpersonal relations. In particular we must understand the reciprocity of yang as nutrition, which as Charles Stafford (2000) has pointed out, includes the nurturing of relationships, reciprocally between older and younger generations, gods and followers, mothers and children, ancestors and descendants, as well as laterally in relationships with graded emotional attachments. One informant in the far northeastern village of Xiajia told Yan Yunxiang (1996: 94), stressing the importance of networks of relationships for supporting survival and life: ‘No matter the dynasty, we ordinary people are always the victims and have no one to rely on except our own relatives and close friends (shizai qinyou). I lost my mind once and devoted myself completely to the collectives, but after the three difficult years [of the famine], no more!’ In other words he had abandoned the moral discourse of self-sacrifice to the greater good led by the Party in favour of an older moral discourse of mutual, interpersonal reciprocity. The language of sacrifice has returned to the family. In Zouping County Shandong Province, Andrew Kipnis reports (2008), children in junior school learn by heart to recite a Tang poem about a mother mending clothes for her son to wear as he prepares to leave her to become an official. Parents in his

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interviews repeated the motif that they willingly sacrificed themselves (xisheng) through hard work for their children to stay on at school and that the children study hard in reciprocity for their parents’ sacrifice. There has, in sum, been a mutual withdrawal, on the part of the collective and the state and on the part of the ordinary person, from reliance on the state and the collective for pastoral responsibility. Reliance on mutual support and favour was the secret to surviving the famine and is now the means of setting up arrangements of trust to make money and to support self and family. The disaggregation of the Party’s capacity to command has brought about another kind of indifference to the lives of others in favour of immediate gain and the ruthless exploitation of immediate opportunities. Liu Xin (2002: 168) cites, as a type of this state of being, a very successful woman investor who sits watching television after a business meeting and after playing a game of cards with fellow successful bosses. She says, in Liu Xin’s hearing, without any expression of feeling and to nobody in particular, ‘There is nothing worth living for’, using the Chinese term meijin that he elaborates as ‘a combination of boredom and meaninglessness’. It is a state of making ad hoc arrangements, keeping no diary, planning only for immediately apparent opportunities as they open with changes of policy. It speaks of a precarious existence, the possibility of bankruptcy and other kinds of ruin as well as of success. In many cases it is also an indifference to the labour exploited for personal abundance, a carelessness for their safety in a country with one of the worst records of work accidents and fatalities.10 It is also a new imbalance of excess and depletion, of banqueting and cheap labour. But it coexists with the obligations of human relations, the care of the old in local institutions such as ancestral halls, and of eating on one hand excessively and on the other hand medicinally in the effort to restore balance – of balancing yin and yang, cold and hot, and the five tastes and five energies (Jing Jun 2000: 150–51). It is a state of mind in which the hardships of the older generation can be cruelly dismissed from a point of view of the new social capacity needed for ruthless self-advancement, as in the characterisation of collective period hardship as ‘lazy’ and ‘stupid’. The older generation see this as a moral decline from the days of shared hardship. To the go-ahead young, the rural past is still represented in the present ‘backwardness’ and poverty of rural migrants in the cities and to the rural young themselves it is present in their own sense of falling behind the prosperity seen on television. Aggravated indifference could still, after more than a decade of decollectivisation, be a sentiment among cadres. A township cadre commented to Yan Yunxiang that a campaign to promote legal knowledge among ordinary people was a mistake: ‘The ordinary people are just slaves, pigs. They can be ruled only by whips.’ (Yan 1995: 235). But, as Yan shows, villagers are no longer compelled to accept cadre authority and they do not fully trust either local

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or central state authority. During the famine, the villagers in Xiajia accepted relief grain with gratitude to the central authorities. Now these good feelings (ganqing) towards both central and local state authority have gone (1995: 237). Instead villagers engage in reciprocal, personalised relations to place cadres under obligation to them (1995: 232) and they insist that because they pay their cadres’ wages, they should be served well by them (1995: 234). The political intensity of friend/enemy campaigns has become a political economy of personal gain, and the self-sacrifice in return for the gift of life has become the reciprocity of human relations (renqing) and ritual economies.

Loss and the Uncertainty of Recovering Humanity When the calligrapher and poet who was also an official in the County seat in the prefecture of Quanzhou said that the famine destroyed human relations (ren yu ren guanxi), he voiced a sentiment reported by others from elsewhere in China. John Flower was told in Ya’an that ‘the cunning (jiaohua) survived, the honest and straightforward (laoshi) died’.11 Felix Wemheuer was told that before the Anti-Right Opportunist campaigns ‘Chinese people had human feeling (yiqian Zhongguoren hen laoshi)’.12 The people making these remarks implicitly ask whether they have recovered honesty and humanity. They do not claim with any certainty that they have. For most people these are much more prosperous times, and at the same time the economy is far more diversified and commodified, and social life even in the countryside is far more urbanised, as cities or large towns are within close travelling distance. Family and other ‘human’ relations are therefore being reworked in these completely new conditions. For most Chinese the present is in contrast with a past of hunger, now including the ‘twenty years’ of making sacrifices before prosperity could be reached under the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership.13 Among those twenty years, the years of the Great Leap famine stand out, as the time when people ‘just thought about surviving through to the next day, making it through one day at a time – you did everything for the sake of your stomach’.14 The legacy of stomach fixation may be a certain sense of priorities and a necessary ruthlessness in the seizing of opportunities in a commercialised economy of uncertainties, as well as the need to repair family and other human relations. At the level of published literature, apart from the statistics and records mentioned in chapter 3, there is some fiction referring to starvation and a subsequent realism – not that the fiction is realist, rather it conveys a version of reality as a way of being and the world, a model realism that conveys brute humanity. A surreal novel about eating, Jiu Guo (1992), translated both as The Republic of Wine and as Liquorland, by Mo Yan is the only novel by someone

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who elsewhere explicitly refers to his own experience of the famine and so warrants a reading of the novel as a portrayal of a post-famine condition. A central scene in the novel is a feast to which the boss of Liquorland’s Party Propaganda Committee invites the detective sent to investigate rumours of gourmand cannibalism in Liquorland. The propaganda boss can out drink anyone and has therefore been a boon to the Liquorland business, since so much of its work is done through banquets. At the table, over the courses of the banquet the detective’s consumption of liquor gradually nurtures in him a warmth of feeling for the boss, the male bonding that banquets and visits to massage parlours creates among businessmen. As a pièce de resistance a covered dish is brought to the table to end the feast. It might be a suckling pig. In fact, it is, but it looks like a human baby sitting cross-legged and smiling, its head a watermelon with grape eyes. The detective comes to what he thinks are his senses. He attempts to arrest the boss and shoots the head off the baby boy. The boss is benignly offended and presses the detective to make up for this rudeness by eating two lotus roots that formed part of one of the boy’s arms. He does. The feast is finished, but the experience has so deranged the detective that he becomes a beggar. This climactic scene is placed in a longer historical context by the literary critic Yue Gang (1998). He points to the horrific pun in the phrase Chi rou: eating meat, eating human flesh, once before invoked in A Diary of a Madman (1918), the famous story written by Lu Xun as a portrayal of the pathological weakness of China as a people, the madman seeing between the lines of a classic on virtue the constant admonition ‘eat people’. The madman’s cry at the end of Lu Xun’s story, ‘save the children’, is a plea of desperate irony for a future that would be a release from a fate in which Chinese were eating each other. Yue Gang sees in it Lu Xun’s placing himself, the writer, as a saviour figure above his disgust, equivalent to a revolutionary leader, but with irony, despair and self-disgust as a rallying cry (pp. 89–90). The line of fictionalised testimony to hunger continues into Zheng Yi’s documentary report, Red Monument (1993), already mentioned in chapter 2. It is factual but written in the same genre derived from Lu Xun, reporting cannibalism in Guangxi during the worst faction battles of the Cultural Revolution in 1967 through a representation of ethnic, Zhuang, innocence having been corrupted by the vile and vicious practices of the Cultural Revolution stirred up by the criminals, Mao and his Party clique. Zheng Yi as writer comes out as humanist saviour, indicating the right direction from which to interpret the immediate and rejected past, but through an inverted racism (pp. 238–52). Unlike these predecessors, there is no narrative position of redemption in Mo Yan’s novel. Instead of ‘save the children’, eating children as an act of gourmandise is seen as the human condition – its carnal and carnivalesque propensities – without a saving condition or leader, except for macabre humour. It

106   The Great Leap Famine

is a work of surreal irony, a parody and a satire on the fleshpots of post-Mao China. Its humanism is an allusion to a general condition of interpenetration, sexual and dietary, and of dependence on the flesh of other animals. Five years later, Mo Yan published the autobiographical essay I Can’t Forget Eating (Wangbuliao Chi) (1997). In it he describes joining the army in the early 1970s and entering a little Communism where he could for the first time eat his fill – the same as the admonition used for the communal canteens during the first year of the Great Leap, before famine set in. And then he describes the present, of banqueting, which includes as exotic delicacies the grasses and insects he had eaten out of hunger during the famine and of banqueters leaving uneaten great portions of meat that he would have wolfed. Youth that had been sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution now form clubs to reminisce and eat in themed restaurants to eat the food of the poor, such as the leaves of sweet potatoes.15 Judith Farquhar’s commentary (2002: 130–36) on Mo Yan’s essay draws it into the more medical discourse of Chinese nurturing of life (yangsheng), of balance and imbalance, excess and depletion, sequential extremes, or simultaneous extremes of cosmic disharmony, adding this to Yue Gang’s complementary detection of a literary tradition and Mo Yan’s distopic parody of it. The essay and the novel of Mo Yan are a remarkable and powerful combination of literary and traditional themes and genres, turning them against the gluttony of the present and recalling the complementary opposite of excess in the famine. Mo Yan’s sardonic realism, dwelling on food, is repeated in another, less direct but nevertheless telling novel that could be a commentary on the aftereffects of the famine, by Su Tong. Rice (1995) is one of a number of novels and stories that take a simple material as the elemental substance through which to portray the time and motivations of their characters.16 Another in this genre is Mo Yan’s own Red Sorghum. Both Red Sorghum and Rice combine the basic appetites of hunger and lust in the realism of a violent world where the ruthless succeed. Their historical setting is the 1930s, not post-Mao China, but this is less important than the reality portrayed. The two main characters of Rice are the family of owners of a rice emporium in a city and Wulong (Five Dragons), an orphan who has escaped from the flood and famine that overwhelmed his village and who is taken in by the family as a labourer. Eventually he becomes the master not only of the emporium and its family but also of the dock gang at whose hands he was humiliated when he first came as a beggar boy, jumping off the freight train by which he had fled his village. Throughout he is driven by hateful revendication and an obsession with rice, a substitute for security and possibly for love, certainly as a perverted enhancement of sexual intercourse. The family into which he inserts himself is borne along by either sensual appetite or obsessive monetary materialism – embodied in the two daughters of the proprietor – and the same

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hateful revendication, the depth of which is reached when Mi’er (Riceboy) the older, ten-year-old son of Wulong and one of the two daughters of the house, is betrayed by his youngest sibling, Xiaowan (Little Bowl). She had found the box containing the family gold and bought sweets with some of the gold. She resented her mother telling her off and let slip that Mi’er had had the idea of spending the gold. Mi’er bides his time before luring Xiaowan to play hide-and-seek by burying herself in the huge pile of rice in the storeroom and then he makes sure she suffocates in it. He is unapologetic, although the story when it gets out is a scandal. The whole neighbourhood is awash with back-biting spite. No one is apologetic or regretful. Indeed one of the most striking characteristics of the exchanges between the characters in this novel is the rising of their spite in word and act to almost bombastic heights in the face of the other’s accusations. Exactly the same as the outside world, the internal world of the family is hateful and spiteful too. Yet its survival is assured through continuing crisis. The novel ends with Wulong dying of the sexually transmitted disease that has been rotting his flesh. He dies in a freight carriage filled with rice he is taking back to his childhood village in a first, triumphant return, accompanied by his younger son. We assume the son arrives with the triumphant load of rice. The strong drive that keeps a reader riveted as well as repelled is the life force of hate, revenge and survival; sex, rice, and, surprisingly, family though an entirely loveless family life, energetically driven, according to Wulong’s recurrent dream and the running metaphor of the book, like a train, the engine of life by which the city and the future is reached. It is as though the political or ideological skills of keeping silent and dissembling are no longer necessary, but the habits of what is needed for sheer survival continue, openly professed in this story of bare, amoral reality. It may be that the village from which Wulong was driven by famine and to which he nearly returned with his huge hoard of rice stands for another reality, of respect. It is possible to read into Mo Yan’s and Su Tong’s appetite-based realism a baseline from which something else might be regretted and, perhaps, built. Indeed, that something is being built according to the more optimistic accounts of the cadres in the Quanzhou County town. The general theme being drawn from all these examples is that of finding moral bearings, as against the amoral realism of the times. Moral bearings of trust are being created through the making and keeping of personal relationships, of family continuity, but also of political and business relations of friendship and reciprocity. As the Quanzhou cadres pointed out, humanity is also regained through ritual institutions and their continuity. Stories of appetite and the city indicate a distopic realism that is the politically disillusioned alternative to the times of hardship. Moral bearings have to be found against both the past and the present that was its future.

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On implicit transmission of the famine I have argued that it is manifest in a negation, an acknowledgement of the past that is an emphatic turning back on hardship. It is manifest in an apparently contradictory combination of short-term ruthless money-making, with immediate and indulgent consumption on one hand illustrated by the fiction of brute humanity with much longer-term family reproduction also illustrated by brute Chinese humanity, mutual sacrifice of hard work between the generations and a concern with cosmic balance and the temporality of ritual repetition. For some years this may have been underlain by a fear of state reversals of policy, but it continues with an underlying insecurity of markets and of income.

Notes   1. Anna Lora-Wainwright has found the same accusation of laziness in a village in Sichuan (personal communication 10 May 06).   2. Many thanks to Willa Zhen for permitting me to use this information, 23 October 2009.   3. Anna Lora-Wainwright’s paper on well-being in rural Sichuan, April 2006, mentions a 6-year-old boy in a village family she knew very well being indulged by three older generations of women and how she once saw him eating four of the ten boiled eggs prepared for a family meal, without anyone remarking on it.   4. Many thanks to Andrew Kipnis for this information (Oxford, 1 July 2005).   5. This should not be accepted as a general truth. For instance, in the western Hubei village that he studied for his Ph.D. (LSE 2009), Hans Steinmueller met a poor man, who had been a ‘rich peasant’ bad class person and had suffered much, constantly complaining about the past. Thanks to Hans for this personal communication (May 2009).   6. Many thanks to Li Sha for allowing me to quote from this interview, part of his dissertation for the M.Sc. China in Comparative Perspective, London School of Economics, 2008.   7. Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Virginia, 2009, chapter 4.   8. Thanks again to Li Sha for this interview (see footnote 6).   9. This element of the rite was remembered by the name given to the small paper and cane soul-houses provided for the orphan ancestors: o+kham in southern Fujianese. ‘O’ – black – refers to the orphan souls, not to the colour of the paper houses. ‘Kham’, literally shelter, refers to the small soul-houses. The rite was part of the general salvation (pudu), conducted in the seventh lunar month of the year in which the genealogy had been restored and inaugurated, and included the merit making (zuo gongde) rite of rescue of souls from purgatory. Rites were performed for the unfortunate ancestors collectively by the whole lineage and individually by their families. It was pointed out that during family rituals of merit-making it is normal anyway to include songs about ancestors’ hardships and urge those who had died more recently to help their more wretched forebears. (Interview with Wansheng and the village head, 6 April 2004).

Implicit Transmission   109 10. ‘The International Labour Organisation puts the workplace fatalities toll in China at about 90,000 a year, a rate of over 10 work-related fatalities per 100,000 workers annually, or about 13 times the UK rate’. Hazards Magazine 93, Sheffield UK, Jan–Mar 2006, downloaded 15 May 2006 from www.hazards.org/ haz93/china.htm 11. Personal communication. 12. Reported at a workshop at Brandeis University 18 Apr 05. 13. There are still (in 2009) over 100 million in absolute poverty – a condition of chronic malnutrition – and there is acute poverty and insecurity among most of the additional 150–200 million rural migrants to more prosperous villages, towns and cities. 14. This is how a woman in the village of Shaocun, in a relatively poor part of Zhejiang province, remembered being a young girl in the famine. Many thanks to Daniel Roberts for allowing me to use this telling quote from his Ph.D. dissertation, LSE 2009. 15. Thanks to Jacob Klein, anthropologist of food at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, for this information, 23 Oct 2009. 16. Warm thanks to Zhou Lei for drawing my attention to Rice and to this genre.

Part II The Luku Incident of the White Terror

Chapter 6

Disruption, Commemoration and Family Repair in Taiwan As for Mainland China in the previous two chapters, this chapter on Taiwan will stress the involvement of kinship with history as material culture and as a narrative of events of change; in other words, with the history characteristic of nationalism and of modern states alongside the reproduction of families. Monuments that commemorate events mark a landscape with rallying points of belonging, just as tombs do for families. When names are associated with such monuments, or are engraved in them, they are personal rallying points for the families of those named, in addition to their houses and graves. But the material culture of history is not only monuments. It is also writing and other media of narration. Similarly, the material culture of family and kinship, for Chinese people, is not only graves and houses, and the domestic shrines within them. It is also another kind of memorial, namely a genealogy. But among the poorest, with whom I shall be concerned, genealogies are rare, so I shall refer mainly to graves and houses. To select and share an ancestor is to establish a relationship of kinship. Family life in other traditions is not as governed as it was in Chinese tradition with the maintenance of a line to be reproduced from ancestors through fathers, including the many ways of doing this even in the absence of sons or their deaths in infancy. So, a few words of introduction to this cultural drive may be helpful. Poverty carried the constant threat of the end of a line, a threat to continued settlement in a place of belonging, to fields or plots of land that parents and grandparents had cultivated and to the maintenance of the graves of the ancestors in that place. Chuang Ying-chang and Arthur Wolf (1995) have established the prevalence among poor Chinese in Taiwan of ways to maintain a line against the depredations of early death, infant mortality, infertility due to malnutrition, and the labour migration of men. They include the adopting of brother’s sons, the adoption from outside family of little daughters-in-law who would in their puberty be married to a ‘brother’ already or subsequently

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born, and bringing in a husband to marry a daughter or a little daughter-inlaw, which made many domestic altars the carriers of two lines, that of the married-in husband and that of the father of the woman he married, so that it was common for men to have double-barrelled surnames. The household records of Shiding, where I did my first anthropological fieldwork, are part of the data-set that Chuang and Wolf used for their analysis. At the time I had them copied (I paid someone to copy them by hand, photocopiers not being available), towards the end of my fieldwork in 1968, I had no idea of the even more severe threat to family line that had occurred only sixteen years before in another part of Shiding township that was particularly poor. It was the addition to the dire poverty that already posed a threat to lineal continuity of a devastating historical event. But not even a hint of it reached my ears, even in the last weeks of fieldwork when I began to hear details of the membership of local factions within the single governing party, the Guomindang, and outside it hints of sympathy for Taiwanese independence. It was only in 1995, on a return visit to Shiding (not my first) that Yu Chien, a young Taiwanese anthropologist friend sympathetic to the Democratic Progressive Party (Minjindang – DPP), told me that there had been a major incident of White Terror in Luku, a settlement in the mountains on the western border of the township, in 1952. He was astonished that I knew nothing about it and had heard nothing during my seventeen months of fieldwork despite the fact that everyone I knew well must have known about it. He could not believe how dangerous the secret of the event had been until the lifting of martial law in 1987, nearly twenty years after I had left. That is the measure of how things have changed politically and in the recording of historical events in Taiwan. The maintenance of relations through an ancestor is performed in rituals of kin meeting and separating and in rituals that turn the dead into ancestors: rituals of burial and then of visits to their graves, and rituals of offering at a domestic shrine. They are also maintained by periodic visits to the ancestral home from which family units have migrated. The disruption and deaths caused by the Luku Incident were unusual because they were political and shared by a large number of families from one location.

The Setting before Disruption The mountains where the event took place were settled in the course of the nineteenth century by people from Fujian province on the mainland. Most were poor subsistence farmers, but some introduced tea and others introduced fruit trees. Then coalmines were opened, small horizontal shafts into mountainsides, then larger and deeper ones by larger enterprises. At the same

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time, transport routes, tracks for small carts, boats on narrow rivers, paths for shoulder-hauled goods, were opened for coal, timber, cane, tea, fruit, indigo, and camphor to be taken for trading in the nearest towns on the Taipei plain, such as Nangang, Xizhe, Shenkeng, Qingmei, Muzha and the two riverside cities that now make up the oldest parts of Taipei city. The settlements became a place called Luku – the name refers to cavepools where deer drank and which were water sources for the Chinese farmers on these high and relatively infertile slopes. The settlements of the mountainsides sorted themselves out over the four or five generations, from the first settlers in these mountains from the mainland until 1952, by creating small neighbourhoods of dispersed houses and their land holdings, each neighbourhood tending to be of one surname. To have an ancestor requires performance of death rituals, from burial to eulogy and the making of merit (zuo gongde), that establish the dead in three locations: a grave, a name in the ancestral position on a domestic altar, and the small or large social network displayed in the course of the rite of reciting a eulogy, as well as offering and feasting. Without proper burial, the deceased is a ghost, not an ancestor. The rites include the spectacle of the procession to burial and of the merit-making rites that secure a passage for the soul out of purgatory and into a celestial residence. The making of merit is the most scriptural element of death rituals, and also, when elaborated, the most theatrical and the most expensive. But it does not mark a spot for an ancestor. Instead it ensures that the ancestor is not a soul in purgatory. Burial rituals are already enough for turning a ghost into an ancestor, even without merit making. Even the costs of burial rituals in poor areas like Luku meant borrowing from kin and friends, and so were an important staging of the cycles of reciprocity in which a domestic unit has to be involved. Into this un-policed economic, reproductive and ritual life came a reforming and progressive Japanese colonial state, establishing by 1905 its local police station and its household records.1 It paired the police station as an engine of reliable census records with a local primary school, or in the instance of the Luku mountains a branch police station with one policeman and a branch school with one teacher. Two other non-domestic institutions were added during the period of Japanese rule. In 1921, a small temple for a Buddhist monk and his assistant was built. The funds for building it came from Luku residents’ donations. It was colloquially called the Luku Vegetarian Temple (Luku Cai Miao), indicating that twice a lunar month, or less frequently, local women joined the monk in reciting scriptures and avoiding meat (though this must have been nominal since they could not afford it anyway). The Temple must also have provided for the recitation of merit-making scriptures for Luku residents’ immediate ancestors. The other institution was a public graveyard on land also purchased by subscription from the residents.

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Through the school some men and women in Luku became literate and if their family had sufficient land or earnings from trade some men went on to further education. One of them, Wang Shengmu,2 became the chief secretary of Shiding township after the defeat of Japan. Two Wu families, who had more land and a larger house than most others in Luku, produced the head of Luku village – called baozheng under the colonial state – succeeding to the holder from another relatively well-educated, but by then poorer family, the Huang, who were the first settlers in Luku. The Luku graveyard was started on land bought from the Huang family by subscription organised by Wu baozheng. His son succeeded him after the defeat of Japan in the Pacific war. The other branch of the Wu family had already moved to Taipei city retaining their house in Luku. They produced two brothers who became interested in politics. One of them, Wu Chunming, was the conduit through which the disruptive event occurred.

The Disruption and its Eventual Commemoration When Japan was defeated in 1945, its fifty-year-old colonial state in Taiwan was replaced by a Nationalist Chinese provincial government and Taiwan became a site of unrest that could have polarised into a civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists, just as happened throughout Mainland China. The brutality and corruption of Chinese rule under the military command of the Nationalist Party (the Guomindang) led to a demonstration in 1947 against the regime and a set of demands by an association of many of the most prominent of the Japanese-educated Taiwanese intelligentsia. The Nationalist military suppression of the Taiwanese intelligentsia was lethal and overwhelming. This event has become known as 2: 28, after the anniversary of the original demonstration on 28 February 1947. Among those intellectuals were some who sympathised with the Chinese Communist Party or at least formed left-democratic organisations of intellectuals against the government of the Guomindang. A small group of such people had formed a study group that met in the city of Taipei. Two of them were the novelist Lü Heruo and his friend Chen Dachuan, who adopted a pseudonym, Benjiang. They had a printing house where they produced books on socialism (Chang 2006: 80 and Zhang Yanxian and Chen Fenghua 2001: 30–34). Both were Taiwanese, but Chen Benjiang had been educated in Japan and Mainland China. An entirely local participant was one of the Wu brothers of Luku, Wu Chunming. In the wake of the repression of the 2: 28 protestors, and the retreat to Taiwan in 1949 of the full Nationalist government, they decided to leave the city and form a base for protracted resistance in Luku.

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Local residents referred to them as people from any other province – moshengren. But most Luku residents were not aware of their presence. The outsiders built huts away from paths and deep in the undergrowth and the trees, making themselves known very selectively to a few families in Luku and only then by false names or ranks of leadership. For instance Chen Benjiang was known only as Old Liu and his brother, who had joined them in Luku, as Old Yang. One of the families to whom they were already known was the family of Wu Chunming and its collateral branch, the family of the Luku village head. Chen Dachuan formed a liaison with the village head’s daughter, and she bore him a child. But even she claims never to have seen, just heard about, a Communist flag being flown. The outsiders began to educate and train small groups of schoolchildren in each of the families with which they made contact, including those of the two Wu families. Their’s was a moral education in principles of social justice derived from Communism, and the training was in combat drills using wooden replicas of weapons. Three of those to whom we spoke (August 2006) were siblings of or were among these children. They remember seeing Communist Chinese flags raised briefly by the hidden huts in a short ceremony. But most Luku villagers claim not to have seen anything. They may indeed not have. Even if they had seen this or that flag, they meant nothing to them, since they were completely out of touch with the politics of the Chinese civil war. Nevertheless, according to the Nationalist Secret Service (Bao Mi Ju, later renamed Ming Bao Ju, the Military Intelligence Bureau), Luku was an armed base of Communist bandits. On 29 December 1952, the Secret Service Police and the Armed Forces combined in order to arrest those who were participating in it. They turned Luku into a military zone and imposed a curfew for twentythree days. All except the very young and old were detained and interrogated in the small local temple, the Luku Caimiao. They were beaten into admitting they had participated and into pointing out or naming the leaders. As noted in chapter 3, 164 of the economically active men and a few women of the mountain area were removed.3 In addition, 19 children of sixteen years of age and younger were also imprisoned in the home of Gu Zhengwen, the officer in charge of the secret service operation, and their parents not informed. Luku village had been overtaken and depopulated by sudden, confusing and terrifying political violence. For the next thirty-five years, martial law censorship and anti-Communist Cold War rhetoric turned any dissenter into a ‘Communist’ and the accusation meant being sent away for long prison sentences. The Luku villagers, long after the release of their imprisoned family members, could not feel safe talking about what had happened to anyone beyond their closest family or neighbour or ex-neighbour. The isolation of the experience was compounded by having to migrate to the city to find work when, from the late 1960s, all the coalmines – in which women from the families of prisoners now worked – closed down one by one over the next ten years.

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Eventually, in the late 1980s, success by non-Nationalist Party (Dang-wai) candidates in local elections and the diplomatic isolation of the Republic of China as the Mainland People’s Republic of China replaced it in international diplomacy, persuaded Chiang Kaishek’s son and successor, Chiang Ching-kuo, to move from repression and military command. He had been in charge of the Secret Service and the Luku operation had been undertaken with his authority in order to present a major success to his father and as a means to promotion for its commanders. In 1987 he repealed military rule and turned the government of Taiwan towards civil administration and civil liberty. When Chiang Ching-kuo died, the Nationalist Party selected a Taiwanese, Li Denghui, to succeed him. Li’s government began a process of revision of history, for monuments and school curriculi, which is still continuing. It included a campaign to commemorate and provide compensation to the families of those who were killed in the suppression of the 1947 protests and those executed and imprisoned for political dissent throughout the period of martial law. That period acquired the name ‘White Terror’ (Baise Kongbu). A thorough work of interviewing families of the victims of the Luku Incident and publishing the interviews verbatim along with the results of research in the files of the military tribunals in which they were arraigned was financially sponsored by the Taipei County government and undertaken by a historian, Professor Zhang Yanxian, of the Central Academy of Research. The two volumes of interviews by Professor Zhang and his two co-authors (1998 and 2000) include the words of seventy people who were either widows or children of the executed or who had been prisoners, and of others who had been involved by being in responsible positions and active in the apprehension or release of those rounded up. At the end of the year 2000, the Taipei County government also inaugurated a monument to the victims (shounan zhe) of the Incident, on the anniversary of the operation, 29 December. It is a huge chromium-plated blade of steel, twisted to symbolise pain and unjust suffering, set on a large concrete base on the hillside where the road from Nangang reaches another road, circling the Luku hamlets. For the family members and ex-prisoners, telling interviewers what happened in the round-up and afterwards was part of the process of speaking about their humiliation and extreme hardship in public for the first time, and of course in a much more public way than just speaking to other villagers. Along with talking to Professor Zhang and his co-researchers, they were told that they could apply for compensation – graded accorded to sentence. But in order to get compensation, victims would have to produce the very document of sentencing that had been a mark of shame and humiliation for thirty-five years. Most of them did claim and were compensated. But the statute of compensation stipulated that if they were found really to have been Communist, they would not be entitled. So the present reformed politics is

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still haunted by the accusatory ‘Communist-bandit traitor’ and all Zhang’s interviewees profess not to have known about Communism and little or nothing of what they were supposed to have ‘joined’ (Taiwanese camka). In fact the strangers in the Luku mountains and Wu Chunming, the only local Luku man who could be said to have been a knowing sympathiser, if not a member of a Communist Party, had become informers and cooperated with the Nationalists and were not imprisoned, let alone executed. Even the selfconfessed organiser of the base, Chen Dachuan, was only imprisoned for three years after his capture and lived in comparatively luxurious confinement, together with his Luku girlfriend, where she bore him a second and then a third child. He was even allowed out to visit his family in Taipei (Chang 2006: 82 and Zhang and Chen 2000: 38–39) while the arrested Luku residents were either executed or imprisoned for far longer sentences in far harsher conditions. Chen Dachuan’s girlfriend speculated that the punishments of the Luku residents were exemplary, to frighten any further attempt at resistance and to isolate Chen Dachuan (Zhang and Chen 2000: 38–39). But that does not explain why he and the other outsiders who were captured were not executed or imprisoned for long sentences. The long, still not published, interview-memoir conducted in 1990 with Gu Zhengwen, the man who had been in charge of the secret military police operation, reveals nothing about the thinking behind this discrepancy, only that the Luku Incident was among many operations aimed at promoting the esteem of Chiang Kaishek and at the expense of rivals for his attention in other sections of the military and police command hierarchies.

Reluctant Participation in the Making of History: Grief and Grievance On 12 August 1998 a conference was held by Taipei County to launch the first volume of interviews. Ten people from Luku, victims and family members of victims, were present. The official version says that during the meeting they asked the government to rectify the injustice (pingfan) of the Incident so that they could regain their purity (qingbai). This is the language of the County report.4 But it does convey what three of the victims we interviewed expressed, that the government had cheated them, that the charge of rebellion was a slur on their name that they wished to have expunged, and that it was the worst experience of their life and the result of a twisting of the truth, symbolised in the huge twisted blade of the memorial. All those we interviewed said that they had told their children about the torture of interrogation, the execution of husbands and brothers, the miseries of imprisonment, hard labour and subsequent isolation, and the extreme

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hardship that wives of prisoners suffered, just as they had told Professor Zhang. Their children have tended to inherit from them a hatred for the party that led the regime in which they suffered. That much is transmitted. But things have changed. History has been remade. The Guomindang under its first Taiwanese leader, and again under its current leader, Ma Yinjiu, has apologised for these past crimes of injustice and turned away from its former rhetoric of retaking the Mainland, towards identification with Taiwan. We asked all the victims of the Luku Incident that we interviewed, what they thought of the Incident monument. A few said it was not as good as having a museum. We were told that the Wu family of the executed village head would donate land for it. Those in favour of a museum said that they want to participate in providing their own materials and renewing them with others, as things change. But the County under the DPP was not active in pursuing anything more than the monument. Under the Nationalists it is not at all interested. Tourism is now the major industry of the Luku mountain area, and tourists usually pass by the monument without stopping. The Nationalists, having apologised, remind people to look to the future not the past. As already maintained in chapter 3, the victims and their families are reluctant to speak in public about their experience. One of the reasons for this reluctance is probably to do with a continuing anti-Communism. Victim families had to say they were not Communist in order to receive compensation and the most important testimony to this effect came from Gu Zhengwen, the very man, then a retired General, who led the military operation itself. Some of the victims, including one of the children who was an active participant in the ‘Communist’ education classes held by her older sibling and supervised by the hidden leaders of the base, are still sympathetic to socialist ideals. Significantly she was not interviewed by Professor Zhang. Others, including older people who had no contact with the leaders of the base, and who knew almost nothing of their politics, learned more about them while in prison and came out with leftist sympathies. What the victims know and remember may be food for an alternative history of Taiwan and its relations to the Mainland. It is extremely unlikely that any of them would take an initiative to have that version written, though they may respond to writers of a more socialist inclination such as Lan Bozhou and other political activists of the left in Taiwan. In 2004 the Compensation Fund held a ritual commemoration of the suffering of all the victims of the White Terror. It was organised at the behest of the head of the White Terror section of the Compensation Fund, a member of one of the new Buddhist in-the-world charitable organisations, which have grown to become a distinctively Taiwanese form of Buddhism and have a wide following. To officiate at the ceremony, he chose another of the new Buddhist organisations, one that specialises in ceremonies for the dead. Its

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version of salvation rejects the older tradition of making merit and crossing through purgatory to rebirth or to the Western Paradise. Instead it emphasises comfort for the living and reduces to little and preferably nothing the making of merit for the individual dead, stressing instead general salvation. Out of consideration for the older practices to which the victims’ families, especially the more working-class ones such as those from Luku, were used, the head of the White Terror section had to persuade the organisation to include the names of the dead, those executed during the White Terror, on separate paper flags at the ceremony. But the named flags were quickly disposed of without further ceremony at the end. So the rite commemorating their trauma also looked to the future, not the past, and to the future of the living, not the dead. Only one or two of the Luku families of the executed came to this newfangled rite. They had already had rituals performed for their dead in their own, more traditional ways, as we shall see. A few others attend the annual, formerly biannual, ceremony in the park that was once the execution ground for all those condemned to death in the period of the White Terror, enacting their own participation in a version of Taiwanese historicity. The execution ground at that time still bore its Japanese name. The Nationalist government then changed its name to Youth Park (Qingnian Gongyuan), but more recently the DPP restored the old name, Machangding, as an act of remembrance. The park is a political site of contention. In July 2006 it was the venue of a left tendency within the DPP to demand the resignation of then President, Chen Shuibian, because of his family’s alleged involvement in financial scandals. The annual commemoration of the White Terror dead is a rallying point for another left tendency, in which Lan Bozhou is active. The two left tendencies are contrasted in common usage as ‘using the left to work for independence’ (yizuo rudu) and ‘using the left to work for reunification (with the mainland)’ (yizuo rutong). Politicisation of the White Terror has drawn one or two of the Luku victims into political activism, but not as initiators. We have no evidence that younger generations of their families are involved. There is still, then, a potential organisation of the history and commemoration of the Incident as part of the White Terror by a left political tendency. But most others in the Luku families would want to avoid any further politicisation. Some might like it to be remembered through a museum, but funding is unavailable for it to be part of local history. Tourism in Luku has a host of other attractions. The brief bloom of historical transmission is fading. Participation in the writing of history by providing testimony must always be amplified or diminished by the politics of history. And commemoration is in any case a way of forgetting. The survivors were passive but willing to be included in the temporality of commemoration that appealed to universal standards of human justice and inscribed them as sacrificial victims in the

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eternity of Taiwanese humanity, at the launch of the first volume of interviews and at the inauguration of their monument. But in the political history of Taiwan, the trauma thus commemorated is being forgotten, not by the aging victims, but by most members of the next generation.

Family Repair Now consider how some of the families of the victims incorporated this disruption into the reproduction of themselves as families, another chronology of generations, distinct from that of historical generations.

Disruption Personified: The Story of Wang Shufan One example of the continuing depopulation of Luku is ex-prisoner and retired coal miner Wang Shufan. He told my colleague Shih Fang-long that before 1952 he shared a small house with his parents, his wife and their daughter. His father had been badly injured in a mine accident. In the first of four television documentaries about the Luku Incident (made by Lan Bozhou in 1996) he describes how when his father died during the years when the strangers were in Luku the coffin was standing in the main room. A man and a woman came to pay their respects and placed a ‘Five-star flag’ (the emblem of Communism) on either side of the coffin. He knew they were political instructors (zhidaoyuan), but no more than that. He was usually away most of the time sleeping in mine dormitories, but in December 1952 he had been at home for a while, recovering from an injury to his foot caused by an accident with a push-cart in the mine. During this time he had been visited one night by a cousin and fellow villager he did not know well, named Huang Xiyuan, offering him lower, more fertile land that belonged to a distant relative. Wang Shufan was very glad to hear this because his mountain land lacked water, whereas the land offered was well watered and he would get a good harvest from it. With it, he would be able to stay up in the mountain settlement without migrating to mines. The man asked him to put his thumb print on a sheet of paper that he said was an agreement about lending or renting him the land, and Wang Shufan did as he was asked. A couple of weeks later, on the day the village was surrounded, his foot had recovered and he was on his way back to the mine. The soldiers told him ‘nobody is going to work today’ and escorted him to the police sub-station where they checked him against his household record. Later he and other villagers were kept overnight in a room in what had been a rice mill and taken the next day for interrogation in the Luku Vegetarian Temple. He was kept there for twenty days, crowded in with many other villagers. His wife was heavily pregnant with their second child. She was briefly detained and then

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allowed back home, but he was not allowed to go with her and she gave birth to a son on her own. A soldier took him to see his new child for a few minutes and then escorted him back into detention. His interrogators took him into a small side room and asked whether he had participated, proven by whether he had made his mark on the list of so-called participants. He replied he had stamped his thumb print for farmland, but they did not believe him and beat his back with a long baton, which was extremely painful and he could not stop wetting himself. Wang Shufan was furious with the man, Huang Xiyuan, for using the offer of land to trick him into putting his mark on a list as if he were now a participant in the base. Later at the military tribunal that followed his interrogation, he realised that Huang Xiyuan was being groomed as part of the leadership of the base. Wang Shufan was imprisoned for eight years, where he was occasionally visited by his wife and her father. While he was in prison, his wife had become the head of a household of three dependants: they were their daughter and son, and his mother, permanently injured from an attempt at suicide in despair at their plight. So Shufan’s wife had to find work in the mine, pushing carts. As a result she contracted what he said was a heart disease. After his release she bore them one more child, another daughter, and then died from the heart disease. His mother had also died. Wang Shufan was now solely responsible for himself and three children. He cut back the weeds from the path to make a way to plots where he could plant sweet potatoes. But it took too much of his energy and time to be sustainable. So he moved with his three children to Nangang and worked in a coal mine there, leaving his oldest child to look after the two little ones. He did not remarry because he feared a new wife would not like his three children. Wang Shufan has remained in Nangang. His son and daughter-in-law and their daughter, a university student, live with him. He had used his compensation money to build a storey on the Nangang house they share. At the same time he has taken to returning to his old house in the Luku mountains during the day to repair it and to plant vegetables on its land. In 2006 he was 90 years old, and had recently suffered a stroke. His daughter-in-law looked after him. She told us in February 2006 that when the weather is good he still takes an early bus up to his old house, returning as usual by early afternoon. Travelling up to Luku for the day is possible because the same head of Taipei County who sponsored the monument and the two volumes of interviews had also, as part of what he called his promotion of Taiwanese culture, had roads built up into the mountains from Nangang. Indeed, several County and Township roads now link the settlements with each other and with the local towns. Promotion of Taiwanese culture was part of a scheme of economic revival based on a refinement of tea cultivation and expansion of trips

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into the mountainscape as a place to enjoy weekends with fine views and visits to local craft centres, most of them run by outsiders, attracted to the beauty and the good air. There are several bus tours around these sites in addition to the regular bus that Wang Shufan and other old men who were victims of the Incident take every morning to potter around their ancestral homes. Wang Shufan had kept the registration of their household in Luku. If there were nobody living there, the house would be demolished (interview with Wang Shufan, 8 October 2004). But the status of his property seems to be uncertain. His daughter-in-law, in a telephone interview on 22 February 2006, said: Now we do not really have ownership (yongyuquan). Because we were too poor to pay tax, so the land has reverted to the government. The land should [since land reform] belong to the tiller, but it’s not yourself who can decide to whom it belongs. And because it belonged to the whole family it is difficult to manage [joint decisions for] two or three generations of the Wang. So many people are involved and they do not share a common idea on how to use the land and it is hard to clarify what piece of land belongs to whom. We also have a family temple (jiazumiao) [a tomb], not a very big one, in the public graveyard, not on our own land but on the other side of the mountain [from it]. The family tomb is possibly a more secure focus for the family, even though it is up in the mountains and they live down in Nangang. In it are deposited the remains of Wang Shufan’s parents and his wife. The house to which Wang Shufan returns may be a less secure focus, but it is a destination for more frequent, weekend family gatherings that elicit ambivalent feelings. It reminded his daughter-in-law of the poverty that removed their rights to the land: Our ancestral house is in the mountains, but because the senior generations were very poor and lacked education they did not know how to design an ancestral home (Taiwanese co chu, Mandarin zucuo). So it’s just a shelter and a store. For us, in the younger generations [i.e. self and children], we go for walks and to see how our ancestors (Taiwanese coxian, Mandarin zuxian) lived on this land. The old house may become a ruin again when Wang Shufan dies, because the family cannot agree on its division. But in the meantime, for him it and the land that was too poor to provide for his family are still important as his birthplace. His returns are also reminders of his being tricked and imprisoned. But, like the other victims, he does not talk to the tourists who come up and occasionally speculate about the Incident when they see the memorial. He

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does not talk to his children or grandchildren either about the Incident. But they already know about it through his claim for compensation. In Wang Shufan’s experience, the disruption figures vividly and he is constantly reminded of it. But for his daughter-in-law, it is far less important than the more immediate fact that he needs her to look after him. They have prospered in the course of Taiwan’s enormous economic change since the Incident. The distance from Wang Shufan’s coalmining days is huge, but they are still relatively poor. The reminder of the far greater poverty of their ancestral home is a reminder of the liability of death and disruption that such poverty brings anyway, of men moving to find work, leaving women and children to cope. It was compounded by the imprisonment of the men. But as a story, the Incident figures much more in the relations between men of the same generation than it does within the family.

An Ancestor in Limbo: Wang Ming’s Elder Brother One of the effects of dire poverty is delay in performing the merit-making portion of death rites, often for many years after the death of a parent. This too was compounded by the disruption in the case of the villagers who were executed. Wang Ming is the third of four sons of a married-in father, carrying on the name of his mother’s father as did his oldest and his younger brothers, leaving his second oldest brother to carry on the name of their father, Huang. Their father was the older brother of the father of Huang Xiyuan, the cousin who incriminated Wang Shufan. At the time of the Incident, Wang Ming’s father was farming, his older brothers working in the mines and Wang Ming was serving in the army. He was arrested on his way home on leave. His comradeship with fellow soldiers was to no avail. He was accused of being a deserter and a participant, and imprisoned for twelve years. His oldest brother Wang Shengxi was eventually executed. About two years after their imprisonment their house burned down and the remaining members of the family had to divide. ‘Huana’, the wife of Wang Shengxi, found work pushing carts in coal mines in Shiding, living in a small room of the mine hostel with their only child, a son. The remaining two brothers worked in mines in Nangang. Twelve years later, Wang Ming joined his family in Nangang, finding a marriage partner there. He and his wife have two children, a son and a daughter. Eventually he rebuilt the burned down house and he spends every day there, sometimes joined by his son and the son of his executed brother and their friends, as on 27 October 2004 when we visited him in Luku. Wang Ming is a very vigorous old soldier and prisoner. He is constantly doing some work around the house, trapping animals and skinning them, planting or picking vegetables and all the time with the radio tuned to news and talk. Going to prison had politicised him and at the same time made him scepti-

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cal of politicians. He picks up issues. At the time we interviewed him it was Taiwan’s arms spending. He thought it a waste of money. Proudly, he makes up his own mind on what is right and wrong. ‘I don’t vote for parties, just for the person.’ He is very keen that the Incident be made known, but only to people who can fully appreciate what happened. When his wife accused him of not talking to her about it, he told us that he considered his wife to be insufficiently educated to understand. Neither had he discussed the Incident or his imprisonment with his son. But this was for an opposite reason. He considered his son’s schooling to have been a Nationalist Party indoctrination, as indeed it had been. Nevertheless both mother and son know about one story, which Wang Ming’s son heard again in our presence from his dead uncle’s son, even though (we were told) they do not talk much to each other. The story is that on the day when Wang Shengxi was executed, the prison officials had his body cremated. Huana was notified indirectly by a friend of a friend and she went by foot to collect her husband’s ashes. When she got to the crematorium she poured the ashes into an oil can to take them home. As she walked back into the night a ghostly fire (Taiwanese guihe) lit the path. It was the fire of her husband’s spirit. He was not an ancestor and was still hanging around. She put the can under the bed on which their young son slept. A schoolfriend of her son (interviewed 29 October 2004) remembers that she had a prominent picture of Chiang Kaishek up on the wall and would bow to it every day, as a way of avoiding trouble. Up at the old house when we spoke to her son in 2004, he told us how the same ghost fire would come to him in the night for two years, and how he could make it go away by a downward gesture of his hand, which he demonstrated to us. After some years, long before her brother-in-law Wang Ming had rebuilt it, Huana eventually found the time to travel up to their burned down house and bury the can nearby, up on a wooded ridge, under a mound covered by a stone as a temporary grave. It is a geomantically auspicious spot. Many years later, in the 1990s, she had the ashes transferred to a family tomb in the Luku public graveyard. When she died, the son did not include his father in the merit making performed for her. So the soul of Wang Shengxi is still not saved, but he is an ancestor because his remains are properly entombed and at home he is honoured on his death day. A friend of Wang Ming’s son, a tour bus driver, was with us and said even he had heard the story of the ghost-fire at least twenty times. It seems then that this story binds together the families of at least two of the brothers, Wang Ming and Wang Shengxi, and that the disruption has in this way been turned into a bond between brothers and their families. But it is not so much a story of the event itself; it is the story of recovering the ghost of someone killed in it.

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The family tomb of Wang Ming and their collateral line, the line of Wang Shufan, are next to each other in the Luku public graveyard and every year Qing Ming, the festival for the care of tombs, brings both lines together. In this way, a remnant of the Wang neighbourhood in Luku is recreated.

Spiritual Replacement and Displacement Turn now to another neighbourhood of families named Wang. Wang Shengjin is the second of four brothers.5 Their father, a farmer, had died in 1948. They lived near the houses of their father’s father’s younger brother and of their father’s brother, Wang Shengmu and his wife and six children.

Wang Shengmu’s wife, Zhengxiu Shengmu had received a relatively good education and worked as one of the two executive secretaries of Shiding Township. He went into hiding knowing he would be accused of being part of the leadership. But he came home after four weeks, possibly persuaded by the township head Gao Bineng’s shouts urging him to give himself up. As Zhengxiu, his widow, described it, Gao Bineng walked around the mountains calling out to him, like calling ghostsouls (Taiwanese kiou hun). Another probable reason for his responding to the call is that he was unable to survive in open, high mountains. He was immediately arrested. ‘As soon as he came out he was taken away. He did not even have time to wash or eat.’ ‘What did he say to you?’ ‘He did not say anything. I think he could not talk. His mind was blank too [as mine was]. He just touched his youngest son’s bottom and left.’ She continued: ‘I did not see my husband again after that. I only saw his corpse after he had been killed … I can’t help weeping whenever I recall this.’ In the same interview on 4 October 2004 she commented: ‘The government suddenly took my husband away and left me with six children, an illiterate woman, working at home as a mother and on the outside trying to be a father. I fed and raised six children until they grew up.’ ‘Did any relatives or friends help you?’ ‘No. No one came or went. They pretended not to know us. Nobody dared to get close to us. Everyone was frightened, it was as if we had no kith or kin (Taiwanese bou qin bou jia).’ ‘Did Wang Shengjin’s family visit you?’ ‘His own family was also wretched. They also had problems of staying alive. Live or die, you had to find your own way.’ ‘I sold the timber from a piece of land to raise more than 8,000 Taiwanese dollars, for the expenses of burying him. Because he had been taken from his home to Taipei and killed, we buried him in the

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public graveyard (Taiwanese gongbo, Mandarin gongmu) in Shidingbu [near, but not in, Luku]. It was very difficult. It was like burying a dog.’ ‘Did you perform merit-making for him?’ ‘With so many children it was hard enough to keep us alive. From where would I have got money for merit-making? Only when my mother-in-law died, about 1981, my children had grown up and we had some money, only then could we perform merit-making. We employed a Daoist (Taiwanese huatsu, Mandarin Fashi) to call my husband’s soul, “now we are performing merit-making for your mother, you may join her”. … For her second burial, her bone urn and Wang Shengmu’s bone urn were put into the Wang family’s reliquary (Mandarin ta).’ Through these strenuous efforts, she made her husband an ancestor and a saved soul. But the reliquary is not in Luku. The family united by it is just that of her branch. But she does visit the other branch, Wang Shengjin’s, at what became its meeting place. She is another instance of a woman taking responsibility, alone, for the care of her family and her husband’s line.

Wang Shengjin Wang Shengjin and his older brother were coalminers. They were arrested as they came to work. Both were imprisoned for having participated in the base. Shengjin was already married with one son. The brothers in prison left their mother, their wives and children relying on the third brother, only sixteen years old, for survival. The fourth, 10 years old, was still too young to earn. The third brother managed for a few years in the mountains, but in 1959 decided to move them all away from Luku to Songshan, in Taipei city. The brothers’ great aunt, a widow who still lived in the mountains, kept an eye on their old house, its domestic altar and on it the god Shangdi Gong, whose statue had been brought from the mainland by the family’s first settler in Luku. Shangdi Gong, though literally ‘The Supreme God’, was a local and domestic protector. When Wang Shengjin was released, he joined his brothers in the city and eventually he and his wife had three more sons and one daughter. He and the rest of the family were kept under constant police surveillance. But he found work and three years later when his older brother was released in turn their income improved again. Then, after a few more years, the third brother, married now, had to stop working because he was sick – possibly the after-effects of the strain of looking after three families and a younger brother while his elder brothers were in prison. Neighbours in Songshan suggested he consult the family god, Shangdi Gong, about the reason for his illness. He did so at a local temple to the god and was advised that something was wrong with the grave of their common ancestor up in Luku. So he went to see his great aunt

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who was, as mentioned, still living there. She gave him permission to open the tomb and inspect the bone urn of the first ancestor, in the company of a geomancer, on the next occasion for the Cleaning of Graves (Qing Ming). They opened the grave and found water had entered, opened the bone urn, poured out the water, cleaned the bones, which were an auspicious colour red (not black), and reburied them in their urn. At the same time, returning to their abandoned house, the third brother saw how covered in cobwebs the domestic shrine was, including the statue of the god. He asked his great aunt whether he might take the statue away for restoration. She told him to ask the god through divination blocks first. He threw the blocks and they showed agreement. So he took the statue to an expert restorer in Tainan, the old city in the south of Taiwan, where rituals had to be performed to invite the god to leave the statue so that it could be restored, and then to invite him back into it – the rite of the opening of the light (kai guang). The third brother’s wife was also ill, with a depressive sickness that had driven her twice to attempt suicide. She was with him in Tainan for the ritual of re-opening the statue and she went into a silent trance that lasted two days, after which she spoke as Shangdi Gong, who said he wanted to be present as a healer. This meant another statue had to be made, slightly bigger than the original. In the end a third statue, slightly bigger again, had to be made and the third brother and his wife took all three back to Songshan with them. The next task was to build a temple for them. In their search for a site the third brother and his wife went back to Luku where the brothers had recently prepared some land near their old home for planting fruit trees. Passing it, she fell into a trance again and with the voice of Shangdi Gong said he wanted to be housed on that land. And so it was that in 1978 the brothers erected a small, thatch-roof shrine for the three statues on the fruit-tree land. But this did not save her life. Within a year she succeeded in killing herself, and her husband died some months later. Nevertheless, the Shangdi Gong in the small Luku shrine became known through word of mouth for its responsive efficacity. Six years later a typhoon blew the small temple down. But even this apparent setback to his reputation was ignored, both by the family and by the new residents of Luku that had moved there in the 1970s and 80s. The family was able over the next three years to collect sufficient donations to build a far larger temple on the same site, which opened in 1987. No one in the family could spend time there, so they employed someone to keep the incense fire burning. Then in 1991, Shangdi Gong possessed the youngest (fourth) brother who was on a visit to the temple. He has lived there ever since, serving the god and his clients as a spirit medium. The following year Wang Shengjin, his children grown up, also moved to live in the temple. It became their displaced home. No one repossessed the old house. In 2002 Wang Shengjin suffered the first of three strokes and had to move out again to be looked after by his eldest son and daughter-in-law in Xizhe,

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but they all spend every weekend at the temple. The youngest brother has added a new shrine, to Sakyamuni Buddha, where the family and the followers of Shangdi Gong spend the weekends chanting sutras. The temple is the main site of this family’s repair. Over the years we have interviewed him, Wang Shengjin has talked volubly, with precision and emotion about his experience of arrest and imprisonment. His eldest son and other children respect what he has told them. Wang Shengmu’s widow, Zhengxiu, also talks with great detail and emotion about her suffering and how she misses her husband. But their stories have not become part of the family mythology. What does remain, from Wang Shengjin’s own point of view, is the slur on his and therefore his family’s name of a conviction that he wants specifically withdrawn. He is not satisfied with the generalised statement of wrongful conviction, which is all the Compensation Fund has been able to provide. But this concern is not shared by his son or other children. The children of survivors try to protect them from their vivid and constant reminders of suffering. At the same time they distract themselves from it by attention to current politics and their jobs, or to the family temple’s rituals. They have left the ancestral house and its land to neglect and ruin (Wang Shengjin’s son, telephone interview 22 February 2006). Their family temple is part of a new landscape of Luku, one of several temples built in these mountains in the 1980s and since. For the younger generation, it is a place of family repair, at the same time new and at a generational distance from the Incident. For other regulars at the temple, it is simply a place of ritual replenishment. The two Wang branches of Shengjin and Shengmu have separate mortuary sites, but when Wang Zhengxiu goes to visit the temple their unity is re-established. It is all that remains of the old neighbourhood.

Family Connections and Disconnections: The Two Wu Families The disruption was even more severe for the Wu families. The first of the two Wu families is the family of Wu Chunming who brought the strangers to Luku. The other is the family of Wu Qiwang, who succeeded his father as head of Luku village. At his tribunal he was accused of posing as a future head of Taiwan Province and condemned to be executed, with the sentence carried out two years later. Wu Qiwang’s younger brother was jailed for thirteen years. Qiwang’s son Tianqi, who had been an instructor on the base, was also executed. These two, collateral Wu families were the most prominent in Luku and the most closely involved in the historic event as both agents and victims. Qiwang’s daughter, Wu Zhengzi, told us that the soldiers who occupied her father’s house not only took money and jewellery. They also took their genealogy and family portraits that were hanging on the wall. She and her cousin

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(her father’s sister’s son) Huang Sitian worked out with me that her father Wu Qiwang was related to Wu Chunming and his brothers by a common great grandfather (2 August 2006). This in itself was a minor act of repair and at the same time recognition of irreparable imprecision. Agnatic relatedness is recognised, but the event divided the two lines and divided Wu Chunming from his brothers. When the village was surrounded by troops, Wu Chunming escaped and went into hiding. After several weeks he gave himself up, and it is thought by ex-prisoners that he incriminated them. In any case because he had given himself up he was not charged. By contrast his younger brother Wu Chunyang suffered twelve years in prison and his other younger brother was executed. Wu Chunming was allowed free on the basis of some agreement with the Nationalist Party and the Secret Service. He and other base leaders were from the start distanced not just by education but also by wealth.6 To the punished members of the Wu families, related both as family and as comrades, the resentment must have been more personal and intense. Wu Chunming’s elder brother, Chuntu, led a quite separate life. He was already in Taipei, remained there, went into business and eventually became wealthy. But much later, he built a large house for himself in Luku as a weekend home and when he died his sons buried him in a tomb on the land attached to this house. By contrast, Chunming’s house has remained a ruin. We were told by a man who had lived nearby that Chunming had once come to the mountains to look after the geomancy of their father’s grave in Luku. But Chunming himself is buried in the city of Taipei, far apart from his father and brothers. In the collateral Wu family, the house of Qiwang (the executed village head) is also still a ruin, but next to it his younger brother’s daughter and her husband have built a house in which they live as a retired couple. Qiwang’s elder sister Wu E was married out to a farmer and miner named Huang. But she would often go back up to her natal home in Luku to help the remaining women, taking her baby son Huang Sitian with her. Huang Sitian (28 October 2004) told us that when aged 5–6 he accompanied her when she collected the bodies of Qiwang and his son Tianqi from a Taipei funeral home after they were executed. It was also she, again taking him with her, who went to visit her uncle Wu Wangming in prison, walking all the way. Her husband Huang was angry at this and possibly fearful about her loyalty to her natal family. He hated and forbad any mention of the Incident, in which they had suffered deep loss in their own family. Their older son, Tiaomu, had run from the troops and gone into hiding, his body never found or identified. It is probable that he died of starvation or exposure. The couple remained at loggerheads about this throughout their subsequent lives.

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Wu E’s solidarity with her natal female kin is evidence of the way the event mobilised the women of the families of victims in many ways, to enter the mines or to aid their mothers and sisters-in-law to survive. When she was near death she asked her remaining son Huang Sitian to visit her younger brother, his uncle Wu Wangming, in Luku where he had returned after his long jail sentence. Huang Sitian brought him NT$5,000. He told us that his uncle had learned a lot about socialism from fellow prisoners with whom he had become close friends. After the end of military rule, he subscribed to a socialist periodical called Xia Chao (Summer Tide). When he died people from the Xia Chao group came to his funeral. He had become politicised into being potentially the historical agent that he was accused of having been. After his death the house fell into disrepair, but his niece Wu Yin has returned there on weekends, covered it with a temporary roof and used the grounds to plant a few vegetables (Huang Sitian, telephone interview, 22 February 2006). In contrast to the separated tombs of Wu Chunming and his brothers, Qiwang’s branch through his two daughters is brought together by a family tomb in the Luku public graveyard. The whole family meet at least once a year for the festival of cleaning the graves. But, unlike the Wang neighbourhood, the event has come between Wu Chunming and his brothers and between the two branches. Zhang Yanxian’s co-author of the second volume of interviews, Chen Fenghua, told Shih Fang-long that after she had transcribed the recording of the interviews, she checked with each person by reading it to them (if they could not read it themselves) and asked whether they wanted anything deleted. Shih Fang-long asked her what kind of thing they had wanted to be deleted. It nearly always concerned fraught relations (shoufen) with someone in the village (interview with Chen Fenghua, 12 October 2004). The creation of the base had made relationships within and between certain families hostile and this carried on into the repair of their Luku home-place, from the distance of their city residences. In addition, rising prosperity has brought about a great change in the Luku graveyard. Instead of single burials of bone urns, families have pooled resources to build shiny and colourful stone tombs in which to store their ancestors’ bone urns together. This has consolidated not just their unity, but also their separation from those who did not join. So the executed Wu Chunying is in a family tomb which eventually his brother Chunyang will join, but it does not include their father. Their eldest brother has a separate tomb because of his greater wealth and status, in the grounds of his Luku house, while the betraying brother Chunming is far off in a city cemetery. The collateral Wu family of Wu E, Wu Yin, Wu Zhengzi and Wu Yunzhu, has a separate family tomb to the side of the Luku public graveyard, near where the old branch school stood. The old Wu neighbourhood is still there in tomb form, but now without Wu Chunming, and with a separation of family tombs.

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Historical Recognition and Family Repair Recognition The Luku Incident, as the secret police operation has become known in its historical recognition, caused an immediate isolation and dispersal of the families of the Luku hamlets. Historical repair was done by the two volumes of interviews, which are a published archive for further historical narrative, and by the inauguration of the memorial to the victims in 2000. The victims are collected together as a case in the new narrative of a recovered Taiwanese people, recovered from the older Nationalist Chinese oppression for which the new Nationalist Party has apologised. Professor Zhang and the Taipei County office in charge of the commemoration of the Luku victims seek explicitly to console the families, as well as to put the record straight and to bring about justice (pingfan). This is conducted in the time of narrative history, of Taiwanese culture, and of the restoration of human rights and dignity.7 Wang Ming still holds out a claim for more compensation. Wang Shengjin wants the criminal record in his name expunged. In other words they are certainly not indifferent to the question of justice and recognition. The historians have recovered the event from its secrecy, made it available, and recognised nearly every victim in the record. There has been a thorough state intervention to recognise and to right the wrong done to each of the compensated families. The state and its historians have finished their work of restitution. For themselves as families, the descendants of the victims of the Incident have done another work, a work of familial repair in another medium and reality, that of domestic shrines, land and tombs. Through them they have forged another sense of continuity and their own form of public recognition. The arduous work over years to give their executed family members a proper burial and the partial restoration of their presence in or near ancestral homes in their old neighbourhoods speaks volumes for the strength of their wish to repair or restore ancestral time. This desire mobilised women in particular, as wives, daughters, sisters, aunts and mothers.

Ghosts between the Two Recognitions and their Temporalities ‘Regaining justice (pingfan) for the Luku Incident is focused on compensation for harm (bushang), never on the original finding of guilt, nor conviction of those responsible. It is like giving you money after you have had a misfortune.’ (Interview with Chen Fenghua 12 October 2004). Their sentences have not been overturned in the courts. Instead, they were all issued a certificate by the Compensation Fund Corporation at a ceremony in 2004, which was the same for them all, saying they had been wronged.8

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Many of the victims had their own sense of just deserts meted out by fortune. General Gu Zhengwen at the time of our interviews was alone, living rather desolately in a decaying house. That was said to be his just desert (bao ying). Huang Xiyuan, the man who tricked Wang Shufan into putting his thumb print onto a sheet of paper by promising it was to help him get some land, was killed in a motorcycle accident. To Wang Shufan this was his just desert. Chen Dachuan (Benjiang) was said to have compiled the list of participants that was then used to incriminate Luku residents. He died of a heart attack in 1967. That was his just desert, according to his Luku mistress and mother of three of his children, abandoned by him after they were both released from prison. This is justice that is not of the courts of a historical regime. Rather it is the justice meted out in karmic fate or the courts of purgatory. For the families of the executed, their spirits are ancestors, not ghosts. But to many who come to Luku and bother to learn about the Incident, the place is haunted by the spirits of the executed as if they still are ghosts. A group Shih Fang-long and I met at the monument in 2000 said it is for spirits who wanted to revenge themselves on Chiang Kaishek, and they referred to them as ‘the good brothers’ (hou hia:-ti in Taiwanese), a euphemism for ghosts. So this was a transfer from the temporality of Taiwanese history and of commemoration of human justice and injustice to the temporality of family reproduction and its tragedies, registering the trauma in both and transmitting it to us in both. The monument and the landscape trigger stories of ghosts, whereas the family monuments, of ancestral homes and the Luku graveyard tombs, which tourists do not visit, trigger no ghosts.9 Ghosts or ancestors, the disruption of the small neighbourhoods of agnates is permanent. The old houses are visited by each of the now three generational families of the victims, but they are not as fixed or ‘permanent’ as tombs. Indeed they are like the homes abandoned in the poorest rural areas by migration and the formation of urban households. Some have been turned into weekend or retirement homes, most not. They give the ever-renewed, divided and remade family an appearance of permanence that is in fact provisional, and a sense of unity and continuity that is in fact occasional, not everyday. Even the tombs could eventually lose their focal significance if the current cohort of young adults chooses the mortuary rites of the newest commercial Buddhist foundations, which emphasise charity to the living and avoid the old rituals of bringing souls out of limbo, instead storing their ashes on the shelves of reliquary shrines (ta), as Wang Shengmu’s widow did. The younger generation, such as Wang Shufan’s daughter-in-law, if they are not wealthy enough, look at the ancestral house as a sign of past poverty left behind. Wealthier survivors have built new homes on the site of the old, and in their retirement returned to their ancestral land.

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Each generation has different reasons for keeping a distance from the Incident as a political and historical event, while attending to family repair and disrepair in a moving present of continuity. Between history and family chronologies, for those strangers who care, hover the ghosts of the Incident – and for those who lived through it, the present is haunted by the fate of the executed and the just deserts of the perpetrators and informants.

Notes   1. For the reforming programme and character of the Japanese colonial state in Taiwan, see Lamley 1999.   2. All names of our interviewees and their forebears are pseudonyms.   3. Zhang Yanxian and Gao Shuyuan (1998 pp. 30–31). The most affected villages were in Shidingxiang, in the upper and middle sections of Luku cun. According to the Shiding population register (Shidingxiang renkou tongjibiao) in 1952 there were 820 people in 139 households in Luku cun. If we count half of these to be the young and middle-aged and half of those to be male, we are left with 105 men. The executed and imprisoned from Luku according to Zhang and Gao (1998 p. 32) numbered 48, all men. So almost half of the most active males were removed, and it must have been a higher proportion from the higher parts of the village area. From one interviewee in 2005 there was a strong hint that others were forced to leave the area by police action. (Mother Cai, 6 Nov 05).   4. Kindly supplied to Shih Fang-long by Adela Lin, of the Taipei Xian (County) office’s document centre, Taipei Xian Zhengfu Choujian Luku Shijian Jinian Gongyuan Tashiji (Taipei County Government Documentation of the Schedule of the Establishment of the Luku Incident Memorial Park).   5. The whole of this section is based on two interviews with Wang Shengjin (on 3 and 23 Oct 04) and an interview with Wang Shengmu’s widow, Wang Zhengxiu (on 4 Oct 04).   6. Wu Jintu (28 Oct 04), one of the child prisoners, remembers that ‘When Chen Benjiang [one of the strangers] and Wu Chunming came up to the mountains they were quite fat.’   7. As stated by the Taipei County Government Documentation of the Schedule of the Establishment of the Luku Incident Memorial Park, the aim was to ‘transform this particular Incident’s tragic implications (yihan), lifting it into something about tolerance, strength, and honesty as signs of the spirit of the times. It would offer something of relatively positive significance for social mentality (shehui renxin) and cultural development.’ The memorial park remains an unrealised plan.   8. Of the 5,975 cases of compensation for victims of the White Terror only 3,295 were issued certificates. The rest refused to have them because they insisted that since they were not guilty in the first place, there was no question of a reversal of a finding. (Source: interview with the head of the Compensation Fund planning department, 19 Oct 04).   9. Thanks to Girish Daswani for remarking on this paradox.

Chapter 7

Gesture and Monument in a Tourist Landscape: The Generation Gap in Taiwan In October 2004, we went to interview a sturdy old man in the rundown house of his childhood and early manhood. At this time he lived in town with one of his children, but spent days at his old house in the mountains, pottering around. He used part of the old house as a sty for one pig. Outside was part scrapyard, part chicken run. Further from the house was his garden where he grew ginger and bamboo shoots. With me were three Taiwanese friends, all in their thirties or forties, one a neighbour of his, another from the same township but further away. The third was my research partner, Shih Fanglong. When we arrived we found him in the scrapyard part of his old house. All of us were interested in what the old man could tell us about his arrest and imprisonment after the encirclement by thousands of soldiers and police of this remote mountain settlement in the first days of 1953. The old man told us he had received compensation for his twelve-year sentence, but not for the several months he had had to wait for a boat to take him from the prison island after the official end of his sentence. He was not happy with the compensation fund. He went on to tell us that he had been arrested in the fields below, just a month before he was due to be married. By the time he was released twelve years later, his fiancée had married someone else and he had to find a new wife. He told us that when he was arrested, he was taken to the Luku Vegetarian Hall and kept in a squatting position for twenty-three days from 29 December to 21 January. To go to the lavatory, they were taken in groups. He then demonstrated the squatting position hard up against the person behind and in front, effectively sitting in each others’ laps. I photographed his demonstration. He is in a blue plastic-covered traditional conical hat, squatting against his younger neighbour. Our other friend is taking notes. In an instant the sight of this posture conveys much that is obvious to anyone familiar with Taiwanese or for that matter southern Chinese rural life.

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First the change of context since the time the old man is re-enacting is evident in the blue plastic instead of banana palm leaves on his conical rain hat. It is also marked by the scooter left by another visitor. Across contexts, the fact that our friend taking notes is also squatting shows that the posture is still common, an ordinary convenience, but not the way anyone would have their portrait photographed, which would be standing or seated on a chair. It is low, near the ground, associated with rural and manual labour and with simple or sparse furniture, such as the very low stools that are an alternative to squatting and ease the strain on the knees. Last and most pertinent is the harshness and humiliation of sitting in such close proximity on the lap of the person behind and facing the back of the person in front, with knee strain for twenty-three days. It evokes not only extreme physical discomfort, defying the imagination to know whether or what relief was found in this confinement, but also the indignity of sharing each other’s hind and fore parts in the terror of beatings that could cause not just sweat but incontinence, with the soldiers standing and threatening above. In other words the brief description and its image are an emotion-laden icon of ordinary people being humiliated and tortured. This demonstration and the description of the squatting position had in fact by then become an icon of the Luku Incident. It is being demonstrated by one of the victims in one of the photographs taken by Professor Zhang Yanxian, illustrating the introductory chapter of his first volume (1998: 27), with the caption quoting the victim: ‘When we were kept in the temple, it was like this, one rammed up against the next, not separating men from women, not separating day from night, squatting without movement for more than twenty days.’ In a filmed interview included in a television documentary shown in 1998, the same victim says that groups taken out to defecate were also mixed, male and female, and if they asked to be allowed to clean themselves, they were beaten. During interrogation, as well as being beaten, a pole was tied across their calves and soldiers sat rocking at either end. We interviewed the film-maker in July 2000 and she told us how she selected those parts of the interviews that described suffering, cutting other parts that were merely informative about the causes and the organisation of the ‘base’ and the Incident. ‘That is what the victims remember most. That is what engages viewers most. And that is what was most unjust.’ At the time of broadcasting, compensation was denied to those who had been involved in ‘Communist bases’. She ended the film with a plea that they be included. And the audience response in telephone calls to the station was surprise and horror that something so terrible had happened, and backed her call for the tortured to be compensated. As a result of this film, of the book by Professor Zhang, and of the campaign by DPP politicians, they were in fact given compensation so long as they could prove that they were not Communist.1

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The Emotional Language that Accompanied Commemoration of the Event Professor Zhang’s first book of interviews (1998) was ceremonially launched in August 1998 by the Taipei County Cultural Centre, which had financed the research and publication. According to a newspaper report (Zhongguo Shibao [China Times] 13 August 1998) on the occasion ten women victims of the same interrogation were present. They too demonstrated to Professor Zhang and to County chief Su Zhenzhang the squatting position in which they had been humiliated and terrified. County chief Su had written one of the prefaces in the book. In it he wrote that as head of Taipei County he had tried to promote the cultural life of the people. As part of this effort, he had actively encouraged the investigation and publication of Taipei County’s history and culture. He and Professor Zhang were both born in 1947 and were both members of the ’47 Society (Siqi She), for remembering the massacres of Taiwanese by Guomindang troops on 28 February 1947 and in the following months. According to another preface, by the Director of the Culture Centre of Taipei County, the publication of the Luku interviews would provide material for discussion of historical truths, comfort those who are innocent, and tell a history of blood and tears that could become a force to reconstruct the culture of Taiwan. From now on Taiwanese people would be able to understand and be kinder to each other, and would protect Taiwan (Zhang Yanxian and Gao Shuyuan 1998: 5). Professor Zhang wrote a postscript to his first volume in which he concluded that ‘Investigating the Luku incident made me think of the poor peasants and miners who lived in cold villages: through blood relationships and traditional social networks they were caught in what was to them an unrecognisable and unpredictable political whirlpool. They had no way to understand the views of the leaders; they became sacrificial offerings.’ (Zhang and Gao 1998: 318). At the end of the year 2000, on 29 December, the Taipei County government inaugurated the monument to the victims on the anniversary of the military encirclement operation. There are two plaques on the memorial. The smaller one on the lower level gives a brief factual summary of the event, set in tones of emotive sympathy, which has already been quoted (chapter 3). The larger plaque at the upper level amplifies the emotive tone of regret and repair. It explains the symbolism of the monument’s design and materials: ‘The shiny steel scimitar is the twisted sword of distorted justice, a monument to the silent who had to bear it without being able to speak out … The parallelograms of stone at the base with their angular edges are the scars on the beaten bodies … The steep slopes and surfaces reflect extremes of imbalance and of blind spots, in order to remind us to lower our heads and descend the

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steps as if walking into an abyss of disaster, and at the same time to lower our heads in memory of the victims … The small pebbles laid into the walls need water to wash them and bring shine to the surface as if bringing out the stone-like grievances of the victims.’ The squatting image is a much more familiar icon of the Luku Incident than the memorial. But its familiarity turns it into a gesture that can be amalgamated with other expressions of suffering and loss. For its part, the monument deliberately evokes such fellow-feeling through abstract symbolism. Identification with representations of an event, such as those of the Holocaust, diminishes the event itself and those who were its actual victims. As Eva Hoffman wrote in concluding a review of Novick (1999): ‘To use that event, with its terrible human anguish, to support ideological positions or moral posturing of any kind is surely an abuse of memory; to use the destruction of European Jews as the foundation of American Jewish identity seems a fundamentally contradictory conception.’ (The New York Review of Books, 9 March 2000 p. 23). But it happens, not only in the USA, or Israel, but also in Taiwan. Inevitably the politics of new contexts dilute the experience to which it refers. Every year on its anniversary, the 1947 ‘2: 28’ massacre is still passionately recalled by people of subsequent generations. The reason for this is that it is a founding, emotive screen event for feelings of Taiwan being under the yolk of a cruel Chinese regime. The main rival party to the Guomindang, the Minjindang (Democratic Progressive Party), has the credentials of being the inheritor of the repressed now triumphant Taiwanese subject of history, and it sets the agenda of Taiwanese identity politics. The Mainland is now the threatening bully against which obligations of Taiwanese solidarity are mobilised. Taiwan is a sovereign state but it is not recognised in global forums or diplomacy. The Guomindang has to accommodate by accepting and parrying this agenda. The two main parties and all the others in their respective alliances therefore frame their agenda in a frozen version of the Cold War, despite the fact that huge changes have taken place within Taiwan. On a visit to the London School of Economics (LSE), one of the things in which Ma Yingjiu, then the Mayor of Taipei city and chairman of the Nationalist Party (the Gumindang), now the President of Taiwan, took pride in the Taiwan he was promoting for his own electoral purposes was that its economic growth to First World prosperity had been achieved without the great inequality of incomes that are so deplorable and worrying elsewhere. We should come to see Taiwan for ourselves, he said, to appreciate its people’s democratic spirit and their wish to live in peace with the Mainland (speech at the LSE, 13 February 2006). The boom in Taiwan’s already fast-developing economy took off precisely when it became isolated from international relations and when military command law was replaced by multiparty democracy.

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Four weeks after Ma came to the LSE, the Democratic Progressive Party’s Mayor of Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s second city, also came to the LSE and for her electoral purposes she invited everyone in the audience to come to Taiwan and so come personally to know the passion and love of democracy of the Taiwanese and to see the river called Love that flows through the city with the sixth largest container port in the world (speech at the LSE, 8 March 2006). There is poignancy in their coming to the UK to talk about Taiwan. Their audiences were mainly Chinese and Taiwanese and much of what they said was about Taiwan not being diplomatically or internationally recognised as a country. Their invitations to visit Taiwan were of a piece with Taiwanese tourism to Europe and North America. They have not been reciprocated. Taiwan is not a popular tourist destination for Europeans, though China is. The Luku Monument, like other tourist stops in the mountains around Luku is for Taiwanese tourists, but they are situated in this poignant politics of recognition.

The New Context Ma Yinjiu has apologised for the injustices of the Guomindang’s former regime, and encourages people to look ahead rather than dwell on the past. The head of Taipei County who sponsored the Incident’s monument for the DPP has now been replaced by a Nationalist, even less concerned with the past. The tourists are nearly all from within Taiwan, but the tourism is lucrative and it is now the major industry of the Luku mountain area. Tourists usually pass by the monument without stopping. Commemorative history has acknowledged the victims and their loss, but it has moved on. As Taiwan has prospered, the city of Taipei has expanded in its large basin and up into the hills surrounding it. People have been absorbed into it from the surrounding countryside and city dwellers have moved out into more desirable outer regions of the city and new high rises. Those that moved out of the countryside have rebuilt their old houses or built new ones as weekend homes for family gatherings. Both inward and outward processes have made the countryside and in particular the higher slopes of the mountainous interior of Taipei County into places of recreation. Appreciation of the purer air, the fabulous views, healthy walking and rustic charm have replaced what the grandparental generation still alive had once experienced as difficult ground to farm or as long unavoidable walks to school or to work. In some ways the younger generations now experience their places of original descent – to be taken in both senses of kinship and of moving down from the mountains – just as a local or even a foreign tourist does. But in other ways this countryside is their past of belonging.

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As an anthropologist I crossed over to the local familiarity, starting as a foreign tourist and going on to make that local familiarity my business. On a visit in early November 2005 I was in the company of Professor Hsiung of the Central Research Academy, based in Nangang, a town that had been separate but is now part of the urban spread of Taipei city. It is a short drive from there to the Luku mountains. Professor Hsiung is a historian and an urban resident who lived in the countryside as a child but not in Taipei County. Two days before, I had presented a paper on the Luku Incident to a conference on history and memory at her research institute. As a historian she had known about it, but her view of the Luku Mountains was dominated by other aspects, those of health and enjoyment. She told me how, for twenty years, she had driven up very early before work for a brisk walk and to breathe the good air, and sometimes on weekends with her husband and daughters to join others enjoying the views, the plants and the birds. She suggested I accompany her for just such a trip, to see what the mountains are like for most of their visitors. It was a fine Sunday morning. We drove up the winding road from Nangang to where it joins the even newer road that winds along the contours of the upper slopes of the Luku Mountains. We came upon picnickers turning a viewing pavilion into a temporary guesthouse for themselves and their guests. They had brought a generator to run a karaoke sound system and screen, which was playing (at 9.30 A.M.) a popular song, xiao xia yi hui – ‘let’s walk through life with careless joy’. In a bay beside the road a little further up, a mobile tea and snacks vendor was setting out seats beside his van. On the other side of the valley, another sound system could be heard, made fainter by the distance. The air and the view were for these visitors a backdrop of health for current conviviality, a habitual change of scene for them, a family and its social network. The landscape was something that was becoming or already had become, as for Professor Hsiung, a part of their own habitual life and therefore their autobiographical memory. It is a place of beauty and wonder that for her was held in great affection. She took me to a further bend in the road where she showed me a wild flower. She picked a seed pod that, held in your fingers the proper way, responds to your body heat by twisting and bursting open to release its seeds, telling me how as a child in another part of Taiwan she and her friends had done this. It was one of her favourite flowers. People come here to see not only the plants, she told me. They also come to see the snakes, the butterflies and the birds. I remembered buying a plastic folder containing a set of butterflies from Taiwan’s highlands in the late-1960s after being told with pride that Taiwan was home to an amazingly high proportion of the world’s butterfly species. Both our memories were jogged and replenished by what we saw. She showed me yet another bend in the road where we looked up into dark spaces under

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high trees, where she had seen an eagle emerge with a snake in its beak and on another occasion had seen a pair of eagles appear and then hover at this height above the valley below and go through a mating ritual in the air. I felt envious of this memory, conscious of the difference between her being a habitual visitor and my being only a very occasional one! On a similar bend is a rock spring where we met another habitual visitor, a man slowly filling several plastic canisters, putting them into the large boot of his car. He told us the water was two weeks’ supply for drinking and for making tea. It is obviously superior to tap water. Thinking about this later, I am reminded that the water and lower slopes of this part of northeast Taipei County have been used for the growing of tea for export to the Mainland and to southeast Asian Chinese residents since the early nineteenth century. But when I was first in the area the tea produced was not as refined or varied as it is now. In the last twenty years, the refinement and grading of teas both here and in the Quanzhou area from which the plants came on the Mainland has increased tremendously, encouraging tea gourmandise and the opening of teahouses on the tea slopes. The best teas go for very high prices, along with an expanding craft industry of tea sets. Teahouses, serving both Taiwanese and Mainland leaves with elaborate finesse, have opened as favoured places to talk and relax, in Mainland Chinese as well as Taiwanese cities, rivalling the previously but no longer exotic coffee houses. The road from Nangang up to the Luku area is flanked by tea plantations and teahouses. Near the top of the road is the large, recently built Tea Museum. It and the other roads up here were built by the County to open the area to tourism, and there are indeed several touring bus companies that travel them, including a specialised Tea Bus Tour. But because Professor Hsiung is a historian and because of her own childhood memories, she saw other things in the mountain landscape she loved. Before we returned down past the Tea Museum to have tea and snacks at a teahouse that she and fellow academicians frequented, she pointed out to me large patches of ragged, sparsely vegetated slope with no trees or other plants, quite close to the viewing pavilion. This was seeing something where nothing is apparent, or rather seeing significance in an absence. It is an example of traces in a view that remind some people but not others of knowledge they have acquired about that place, because they have lived in it or visited it over a long time, or have enquired about it. In other words, a landscape is a trigger of the ways people have made places out of it, including older residential settlements. But these traces or reminders can be ignored or just not seen. A car park, for instance, marks the space where a seventeenth-century rectory had stood in Trowbridge, an old town in the English county of Wiltshire, until the 1960s. It had been a fine building where the poet George Crabbe had lived, and much later my wife’s aunt and uncle had also lived, and whose

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intricate spaces and garden my wife had enjoyed as a child. This is what a grown-up and educated child can see in one empty space. Or, to take another example, the huge empty square at the centre of the city of Kursk, in the Ukraine: its roads are tree-lined but the square is bare. In its space there had, before the German occupation in the Second World War, been a charming old city of narrow streets. But it had been ruined in the German occupation and then the Soviet government decided, instead of preserving or restoring the remaining buildings, to clear them all so that the new city could have a huge paradeground for the Soviet army, whose battle for Kursk had been a turning point of the War. This is what a historian can see in an empty space (Merridale 2005: 2). What did the historian and grown-up Professor Hsiung see in these empty patches in Luku? She always wondered why no trees were growing there. She knew that the Luku Incident was a military operation of the Nationalist government to flush out members of what they claimed was an armed Communist base in the winter of 1952, incidentally the year in which she was born. She had heard that in the Luku Incident, the state forces had tried to burn out the people hiding from them. These blank patches, she thinks, had been permanently defoliated. She recalled to me how in her childhood on the other side of the island there were houses in which people lived, ‘staying in the shadows’, as she put it. They were people released from jail after serving sentences for opposing the government (fan zhengfu), accused of being Communist spies. It was something too fearful to talk about at that time. As a historian, and mildly haunted by memories from her childhood, Professor Hsiung saw something in this relatively bare slope. But it was probably simply uninteresting to the man driving past with his spring water and to the family and friends sitting next to the blank patch and enjoying each others’ company. For each, the consumption and contemplation of these mountains and their views materialised a different sense of past and future. If they had come up the road we had come, just after the Tea Museum they would have passed by the memorial to the villagers who had been tortured, executed or imprisoned in the operation. Even so, they might have simply driven past it every time without stopping and hardly looking as most visitors do, including Professor Hsiung, wondering what it was but without stopping for further inquiry by reading the explanatory plaque.

Changing Name and Place: How ‘Luku’ is Erased and Retained You might say that the landscape and its sites and sights could accommodate all kinds of contemplation equally. Each contemplates and consumes the

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sights, the water, and the air according to their own sense of delight, exercise of their bodies, and interest in the past. But such a bland conclusion would be deceptive. There is, for instance, quite a lot at stake in such a simple matter as the name of the place to which they all like to come. Most people who live here and those who come here refer to it simply as ‘up in the mountains’ (shanshang). Only those who live or used to live in Luku divide it into upper, middle and lower Luku. Tourists know from maps or just from their way here that the mountains are on the borders of three local administrations within the County: Shiding, Xizhe, and Nangang. The issue is whether they are reminded of the name Luku, or not. A nature reserve or park was planned by Xizhe to be an addditional memorial to the victims of the Incident. It was to have been called the Luku Memorial Park. There was in 2004 a sign by the road saying ‘Luku Memorial Park (Jinian Gongyuan)’ but it had gone in 2005. The memorial park had in any case had little work done on it due to the Sizhe city and township leadership being torn between DPP and the Nationalist Party. In 2004 the Nationalist government, favouring a tourism future of rustic nostalgia to the political past, decorated the car park opposite the Luku Vegetarian Temple, now called Guangming Si (Retreat of Broad Enlightenment), with rustic fencing and trees and made other improvements to the roadside spaces. The name of the administrative village in which the bulk of the residents rounded up by the troops lived at the time of the Incident had been ‘Luku’. But within a year of the Incident, the head of civil affairs in the township office of Shiding had already consulted the neighbourhood heads in Luku, and one of them had said that Luku is a ‘bad name’ because it sounds like ‘rebels’ den’, rather than its literal translation as ‘deer’s cave-pool’.2 They agreed to change the name to Guangming village, after the formal name Retreat of Broad Enlightenment (Guangming Si) of the small Buddhist temple. The Incident removed nearly half the men of the upper hamlets and much of the remaining population emigrated to Taipei or other cities twenty years later in the 1970s when the coalmines closed. Tourism has brought an influx of new residents. One of them is a returnee: a Buddhist nun who is the third generation disciple of the founders of the Guangming Si. She had lived in Nangang, but returned to run the temple, which has been renewed and considerably enlarged since 1987. All our attempts to ask the nun about how she views the Luku Incident have met blanks. She also refused the County’s request to purchase the land opposite the temple entrance, its first choice of site for the Memorial because the villagers had been held and beaten into making confessions in the temple’s grounds and small hall. She and the Buddhist Association of Taiwan of which the temple is a member seem not to want to get involved in the politics of commemoration.

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Another erasure of reminders of the past was the renaming of the one old track up to the mountains. It had been ‘Luku road’ but was renamed ‘Xiding road’ – a combination of the two adjoining townships, Xizhe and Shiding – and of course it was widened and surfaced for motor vehicles. On another road, not well frequented by tourists, there is a small pavilion on a bend. On the other side of the road is a notice for a ‘Luku noodlebar’ that no longer exists. It was not a viable enterprise, but the owner insists on keeping the notice up as a reminder of the name of the area. The builder of the pavilion and proprietor of the land, where he lives and where the noodlebar used to be, is waging a personal rearguard action for recalling Luku. The pavilion is in memory of his father, who lived here at the time of the Incident but then moved, as did so many others. Eventually the son had after decades in Taipei moved back to the ancestral home after the death of his father and told Shih Fanglong: After his death, I used NT$800,000 of what he left to me to build a pavilion. I named it Wang Wu Ting, View of Nothing Pavilion. In fact, there is a great view from the pavilion onto the whole valley and mountains. I named it View Nothing because that is true of my mind. I had no father, so I sat in the View Nothing Pavilion, with my father in my heart. The View Nothing Pavilion bears a similar sentiment to that of the Luku Incident. Obviously, sitting in one position you can see many places, so why say Nothing and a view of Nothing? One thinks of one’s father after he has died. This is important.’ (11 October 2004). Shih Fang-long thinks he means returning to his roots, to understand where he comes from, which is a place in which so much happened but you just say ‘nothing’ holding it inside yourself. None of what happened is visible. The son now lives on the cultivation of ginger and bamboo on the land around his house. He remembers as a child being sent away when his father was talking to trusted neighbours about the Incident. He was vitally interested in our research, helping us collect testimonies from the ex-prisoners who now come back during the day to their old homes to potter about on their properties. For them and for him, the land is a reminder of what was a secret and personally painful history. The history is now in the open, but it has been commemorated and then either forgotten or remembered according to the use to which it can be put. All this is hidden to most tourists. But another local man, from Shiding well beyond the Luku region, takes a strong interest in the history of Shiding and had also been helping us in our research. He is an active promoter of the tourist industry, from which his own enterprise benefits. He takes tours as a guide, and he likes to include good stories of the history of his home

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township. One story he likes to tell is how as a child he was taken on a long school walking trip in the 1960s from Shiding’s main primary school to the branch school in Luku that used to be open to children of families up in these mountains. He told us that when they reached the Luku Vegetarian temple, he went exploring through the gate on his own. His curiosity brought him a moment of horror when he entered a room and saw a pile of bones. He kept this to himself because it is bad luck to see the unburied dead. From the rumours he had heard he was sure they were the remains of the many people killed in the Luku Incident and he recalls looking up to a mountain called Fengmu Shan – Tomb Mountain – and is sure that is where the other villagers killed in the operation were buried by the soldiers. The school trip was during the period of martial law and he recalls being frightened that he too ‘might be disappeared (pa bu jian)’ (28 September 2004). As Professor Hsiung’s speculation is for her a real feeling about a blank space in the landscape, the memory of bones remains vivid for him, though they are in fact very unlikely to have been the remains of people killed by the troops in 1952–53, because full investigations have revealed that only one person was shot and one may have died of exposure in the operation, the rest having been executed down in the city of Taipei.3 What he recalls is nevertheless for him a real childhood experience. He used to relive it every time his tour passed the temple and he showed his group of visitors the gate where a pair of stone lions stood until 2005. The ear of one of them had been broken off while the eye of the other had been damaged. He would tell his group of tourists that ‘Luku history is like this pair of lions – don’t listen too much, just one ear is enough; see but not too much, one eye is enough.’ In October 2004 we found poems painted through stencils on the gateposts next to the lions on the walls beside the gate. Within Buddhist sentiments they carried a cryptic message: People’s life changes within a breath Renming wu chang huxijian The eyes see the sun setting in the western mountains Yan’guan hong ri luo xishan In the world fortune ends, the head turns back to emptiness Shijian lujin kong huishou One loss of the human body, ten thousand disasters Yishi renshen wan jienan [a possible reference to the Incident or to the White Terror] To seek Yes or No every day is empty (i.e. of distinction between right and wrong) Shi fei zhaozhao kong Do not listen to self …… Bu ting zi . . There are no problems basically under heaven Tianxia ben wu shi All twists are made by people for themselves Yong ren zi rao zhi

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In 2005 when Professor Hsiung and I passed by, not only had the poems been removed; the lions had also been removed and replaced by new and smaller versions of the originals, and of course they were whole. She had not noticed any difference, possibly because she had no interest in the temple. But I had. There is still a fraught conflict and avoidance over what happened in the Luku Incident and whether to be involved in its commemoration. Our friend the tour guide is upset at the removal and replacement of the old lions. They were a part of the history of the area and were probably removed by the new County regime intent on environmental improvement and living for the future, and not dwelling on the past. A beautiful temple, with its traditional architecture and synthetic rustic fencing is the reconstructed and selected past preferred by the funders, the Taiwan Buddhist Association, and the County. So the same sight triggers quite different responses. Less historically inclined tourists just see the gates to a Buddhist temple in the mountains, which is a common sight. Indeed the mountains of Shiding have become a favoured location for new temples, each bringing in its own devotees as another kind of visitor. The mountains have become a religious dreamscape, for divination of various kinds, for healing, and for the changing of destinies. Much can be accommodated in them, many different senses of fulfilment and creations of family and personal life stories. But the removal of the broken lions shows that this accommodation and renewal is selective and destructive. Some pasts are marginalised and it is quite possible that reminders of them will be extinguished. Contrast Wang Ming’s old house with the Luku memorial. The one will probably be rebuilt or abandoned by his children after the old man dies, while the other will remain. It is a compassionate reminder of an event in a style that is purely symbolic, having nothing in it that can remind anyone of the substance of the lives and the work of those whom it commemorates. Nobody regrets their life of extreme hardship. But the event and the former life of poverty are still a live issue for their families and for the locals who sympathise with them. Is the memorial turning it into a dead issue? Is the removal of the broken lions part of that turning process? In 2004, on the road above the memorial, Shih Fang-long and I overheard a man waiting for a bus say that the memorial is all about the Nationalists shooting several hundred Communists who were singing the Communist anthem. A moment later, Wang Ming walked past. We had recently interviewed him and we suggested to him that he tell the curious stranger (and some others to whom he had been talking) about the Incident. He did not respond. He just waited for the regular bus to come and got on with the others without a word. He does not want to be a tour guide and he is not concerned with what other people imagine might have happened.

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Just as the lions triggered in one person an image of what happened, so does the memorial for others. Those that lived through it have accurate information, but they have confined it to interviews with historians and anthropologists. Without the curiosity that could lead to the resulting publications, each imagines what the little information they bring with them conjures up. The tourist trail and its stops are like a museum with small captions of information, from which each visitor creates his own images. From the sights that trigger them, and the fragments of information absorbed, each places their own internal context on the object seen and projects upon it a past. In fact, there is yet another tourist trail that is actually called a Museum by our friend who liked telling tourists about the bones in the temple. He had read about a way of promoting local specialties by joining them into a Museum Family (Bowuguan Jiazu) in Ilan a township on the other side of northern Taiwan. In 2001 he founded a Shiding Museum Family. There are altogether twentythree members of this Family. Some of them are actually small museums in educational establishments (schools and a Buddhist technical university). The others are an art gallery, an indigo tie-dying centre, restaurants of special foods such as locally made bean curd or lingzhi immortality mushrooms, and of course teahouses and gardens, and sites of special beauty, including two large reservoirs. Most are in fact run by people who are not from Shiding. But they are now what the township advertises, through this organisation, as local specialties. Beside the Museum Family there is also a Shiding Tourism Development Association (Shiding Guangguang Fazhan Xiehui) developing more sites for visitors and training its members to be guides. On our return down the road to Nangang, Professor Hsiung took me to the teahouse where she and fellow academicians often drink and eat small meals. This time, because I was with her, when the proprietor came to our table Professor Hsiung asked whether he knew anything about the Luku Incident. It turned out that he was eight years old at the time of the Incident and could remember coming back up to the house, near where the teahouse has since been built, having been sent down to Nangang to exchange tea leaves for cooking oil. On his return, he recalled, he saw soldiers leading his uncle away. He had retained sufficient interest to have kept an envelope of recent articles in the press about the Incident. (Later he allowed Professor Hsiung to make photocopies of them for me.) Then we talked to his lively 90-year-old mother who told us (6 May 2005) how terrified she had been and how they were made to move out of Luku. Within the new home and enterprise of the family, their memories of this place are, for the time being, associated with the same mountain slope to which they have returned. But they did not share this history with most of their visitors.

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Conclusion What I have tried to show in taking this tour of a small section of the Luku mountains is how the countryside is being turned into a museum. Like all museum objects its sights contain information that may or may not be noticed. One of my main points is that people embellish what they notice by the way it reminds them of something in their own life story. But the best informed keep a distance from all this because what they can recall is immensely complex and is confused by the way their own childhood experiences have been simplified and politicised. Finally, I have tried to convey how the landscape is being transformed so that the triggers to a recently lived past have been reduced. Some people attempt to halt or even reverse this process. But it is far more common, among habitual trippers but also among offspring of the farmers and miners of Luku, to share a view of the mountains as a landscape to be enjoyed. To them as to outside visitors the Memorial will remain as the only trigger to the past of the Luku families, and its symbolism is a way of forgetting what it was like up there, unless consulting the historical archive.

Notes   1. Interview with Wei Mingyu, 2 July 2000, conducted by Shih Fang-long, Taipei city.   2. The three main water sources of this particular mountain area were called ‘deer pools’ according to the history of Shiding prepared for the local school by the then headmistress in 1993 (Shidingxiang Xiangtujiao Cun (Shiding Township Rural Education Villages) p. 31). Information about the name change comes from an interview we conducted with an 83-year-old ex-resident of Luku village, a farmer there at the time of the incident, but not imprisoned (26 Oct 04 Taoyuan).   3. The old ex-resident we interviewed in Taoyuan (Oct 2004) who was thirty-three at the time of the incident, told us that there was a mass grave, not an ossuary, of people killed during Japanese rule.

Part III The Third Reich

Chapter 8

Acknowledgement of the Third Reich in Postwar Germany This chapter will set the scene for the following two chapters about families and their transmission of losses created by the Third Reich, the twelve years of Nazi rule that committed Germany to a European war of conquest, the enslavement of Slav populations, and the annihilation of the Jews in Europe. It is now more than sixty years after the defeat of the Nazi regime and its armed forces, which led to the occupation of Germany by the Allied forces of the USA, the Soviet Union, France and the UK, dividing Germany into their four zones – sixty and more years after the long process began, at first faltering, then well-organised, of medical rescue and rehabilitation of the few survivors of the concentration and death camps. Since then, the institutional acknowledgement and reparation by the Federal German state have grown into what must be the most sustained and elaborate of any state for its past of atrocity. However, it is impossible to use the word ‘adequate’ to describe any financial reparation or teaching in school for the atrocities committed by the Nazis. The history of the two Germanies since the Third Reich is the subject of a large body of writing and documentation. So this chapter will only produce a sketch of the history of the transmission of that dreadful past, not a full history of modern Germany. It will focus on some of the properties of transmission, such as denial or rather partial denial, and the attempt to seal away the past. As in chapter 4 on the Great Leap famine, the social feelings of shame and guilt and their part in denial will be introduced. The two most constant groups of institutions of acknowledgement and of reminder are on one hand the Federation of Jewish Communities and on the other, schools, museums and memorials. The Federation of Jewish Communities, state recognised but autonomous, takes upon itself a duty to draw attention to all recurrences of anti-Semitism in Germany. The West German state from the early 1950s included in the standard curriculum compulsory teaching about the Nazi period in history classes for four years in high school. The Holocaust has been emphasised since the 1960s. Schools in

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eastern Germany taught about victory over the fascists and de-emphasised the Holocaust until unification in 1990. The sheer juxtaposition of these two institutions, the Jewish Communities and German state schools, requires filling out, with their history and their nature and the addition of other institutions of commemoration. But juxtaposition of Jews in Germany with the slow process of school learning about their annihilation is enough to indicate a drama of acknowledgment and reminder, which is worth dwelling upon. Jews who stayed in Germany lived among people, most or at least very many of whom had perpetrated, benefited from, colluded with, or chosen not to pick up hints of information about the systematic murder of Jewish German families. It was still possible in the 1980s for Rachel G., one of the subjects of the study by Kurt Grünberg (2006: 147) of the second generation after the survivors, to overhear in a theatre foyer a man saying he had only managed to murder one Jew. She had not found it possible to remonstrate. By this unwillingness to confront, she learnt for the first time that she too would have failed the test of not being ‘sheep’ as she called her parents and the other Jews in Germany who failed to act on what they saw happening, leading to their defenceless torment. It was still necessary in the 1990s for Grünberg himself to point out that the invitation of perpetrators and victims to come together in reconciliation in the case of Jewish slave workers is not possible because it implies a kind of parity, whereas what was done to Jews was entirely one-sided. It was and is still necessary to point out, against appeal to a symmetry of reconciliation, that redemption or reparation and acknowledgement are the appropriate terms, including recognition that anti-Semitism persists in the absence of Jews (2006:70–74). It is necessary, though perhaps futile, because for instance it was still possible in 1996 for someone to be accused of ‘inhuman persecution’ and ‘Nazi behaviour’ for pointing out that the founder of his professional association, the German Psychoanalytical Association, had been a member of the National Socialist Party before it entered government and had benefited from the exclusion of his Jewish colleagues (Grünberg 2006: 78). These are instances of denied or of outright anti-Semitism. Many more can be cited. But to conclude from them, as Grünberg does (2006: 79–86), that more should be done by the German people, or to conclude that all German people are in a collective state of denial, and that the German state should do more is to demand the impossible. For acknowledgement to be in some way adequate to the fact of the atrocity in this case, and probably in very many others, is impossible. And to say that German people should not be defensive – that is to say they should not erect defensive mechanisms against the anticipated accusation of guilt – is also an impossible demand, especially coming from a psychoanalyst (Grünberg 2006: 83). This chapter will therefore be a brief history of those defences and how they were ‘overcome’, fulsomely or partially, or both at the same time, prin-

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cipally by state institutions. The word ‘overcome’ – Bewältigen – was used in a phrase coined in the mid-1950s to describe the task of ‘overcoming the (Nazi) past’ – Vergangenheits Bewältigung. Michael Carrithers (2008) has given a marvellous description of the rhetoric of this coinage, how it started as an appeal to fellow Germans and has now become routinised: as he writes, ‘the phrase can now be used routinely and with little or no[ne of the] moral weight [it had to begin with]. Public acts of commemoration of the Nazi past are now common and widespread.’ The word can also be translated as ‘mastering’. I have translated Bewältigung deliberately as ‘overcoming’ to highlight the ambivalence of the notion, which was meant in its original coinage to stress ‘facing up’ to the Nazi past but can also mean conquering it in the sense of making it disappear so that it no longer matters.

The Postwar Division of History The defeat of Nazi-led Germany was heralded by destruction by fire of German cities and citizens, a mirror reality of the Nazi vision of the final battle to the death (Sebald 2003: 98). The immediate response was a frenzy of clearing up the rubble of cities and making do in the ruins, which then became, first with Marshall Aid (1948–51) and then the economic reconstruction under the first government of West Germany, the German Federal Republic under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his economics Minister Ludwig Erhard, the activity that became known as the German ‘economic miracle’. Erhard succeeded Adenauer as Chancellor. Marshall Aid to Europe from the USA became an instrument of containment of Soviet influence in its zone of Germany and the rest of its European ‘bloc’ (territorial zones agreed with the Western Allies). It reinforced the rivalry of economics and politics that was engaged on either side of the Iron Curtain between the Soviet bloc, or the ‘East’, and the so-called ‘West’ of capitalism. Capitalism was named by its partisans and the ideological masters of the Cold War on the US side as ‘the Free World’. In this War, which was also civil war and anti-colonial or anti-post-colonial war in China, Korea and Vietnam, Germany like all three of these East Asian countries was divided in half by the Iron Curtain, into East and West. ‘Communism’ – the new designation replacing the older ‘Bolshevism’ – was the official enemy of West Germany. Bolshevism had also been Hitler’s main external enemy. One effect of the Cold War was to reinforce the accusations and facts of brutality of Russian soldiers in their advances across Nazi-conquered territory, at the expense of recalling anything preceding it. West Germans’ preferred account of their history was, generally, as victims, of the Allied fire-bombing

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of most German cities and of the dislocation and flight of Germans from what had by now become the countries of the Soviet bloc. In the East, it was a commemoration of victory over the fascists and the heroic deaths of all those who had been the victims of the Nazis.

A Problem of Temporality for the History of Nazi Atrocity During the Nazi era, history as taught in schools was a millenarian version of the common nationalist time of an emergent and future people. It was the coming of a time of the destiny of a future master race, purified from whatever had been holding it back: a mythological history about which any scepticism or falsification was treason. That which might threaten its destiny or hold it back was either already external – Bolshevik Russia and its Union – or internal and to be expelled or eliminated: the non-race of Jews, the degenerate race of gypsies, the treasonous German socialists and Communists, misfits such as homosexuals and those born with congenital defects or were subject to mental illness, epilepsy, and other disabilities as diagnosed by racist psychiatrists and doctors. The rejection of this history and the construction of another past and future of German people was the task of the reform of schools and of the reform of the ceremonies of commemoration that Hitler had himself inherited and transformed. The task of creating a new continuity, a new progressive history, is, however, bedevilled by the question of how to treat the Nazi era itself. All progressive-time histories are at once continuous, the eternity and future of a people, and discontinuous, the break from a past of backwardness or of domination by others into the future of modernity and liberty. What should a break with the Nazi past be, itself a break with a corrupted past? A common trope in the post-war histories of Nazi Germany is an opposite version of the concept of degeneracy that Nazi historians and critics used to reject the immediate past and its artistic avant-garde in favour of a time before degeneration. The trope now is to call the Nazi era a (re?)turn to barbarity, invoking a time before this degeneration and hailing the Federal Republic as a return to civility. A problem historians have faced is the extent to which identifiable particularities of ‘German’ history, culture, and ideology are responsible for the Nazi episode. In other words, they write in the progressive continuous mode the narrative of a people but they have also to account for a present that includes the rejection of that episode and the conditions that made it possible. In short, the Nazi episode is treated as both ‘German’ and as an aberration. At the same time, the Nazi era has to be recalled as an object of guilt and, if effectively recalled, as an episode of profound shame. Defence against this guilt and the admission of shame becomes ever more understandable as a second and now a third generation separates itself from this episode. But at the

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same time the apparatuses of reminder increase: the archives, the schooling, the commemorations, and the museums. Wars generally are episodes that create this kind of problem. They are extreme events, inverting the priorities of peace and progress, but at the same time they are the subject of the most intensely vivid memories, senses of comradeship and loss, the contexts of the most dramatic stories of good, evil and corruption. Wars stand as myth to progressive histories. They are formative but anomalous, marked-out periods of violence. The Nazi period was one of mobilisation for war and of war itself, as well as of the commission of the worst atrocities. It was an episode of myth, preferred stories, and anti-myth, the extremity of shame. German transmission since 1945 has had to find ways of dealing with this acute ambivalence and anomaly of progressive time.

Non-Jewish Germany: West It started with a longing for continuity. In the West the response to defeat was a nostalgia for ‘Heimat’ – the locality of belonging and the passionate knowledge of where you belonged that had been fostered before and during the Nazi years. Immediately after 1945 German refugee Heimat organisations came together to form a party that joined the ruling coalition led by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, the first Federal German government after the war, and successfully got compensation (Wiedergutmachung) money for themselves. There was also Lasten-ausgleich, which was compensation for land lost in the east because the most active organisations were those of Germans expelled and returned to Germany from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union. The biggest of them, still very politically active, is the Bund der Vertriebenen, BdV. But there was nothing for the families of exterminated gays or gypsies or those who survived the camps, because neither gypsies nor gays were able openly to admit to being gypsy or gay. Similarly there was at first nothing for Jews either. (Georg Elwert, personal communication 27 July 02). Over forty museums have since been built in the west for Heimats in the Eastern provinces where German-speaking communities had lived (Silesia, East Prussia, Galicia, etc.) as well as in the Länder of the present, unified Germany. In addition there are festivals such as the Easter meetings of the Sudetenland (German-speaking communities in the former Czechoslovakia), organised by political parties, particularly the CSU (Christian Social Union), the Bavarian ally of the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) – Bavaria having a border with Czechoslavakia. In 1950 the national day of mourning, which was started after the First World War for fallen soldiers and had been turned by Hitler into a Commemoration day for Heroes, was restored to include the German soldiers

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who died on all fronts in the Second World War. The date, 15 November, with ceremonies at municipal and state memorials and graveyards, now honours not only fallen comrades, soldiers, but also the women and children killed in the war. They are all treated as victims of the criminal leadership of the Third Reich (Hausen 1997: 141). In Bavaria, the day taken is the nearest Sunday to 15 November. In one village, it takes place at the ‘Kriegerkapelle’ (the warrior’s chapel) next to the church, with the priest holding a memorial service. The brass band plays mournful songs and ‘Ich hatt einen Kameraden’ (I once had a comrade). Soldiers stand, carrying machine guns. It is a big day for the local association of veterans – those who are still alive. So here at least, if not in many other parts of Germany, it remains a veterans’ day despite the inclusion of all the other victims of war.1 Intruding into this commemoration of German victims, the process of remembering the Nazi annihilation of Jews had already started with the British and other occupation forces making perpetrators face the sights of the camps. Then, from 1951 Konrad Adenauer as Chancellor, who employed as his state secretary a lawyer who had contributed a legal commentary for the implementation of the Nuremburg Racial Laws, committed the German state to reconciliation with the state of Israel and with Jews throughout the world, as an act less of moral compunction than of Realpolitik in Germany’s interests (Fulbrook 1999: 61 and 66). He committed the German state financially to compensate the state of Israel and eventually with regular remittances to compensate identified Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution wherever they now lived. Adenauer’s self-interested agreement to compensate then began to expand into other acknowledgments of the Nazi annihilation of Jews. It had already been the subject for a new crime of inhumanity, ‘genocide’, at the Nuremburg trials of Nazi war criminals by allied international judges and prosecutors in 1945. The first German trials of Nazi war criminals began in 1958. These trials continued in various West German cities culminating in the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, December 1963–August 1965, which coincided with the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann the main administrator of the ‘final solution’ to the Jewish problem, including the rounding up of mixed-race Jews in 1944. As Mary Fulbrook comments, the sentences in the German courts were extraordinarily mild but the facts had been put before the German public in ways more home-grown and forcefully effective than confrontation with the barbed wire and victims of concentration camps that the Allied occupiers forced upon ex-Nazi military and government personnel in the months after their defeat. The Frankfurt Auschwitz trial may well have sparked off the questioning of the older generation by the postwar generation (1999: 67–95). Many among the generation that became university students in the late1960s and the 1970s made it their political duty to investigate the guilt of their elders. But this was still a minority activity, the fervour of which was against the backdrop of at best partial acknowledgement. In April 1985 the

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visit of reconciliation, as it was called, by US President Reagan and West German Chancellor Kohl to the Bitburg cemetery that included not just regular soldiers but also the dead of the SS (Secret State) battalions who had been made responsible for the final solution, became a prime trigger for vigorous and tense demonstrations and for debate about victimhood among German historians and politicians. The debate among historians was set alight by the comparison of Nazi atrocities with previous Stalinist atrocities – the deportation and starvation of millions of those labelled rich peasants and purges of thousands suspected of plotting against Stalin. It was not just an analogy. Some German historians treated it as a partial justification: repeating the Nazi claim to have been a bulwark against Bolshevism. Supporters of this position also criticised or rejected two other famous interventions later, in the 1990s: the publication in German of Daniel Goldhagen’s book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which made the whole non-Jewish German population and its absorption of a peculiarly virulent German anti-Semitism culpable; and the travelling exhibition of documents showing the active complicity of the regular armed forces of the Wehrmacht in the Nazi atrocities – the criticisms of the exhibition were investigated by a historians’ committee and partially sustained, but the committee upheld the basic case that the regular forces had been actively involved in the war of annihilation, including the annihilation of Jews on the Eastern Front. The guilt of perpetrating the atrocities against Jews was made ever more evident and substantial in the form of memorials for the victims of the Holocaust and Jewish Museums recalling the communities of Jews that had been eliminated. They reinforce what has long been part of state schools’ history curriculum. It is compulsory to teach about the Nazi period: Hitler’s rise to power, the establishment of his dictatorship, its persecution of political opponents, its racial elimination policies, the reticence or opposition of German citizens, the instigation of world war, and the suffering of the German population as a result. These are topics for history classes in high school. It is a curriculum of facing up to the Nazi past but also of treating it as a regime both of and against the German people, who are presented as reticent at worst, resisting at best. The curriculum is not strictly imposed. A standing conference of the ministers of education of the states that make up the Federation issues guidelines on teaching. The topics are compulsory, but how to teach them is left to teacher and student. The guidelines do not prescribe texts or the ways lessons should be taught. The textbooks themselves, like those of other European school systems, provide materials (pictures, documents, reports of certain events, statistics) for students to think about, to put themselves in the places of young people living through those events, to put to themselves the problems and crises that were the circumstances of those times. They do not

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tell a definite story, just a chronological sequence of periods in European and German history. The textbooks are quite the reverse of those prescribed during the Nazi period itself, in which a very definite story had to be taught about the German people. German textbooks now stress the division of Germany in the Cold War, its unification and the place of Germany in a European Union as a democracy, contrasted with the Nazi and the Communist dictatorships. The memoirs, collections of witness testimonies, museums, and television and radio programmes available to students are varied and numerous, many of them recommended for further research in school textbooks. Among those we interviewed in Berlin, including Jews, there were altogether nine who had been to school in Germany (two of them in East Berlin). The nine ranged in age between being at high school in the 1950s to being at high school in the 1980s. All of them, including the oldest, reported that in one way or another the concentration camps had been introduced in lessons and that in addition they had been shown a film about the camps, or had been taken on a trip to visit a camp as part of their school activities. They all said that they had been more impressed by out-of-school reading and activities. A common instance was of Anne Frank’s diary or stories of other Jewish children hidden or following their parents to the camp. Another was visits to museums. Or it was seeing films that made the history vivid (the earliest being Nuit et Bruillard by Resnais; much later were films such as Spielberg’s Schindler’s List), sometimes organised by their school. In all these ways, they said, the annihilation became a story of real people and not just a school subject.

Jews in West Germany Most of the Jews who survived the almost-successful annihilation wanted to leave Germany from the many Displaced Persons camps that the Western zones set up to receive them from the concentration camps. Their first activity was to organise committees for various purposes, among them the search for family and for fellow survivors from the same place of origin, for proper commemoration and if possible burial of the dead, but also to demand separation of Jewish, from whatever country of origin, from other, often hostile (mainly Eastern European) camp survivors (Feinstein 2010: 17). The most sympathetic displaced Jewish persons’ camps and the largest number were in the American zone. Most Jewish survivors had the aim of leaving Germany, most often for what they thought would be the security of a homeland of their own, in Palestine, otherwise preferably in the USA. The first Jewish organisation was simply coming together as a quorum, called a minyan to say the mourners’ Kaddish – glorification of God’s name and prayer to be accepted into heaven and eternal peace – a reaffirmation of

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their Jewish identity, even if secular (Feinstein 2010: 68–69). The memorial prayer (Yizkor) said at four of the high holy days of the Jewish liturgical calendar and on the day when the destruction of the Temple in Jersualem is marked, a day normally reserved for visitng graves, were also occasions when the unfound and unburied dead could be painfully recalled by survivors (Feinstein 2010: 73–74). Denazification procedures implemented by the occupying allied forces included forcing camp guards to bury the bodies in open mass graves, but Jewish survivors organised to give them a proper burial with Jewish rites and in processions carrying the bodies to their graves, deliberately wanting them to be accompanied or at least watched by local Germans and in particular ex-Nazis (Feinstein 2010: 70 and 85–86). Bodies were recovered by ritual retracing of the routes of death marches and buried either in special sections of old Jewish cemeteries or in covered mass graves that were fenced, as were the covered mass graves of the camps themselves by these committees of Jewish Displaced Persons, and marked with memorial stones. Other ways of remembering the unnameable dead included the creation of mourning academies which met on the anniversaries of the liquidation of particular Jewish communities while others came together to collect memory books recording in detail the life of their liquidated communities and mourn them with candles. Memorial prayers were sometimes ended with singing the Hatikvah, the Zionist hymn of hope for a Jewish homeland. (Feinstein 2010: 80–85 and 103–4). For three years the British with governmental mandate refused to allow migration to Palestine. But with the Balfour Declaration in 1948, and after the war of independence that set the first boundaries of an independent state of Israel, involving the expulsion of thousands of Palestinians, restrictions on emigration to Israel were lifted. For Jews in Germany, the break in their progressive time since emancipation in the early nineteenth century had to have a new beginning, usually elsewhere. The few German Jews who chose to stay in Germany were often of mixed, Jewish and non-Jewish, parentage and had been protected or gone underground in the last two years of Nazi rule while the final solution was worked out under Eichmann’s administration. A number of fully Jewish Displaced Persons also chose to remain. Most of them were originally from Poland, including many who fled Polish anti-Semitism after being returned to their homeland (Brenner 1997: 42). The proportions between these mixed German and mainly Polish Jews varied according to the German city in which they recreated Jewish institutions. In Berlin, mixed German Jews were in the majority, whereas in others the proportions were reversed (Brenner 1997: 42–45). In all these cities, even previously non-observant Jews devoted themselves to re-introducing institutions of Jewish life, synagogues, weekly newspapers, magazines, kosher butchers and restaurants, burial societies and

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cemeteries. The intense anti-Semitism they had experienced and the dread of its continuing had turned secular Germans with a variously acknowledged Jewish heritage into more defensively acknowledged Jews. Above these the over-arching Federal Organisation of Jews and its constituent Communities that had existed in the main German cities for public and state representation from the early twentieth century until they were either abolished or turned into ways of forcing Jews to organise their own ghastly rounding up, were revived. The Gemeinden, or Communities, for Jews are quasi-state public corporations, funded from tax revenues. The name Gemeinde is also used for the smallest administrative unit, a village government, and for a parish community of Catholic and Protestant churches, called Pfarrgemeinde. Every confessional Jew (one who professes to be Jewish) pays an extra income tax to the state, which returns it to the Gemeinde where he or she is registered (a similar tax, called Kirchensteuer (Church tax), is paid by Christian parishes). Those who because of unemployment, illness or injury pay no income tax can still be registered members. Registered members directly elect a Gemeinde board of representatives who in turn elect an executive board and the chairman, and among themselves the Gemeinden elect the president of their Federation. Through their Jewish Gemeinde, registered Jews gain access to substantial social benefits, including German as well as Hebrew language classes, advice, help finding work and inexpensive housing. In addition Gemeinden provide places for their children in day care centres, summer camps and Gemeinde schools. For the elderly there are Gemeinde old people’s homes, and subsidies for burial in Gemeinde-managed cemeteries. But the main task of the Gemeinde is the organisation of Jewish life. To the Gemeinde a Jew is primarily religious and its prime responsibility is for the synagogues in its territorial and communal remit. The Kultus section of the Gemeinde, not the individual synagogue as in other countries, appoints and employs rabbis. Another section of equal importance is in charge of schools and the teaching of Jewish heritage in them. In Berlin at the time of our interviews, the person in charge of these schools was trying to promote a Jewish humanistic and ecumenical curriculum. A third section for cultural activities organises exhibitions, film shows, concerts and book launches that are not religious even though the artists are Jews, who may or may not have been observant. The Gemeinden, their synagogues and schools police the official presence of Jews in Germany, setting three standards. A religious standard, in both the Kultus (synagogue services) and schools, and since 2007 a rabbinical college, holds up a loosely defined orthodoxy of observant Jewry. As everywhere in the Jewish world, there is great tension within the Kultus and schools sections over the issue of including Liberal Judaism – the most ecumenical branch, closest to full assimilation – whose rabbis had twice been included and twice had their

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contracts terminated by the two heads of the Berlin Gemeinde up to 2004. The second is a standard of watchfulness against anti-Semitism, keeping records of incidents and drawing them, especially politicians’ anti-Semitism, to the attention of the Federal government. This is part of the reminder of the Holocaust. Every year, in the Fasanen-street synagogue of the Berlin Gemeinde, the chosen anniversary of this reminder, the Day of Remembrance for the Shoah includes the reading of every name of Berlin Jewry driven to death or gassed in the camps – 55,696 names taking thirty-six hours to read out in which politicians in the local and central government feel obliged to take part. Third is a standard of loyalty to the state of Israel, the longed-for security of a homeland for Jews. A huge white banner was hung across the front of the Berlin Gemeinde, as a fixture, on which was written in large black letters ‘Berliner Juden für Israel’. It was displaced East European Jews who formed the Berlin Gemeinde in 1945, insisting on Hebrew and German, relying on imported rabbis, and denying their Yiddish and Ladino backgrounds. From the start, then, there were Jews in Berlin, such as liberal and reform Jews, who did not conform to the orthodoxy of those who established state recognition. But they may still have supported the three standards of what can be described as ‘defensive’ Judaism. Defensive Judaism is reinforced by every action of the Israeli Defence Forces, by every EU condemnation, even the mildest, of the ‘defensive’ killing of Palestinian families and destruction of Palestinian land and economy, and by every omission from German news media of the bombing and rocketing of Israelis and virulent anti-Semitic attacks by Arab and other Middle-Eastern media.

Non-Jewish Germany: East In the Russian zone, which became the German Democratic Republic (DDR in German), with a government formed by a party aligned to the USSR, rejection of the Nazi past was celebrated as a victory of Communist resistance. The Nazi programme of racial hygiene was merged into the Nazi attack on Bolshevism, including German socialists. The eternal flame in the New Guardhouse commemorating the victims of fascism and militarism on the main avenue in Berlin (Unter den Linden) set the tone. The Eastern government was proclaimed to be that of German victors with the strong help of their Soviet liberators. The emphasis was on heroic resistance to the fascists, the heroes including Jewish resisters. In the Soviet Union, Jews were a designated nationality identified on their internal passports: not a religious designation, simply an ethnic one. In the DDR, of the few Jews left many considered themselves to be secular and socialist. But identification of Jews was as a religious community (Fulbrook 1999: 151). As in the whole of the USSR and the Soviet bloc there was no special recognition of Jews among the victims of Nazism. On the contrary, in

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the USSR there were a number of campaigns against Jews, in renewed suspicion of Jewish conspiracy, culminating in the paranoid fiction of a Zionist anti-Soviet plot by Jewish doctors and intellectuals in 1948. This anti-Zionist form of suspicion spread to the DDR.

Jewish Germany: East Even socialist and mixed-birth Jews who stayed in the Russian zone could be frightened of speaking openly about their Jewish heritage. One woman, who would eventually become a founder of the East Berlin Jewish Union told us (27 July 2002): I had this terrible anxiety about being a Jew, about our being shunned by people who were now friendly again. I was suspicious. We had stateless persons’ passes to get our income (Stipendium). I used mine very guardedly, always taking the last place in the queue so that others would not see it. The theme (Thema) was taboo. I did once speak about it to my colleagues at work. Victims of fascism got compensation (Rente) in the DDR. Members of the resistance got 300 DM more. I told a good colleague the compensation my parents got was from the VVN (Verband der Verfolgten des Naziregime – Association of those persecuted by the Nazi regime), which had before been called Opfer des Faschismus (Victims of Fascism). She asked ‘So your father is a Communist?’ ‘No, he is a Jew.’ They all fell into silence. That was in the sixties or the seventies. They didn’t ask me any further questions. We never spoke about it again. We knew each other very well and had known each other for very long. As we were told by another woman, who was a friend of the first and a mixedJewish historian from the East, ‘For my parents, Jewishness was not important. They were members of the Polish Socialist Party. Nationality of any sort was not important; all that is regrettable has its roots in nationality (das Bedauern ist darüber).’ But then a wave of official anti-Zionism turned her and others like her toward her Jewish heritage. The eventual result was the founding of two Berlin institutions for the preservation of Jewish heritage. She continued: ‘In 1968 we were affected by state anti-Semitism. Jews were thrown out of jobs and were effectively forced to emigrate. For me this was so obviously a criminal and absurd thing for what was supposed to be a socialist society that I became interested in the Jewish Problem (Jüdische Problematik) … As part of my interest in the Jewish Problem I had become interested in, though I did not join, the Jüdische Wir für Uns (Jewish Self-help organisation) of

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Communist Jews, which in 1987–88 founded the Jüdischen Kultur Verein (Jewish Cultural Union) in East Berlin under the DDR.’ (25 July 2002). At the time of our interview she was a senior member of this Jewish Cultural Union. The years during which talks between the Federal Republic, the DDR and the Soviet Union had reached the stage of serious consideration of the unification of the two Germanies provided more leverage to the Jewish Cultural Union and to the restoration of some Jewish cultural life in East Berlin, including a second East Berlin Jewish institution: The Jewish Centre (Centrum Judaicum). The Centre takes up several rooms and a museum in the main hall of what had been The New Synagogue of 1866, a monument of civic pride to house services of Reform Judaism under a large golden dome. On 9 November 1938 during the pogrom that the Nazis called Reichskristallnacht – State Night of Crystals, the shards of the Jewish presence – the New Synagogue had been set alight. Then it was bombed during the allied air raids. It remained a ruin in East Berlin until restoration began in 1988, the year before the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, on 9 November 1989. Now religious services have been restored but only in a smaller room, not the main hall in which they took place when it was the New Synagogue. At the same time, the Jewish Cultural Union lobbied to welcome Soviet Jews who wanted to migrate into the DDR. After much debate in the Federal Parliament (Bundestag), this policy of welcoming so-called ‘quota refugees’ of Soviet Jews was continued by the unified government of the Federation in 1991 as a way of meeting its responsibility for German history and a means of building or reconstructing a Jewish life in German cities. This policy of annual and quite large numbers of immigrants from the ex-Soviet Union countries was restricted after fourteen years in 2005 by an agreement among the sixteen Länder of Germany through a system to test that the refugees were confessional, religious Jews who would register with the Gemeinde, whereas until then most quota refugees had not registered.

Unified Berlin and its Jewish Organisations The process of unification (1989–1992) was dominated by the West German government, under Chancellor Helmut Kohl. One of the conditions of unification was the inclusion of the Federal school curriculum, of commemorations and of expressions of war guilt in the east. The socialist government of the east was itself condemned as a dictatorship and the whole language of perpetrator, victim and bystander applied to its inhabitants, all over again. This new history to be overcome has to some extent displaced the history of Nazi atrocities. One repercussion of this new history to be overcome is evident within the Jewish community. In 2002 I heard a liberal rabbi, recently resident in

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Berlin, say of an earlier, German-speaking Russian migrant settled in Berlin and holding a position of great responsibility in the Gemeinde, that he must have been a member of the Soviet Secret Police (the KGB). This Russian Berliner later told us that his own father had refused to attend the synagogue in Moscow because he believed the rabbi to be a member of the KGB. Such political suspicion goes further. Jews of the West Berlin Gemeinde generally suspected that the Jews who ran the East Berlin Jewish Union, such as the two women whom I have quoted, must all be members of the DDR secret police, the Stasi. I heard this very accusation from the Russian German about whom others suspected his being ex-KGB. Closer to an underlying truth is what the founder-member of the Jewish Cultural Union told us (27 July 2002): I am not unhappy about unification itself, more about how it was done. It was done from above, and very suddenly. … The director of the East Berlin Gemeinde was not happy with it either. He had given up his medical practice to lead the Gemeinde and was given no position in the unified Gemeinde. He had worked with the Stasi, but it was impossible to become the leader of the East Berlin Gemeinde without working for the Stasi. The [Union’s ] library was convenient for us in eastern Berlin [but it was taken and merged with the library in the Western Gemeinde far from where we live]. I do not go into the [Western] Fasanenstreet Gemeinde library as a point of principle. In fact the interview took place, for my convenience, in a nearby café in Fasanen Street itself. So it was indeed not just inconvenience but a deliberate boycott. She describes her own activity in the Union, illustrating its emphases on non-religious Judaism: I work with people older than me who are Holocaust survivors, organising excursions and events for them or visiting them in their homes when they can no longer manage to go on outings. The excursions are about once a month, in Berlin and its surroundings, always with Jewish themes. To places where famous Jews had lived, for instance to Arnold Zweig’s house or the memorial place (Gedänkstätte) of Anna Segers, the famous writer. Under the DDR no one knew she was an orthodox Jew. Or to Helene Weigel’s (the actress, Bertold Brecht’s wife’s) memorial place. The survivors who were not religious are not buried in the Jewish cemetery. [The director] would give the mourning speech at the grave, when there was no rabbi. I would go to their funeral services if they had no family to attend. We also put on birthday brunches for ‘the veterans’. Notices would be put into the Korrespondenz (news-

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letter) when they had their 90th birthday with a picture and a short biography, as well as death notices. But it was for the family to decide if we should publish such notices. Anyone who is from a Jewish family, not necessarily a Jewish mother, for example just one grandparent, can be a member of the Jewish Cultural Union. Or else one can be a ‘friend’ of the Union. The Union wants to be independent, but to keep close contact with both the Gemeinde and the Asser Israel (the East Berlin orthodox Gemeinde). Many Russians have come to us. We put on German classes and courses in Russian literature and in written Russian for children. … The Union charges fees, so the poorest Russians no longer come, but many German-speaking Russians do, particularly the retired. The history of the Jewish community in Berlin and other German cities has been the subject of recurring news of German defence against Russian, the native tongue of the majority of Jews in the city, being used in services, such as funerals. A similar but much more extensive suspicion of ‘quota Jews’ not being properly ‘Jewish’ sides defensive Jews with the Federal restriction of the quota to only those who can prove they are religious. The suspicion and the standard it upholds demand that secular Jews become religious, whereas the Jewish Cultural Union and equivalent organisations in the newly formed communities of Jews in the countries of the former Soviet Union raise the possibility of acknowledging a Jewish heritage without religious observance.

Unified Berlin: Avoidance and Admission of Guilt For many non-Jews, the building in the capital of unified Germany of two memorials to the Holocaust is immensely important. One is the extension of the Berlin Museum by Daniel Libeskind into a museum charting Jewish life in Germany: the Jewish Museum, opened in 2001. The other is the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin designed by Peter Eisenman and formally inaugurated in 2005. Let me cite some interviews we conducted with visitors to the Jewish museum on 25 July 2002, to show how fully some Germans have taken an interest in the Jewish German past. A few days before these interviews, a speech by Jürgen Möllemann had made the news. He was at the time the deputy leader of a small but key party, the FDP, in the ruling coalition and a minister in Chancellor Kohl’s government. In the speech he said that there had been too much concentration on the Nazi era and German responsibility for it. Previously he had said that the Israeli Prime Minister at the time, Ariel

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Sharon, was contributing to anti-Semitism by his actions against Palestinians. Möllemann was president of the German-Arab Society and in yet other speeches had said that if he were Palestinian, he too would resist the occupation of his country.2 The first interviewee was a science journalist, aged thirty-nine. What had struck him most in the museum had been the personal letters and photographs left behind by victims. ‘It made it more real.’ Pressed further, he said that he was impressed by the fact that Jewish culture was ‘like ours but different and it was so opposed, attacked and denounced by Christians.’ We asked him why he had come to visit the museum. His father, aged seventy-six, had been in the army during the war as a very young man, he said, and so he asks himself how could it all have happened. We asked him, what he had been taught about that time in school. ‘Yes, at school. I found it schreckendlich (notionally terrifying, rather than actually terrifying). I was moved, but it wasn’t for me. I didn’t connect it with myself. I thought it was so incredible. Yet my father’s father had been involved and my mother’s father was in the SS. It is now my own business. I suppose this has come with age. I am reading a book on the Gestapo at the moment.’ He also mentioned that he had read many other books, including works of Primo Levi and Imre Kertezs. ‘In the past few years, on TV and elsewhere, there has been a greater preoccupation with our history.’ We asked him whether his interest in this history is unusual among his friends. ‘Yes it is. But none of them say there is too great an interest in this subject. At first, after 1945, no one spoke about it. It was probably 1968 that opened up the subject. And now there is this Möllemann story. In Köln [as in Berlin] there are markers where Jews had lived. This is a good thing. My parents and their parents say it is all past, forget it. But there is more to be worked on – acknowledging guilt, understanding how it could happen. Most Germans know, but they are not changed by the knowledge as I have been.’ A second example of this somewhat exceptional and genuine interest was a couple, he in his early sixties, an advertising executive, she about ten years younger, a flight attendant. Both of them had lived in the DDR. They had that day visited only the exhibits dating from the earliest Jewish presence in Germany to assimilation. That was enough for three hours. They each had a season ticket and intended to return a number of times. A friend of theirs was a guide in the museum and had taken them round. Now they were relaxing with coffee in the museum’s cafė, and did not at all mind our sitting at their table and asking them questions. We asked them what had made the biggest impact on them. The woman said the Jewish ‘citizenship (Bürgertum)’. ‘They were completely assimilated. More than in other countries. This makes it easier to understand how astounding and unbelievable it was for them to be picked out.’ They had also

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liked the game that asked what the Widow Glinks needed to pack when in the nineteenth century she, a rare case of a Jewish woman, mother of ten, had to travel away from home to find work after her husband had died. And then they had been struck by the four drawers of a Christian chest which contained the standard anti-Semitic libels of the time, such as ‘they eat children’, ‘they eat pets’. The man said that knowing how old anti-Semitic stereotypes are, what their history is, helps us to overcome them. We asked them what had moved them to visit the museum. The man said: ‘I am interested in history, and Jewish history in particular. We have a friend who survived Auschwitz. I came from the DDR – long before 1989. We were resisting the regime as citizens.’ The woman added: He was jailed twice for trying to escape. We were psychologically tortured, but not in danger of our lives, nothing compared to the Jews under the Nazis. But it brings a fellow feeling. It is free-thinking (Freiheitsgedanke) that led to our wanting to find out about the Jews. When I was living near [the concentration camp at] Buchenwald in the DDR I saw that school students were being shown around. But schoolbooks stressed that the victims were Communists. Jews and Gypsies, and others of course, but always as socialists. A woman minister under Ulbricht [President of the DDR], Dr Hilde Benjamin who looked Jewish and was a terrible minister, gave rise to many anti-Semitic remarks. The whole subject of the Jews is an eternal dance on eggshells (Ein ewiger Eiertanz), for instance when criticising Israel. Inevitably there is a diminution in their fellow-feeling as victims, a diminution of which they showed themselves to be well aware. It is surely an inevitable accompaniment to imagining yourself in the place of the other, as the schoolchildren had done in their extracurricular activities. Note how they refer to the Jewish Germans, so similar to other Germans in their citizenship, in the third person. It is tempting to think of Freud’s essay on the uncanny: those who are so like us but different alienate us from ourselves. But then we, if we are like this enquiring and welcoming couple, re-assimilate the uncanny, make it our own. The woman added, ‘Before we knew each other we were both people of the kind that had to know, who felt the guilt even though we were not the criminals. Now there are younger people who say I have had enough of it – up to here.’ The man added, ‘The memory has to be kept open; it is our history. And there are other younger people, the internet generation, who have a renewed interest. When we were at the Brandenburg Gate collecting for a Holocaust fund many people over sixty years old said ‘you’re getting nothing from us’.

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They know they are exceptions from a more prevalent avoidance of the subject of guilt. But apart from the history of Nazi atrocity, other aspects of the war into which the Nazi government led Germany have also been recalled in fiction, history, and commemoration. How the two histories, of guilt and of victimhood, are balanced, is a political and a moral issue.

German Victimhood There have been very many publications of psychological, sociological and oral history, recording what SS and other Nazi functionaries as well as what Jewish survivors can recall. Television and radio documentaries are also produced every year. As against them, in 2002, the descriptions of the firebombing of German cities published immediately after the war but little read in the ensuing decades were pulled together and published to much greater readerships, as was the diary of a Berlin woman journalist describing the last bombardments of Berlin and the mass rape and looting of those who hid in the cellars by the Red Army troops (Anon. 2005). Treatments of both histories, of perpetrators and of veterans and victims, began immediately from the year of defeat. The national day of mourning in the late-1960s was made less specific because it was enlarged to include the victims of Nazi extermination and persecution. Then in the 1980s it was further diluted to include all people who have and are yet to fall victim to war, violence and terror (Hausen 1997: 141). At the same time, the television series Heimat (Edgar Reisz) in the 1980s with its portraits of families living a good life with marginal glimpses of slave labour and transports of prisoners, opened the possibility of public recognition of the Nazi break in the continuity of German history, since the series covers the story of a small, rural locality over the whole of the twentieth century (Santner 1990: chapter 3). The series made public and therefore gave authority to what many, probably most, families were doing, trying to make sense of family continuity transmitted by grandmothers, very often from rural settings, broken by the Third Reich and its terrible death toll. Similarly there is much stress on the Russian expulsion of Germans from East Prussia, a constant topic of German victimhood. As the older couple at the Jewish Museum pointed out: ‘Everyone has someone in their family who suffered. Film and TV documentaries on the Hitler time usually include material on East Prussia.’ Here is the homely, first person German, whose victimhood is linked to the other victims, but the other victims are like ghosts – the uncannily similar – who must be welcomed out of guilt and are welcomed by this generous couple.

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There has been sustained state (Federal and local governmental) acknowledgement of guilt for the acts of its predecessor, the Third Reich. From this baseline of making the Third Reich and the Nazi leadership a very definite past, narratives of different kinds negotiate the fact of defeat in a number of different ways, for a major instance the different ways in which the East German government celebrated the cut-off point as a victory, while in the West and now for the whole of Germany it was acknowledged, at first reluctantly then much more fulsomely, as compensable guilt – if not also as shame. But they all have to negotiate sharp discontinuity with equally unavoidable continuities of family reproduction and larger scales of continuity, including those who continued in office despite having served the Nazi leadership. A backlash to commemoration of victory over the Nazis was the rise of Neo-Nazism as popular cultural opposition to the DDR (Hasselbach 1996). On unification, East German Neo-Nazis joined West German and Austrian Neo-Nazis who could claim direct continuity from original Nazis. Together they became shock troops of Holocaust denial and carried out attacks on refugee hostels. They are attracted to the National Party of Germany and other smaller right-wing parties that have had considerable success in elections to the assemblies of east German Länder. Considering all this together, what is most remarkable is the breadth of opportunities taken to contribute to commemoration and historical documentation, to publish, broadcast, film, or to form new institutions. At the other extreme from the National Party and its Neo-Nazis is the Berlin Topography of Terror, a marking out in Berlin of the central institutions of the SS and the rounding up, imprisonment and torture of political opponents, gypsies, homosexuals and Jews in the Hitler years. There is great scope for the activities of public intellectuals and for political parties to make history an issue.

Concluding Questions about an Unpalatable Past A third generation after the survivors, the huge immigration into Berlin of Russian, Byelorussian and Ukrainian Jews – very many of them non-religious – on top of the unification with East Germany and its assimilated Jews, has created huge tensions within and against the defensive stance of the Gemeinde. It is basically a tension around the issue of the so-called diaspora, whether it can acknowledge itself and be acknowledged as a secure settlement of Jews of any described heritage, religious and non-religious, in the land of the Shoah. For the Germans amongst whom they live, defensively or more openly, there is the by now routine, normalised and forgettable admission of guilt for the Nazi episode. Politicians such as Möllemann want to set it aside. The German government under Chancellor Merkel seeks to combine good relations with Israel, and accepts the honour of addressing the Israeli chamber

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of deputies (the Knesset) in German (18 March 2008)3, while also aligning herself with EU on-off-on aid to Palestinians. Some Germans seek continuity through and including the Nazi episode by nostalgia for their Heimat, others by means of open display of Nazi emblems. The dilemma for many others is just how Heimat can be still of value after the word was soiled by its Nazi use. The word is equally compromised by its use in Heimatfilm, a popular genre of film in postwar Germany, and by its use in volkstümlicher Musik (popular music). Both are forms of kitsch that yearns for an idyllic past, a safe world (heile Welt). ‘Both are despised by most of my generation, as a commercialised, sentimental and simplistic romanticisation’ (Hans Steinmüller, personal communication, May 2009). Others resent Jews for reminding them of the Nazi German annihilation of German Jewry. Yet others identify with the victims while avoiding the history of perpetration. When the novelist Martin Walser was awared the Peace Prize of the Book Trade in 1999, in his acceptance speech he deplored the use of the Holocaust as a moral cudgel (Moralkeule), a constant reminder of shame. He also resented the scheme to turn a large area in central Berlin into a monument of shame, Eisenman’s memorial to the Jewish dead. Ignaz Bubis, then head of the central council of the Jews in Germany (Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland), accused him of intellectual arson (geistige Brandstiftung). ‘The issue was a topic in history and German classes in my last years of high school’ (Hans Steinmüller, personal communication, May 2009). For all sides the Nazi period is a challenge of accommodation to a sense of German history. So too it is for Jews in Germany. Can Jews in Germany overcome the past and become Jewish Germans, accepting fully their belonging to Germany? And then there is the hospitable acceptance of the other Jews? Can they accommodate Jews from the ex-Soviet Union with their lesser emphases on the Shoah, and vice versa? Can they in turn accept the religious, or the other way around can the religious accept their shared Jewishness and German belonging with the other Jews? These are questions of intimacy and friendship – acceptance as an ‘us’ with whom we might have more than just cordial relations, if not relations of marriage, on grounds of common interest, professional, aesthetic, or love of the same material things – a landscape, a city, a food, or a kind of music. As a British German Jew I ask myself whether current brutality, hero worship and hostility to foreigners are signs of a danger of the recurrence of the apocalyptic Nazi era. Or are they the accompaniments of a very varied humanity, acceptable without dread of their becoming an overwhelming force? The fact is that forms of ethnic cleansing have been recurrent, even characteristic parts of European history (Judt 2005). The Nazi era thus stands, not as an anomaly but as an extreme, radically questioning the progressive credentials of the modernising project. The pasts of extreme state violence

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and of lethal hostility among neighbours who have most things in common but do not intermarry for religious reasons, or who are seen as uncannily different have dawned on us as part of our common historical inhumanity. We have to envisage a temporality that can be interrupted by such brutality. That is the irony of the tiresome reminder of the Nazi era. Shall we conceive of an ironic temporality to shade progressive temporality? Can this be extended to a querulous kind of generosity and hospitality, the unacceptable as ‘us’ but also as ‘never us again (we hope)’?

Notes   1. Very many thanks to Hans Steinmuller for sharing his reminiscences.   2. Later, in September 2002, he published 8 million anti-Israel leaflets addressed to voters before the general election. For this and other reasons he was expelled from his party, the FDP. He was a flamboyant celebrity. He had been a paratrooper and made good news copy by parachuting into political rallies, but in 2003 he was killed in one jump too many. (BBC News: www.news.bbc.co.uk, 31 May 2002 and 5 May 2003).   3. ‘The Shoah fills us Germans with shame. I bow before the victims. I bow before the survivors and before all those who helped them survive,’ she said, using the Hebrew word for Holocaust. (Haaretz 23 March 2008).

Chapter 9

Disruption, Commemoration and Family Repair: Some Jewish German Families I and the other subjects I will introduce pose this question to ourselves: ‘Belonging to what?’. All of us are in families that mix Jewish with non-Jewish traditions. Two Jewish imperatives demand our attention. One is the command to remember that we are Jewish, which comes in contrasted histories, in the biblical story that we are bound in a compact with God, however that might be interpreted, and in the history of Christian civilisation that we are in families that have been subjected to anti-Semitic attacks. The other is the famous principle of inheritance of Jewish identity through the mother. Equally, leaders of Jewish communities worry about dilution by Jews marrying out and assimilating to non-Jewish senses of belonging. In Germany, such ‘assimilation’ has been described as the spiritual accomplishment of the material annihilation of Jews that Hitler almost succeeded in accomplishing. So, the question of belonging carries a force of interpellation: ‘to what am I obliged to maintain some kind of loyalty?’, heightened by the demands of ethnic belonging posed by the politics of identity in Europe and the USA. I am including myself in this research, not just as researcher but also as subject, because I am implicated more directly than usual as far as my research experience goes. Usually I am concerned with China and Taiwan in my research and I have only close personal relations but no family of kinship in either place. Here I am concerned with Jews in Berlin and in mixed marriages. I was born in Berlin to a Jewish father and a problematically Jewish mother who was the child of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother. She became Jewish by a ceremonial bath in order to marry my father. Shortly after my birth they had to flee Germany (with me of course) and eventually arrived in England as refugees a few months before the outbreak of war. I am married to an English woman of Anglican birth. We have not brought up our children in any religious tradition. We wanted to bring them up as moral beings without religious sanctions (positive or negative). At the time (the 1960s and 70s)

we treated ourselves and them as new beginnings. At first I did not wish to acknowledge my debts to my parents. But I have come around to doing so in later life, after watching and helping our own children grow to adulthood and having their children to care for and enjoy. My research for this book is therefore a way of approaching through others the question of how to acknowledge debts and then seeing the direction the answers take us in.

Kinship and Parental History Kinship here is not given. It is neither blood nor law, invoking both of which traces a large and abstract set of kin. Rather, I shall be describing a peculiar mix of selection and obligation, fateful events and procedures of on one hand denial and on the other selective amplification in the tracing of kinship. Above all, I will be exploring the ways in which mixed-Jewish families have negotiated devastating acts of state violence, including in particular the Naziled war of European conquest and the annihilation of Jews. I think it is true of everyone, anywhere and in any circumstance that we are curious about and bothered by our immediate prehistory – the time when our parents met and lived together and then conceived us. The long process of becoming adult starts from accepting that they had lives without us. It goes on to taking responsibility for the world we inherit from them, in the distance from our parents that we make or that is made for us by external events, simultaneously or eventually confirmed by their deaths. The historical disruptions that disturb and inform my subjects’ kinship are particularly dramatic accentuations of this normal process. Great catastrophes suffered by our parents, such as war and genocide, accentuate our immediate prehistories, giving them an importance greater than our own lives. Unlike so many others, we may have been fortunate enough to have had the chance to indulge a fascination and enjoyment of stories our parents told us of their own childhoods and early adulthoods and have gone on to finding ways to escape from the constraints of our dependence on them. But to an extent for us and to a far greater extent for many others who as children lost their parents altogether, historical disruptions have cut curiosity and fascination short, destroyed the records of their early lives, and turned them into refugees. The historical significance of the disruptive event makes more of the loss that any ordinary migrant experiences. In our case as refugees, we are not only cut off from the extended family that kept memories, but in addition the catastrophic event imposes its own accentuation on the normal distance we would have sought. It makes the loss more important, turning our prehistory into an overshadowing object of search, or research.1 In becoming adult, we select significant others – not necessarily our parents. We select, to some extent, what we inherit, including a prehistory of the per-

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sona that we consider to be our own. We accept them as an external constraint of what we have become, either negatively of what we have had to avoid, or positively of what we have to follow. The dynamic of this selective kinship is acknowledgement of debt and therefore of obligation. It has a reverse side in refusal to acknowledge debt, or a refusal to respond to a demand for loyalty and obedience, the wish to be free from dependence that can be threatening. Our acknowledgements are voices heard within us. Acknowledgement of debt and obligation is the result of having invited (or permitted) voices to speak (and be heard) in imagination and self-definition. They include not only parents or other senior kin but also spouse and children, plus influential figures like mentors, or the even more imaginary figures of forebears and God or gods and heroes. The darker, less idealised side of this selection (or invitation) is oppressive identification of significant otherness, marginalised or externalised in the masquerade of self. The singular first person distinguishes several such internal selves and also contains them, even if it does so inconsistently and uneasily. I shall infer from our interviews what some of these voices, positive and negative, must have been. But I cannot have come anywhere close to the full cast of voices that any one of us has as their dramatis personae. They constitute the fictions by which we live, our personal myths structured as a multilogue of answerability, voices to whom we are bound to answer or else avoid and negate.2

Acknowledging Jewishness in the Stories We Tell On the issue of Jewishness, each of the families and their main protagonists that I will introduce offers a different strategy of selective acknowledgement to deal with mixed marriage and mixed parenthood and the question of native belonging. I seek here to avoid the twin terms ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nationality’ in order to observe without too many assumed connotations the particular identifications that we, my subjects and I, have mixed. In any case, it is always ‘national’ even though always more than one nation. For each of us, one identification among others is ‘Jewish’, which is a notoriously resolute identification that refuses to be reduced to any one of the three categories that it suggests in social science: ethnicity, religion, and nationality. For all of us another, national and historical identification is ‘German’, variously felt and defined. Another, for the family of Baruch, is ‘Russian’ in the broadest sense of ex-Soviet Union. For me it is ‘English’ or ‘British’. These identifications, by others as well as by us, are impelled by political histories of revolution, war, and genocide. But they have also been internalised and personalised, as particular voices. How each of us made and kept a family, engaging with the institutions of school, work, profession and religion is also informed by our less formal iden-

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tifications with more than one collective entity, shared with others through a landscape, a cityscape, with music and other arts and writings, food, language and much more, and only through that to a state and its territory. I shall be writing primarily about strategies in creating a family and acknowledging lines of kinship across different histories and identifications. The number of case studies I shall present is small enough to provide personal detail and at the same time large enough to indicate a range of responses to similar circumstances. From the three families I will introduce from my research, I have picked out three men: Baruch (born 1944), Daniel (born 1958) and Stephan (born 1937).3 All of us have a strong connection to Berlin. But so that I have another German Jew to compare and contrast with Daniel, I will add Berthold (born 1954) and his brothers Ronnie (born 1955) and Gabriel (born 1969) portrayed in Bodemann (2005), whose last interviews for his book about their extended family were conducted in 2001, the year before our interviews. The perspectives of the wives of these men would be different, but since many of the decisive choices were made jointly, or in agreement with their husbands, it would not be that different, as we shall see. Besides, one of the points that I seek to make is that certain shared stories and their transmission are ways of creating and maintaining a shared history, of being a family and of creating a family as a social being.4

A Public God: Destined Choice, or the Selection and Silencing of Voices Baruch’s father Isaac was swept into the Russian revolution and wanted to fight for the Red Army in the civil war. Isaac’s own father, Solomon, was a mathematical scholar and a very religious Jew. Solomon thought Isaac had become unworthy of the Jewish covenant with God when he joined the Red Army.5 Although Isaac changed his name and went to save Jews from the White Terror, Solomon said that no worthy member of his family would fight and as a consequence he withheld his blessing. Isaac went anyway, but he deserted after being ordered to lead his squad to sack a village, and returned home to work as a dock porter, while studying political economy in the evenings. He eventually became a professional economist, but kept a Jewish life at home, passing on the family history as his father had told it to him. Baruch studied mathematics and now feels that he has been conversing with his grandfather Solomon, from whom he has inherited the most demanding responsibility, which is to comprehend God and in particular the task of understanding heathen elements in the history of Judaism. Solomon posited what he called a Gnostic hypothesis for the comprehension of God: a mathematical problem. That problem is the proportion of undecidable prop-

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ositions, which can be shown to be asymptotic, arbitrary and small, within the open-ended number of nontrivial propositions. Asymptotic is a mathematical term for a line that continually approaches a given curve but does not meet it within a finite distance. Baruch’s mathematics and physics is, he thinks, an acceptance of a particularly familial strand in the general responsibility to comprehend God. But he recalls that while he lived in Moscow he was not consciously Jewish. ‘I had no clear relationship with God.’ God was ‘only on the level of feelings’. Now he stresses a rationality of conscious decisions and measures himself against this most demanding standard, in particular the first covenant, of Noah with God (Genesis ch. 9) including the whole of humanity, before the covenant through Moses with a chosen people, who thus became the Jews. This and much else of my information on Baruch’s Russian past comes from a family history that he wrote when he was seriously ill in Germany towards the end of the 1990s. He wrote it in German, encouraged by his two older children, Russian-born but educated in Germany. Writing it came after a number of other acts that amount to a strategy in which Baruch, after deciding to emigrate, repositioned himself in Germany, and as a Jew. He told me that he had decided to be Jewish. But first he had ‘to make a decision to make this decision’, as he put it, out of the negative definition of Jewishness with which he was labelled in the Soviet Union. ‘Jewish’ was a nationality of the USSR, inherited through either father or mother, and nationality was entered on every person’s internal passport and identity papers. ‘After emigration [to Germany in 1975] it became a conscious work. I came to an insight that I must define myself religiously to become a Mensch [a decent human being].’ So in Germany he began a retrieval of his sense of himself and his Jewishness, reversing the direction he had been going in Moscow. In the Soviet Union, unlike any of his forebears, he had formed a relationship with a non-Jewish woman and they had a daughter together. Then he fell in love with a visiting German postgraduate student of Russian and she became pregnant with their son. They married and the son was born in Moscow. Baruch had already applied to emigrate to Israel, but now he changed the destination to Germany and he named his son Solomon after his father’s father. His reasons for emigrating were negatively to do with being labelled Jewish as a national identity and partly out of general intellectual dissidence. But leaving Russia and beginning a new family was a step in the formation of a new strategy of remembrance and generation. Baruch’s son says of his father’s family history: ‘It is not easy to hold on to this kind of information these days when we are overwhelmed with different kinds of information. There was a large family archive in Leningrad but it was annihilated (vernichtet) during the war. So my father took a major step.’

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What Baruch has written replaces the seven volumes of family history written by his grandfather, ‘annihilated’ with the rest of the archive. Baruch in his turn has written for his own archive what he had been told by his father, Isaac. The new archive is in Germany and centres on his life with Julia, the German postgraduate whom he married. Baruch credits Julia with having brought him out of his Soviet confusion and with helping him to make ‘his decision to decide’ to be Jewish. He married her when he thought she was a non-Jew. But they decided to bring up their son as a Jew as soon as he was born. This set in train an amplification of a gradual process of maternal identification that she says had already begun for her before she went to Moscow. Julia was born in what she calls pure Nazi country in East Prussia. Her mother is a baptised Christian. She despised Hitler and had longer foresight of the Nazi defeat than her neighbours, so before the Soviet advance into East Prussia she brought Julia and her sister to the West. In western Germany, they became members of a Christengemeinschaft (a Community of Christians). The school the girls went to was Protestant. When Julia began school, nothing was said about the Holocaust and Jews. She was a witness, as she put it, of how her teachers slowly became aware of the Holocaust. In the 1950s they showed the film Night and Fog, a French documentary about the Holocaust that was shown in all schools (Alain Resnais, 1955). ‘Our class was deeply shocked’, she says with hindsight, ‘and from then onwards there was more and more.’ Exceptionally, in 1960 this Protestant school organised ten girls to join ten girls from a French school to go on a trip to Israel. She was one of the ten. It was, she says, the first German school trip to Israel. ‘For me this was the moment when I understood what it is to be Jewish and when I asked precisely [about my ancestry].’ She was curious to find out more about her mother’s line. Her mother’s mother, Petra, had stayed in East Prussia until the end of the war but managed to join her daughter, Julia’s mother, some years after. Julia’s mother looked after her until she went to live in an old people’s home. Julia then visited her grandmother in the old people’s home regularly and alone. Eventually, Petra told Julia that she, Petra, was the child of a woman who was the daughter of a Jewish administrator of a sugar refinery who was emancipated enough to send her to an ordinary school, a Gymnasium. The owner of a large estate nearby saw her, was attracted to her, they began an affair and when she fell pregnant he brought her into his Christian household as his housekeeper and had their daughter, Petra, baptised. As a child Petra was teased by other children for being a Jew. She did not understand, until the house servants told her why. Her father gave her a generous dowry and married her to a Christian businessman. With their combined wealth, Petra and her husband had bought their own landed estate in East Prussia.

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Julia’s mother and elder sister deny their Jewish ancestry, while Julia has affirmed it. They consider Julia’s affirmation to be defamatory and have added to Christian Community a further adherence, to the anthroposophic movement and organisation, whose founder is Rudolf Steiner. They have made it their primary loyalty. As inheritors of Petra, including the Prussian estate but also Petra’s effects, they have destroyed the diary in which she had recorded the details of her Jewish ancestry. For her part, Julia, a schoolteacher, firmly rejects anthroposophy and with it Rudolf Steiner’s pedagogy and its mysticism, which she claims has anti-Semitic overtones. Julia’s choice of Baruch in Moscow, their having a son and deciding to bring the child up as a Jew were major steps in the long process of her separation from her mother and sister, of finding and acknowledging her mixture, as they denied theirs. This story of secret Jewish ancestry is a common thread in the history of Jewish assimilation in Germany. Secrecy and its harder version, denial, is a strong, politicised version of the selectivity that happens in any reckoning of kinship. Following emancipation in Prussia in 1812, Jewish–Christian mixture, and a continuation of the pre-emancipation practice of conversion, as well as simply abandoning Jewish religious observance, became common (Hertz 2007: 97–99). Even so, when it was known to non-Jewish Germans, Jewish–Christian mixture and conversion were often stigmatised. This gradually decreased, without ever ceasing, during the extraordinary spread of Jews into urban cultural, professional and commercial German life. But then antiSemitic stigmatisation hardened again into the threat of annihilation. (The story is well told by Amos Elon, 2002).

The Chosen Story and its Coordinates The separation of Julia from her sister and mother is how the event of the Nazi annihilation of Jews worked itself out in her mixed family. It was a long process, but for Baruch and his son Solomon the story of Julia’s discovery of her being Jewish by matrilineal descent, which is to say by birth, has become simplified into a much shorter tale. After unification of the two Germanies, in 1990, when she had for some years known of her Jewish ancestry, Julia and Baruch went to visit the cemetery where her maternal great grandmother was buried. Finding the gravestone was, in the way Baruch and Solomon tell the story, the turning point of their (the family’s) discovery of Julia’s Jewish identity. The grave confirms the destroyed diary. In fact, Julia had twelve years earlier become officially Jewish as the last step in her decision to bring up her son as a Jew, after consulting the rabbi who had overseen Solomon’s circumcision and being told that the lack of documentation of her Jewish matriline meant she would have to convert.

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For the family story her great grandmother’s grave is a point on the map that coordinates their orientation. Finding it has become the key to bringing her Jewishness out of shameful secrecy. In this story, Julia’s mother and sister are bad ghosts. Another graveyard, in the town in Byelorussia where Baruch’s patri-family lived for many generations, is another coordinating point. Baruch visited it for the first time two years after his visit to the grave of Julia’s maternal great grandmother. In it he found not only twenty-eight graves of his family, but also the mass grave in which Jews slaughtered by the Nazi invaders had been dumped, now marked by a memorial stone that had been vandalised. Among the bones in the mass grave were those of two other relatives about whom his father, Isaac, had told Baruch when he was a teenager. Isaac had had a child with another woman before meeting Baruch’s mother, just as later Baruch would before meeting Julia. Isaac’s first partner and their child had chosen to live in his family home in Byelorussia, from which Isaac and his father had moved to St Petersburg. Though urged by Isaac to leave, they had chosen to remain because they thought the invading Germans would liberate them from the Soviet regime. Baruch spoke about this with far more hesitation than the other stories he told Tsypylma. It is a part of his family story that was known but hidden, because his mother had forbidden any mention of it, and it is omitted from his written family history. The dishonour of a mass grave seems to compound the darkness that shades the great light of an illustrious history of a covenant with God that Baruch celebrates in writing. The third grave that coordinates the family’s orientation is in Israel. Not long after Baruch left for Germany, his father died. Baruch, despite great difficulties, managed to extract his ashes and persuaded a burial society in Israel and a rabbi to allow rites of burial after cremation. Fifteen very difficult years later he had established himself in Germany and could finance a return to Israel, where he found his father’s grave in upheaval caused by the roots of the cypress he and a friend had planted, and the tree had been struck by lightning. They repaired the grave and left the scarred cypress ‘as a memorial’ to Baruch’s recovery. Graves, when found or cared for, not only locate, they register (in their upheaval, their dishonour, their blessings, their being vandalised) major events in the vicissitudes of destiny. Destiny includes historical events but only as they affect the lives that give graves their meaning. Graves form an important part of a family archive and its story of location and dislocation; they filter historical events into the archive and its stories. Baruch and Julia’s partnership extends from these coordinates into Jewish and German public life. She is now retired as a schoolteacher and his work in scientific consultancy is not very engaging. Together they are instead profoundly interested and engaged in pedagogy and write philosophical policy statements on the humanistic

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Judaism that they wish to promote in Jewish schools and further education. They have also published a programme on cognitive, scientific humanism, which they want to be used in schools more generally. It is an elaboration on what it is to be a Mensch. For Baruch, he and Julia are undertaking the family responsibility that he has inherited, the task of understanding heathen elements in the history of Judaism. In my view they are one of many departures from the defensive, almost shame-faced, Judaism that the protective semi-governmental Unified Communities of Jews have promoted in the main cities of Germany.

An Exchange with Solomon on Heritage: Choosing other Voices of Destiny Solomon, Baruch’s son, like me and like his father before he knew otherwise, married a non-Jew. His wife Rachel is the daughter of a non-Jewish mother and a Jewish, but not religious, father who is also Baruch’s closest Moscow friend. She was born shortly before Baruch left Moscow and their parents had wondered whether Solomon and Rachel might one day marry. As she approached adulthood Rachel decided to continue to stand by her Jewish identity but also to attend Catholic church, not Russian Orthodox. To cut another famous family story short, Baruch engineered a meeting between her and Solomon in Berlin and, predestined to fall in love, they married and she was soon pregnant. Just as happened to Julia, she agreed with Solomon to bring up their child as a Jew, and this was quickly followed by her giving up her Catholicism and converting to Judaism. I asked Solomon about his Judaism. But he turned my questioning around and asked me about my heritage. He observed that while I could claim a Jewish heritage the main turning point for people like me was whether I married a Jew or not. By marrying a non-Jew and not deciding to bring up my children as Jewish (nor asking my wife to convert to Judaism) I had, he pointed out in a challenging way, denied my children the choice to be Jewish, or at least made it difficult for them to choose to be Jewish. They would have to convert. He had already spoken, as his father had, about making a choice out of all religions, to decide to be Jewish. I think you need to add to this rationality the fact that both he and his father had started from a family ‘feeling’ of God to make the decision to decide to be Jewish. I had also been brought up, at home in boarding school holidays, with the Friday family meal and kiddush at the beginning of the sabbath, but I had not done this with our children. Solomon called this moral irresponsibility. I said I would think about what he had said and he asked me to email my response to him. I never did, but here it is.

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My wife is a non-Jew more completely than either Solomon’s mother Julia or his wife Rachel. But this is less relevant than what I feel about the way Baruch and Solomon seek explicitly to answer the philosophical question ‘how should I live?’ by a doctrine of rational choice. When Solomon asked me this question in a more aggressive form (‘what is your purpose in life?’), my answer was a reflection on the few moments when I did make a choice that directed my life, and to wonder what brought me to them. He was far more definitive: his purpose in life is procreation and the advancement of reason. The voices of Solomon and his father remind me of a demanding authority that I hear within my father’s loving voice, and beyond it a sense of immense power and authority that is not necessarily interested in our lives, but demands we see the world from within its command, including the world as a danger, not from racism in general, but from anti-Semitism in particular. Another authoritative internal voice is more passionate and stylish but egoistic, which is that of my mother, who by contrast was less motherly to me as a small child and to our children than was my father. In earlier life I had tried, quite successfully, to escape from both. Now I am proud of both, though not without conflicting emotions about each of them. If I were to idealise a voice, as Baruch does those of his patriline and as Solomon does his father, I would move away from the superego of Judaic demands toward the splendidly cosmopolitan Berlin mother of my mother who named all five of her daughters by an Aryan and an Old Testament biblical name, ran an art gallery, was a pacifist during both world wars and passed much of that spirit to my mother. From her I inherit the cosmopolitan task of holding together Jew and nonJew without resort to religious commitment or conversion. At the same time I acknowledge that she was opposed to and tried to compensate for a much more prevalent war nationalism and anti-Semitism in the Germany she loved. I choose to acknowledge a heritage full of highly ambivalent memories of both my mother and my father. But I am plagued by a sense of obligation to my Jewish heritage, which is how Solomon’s goading got to me. The research that brought me to him is a search that opened me to his challenge. As the defensive Communities of Jews in Germany keep their rituals to themselves, I too have kept my memories of Jewish ritual to myself, and until recently felt something like exposure when Jewish rituals were displayed in public, for instance in the film Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg 1993). In this research I am vicariously looking for openings from that defensive privacy.6

The Voices of Isolated Family Survival and of its Breakdown Turning now to Jewish families that have been in Germany far longer than Baruch’s, I select the three sons of Albert in a family described by Bodemann

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(2005). For them, what is now commemorated as the Holocaust is right at the centre of their story, whereas for Russian families such as that of Baruch it is not, though their stories are certainly touched by it. Albert and his two brothers are among the families of survivors of the annihilation and labour camps who stayed in Germany. Most of them had been transported to the camps from Poland and the other countries of what became ‘Eastern Europe’ in the Soviet bloc, as well as Russia, Ukraine and Byelorussia in the USSR, and were then put in Displaced Persons camps, usually in Germany. Their remaining in Germany rather than going to Israel is a cause of anxious explanation, particularly to members of the same family who live in Israel. At the same time, remaining in Germany is coloured by another defensive anxiety, similar to that expressed by other German Jewish families reported to me by the Berlin psychotherapist who counsels survivors and their children, and with whom I started chapter 2. She told me that they say they are the reminding thorn (Stachel), showing that Hitler did not succeed in his project of annihilation. Albert used a more Yiddish word: Daffka (defiance) (Bodemann 2005: 19). The story that binds the extended family together is about what happened after survival. As the family he founded with his Swiss Jewish wife Eva grew, so did the household furnishings business that Albert founded with his brothers. He was the managing director and made sure it provided not only for his children’s welfare but also for his brothers and their families. To Albert family was everything. As one of his sons, Ronnie, said, it felt like ‘everything outside was bad’ and that it was ‘us against the world’ (p. 109). But the brothers became increasingly fractious and fell out. The business collapsed soon after Albert’s death. Having fallen out, they do not deny each other’s existence, but they each stand as negatives to the other. Members of each brother’s family refer to the others as a contrasting character, such that the family remains a character repertoire for them (pp. 23 and 33). Beyond the stories of the business and blame for its collapse, all retell tales of the three brothers’ successful survival, their triumphs of mutual support and of occasional acts by SS guards that saved their lives. But on his deathbed, Albert coming out of a coma and seeing his son Berthold at his bedside said ‘we have to get out of here, because the SS is coming’ (p. 69). Let us now see the different ways Albert’s three sons found of being German and Jewish. Berthold is the eldest. He tried to keep the family business going after his father died, until it collapsed. Like Baruch’s father, Albert wanted to be buried in Israel. In order to arrange this, Berthold had to acquire the help of the nearest German Jewish Burial Society and found that it charged an exorbitant fee. This just confirmed for him a distrust of the Jewish Community, inherited from his father who had refused to join the Jewish Administration of the Polish ghetto in which he was confined and then found that he was on the first list of deportees that the Administration drew up.7

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Berthold’s partner (they are not married) is not Jewish, but he says they will bring up as Jewish the children they plan. He will personally determine what kind of ‘Jewish’. ‘As far as I am concerned, Jewishness and a certain humaneness belong together. Where that basic premise does not exist, those people [in the organised Community] will not tell me what is Jewish and what is not’ (p. 87). Berthold follows his own sense of being both Jewish and German within a private, family base, coming out of a family trajectory of distrust but not out of a fear of anti-Semitism and not from a camp survivor’s fear of the Nazi SS that lived on in his father. Ronnie, the next of the three sons of Albert, breaks out of the defensive family confinement by an overt enjoyment of life, saying the petty conflicts between his father and his uncles destroyed the great gift of life that they had sustained by their survival (p. 115). He hates the continued profession of the victim role by German Jewish organisations and concludes that he is German and ‘never felt very Jewish’ (p. 118). Gabriel, the youngest of Albert’s sons, has a much more public way of being both German and Jewish and of having fun. He runs a radio station and an advertising agency, a successful young entrepreneur. But for most fun he produces a daily radio show in which he can clown around. One show a week featured a couple of Turks telling Turkish jokes against themselves using Turkish-accented German. Another once-a-week show, partly in Yiddish, featured himself (speaking little) doing the same with a Jewish Yiddish-speaking co-worker. The more politically correct, including both the German Catholic Church and the Jewish Community, objected (p. 171). He did it for fun and as a celebration of the heritage of Jewish humour. As Bodemann comments, Gabriel is bold and subversive. ‘If all goes well between Germans and Jews in the next decades, then Gabriel’s interesting approach, informed by his optimism, might exemplify a possible future path for German–Jewish existence’ (pp. 20–21). He brings out into the open the Jewishness of his heritage and makes it possible for everyone to know about and enjoy it, much as many other Jewish comedians, such as Woody Allen, have done elsewhere.

Internalisation of Auschwitz: Family and Public History Last, I come to Daniel’s entirely German mixed Jewishness, in which the Jewish element is both personal like Berthold’s and public like Baruch’s in the writing of books and broadcasts. But where Baruch’s writing is pedagogic and grounded in his interpretation of Jewish scripture, Daniel’s books and broadcasts have been interviews concerned with the Shoah and have no reference to scripture. Daniel is the child of a half-Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother and he is married to a non-Jew.

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He recalls his father’s death in 2000 with a story much like the one Berthold told of his father Albert. During an operation on his back, Daniel’s father was infected by a hospital virus and put into an isolation room where Daniel and his wife visited him in masks and gowns. In the dim light, with windows shuttered, his father eventually recognised his son by his eyes and spoke: ‘Daniel pay heed, there are doctors here, some are Nazi doctors, some are Jewish doctors and the Jewish doctors are on our side, the Nazi doctors want to kill us’. Typically, Daniel put this in historical context. ‘Everyone who has been able to has said in my interviews that victims of the Shoah do this on their deathbeds. I knew this as a journalist, but now it was happening to me.’ Daniel’s father was the son of a non-Jewish mother and a Jewish father with a German name, Franz. Franz was a proud Prussian jurist, lover of German culture, part of the great assimilation of emancipated Jews in Germany. But his boy, son of a patriotic and eminent jurist, experienced the intense humiliation and isolation that teachers made even mixed Jewish schoolchildren feel under the Nazi regime. In 1944, Daniel’s father’s Jewishness became lethal when it was decided that mixed Jews (Mischlinge) like him should be rounded up and deported to annihilation camps. He went into hiding. He was one of a surprisingly large number of so-called U-boats, who managed to survive by their wits and with the help of some of their fellow Berliners.8 He described to Daniel how he survived in cellars and lofts until May 1945, when he was hiding in a one-person bunker in possession of a can of fish and a radio, and under the cross fire between Russian troops and Hitler Youth children. He recalled the sunshine, blue skies and singing birds on 8 May when firing ceased and he climbed out of his bunker. But as with Albert’s stories of survival, this one is accompanied by ‘traumas’, as Daniel called them. They are vignettes of horror, of his father witnessing the deaths of comrades. For instance he saw a close friend strung up and hanged from a lamppost. In the American zone of Berlin his father then trained as an architect and married a fellow student architect, daughter of an unapologetic Nazi who was trying to live down her father’s, now stigmatised, past. They had two sons, of whom Daniel is the younger. According to Daniel, what their father passed on to them was an unceasing, compulsively repeated lament about Auschwitz and the horrors he witnessed. ‘My father had a terrible feeling of guilt that he had survived and had seen people of his age being taken to be killed in concentration camps.’ The counterpoint of these traumas was an equally repeated idolisation of his father’s father, Franz. ‘I grew up with the sentiment “Daddy was always kind, always fair”.’ Daniel called this and his father’s other stories ‘transfigured anecdotes’ and ‘stereotypical stories’. He says it has taken his removal, in the next generation, to be able to face and find a more factual and documented story. He has discovered that Franz died not of a heart attack, as Daniel’s father thought, but by taking poison and hoping by his death to

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protect his children from annihilation. The more factual story is more heroic, and it is the one Daniel passes on to his own children. Like Baruch, Daniel has written a family history that in his case includes an album of photographs and documents. In addition, in the public sphere, Daniel has been preoccupied with recording, broadcasting and publishing interviews with well-known survivors of concentration camps and their children. He describes what he has written as leading to and from ‘Auschwitz’. ‘The Cold War is unthinkable without Auschwitz’ he claims. He placed this peculiarly German, and perhaps also peculiarly Jewish version of world history under the authority of one of his interviewees who he supposes to have said that ‘The division of Germany, and so also the Cold War, is in the end something that began in 1937.’ Checking against Daniel’s book, I found that there was no mention of 1937 by his interlocutor. Daniel seems to have latched onto it in our interview for no other reason than its being the year of his grandfather’s suicide. Baruch chose, as he put it, to make his destiny (Schicksal) a positive Judaism. By contrast, Daniel is German first, but Jewish by his inheritance of the negative legacy, the destiny of Nazi anti-Semitism. ‘I belong to my destiny community (Schicksalsgemeinschaft). I belong to my land, I am German. I know all the ups and downs of German history.’ His family history and his researched knowledge of the camps are at his children’s disposal. ‘My elder daughter [aged 11] has started to learn something [about the concentration and annihilation camps at school]. But most information she receives comes from me and my wife, not from school.’ In passing on his knowledge, he tells her a little at a time as appropriate, taking care not to repeat his own experience. ‘My father never kept silence, rather he told me everything … Instead of therapists he used his boys, especially my brother.’ Daniel has kept on trying to make his German destiny and its Jewish content a public work. ‘My whole book, through which you [Tsypylma] and I were introduced to each other, is surely built, so to speak, for completion as my father lay dying. I had to work myself around that, so to speak. During the process of his death I arranged to have the interviews published. I think that is my way of getting through the death process. It really released in me the wish to finish the book.’ Daniel keeps God to himself. ‘I have my individual notion of God, but I am not a member of any religious community. Because I think that it is not right for me personally with such a family history to belong to a religious community. I have my individual connection with my God.’ In Sum: Strategies for a Present and Future Location In Jewish traditional law (halacha), if the mother is not Jewish, the decision to bring up the children with Jewish family rituals presses, if not requires the

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mother to convert to Judaism through a course of religious teaching followed by ritual bathing. But some of us – Daniel, I and probably Berthold – chose to bring up children with knowledge that they were partly Jewish, but without Jewish family rituals and without conversion. In either case, all families that include a Jewish line have also to negotiate the negative of being Jewish. Each has worked out a personal strategy that plays out historical events and in turn makes history, in the sense of marking out ways of being Jewish in postgenocide Germany or in avowal or disavowal of also being German. The range these families demonstrate goes well beyond those that lead their lives within the institutions of the Unified Communities of Jews in Germany: a restricted, Jewish and accusatory public life. Baruch and Julia, through the story of Baruch’s patriline and the discovery of Julia’s Jewish matriline, pursue a humanistic Judaism that hopes to open the Jewish Community into a greater, German public life. Daniel, through the history of his assimilated and part-Jewish father and suffering Nazi anti-Semitism, pursues a public life in which stories of ‘Auschwitz’ are at the centre of political and cultural postwar Germany. Of the three sons of the camp survivor Albert, Berthold restricts his Jewish life to his family, Ronnie is hardly Jewish at all, but Gabriel openly enjoins the public to celebrate Jewish humour and culture. I on the other hand have not passed on a family Jewish life but have entered this research as part of a public resource stemming from my attempt to come to terms with a positive as well as a negative Jewish identification that I share with the others: our pressing parental prehistory. Disruption and relocation must be taken together in describing the families’ strategies. Each makes a different space of belonging within, but not constrained by a national territory or a single national history. From their bases in the united Germany of the European Union, disruption is filled with stories that put the former life behind them. The series of ‘befores’ is long for Baruch. It is much shorter for the three children of Albert, but they know that their cousin, second son of their father’s youngest brother, took his parents to visit not only Auschwitz but also the Polish towns from which they had come (Bodemann 2005: 277). The stories they tell mark and are material parts of their strategies to establish family being and lines of kinship, but not continuity. They are better described as strategies establishing a series of pasts. They mark a continuity of kinship as a series of disruptions. All tell a family story that refers to and is authorised by reference to larger national stories of disruption. They all refer to publications and documents in the public domain. And many of them make their own interventions in the public domain, making or interpreting a more public history. But each also reserves from the public domain a personal and familial acknowledgement of debt, each with its own angle on the nation stories that cross them and to which they refer.

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The ‘materials’ of our kinship are archives (graves, documents of marriage, conversion, birth, dismissal from job, a destroyed diary, photographs, court records, written family history or album, and so forth). Their ‘code’ is the selection of a line of identification and a sense of direction through stories that make family and orient belonging. The terrible events that have caused the disruptions and dislocations in our family stories are filtered through this code, registering historical events in another kind of story, of pasts cut off and told for family repetition. And repeated in them are stories that are favoured, shaded by others that are denied, partially silenced, or entirely silenced by shame or humiliation. Similarly, we live our lives answerable to those we favour and avoid those we fear or find oppressive.

Notes   1. For the centrality of becoming adult to any account of kinship and for stimulating these reflections I am in debt to her delightful inaugural lecture as Professor of Anthropology, March 2005, whose text Janet Carsten kindly sent me.   2. The idea of answerability in fiction is taken from Bakhtin (Holquist and Liapunov (eds) 1990). But I have given it a more psychoanalytically informed slant.   3. Except for mine, I have disguised names and left out identifying facts.   4. I understand ‘social being’ along the lines suggested by Pierre Bourdieu (2000) to be a practical and temporal learning through experience of relatedness in a hierarchy of chances of social recognition and of aspiration to social existence. So a family as a social being is something that is both learned and maintained as its own hierarchy of recognition and aspiration.   5. As a marker of monotheism and out of respect for the religious, I capitalise the initial letter of God throughout.   6. I have published elsewhere an account of another Berlin Russian family, which is more fearful and private about its Jewshishness (Feuchtwang 2005).   7. Albert’s younger brother, sharing the same memory, points out that since this was a deportation to a labour camp it actually saved Albert’s life (pp. 140–41).   8. One thousand four hundred and sixteen Berlin Jews had survived the war as ‘illegals’ in hiding, according to a 1947 count cited by Michael Brenner (1997: 42).

Chapter 10

Recalling the Third Reich and the Holocaust after Two Generations: Some German German Families Many non-Jewish Germans avoid open talk about guilt and about Jews. Sometimes a distant relative is identified as a Nazi and becomes a rod for the lightning accusation and guilt that might otherwise have struck the closer family. Otherwise such Germans do not talk and do not want to know about the annihilation of the Jews or about the Third Reich in general.1 Hans Steinmüller, a student and intellectual from a peasant-farmer family in Bavaria, tells of his cohort in the 1990s: Many students and intellectuals continuously want to speak about the Holocaust and point out the continuities to contemporary Germany. Most student unions at universities have Antifa (Anti-faschistische Studenten) groups, and most left-leaning students and intellectuals are deeply concerned with the memory of Nazism and the Holocaust. … There is a huge difference between intellectuals and peasants, and I often had to think about the lack of ‘debate’ and ‘acknowledgement’ at home. For example, I remember a very heated debate I had with student friends in Munich (who were, like me, sociology and anthropology majors) about this. I had mentioned my dismay when people in our village still called a liar or an impostor a gypsy (Zigeuner), and a miser a Jew (Jud). One girl, a very active member of the student union, and a member of the Antifa, resolutely argued that such is the continuity of racism, Nazism, and fascism in Bavaria. I felt myself compelled to argue for a differentiation: that I certainly disagreed with it, yet at the same time did not think it would be justified to call those ordinary people ‘Nazis’ for it, as she would have it. (Personal communication, May 2009).

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Perhaps over conscientious detection of continuities with the Nazi era is an exaggeratedly guilty response to the accusations of Daniel Goldhagen (1996) that all Germans were guilty of complicity. This chapter will be looking at similar responses as well as the defensive responses that were introduced in chapter 8. I shall present the results of interviews with four people. Three are in a circle of young artists, children of young adults of the sixties in Berlin: Max, born 1966, his mother Ana (born 1941), Julius born 1970, and Carola born 1972. Carola was brought up in the DDR, and I have added a fourth: Maria born 1976, not one of this circle but an academic who was also brought up in the DDR. All these are pseudonyms. The four are not typical of the German population. On the contrary, they are artists and intellectuals. My interest in them is that they are a set of the most open-minded Germans and I want to see how they, like the people we talked to in the Jewish Museum, overcome the terrible past in comparison with other Germans’ transmissions of that past (see chapter 8). For this comparison, my baseline will be the study by Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall, ‘Opa war kein Nazi’: Nazionalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (2002). Theirs is a study of a far larger cohort of families. I shall report the conclusions of that study before turning to my four examples.

‘Grandfather Was No Nazi’ (Opa War Kein Nazi) The authors of Opa War Kein Nazi conducted 142 interviews in forty families, a snowball sample, done between 1997 and 2000. From these interviews they isolated 2,535 stories and classified them (p. 11). Here are two of their conclusions: ‘In our view, our most important finding is that the child and grandchild generations of German families show a strong tendency to stylise their parental and grandparental generations as heroes of everyday resistance’ (p. 16). ‘Another central element of the stories of the Third Reich handed down is the conviction that the Germans were victims – victims of war, rape, being prisoners of war (Kriegsgefangenschaft), scarcity and destitution (Mangel und Not)’ (p. 16). They conclude that victimhood is also a displacement, a way of avoiding war guilt. My account of the institutional context, the history of institutions of commemoration, compensation and schooling in chapter 8 supports this second conclusion. That was already the prime response of Germans immediately after defeat. It is also beyond doubt that millions did suffer dreadful hardship in the firebombings, battles, refugee trains, treks and ships away from the advancing Russian front. Victimhood is one of the five types of transmission (Tradierungstypen) into which they classify the results of their interviews. The other four are

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Heroification, Justification, Distancing, and Fascination. Victimhood transforms critical perspectives by empathy with the situation in which Germans found themselves at the time before the last year of the war, even when the person in the story was a bystander or a perpetrator of atrocity. It displaces the victimisation and annihilation of the Jewish population, to deflect suspicion of being an actor or of having profited from the systematic expropriation of Jewish property and expulsion of Jews from their jobs (p. 82). Justification is in the face of ever-new revelations and accusations, such as the Goldhagen (1996) accusation of general German complicity in the annihilation of Jews and the travelling exhibition of the guilt of the standing army, the Wehrmacht, in the committing of atrocities. In defence a number of routine responses include ‘we didn’t know about the camps’. Distancing is by irony and by ridiculing ‘150 per cent Nazis’ and leaders of the Third Reich, a distancing from all leaderships. Fascination goes along with treasuring the good times of childhood and youth for those who lived through the Nazi era and the achievement of ending unemployment. Heroification amplifies the giving of help and resistance or being opposed to the Nazis. This and Victimhood were by far the most important transmission types. The frequency of Victimhood was, they say, probably the effect of a predominance of women in the larger sample. Many more of the men of that generation had died (p. 99). Men tell stories of adventure, whereas women tell stories of surviving emergency, the dangers of bombing, and of flight, in which they are not agents but sufferers (p. 85). I would add that victimhood had long been part of the vocabulary of German leaders and followers who considered themselves to have been wronged by the harsh conditions of the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War. Then Hitler’s rhetoric turned Germans into the righteous victims of a world conspiracy of Jews. One of the most interesting ideas of Opa War Kein Nazi is that the transmission of Third Reich experience works in a framework of exchange or transposition (Wechselrahmen), transposing to Germans the German atrocity of victimisation of Jews. They point out the same had happened immediately after the war, when the icon of skeletal figures behind barbed wire was used to portray German prisoners of war (p. 91). A similar transposition occurs in stories of German prisoners of war and refugees transported in that other icon, cattle-wagons. Another of their findings is that the younger generations seek ways of retaining a good relationship with parents and grandparents, diminishing the possibility of interrogating their elders, by sympathising with the fact learned at school that they must have been terrified of the Nazi comradeship and then of the ‘Russians’ (p. 88). Further, they find that the younger generation edit out even those things that parents and grandparents say about their being complicit witnesses of the killing of Russians and Jews, telling only preferred

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stories of their protecting Jews or of their being forced to join the SS or the SA, the more specifically Nazi Party armed forces. My findings among the exceptional four do not flatly contradict any of this, but I have found instances where the younger generations do seek more information than the first generation is prepared to divulge.

What Grandmothers Have Passed On The Opa War Kein Nazi interviews found that the majority of transmitters are women. This fact might bring into question whether there is any avoidance of more guilt-inducing stories, whether the stories of their own suffering are just the fact that they did suffer at home or in fleeing from the Russians and that they were not soldiers or guards in camps. I shall draw attention to instances where I think guilt is implied and though only implied, it is not avoided, as well as other instances where enquiry might well have been avoided. I start with a mother and son: Ana is a librarian, born in 1941 (interview 27 July 2002) and Max is an artist, born 1970 (interview 23 July 2002).

A Mother and Her Son Ana Early in the interview she made a point of telling us that although she is blond and blue-eyed like one of her uncles, the rest of her family are dark and Spanishlooking, unlike the Aryan model. She also pointed out that under the Nazis the young men in the family were not allowed to go on from school to university. They had instead to join the armed forces and most were killed. Only two survived. We did not pursue the possibility whether she knew more about them and what they had been involved with, or whether she had ever inquired. We did not want to present her with confrontational questions. But the fact that she said no more about them in an interview with Tsypylma, a trusted friend of her son might indicate reluctance on her part to inquire further. Instead, she told us a story about her mother that her son, in a separate interview, also told us. Her mother was an orthodox (fromm) Catholic. Her house was in the middle of the village, but she was a widow and very poor. One day the Nazis told her to hang a Nazi flag from her window. She said she could not afford to buy one and hung a yellow, Church flag out instead. The Nazis objected, but she closed the door on them. As they left they shouted ‘you have not heard the end of this’ (es wird ein Nachspiel haben!). But in the end nothing happened. This is certainly an instance of preference for minor acts of heroic resistance. The village where Ana was born is near the Dutch border, in a region that was full of industrial towns. The area was heavily bombed. Another story repeated by her son as well as by her is that Ana hates the explosions of fire-

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works. They remind her of the sound of aircraft and the fall of bombs from which she and her family hid. A third preferred story concerns Ana’s father. When her son Max was born Ana became interested in her father’s life, because her mother had remarked on how much Max resembled his grandfather. Her mother told her that when he was a schoolteacher, he had refused to be an interpreter for Nazi officials into the local (Dutch-like) language. Privately he called them a ‘brown pile (of shit)’ (brauner Haufen). According to Max he had in the end to serve as a soldier and came back on leave twice, each time conceiving a child, Ana and her sister, and then never came back. Max does not want to find out about his maternal grandfather’s military service under the Nazis. Instead, he prefers to go a further generation back, saying ‘my mother’s mother’s father left an album of postcards and photographs from the First World War. It is full of life and interesting stories’ (23 July 2002). But he had once seen the film of Günter Grass’ novel The Tin Drum, which included shots of ordinary Germans smashing Jewish windows during Kristallnacht. ‘They could have been my grandparents. How could they have gone along with putting yellow stars on people?’ He asked his mother’s mother how could people have complied with the Nazis ‘without blinking’. She had replied with the story of the flag. To it she added another, that she had asked young men coming back to the village with swastikas on their lapels to remove them. But she also said that gradually people get used to anything. Ana told us that there had been Jews living in the village and that they had been removed. Tsypylma asked her what the villagers felt when the Jews did not return after the war. ‘I don’t know … Nobody spoke about the time before, if the Jews were [unfinished sentence].’ Instead she went straight on to tell what she called ‘a very nice story, it must be my mother’s. The village midwife was old and near death. She was Christian and towards Christmas she had to confess. She was confused and said this to the priest. She said that all the children of the Jews she had helped into life she had secretly baptised without telling their mothers. She had baptised all the little Jews in the village. I liked this story from the village. She baptised them in the Roman Catholic Church. It was a joke.’ [This last was said in English] And then she told us something much more personal, that she had a doll she called Elisabeth. It was beautiful and precious, with fine details. It had been in a barn belonging to her uncle, kept with the furniture and other belongings of Jews deported from the village in 1941. They had asked her uncle to keep their belongings for a time until they would be allowed to return to the village. She told us this and the story of the kind midwife without further reflection from the present in which we were asking our questions, apparently without being aware of any present undercurrent beneath saving the souls of

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children taken to be slaughtered and of her naïve childhood love of the doll. This is not avoidance, but it is an odd retention of naïveté. Max Max had learned about the Holocaust at school in Kreuzberg, Berlin, aged twelve or thirteen, in 1978 or 1979. He also remembered in Gymnasium (high school) being shown a film about Hiroshima and when he came home he told his mother about it. But she recoiled, saying that what she had seen in photographs and films of the German concentration camps had been terrible enough. I asked Max whether he thinks that Germans were victims as well as perpetrators during the war. ‘They occupied other countries, so they were perpetrators. Of course to some extent ordinary soldiers going for days without sleep and dug into dirt are also victims. But they obeyed orders.’ We turned to his father, who had told Max about his fleeing the Russians in his childhood. He, his three brothers and sister each carried a suitcase. They reached Mecklenberg, but there the Front overtook them. While they were eating, the door was broken open and a soldier simply announced ‘Guten Tag, der Russe ist da’ (Good day, the Russian is here). But there were no horror stories. I asked Max whether he had read Günter Grass’ latest novel Im Krebsgang (Crabwise) which is about the Soviet campaign in East Prussia. He had heard about it, not read it, but hearing about it was the first time he had learned about the German ‘victims’ of the campaign. Nevertheless, he thinks ‘the Soviet soldiers’ actions are understandable, even though they are not excusable.’ His parents, he and his sister are a left-leaning artistic and bookish family. They do not support the idea of Germans as victims because they accept that under the Nazis, Germans were responsible for their own hardship and for the crimes they committed by invasion and by persecution of the Jews of Europe. Taking sides with the war dead and the victims’ plight splits some families, but not in this case. In this family there is simply Ana’s and Max’s retelling the same stories of minor resistance on the part of his maternal grandparents, and her avoidance of the truth behind her favourite doll. They also share a preference over her brothers and her father’s activities as soldiers for an artist great-uncle they told us about. He had avoided military service. And Max told us of his strong attachment to another great-uncle, the same man who had given the doll left behind by deported Jews to Ana. He was a metal sculptor in whose forge Max worked as a boy. By contrast Max mentioned little about his father’s family in Poland, possibly because he did not want to dwell on German suffering. The war is conveyed by family figures. Some are internalised, others are kept external (though they may figure internally as negative figures) by a cross between choice and circumstance. The war is also conveyed in the vivid

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vignettes that a family repeats, such as in this case Max’s mother’s fear of fireworks, and his grandmother’s insistence on her flag. One last remark is that Max’s mother makes much of her love for the north Rhineland, a sense of her Heimat, lost only in having been left behind rather than now being in another country as in the case of East Prussia. But she has not transferred that love and pride to Max, whose preferred allegiance is to Kreuzberg in Berlin. He clings to that localised allegiance in great preference to being identified as German. Max told us how he feels awkward about being identified as a ‘fat German’ abroad. On holiday in Ireland he said he was Hungarian. Another Artist’s Son, Heimat Again (Interview 26 July 2002) Julius is a photographer. Both his parents came from the East, his mother born in 1942 in the Sudetenland, his father born in 1943 in East Prussia, near Königsburg (Kaliningrad after 1945, incorporated into the USSR). You may recall that Julia (chapter 9) was also born in 1942 near Königsberg, and said it was at the time ‘pure Nazi country’. When I asked Julius what his grandparents had said about their experiences, he said he was close only to his two grandmothers not his grandfathers and that he could think of no specific story, only that he and his parents were all the time reminded by them of their Heimat: ‘their flight, before which everything had gone so well. That was actually the central moment. Always the loss and love for their old Heimat.’ Julius told us the name of the estate for breeding horses in which his father’s grandfather had worked, as a clerk in the estate’s office. ‘Since this was a good position, things were good for him. He had the use of a house. He was influential. My grandmother always said how beautiful it was, with the horses – that was the glory of the good old times.’ And then he became conscious of his earlier response that he knew no stories, and reflected ‘The further I go, telling you these things, I am astonished at how these stories which I have myself always been told, how active they are in my memory.’ He went on tell us how his parents even celebrate their parents’ lost homelands (Heimaten): From what they said, what is interesting is that they got to know each other because they both took part in folkdance where, how should I describe it, where, so to speak, the history of East Prussia, Sudetenland, or Ostfeld, for instances, their culture would be cultivated (gepflegt) even though they had not themselves lived in that culture. They were far too little. But there in the Rhineland they practised it later. Where so to speak the immigrants found each other and formed their own community. [He is hesitant, doesn’t approve but this doesn’t stop him

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having some empathy] … I have a bit of a problem with the constant reference to the past, because with this way of going back into the past many right-wing, old-time comrades are associated. They say they want East Prussia back, because it belongs to Germany and there are absurd proposals to maybe buy it back from the Russians … Of course, my parents don’t, but when such a group sits in a touring coach, travelling together through a Land [they are] always saying to each other, ‘God everything is now terrible. Before it was so good. Now everything is destroyed (kaputt)’. There was a documentary of such a coach tour and one gets hot and cold the whole time listening to the commentary. I don’t discuss it much with my parents because I am sometimes very critical. It makes me feel bad [to criticise them].’ In other words, this is a family in which he, in his generation, is both loving and critical – a family held together but also divided by unspoken differences. Another often told story that has come from his maternal grandmother is how she crossed the line of Russian occupation with her child, Julius’s mother, trading on Russians’ love of children, and the soldier let her through the fence. ‘It is always the soldier and the fence’, he says, ‘though the story changes a bit each time’, and he laughs. In other words the fence and the soldier are a mythical vignette in the family. But he establishes his distance from it by turning to another inheritance, more to his liking, saying: what I find exciting [is] when my grandmother, on father’s side, shows me photos, people in them I could not recognise … I would like to write it down so that I can look at them. When one gets older one begins to be concerned with such things. And since my father had separated from his father completely, there is no contact whatsoever … somehow it happened that my cousin, the daughter of my father’s brother … happened to make contact with Opa. That is, she went there. And I once went with her and then once I went alone to see him. Alone to see him. Because I was very interested ... but the last time because of the stories he told me, I found it frightful (fürchterlich) … To my eyes they had something that was still Nazi. The war, his heroic war. And what they had done in Poland, and he called them Polaks … What comes back to me today is the bench, the photographs, and that he told me of his veterans’ trips to France, to their own battlefields … And by the way there are great photos of such meetings, of veterans meetings in which the old ones, those who are still alive, meet each other and go through the same battle order … these photos are always by a battle grave, or next to a tank, or up on something in the heroic pose of a conqueror.

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This grandfather had been what we could call a negative transmission, a negative and unknown but potent figure in his father’s refusal to mention him. Julius told us his father, when aged seventeen, had completely cut himself off from further contact when Opa started living with a nurse whom he must have got to know while being treated for a wound. It had nothing to do with his military exploits. ‘My father lived with his mother in Bonn, and never spoke of his father again, not at all. This eventually made me curious to know more, to find out for myself.’ This is certainly a familial split, but it is complicated by an entirely familial, or better, parental separation that incidentally also separates off an embarrassing figure of Nazi war involvement. In finding out about his unapologetic Nazi past, this negative figure had become more real and possibly also more of a negative object in Julius’s imagination of his family. We asked him how his father and mother felt about his visits to this grandfather: ‘[my father] said “if you have to do it, do it”. Afterwards, [my mother] asked me about the visit. I said I thought he had been a Nazi. She said, no, he was in the Wehrmacht. As usual, there is no family that was Nazi’. Julius had earlier told us in a similar manner that his grandparents are like most people in German society, saying of the annihilation of Jews that they had nothing to do with that, it did not interest us. ‘They say “I was busy bringing up my children. Na ja, what should we have done?”’ From his own experience he mentioned how he had learned about the fate of the Jews: ‘Every pupil had to read Anne Frank’s diary, but that was in literature, not history, and in literature there was more discussion of what we read. It made a big impression. I had known that something was wrong, that there was a problem, but did not understand until I read the story of Anne Frank.’ (Did you discuss it at home?) ‘I could well have told my parents, and would have got the same response of “ach wie fürchterlich” (how dreadful).’ With his knowing and mildly critical remarks, such as ‘there is no family that was Nazi’, Julius has gone beyond avoidance and transposition, beyond the language of accusation, condemnation or justification. He does not conform to the findings of Opa War Kein Nazi. Towards the end of the interview he said ‘For me it is full of conflict.’ It is unspoken conflict with a generation that does not like conflict to come out into the open. But the conflict in relation to the military nostalgia of his father’s father is also about his father’s own refusal from late adolescence to have anything to do with him because of his desertion of his mother. Julius’s father had instead selected his mother’s stories of the loss of her Heimat, the suitcases, fleeing with him as a child, just as Julius’s mother had received such stories from her mother. Much as he distances himself from their stories of lost Heimat, they are part of his childhood, they are what binds him and his family together, in preference to the veterans’ association visits to old battlefields that his grandfather (father’s father) and others relish as their sense of continuity and nostalgia.

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Carola: An Artist from Eastern Germany (interview 26 July 2002) Carola was born in East Berlin under the DDR, and was finishing school at the age of eighteen when the wall came down. She was close to her mother’s mother, with whom she spent much time as a child, and had even met her mother’s mother’s mother. She also knows a lot about her father’s father, a metalwork artist and photographer, who she says is her hero. Her maternal grandmother came from Bromberg, East Prussia (now Poland) and Carola heard how she had fled west from the Russian occupation. It was not a major topic but Carola enjoyed looking at the many photograph albums that filled one of the suitcases Oma had carried west. They were pictures of the landed property they had owned, reminders of good time s. Grandmother (Oma) had told Carola that she had been a keen Girl Guide and that she had been the only girl to graduate with an Abitur from her school in Krakow, and had gone on to university to study languages but did not finish. Carola thinks this could have been because her mother was ill, but possibly also because by then she had met an older man, a widower with two children and they married. He got a job teaching zoology at the university in Potsdam, where they lived before the war in a grand house on a lake. She gave birth there to two children, first Carola’s aunt, then her mother in 1943. During the war she had to leave the house and kept moving from place to place. Carola took a great interest in the twelve moves her Oma had had to make, most of them during the war, even writing down a list of all the places, noting how her grandmother kept going from place to place with the two babies and her two step-children, one of them always carrying a suitcase with the 20 photograph albums in which, as Carola put it, there was their history of the twentieth century. Every time Carola goes to visit her grandmother who lives with her elder daughter, a librarian, she goes to the same cupboard in the living room and takes out the albums. Among the stories Carola remembers from both her mother and her mother’s mother is one about living for a time in a castle near Halle, plundered by the Russians but still with a library that grandfather worked in, and how in one fine room with parquet flooring poultry wandered freely – chickens on parquet flooring, another family vignette. For Carola, the stories contained in the photograph albums come to life in her grandmother’s apartment and its furnishings, triggering stories of fine houses in Bromberg, Potsdam and Halle. On Carola’s father’s side the equivalent of the photograph albums of a lost past are the eleven beautiful books of the works of her paternal grandfather, the artist who is Carola’s hero. She knows nothing about his origins and never knew him personally. But she knows a lot about him from the books and from her parents. He did not have to join the army, probably because he was not in sound enough health. At the end of 1944 a bomb destroyed his studio. The couple and the child they had just had, Carola’s father, went to live in a

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village near Berlin where her grandfather produced drawings from nature that became one of his books. After the war, sales of his work earned him enough to finance the rebuilding of his studio. His work had become well-known and was held in several collections in the West. Because of the influential people he had come to know before the war, he was able to continue exhibiting in the West and to travel to the exhibitions. Among his other works is a large monument for those killed in a concentration camp. She has not seen it, but thinks it is in Dachau. Carola’s maternal grandmother gave all three of her children Jewish biblical as well as Christian names, as did my mother’s mother (chapter 9). Carola’s mother and father carried on the same tradition and so both she and her brother have Jewish and Christian names. It is a way of respecting and appreciating Jewish people, as Carola put it. Her idea of Jewish people (Judische menschen, not volk) comes, she told us, from the art of Jews, for instance in the Berlin Jewish Museum (built by Daniel Libeskind), which she visited three times while it was empty. Despite her respect for Jewish art she thinks the building conveyed the history of the Jews in Germany so well that it should never have been filled with exhibits! She thinks she must have learned about what happened to Jews at school. She remembers best a primary school class visit to a concentration camp, it must have been either Dachau or Buchenwald, she does not remember exactly. What humans could do to other humans made her speechless and she was shocked at her classmates continuing to talk to each other on the visit. I asked her whether she identifies herself as German. ‘By my language, by my country in which I have lived most of my life, by the classical culture of German art I am naturally German. On the other hand I love to travel outside Germany and would like to live in New York for a time, because I feel more at home in a multicultural environment than in the more monocultural Germany.’ She does not like it when Germany celebrates itself, as for instance in beating others at football. ‘Is this because you don’t like nationalism?’ I asked. No, it’s particularly German nationalism. I find it difficult to say out loud that I am German. I prefer to say I am from Berlin which is an international city in Germany … It was the same as a child in the DDR. My parents brought us up to look beyond the DDR, open to the world, as a child of an artist family. But I felt fine in the DDR. My father’s art was not political, it was abstract, not socialist realist – he was not a state artist, but tolerated because his art was exhibited abroad a lot [like that of his own father]. I come from a very unusual DDR family. Carola’s identification with Berlin comes with attachment to a photograph album and the example of two of her grandparents, the photographs describ-

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ing a family version of loved houses and landscapes lost, stretching far east into what is now Poland. By the vicissitudes of her family history or by some choices made by her parents and grandparents, none of her grandparents were even in military service, let alone Nazi. Note also that for her the language of responsibility and guilt never entered the conversation, an effect of schooling in the DDR. So this is a German who falls quite outside the ambit of Opa War Kein Nazi. She knows, and feels about, the Nazi annihilation of Jews and is somewhat ashamed of German nationalism. An East Berlin Academic, Grandchild of a Nazi Policeman (interview 28 February 2005) Maria is a little younger than Carola, but like her is two generations away from the Third Reich and grew up in the DDR. Unlike Carola however, both her parents’ fathers worked for the Nazi regime, her father’s father as a teacher in a military academy, her mother’s father as a policeman. Like Carola her childhood was spent with mother and mother’s mother, but unlike Carola that is because her mother left her father, a university student at the time, while pregnant with Maria. Unlike Carola, the story of her grandmother is not one of great landed estates and houses but of poverty, farming and the deaths in childhood of three brothers. For Maria, ‘heimat’ figures only in local history, Heimatkunde, which she learned in her first years at school in the DDR. It featured heroic Communist resisters to the Nazis. Again like Carola, Maria’s grandmother married an older man who was a widower who already had children, three in his case. But unlike Carola’s grandfather, he was not an academic, but a policeman who in the last years of the Third Reich served in its armed forces. Unlike Carola’s grandmother, Maria’s grandmother does not like to talk of the war period at all, just saying it was a difficult time. But Maria remembers hearing her tell one of her other daughters, an aunt, about how she sometimes saw forced labour gangs on the road passing their small village and how she left bits of bread in the fence for them. Unwillingness to talk about the Third Reich was reinforced by the fact that her policeman grandfather had joined the NSDAP (the Nazi Party) in order to continue his work and feed the family. He was arrested by the occupying Russians and disappeared. To mention this would only bring further stigma on the family. Maria’s mother joined the ruling party of the DDR, but was nevertheless prevented by this black parental mark on her file from pursuing the studies she wanted to become a banker. Mother and grandmother only told Maria of this after the fall of the wall, when Maria’s mother tried to find out what happened to him, without success. Maria’s sense of family without men is not in itself unusual for the grandchildren of the war generation. But the negative presence of the disappeared grandfather is a peculiarly East German sense of loss. Both Maria and Carola

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have been affected by the greater East German claim to have been (unlike the West) severe punishers of Nazis that the Russians had defeated, not with public trials as in the West and their mild sentences but with immediate imprisonment or consignment to a concentration camp – Buchenwald continuing in service for this purpose. Maria thinks that is where her mother’s father must have been taken. She told me how at school what she learned about the Third Reich were stories of heroic Communist resistance to it, such as the Rote Kapelle group, and how she joined a Pioneer group named after Ernst Thälmann, another famous Communist, then resister, who was eventually shot in Buchenwald. She remembers school visits to the place where General Zhukov accepted the surrender of the Nazi forces and to the cemetery where Soviet soldiers were buried and how she loved learning foreign languages, including Russian. Still at school at the time of the Change (1989–91) with the breach of the wall and moves toward unification, an excellent history teacher encouraged her to read about the Holocaust. But it was only in later life, as a university student after the Change that she visited concentration camps for the first time as an organiser in a human rights organisation. It was through similar activity that she also began to learn about the terror her grandmother felt about the Russian troops and about their looting and raping, and retrospectively thinks how pained her grandmother must have been by her enthusiasm for Russian. She does remember at the time thinking it strange that she did not hear from her grandmother any stories of resistance, which were all she learned about at school. Nevertheless, she has been affected by her schooling in continuing to stress that it was not only Jews, but also Communists and other resisters who were killed in the camps. Like Carola, she is aghast at the inhumanity, not just at the special case of the annihilation of Jews. Maria, like Carola, did not use any of the language of blame or guilt, or the avoidance of guilt by association. On the contrary, she resents the way West Germans use that discourse to deprive her mother and people like her who did well in East Germany and who took seriously and actively a sense of social responsibility, by applying the language of guilt to the officials of the DDR and its secret police network of informants, forcing her from the job she had as manager of a state company dealing in stylish clothing, just because she had been a member of the DDR ruling party. West Germans put her parents’ generation down for serving what they consider to have been a bad regime, but they never for a moment reflect on their own positions in a system that is exploitative and damaging.

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Conclusion I have presented what I admit to be rather special cases. They are third generation artists and intellectuals. In comparison to the families interviewed for Opa War Kein Nazi, they present what I think is an interestingly different perspective. Among my examples, there is certainly an emphasis on Heroisation (Ana’s mother) and heroic resistance learned from school in the DDR. But out of that schooling, Carola and Maria learn later about the annihilation of Jews and respond with a humanistic concern and horror at the Nazi atrocities, not an avoidance of guilt because the language or implication of guilt and its avoidance is not an issue. In the case of Julius, where there might have been avoidance of a Nazi soldier who is nostalgic for his battle honours, it is not avoided by the grandson, on the contrary it is discovered. Three of them told stories of grandparents fleeing the Russians with suitcases and Maria eventually heard stories of her grandmother’s fear of the Russian occupying forces. But none of them claimed victimhood. They conveyed different senses of Heimat, history, and avoidance of being German. Julius commented on his parents’ taking up their mothers’ nostalgia for their lost Heimaten. But it was not the same as the still flourishing Heimat associations that are associated with the Christian Democratic and Christian Social Unions. Max’s mother’s attachment to North Rhineland is not at all right-wing, but a way of conveying her anti-Nazi credentials. Max’s and Julius’s attachments to where they live in Berlin and Carola’s attachment to Berlin as a whole are similarly ways of avoiding identification with German nationalism. This is a theme entirely missed by the authors of Opa War Kein Nazi. They are German, but they prefer a more local identity to the far more problematic German national identity. As the couple in the Jewish Museum said, every family has in it someone who lost their Heimat in East Prussia. For them, the Jewish Germans that were eliminated are at best another kind of German, distanced subjects of sympathy. And the same seems to be the case for these four. I come now to the way family transmission can become a more public, political historical transmission. The Heimat associations did form pressure groups for being considered victims for compensation and both they and veterans’ associations have supported a questioning of the prominence of German war guilt and guilt for the annihilation of European Jews. Heimat offers a sense of continuity. But in the case of these four, attachment to locality is not a claim of victimhood. Rather it is an avoidance of German nationalism. Interestingly, none of them referred to the documentary film series Heimat made by Edgar Reisz, which does not dwell on the Third Reich but carries on through it and further through the sixties up to the present, following an extended family story. It is a chronology like that of a novel and quite unlike the much more

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fragmentary and associative responses to our interviews. Retaining love of Heimat, whether with left- or right-wing affiliations, creates a continuity that can omit the Nazi era. But more than omitting, it also avoids the negative use of belonging that was put upon Heimat by the Nazis and their supporters and which has been transmitted into the present day. Like Edgar Reisz’s film series, the right-wing Heimat is rural. And as already mentioned in chapter 8, Heimat has several other strong resonances, amongst them the genres of Heimatfilm and its invocation in folk-based popular music (volkstümlicher Musik), both of which are a huge industry. Their sentiments are rural, against the coldness, and possibly also the cosmopolitanism of the city.2 For the many German anti-Semites and in the Nazi media, Jews stood for the urban, financial and rootless. They were caught in images of the subhuman, of parasites sucking the blood from those who are rooted and authentic in their German belonging. This enters some of the interviews by Wechsler et al. with those who were adult during the Nazi period: they had heard their parents talk of Jews or saw Jews being led off and said that they were different – they had long beards and black hats and long noses. They themselves said in their interviews that Jews were ‘different from us in a way I cannot say exactly how’. Anyway, they had money. They never fled anything, they left because they had money (2002: 148). All this was a way of denying that Jewish Germans were also Germans and most of them indistinguishable from other Germans. One woman remembers seeing some Jewish children being rounded up, one boy kept anxiously crying out ‘please don’t, please don’t’. She describes this as ‘so cowardly’ and in doing so turns what he was frightened of into his character (p. 146). None of the young people we interviewed were like this. But, in their attachment to the city of Berlin in preference to Germany as a whole, and in their fascination with East Prussia they skip the Nazi era even though they escape from any Nazi connotation of Blood and Soil. On family division and reproduction, I hope I have shown the different ways in which family vignettes convey a sense of the personal experiences of the Third Reich, principally the suitcase experience of flight, the experience of bombing and the loss of home, as well as the avoidance of grandparental generations’ involvement in the Third Reich forces. The internalised figures are a counterpoint to the avoided or externalised figures, but Julius did find out, rather than edit out, what the men in the grandparental generation did and experienced as supporters of the Third Reich. And that brings me to my final point: that the cases I have chosen are departures from the whole lexicon of historical, judicial and political accounting in terms of victim, hero, perpetrator, and bystander. They may well convey a different sense of German history. Certainly they have erected defences, including avoidances of shame. But they are entirely understandable, and inevitable. The only way to ‘overcome’ is to depart from the whole politics of victimhood.

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Notes   1. This observation was offered by someone who had spent ten years in Berlin as a student in the 1990s. Many thanks to Elizabeth Neswald, University of Aberdeen (10 May 06).   2. Thanks once more to Hans Steinmüller for this observation (May 2009).

Conclusion

Chapter 11

Beyond Bad Death Let us agree to indicate by the word ‘ghosts’ those who are between life and death, forgotten or problematic victims, alive or dead, partly excluded but at a threshold of being recalled, as an often unwanted reminder. The unwanted are, of course, defined by stipulations of the wanted or the desirable, the good dead and the good subject or citizen, by ritual, familial, historical, memorial, museological, ceremonial and other – including legal and political – institutions of recognition. Ghosts are a good way into the dynamics of transmission of grievous loss.

Ghosts as Acknowledged but Problematic Members of a Rejected Past Chapter 2 argued that the conditions of state violence in Maoist China and Nazi Germany were states of exception in which those who represented a past to be purged from the future were political and physical realisations of an imagery of bad deaths, of ghosts, demons, and monsters. The states of exception at the same time created conditions in which the familial repair of bad deaths was made impossible. The most secret spaces of familial life and ritual were threatened and bore the constant threat of exposure. The victims became living ghosts. Caesural change to a new politics again made possible or rather made openly possible, since it was always maintained but had been deeply secret, the separation between political and familial life. The transmission of the losses suffered in the period of exception and violence could now occur in several ways. The now acknowledged victims, however, remain problematic unless they are cast as heroes of resistance. If not, they retain a ghost-like quality. Neither the executed in Taiwan nor the annihilated in Germany are heroes and heroines fallen in battle. They are problematic for the national population for whom their public memorials have been created. Even in Israel the

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survivors of the camps as well as the millions of the annihilated are a highly problematic category of the defeated and the weak, justifying the strong and the heroic, who are celebrated in less ambivalent ways. The defeated war dead of the Nazi-led German military are problematic in another way. The war dead were heroic self-sacrificers in the Nazi account; in the post-Nazi account they are shameful. The days for their mourning are shared with the dead of German civilians. The national day of mourning, 15 November, with its visits of solicitude to military ceremonies, and old comrades at their old battlefields, with or without state representatives, are fraught with the danger of Nazi apologetics, a danger avoided only in ‘regretful’ sympathy for the dead as victims. Those who died without children during the famine in China have been anonymously acknowledged by ancestral rituals or indirectly by ritual address to gods aiding the reproduction of families, but not by any public events or memorials. They are subjects of shame or of regret. They are the ancestors or parents whose descendants could not give them proper burials, and so inherit the shame as their own. They are the less capable or cunning, the old and the weak who could not be kept alive, the more human and honest who could not find the ways to scavenge or steal. Taking all of them, from all three contexts, together, they all died bad deaths. Their families, the families of survivors, can retrieve them, make of them parts of their identity as families through family archives, stories, graves and rituals and through the personal reminders that public events evoke in them. But they are ghosts to others than their family members in various ways, according to the standards of both civic memorials and of mortuary and remedial rituals and the honouring of ancestors. They may be ghosts with whom strangers are sympathetic, like the old people we met at the Luku memorial in 2001, who thought the executed were orphan souls (chapter 7). They are worthy of charity just as the living survivors are or could be worthy of compensation or at the very least some apology. Or they are avoided by the rest of the population, as by the large portion of the German population that knows about them from schooling but does not visit the memorials or events for annihilated German Jewry. One way or another, they are ghostly strangers to the publics of their commemoration or to those who come across them in the landscapes and calendars of their nations, just as they are ghosts that might be harmful in the temporality of ritual and magic. Ghosts pose the most stringent tests of hospitality and are thus a problem of public morality even when they are acknowledged as victims. In the rituals and other practices of family repair and the replenishing of the substances and reminders of family, the keeping of photograph albums, the retelling of stories, the visits to each other or to cemeteries, as Baruch exemplified elaborately (chapter 9), selected ancestors are voices of forebears

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internalised. Alongside them are less comfortable, more fearsome voices, of estranged fragments or forbidding parental figures. More remote and childless kin will not be named voices, but they may be remembered as a category, just as in civic events the national dead are commemorated or, in a ritual of mediation, they were treated as a category of ‘forgotten ancestors’ when the genealogy was re-inaugurated in the village in Quanzhou (chapter 5). That ritual was a replica of the welcoming of the ghosts of other families’ forgotten ancestors, which is performed in mortuary rituals and the re-inauguration of territorial temples all over China. The replica is, however, an act of filial duty rather than one of charitable obligation.

Family and State Family ghosts and the ghosts of other families are part-remembered and usually anonymous. They are at the outer rims of me-centred and family-centred circles of friendship and intimacy, in which all are named and individuated as ancestors or kin or friends or associates. In civic rituals of public events and the landscape of commemoration, another voice, the voice of the state or of a sub-national community of which we are subjects expects us to hear and internalise its call of obligation to honour named heroes and heroines, who are not within our circles of friendship and intimacy; others have the more generalised title of ‘unknown soldier’, forgotten dead, ancestors who should be honoured. Further away, it expects us to regret the passive victims, more like charity but also duty, each of us hearing the call to greater or lesser degrees, according to what the call evokes in us. We are expected to identify with the named, or with the mass of the unnamed, individuated as the ‘unknown soldier’. Memorials such as the Washington memorial to the Vietnam War dead or even more the Washington Holocaust memorial name the dead in these obligatory outer categories and try to engage us with individual exemplars of the category, so that we welcome a named ghost, in an effort to bring her or him closer into our circles. In the annual events of commemorating the Holocaust followed by commemorating the heroic dead of the Israeli Defence Forces, the same is done by selection of new individuals and their stories each time round (Handelman 2004: 131). But in none of these instances can we find the naming and singling out that Vietnamese villagers do for a ghost of war through spirit mediums, bringing them into a dialogue that over time can become a familial friendship (Kwon 2008). They even include US war dead whose remains have been left behind. This is not an act of obligation, of filiality or of belonging or of charity. It is more appropriately described as voluntary hospitality, because they inhabit the ambivalent status of victims of both sides. They summon

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the familial and incidentally bring the sides of a civil and international war together in their own honourable practice. Even though it can only be familial and the selection has to be of singular ghosts, not categories, it transgresses the national universe of commemoration and public events, bringing together the defeated, the victorious and the in-between, whereas the civil or revolutionary war victors of the state of unified Vietnam celebrate only their own and the US only its (defeated) heroes. In Vienna and in Berlin, as in other centres of Jewry annihilated by the Nazis, there are now memorials that induce hospitable empathy in some visitors, both local and international. They are close to the Vietnamese villagers’ hospitality, but the memorials have been commissioned by states as redemption of guilt and so for most of their populations they are an obligatory reminder, not voluntary hospitality. Such voluntary hospitality exemplifies a more universal standard of humanity than obligations of guilt. It is on a par with standards of hospitality to strangers that exist in every culture, in some of which the stranger can only be accepted by being addressed as kin.1 Universal morality exists as a standard in every culture. For the Chinese, it is the universality of responsiveness to the movement of life in other things and in particular other humans, or the general salvation of ghosts ritually accomplished in the seventh lunar month every year. But universal standards are undermined by greater loyalty to the known and familiar or the particular community of faith and truth, or the national. The ghosts are outside and are kept outside. The Vietnamese villagers present a less compromised hospitality, but it is necessarily singular because it is familial. To my mind, the two kinds of law, family and state or civic law, inhabit different temporalities and set different standards. They are incommensurate, but they coexist, neither can replace the other, but each inflects the other and we move between them. This concluding chapter offers an elaboration of their coexistence in the light of the previous chapters about loss inflicted by extreme violence in exceptional conditions of state law. The moral problem of hospitality, of empathy for ghosts – of those whose bad death is acknowledged beyond their families, or as in Vietnam by bringing what is beyond into their families – is conjoined to the moral judgment of causes of their victimhood. I have found that the mutual inflection of state law and the law, or custom and ritual practices, of the family, approach the universal through general categories of the forgotten or the problematic dead, rather than the singularity of the named voices and figures of family repair or the named heroes of nationalist commemoration. So I will start from the state politics and laws of their acknowledgement and of assigning responsibility for their deaths, then turn to the temporality of family repair and the space and time of mutual inflection between both, where ghosts are entertained.

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Victims and the Attribution of the Cause of their Suffering All those who were killed in the course of the events of state violence and all those who lived through the events covered in this book are well described as victims. They died premature and violent deaths. As a term of description ‘victim’ is also appropriate to the survivors since it conveys the sense that they suffered serious deprivation and loss, if not also severe disruption and dislocation. They were stigmatised by association with the targeted. Or they carried a sense of shame, the shame of survival, of the base means they had to resort to in order to survive, of the humiliations they endured, or the shame of not having been able to protect those who did not survive. The starving survivors of the Great Leap famine were not only unable ritually to mourn their dead, they sometimes described themselves as being ghosts, between life and death. So were the skeletal survivors of the Nazi death camps described as being between life and death. But beyond that description much more can be conveyed. A moral, political or legal load can be placed upon the word ‘victim’ and in this extension the idea of being a victim differs in each of the contexts of loss that have been described. Take the victims of targeted violence: those who had been labelled Rightist or Right-opportunist or counter-revolutionary in the PRC, those who had been classified as Jewish in the Third Reich, and those who had been charged with being Communist spies or insurgents in Taiwan. Each is a different kind of victim. In all three cases a combination of police and military or militia forces implemented the violence, but the manner of death and the violence of exclusion for those who survived are quite different in each case. Wholly or partly Jewish victims who had considered themselves to be German were targeted for total removal into ghettoes and thence slave labour and annihilation camps. Their sense of being German was totally denied them, whereas the sense of being Chinese and of the people represented by the Party and government of a state was preserved even as that state targeted them for reform through humiliation and labour. Jews were targeted as an enemy within, just as Rightists and counter-revolutionaries or Communist spies were. But Jews were to be removed altogether both as a category and physically, not displayed or tried and imprisoned. They could not attribute their being labelled and removed to a mistaken decision by a regime they had trusted, since they were the targets of a new regime, albeit one implementing programmes that had been aired before, including the idea of the removal of a Jewish conspiracy. Soviet Jews were more in the position of those labelled Rightist in China, since they could switch from adherence to an idea of socialism or a love of country and a professional career under the USSR to a sense of betrayal of these justified prospects when attacked, albeit for being Jewish. Contrast this with even partly Jewish Germans who knew by 1943 that they too were to

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be removed as members of a race; though they could, like Victor Klemperer, bravely and obstinately, secretly in a diary, insist it was the regime not them that had betrayed Germany (Klemperer 1999). Attributing responsibility for the victimhood of Jews, the choices favoured appear to range between a theological explanation of evil, or various historical explanations of a whole society, a people, or a political and economic conjuncture called ‘Germany’ and an inherent ideology of purification, which would later and in other cases all over the world be called ‘ethnic cleansing’. When the Nazi onslaught came, victims and their families felt overwhelmed by a malign force and its personal manipulators, led by Hitler, a racist extreme of nationalism. In sympathy, this force has become known as a phenomenon and named Holocaust or Shoah, an anonymous force, an event of malign fate, which is the first resort of all representations of the Nazi victimisation of Jews. For the victimisation of ‘Rightists’, one strand of historical criticism characterises Maoism as ‘feudal’, equivalent to the Orientalist characterisation of Mao as a despot or emperor (Li Jie in Barmé 1996: 144). This comes close to a characterisation of Chinese society as a whole. But even then, it is as a stage in the political economy of China. The close equivalent of such an explanation is the Marxist explanation of fascism as a counter-revolutionary retrenchment of capitalism. Theoretically and analytically, it is possible to mount either kind of explanation anywhere – by the characterisation of a regime or an event as part of a people or as a product of a politics or of a kind of political economy. I am concerned now not with analysis as such but with the politics of explanation and of attributing responsibility. And what is remarkable is how in all three instances there is continuity from the politics of victimisation to the politics of subsequent explanation. Both the politics of victimisation and of later attribution of responsibility in Western Europe appear to sway toward nationality and race or destiny, and the historical need to create a new destiny and identity, that of Europe and that of Israel. The Zionist project of a Jewish homeland is the counterpart of all late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nationalisms. Its proponents had already blamed European Jews, before the rise of Hitler, for holding false hopes of assimilation. Instead of seeking a diminution or eventual elimination of European anti-Semitism, Zionism created the idea of a refuge from it, and the state of Israel powerfully confirms this idea to the present day. The politics of victimisation is continued in China as a problem of political line with its attribution of the disaster to the wrong kind of political ideology (a wrong emphasis on continuous class struggle) and of backwardlooking despotism. Only in attribution to external forces of humiliation is the full panoply of perpetration, vicitimisation and compensation used in official discourse, for instance when the invasion of the eight allied armies (baguo

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lianjun) in retaliation for the Boxer rebellion, or the Japanese occupation in the Pacific War, are dealt with in schoolbooks. In Taiwan, the politics of victimisation was nationalist – the betrayal of a national essence by Communist conspirators – and it is continued in the politics of attributing responsibility to the oppression of a budding nation by a neo-colonial state. The grammar of victimhood ‘expects’ a person to be responsible, a perpetrator, not just a more abstract or generalised cause. In the turning-point of regime, the caesura that allows recognition of victims also condemns perpetrators. It justifies hatred of them as agents of a wrong kind of politics or of a wrong kind of society. But again, on this common basis are built quite different possibilities of blame and acknowledgement of responsibility. In China, as described in chapter 3, acknowledgement of mistakes, in particular the mistakes of Leftist subjectivism and of getting things done by force, also acknowledged victims and withdrew their condemnatory labels on one hand and on the other compelled the perpetrators to apologise not just to the targeted but to the masses in general, the untargeted victims. There was no selection of perpetrators for trial, as there was in Germany. In China many of the cadres remained in post as did ex-Nazi officials in Germany. But in China, their presence was open – it could not be otherwise in village life – and admitted, while in the much more urban Germany they might well be known but their presence was hidden. In both China and Germany the perpetrators usually remained in positions of responsibility. But in rural China a great many of the local cadres responsible for implementing constant switches between ‘left’ and ‘right’ policy lines, were torn between Party obedience and local loyalty, whereas in Nazi Germany this was only rarely so. As the Quanzhou cadres of that time said (chapter 4) they could be enthusiastic and then tired; they could know as members of the Party what was best for their fellow villagers and force it upon them while to some extent also responding to villagers’ and their own common sense. Despite the post-Mao emphasis on ‘democracy and the legal system’ the acknowledgement of responsibility and the organisation of apology has been through Party political procedures, though a withdrawal of politically inspired criminal records could occur by petition to the court as well as to the Party. For more recent grievances, the law has become a favoured avenue of redress and of protest. For instance the parents of children killed in a badly built school that collapsed during the earthquake in Sichuan in 2008, briefed a lawyer to sue the responsible government department. Finding the responsible perpetrator, demanding apology or reversal of verdicts was in this case, in these new political and legal conditions, not sufficient compensation. Even so, the issue is still political – the corruption of officials in cahoots with builders who cut costs and flout safety standards – and so the law even in this case is an avenue to demand political redress, both through courts and the Party’s Discipline Inspection Bureau (The Guardian G2, 18 Dec 2008, p. 11).2

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The range of possibilities among surviving cadres of the Great Leap Forward still living in their villages is suggested by two very different cases. One is from our main research village, Chen Wansheng, the cadre in charge of the police in the brigade during the famine. He was one of a few leaders responsible for implementing the production campaigns of the Great Leap Forward. In 1961, the last year of the famine, as villagers were attempting to out-produce each other in both practical and ideological rivalry, a feud occurred over the theft of agricultural implements by people of his village from its larger neighbouring village. He enforced the return of the implements, but one was still missing, a ploughshare. Hearing that men from the larger village were planning to cut crops from his village to compensate, out of loyalty to his own villagers he condoned the secret organisation of a sworn brotherhood that would organise its defence. Officially he tried to defuse the conflict, but a fight in fact occurred and men from the neighbouring village were injured. Not long after, as already noted in chapter 5, he helped his villagers rebuild their ancestral hall, as a way of comforting the old who had been most vulnerable to the famine. In these ways he balanced his loyalties. In 1963 he was accused, tried and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for not preventing the feud. The sentence was implemented in 1965. He claimed it was a politically motivated trial, since he was accused of organising a faction. In fact, as he told Wang Mingming, he was in a patronage faction that could no longer protect him in 1965. The trial was for a criminal as well as a political offence. And so in his case it was by a successful appeal to the same County court that he was in 1988 granted withdrawal of his sentence from the record. Petitions to either the Party’s disciplinary officers or to judicial courts to reverse political and criminal verdicts were frequent in the 1980s. When targeting is through political and less often criminal categorisation, then acknowledgement of political error can occur through the same institutions after a political change. For the general population compensation went only as far as returning confiscated food and goods to households. For the targeted, further compensation was neither asked for nor offered beyond withdrawal of verdicts. A contrasting Chinese case is of a village cadre’s far less mitigated loyalty to the Party. In Ralph Thaxton’s (2008) study of a village in the north of Henan province, the Great Leap collectivisation, procurement, and military organisation of production were led, as vice director of the Commune, by a cadre hardened by the guerrilla wars against the Chinese puppet forces of the Japanese command and then against the Nationalists. Thaxton shows clearly how this hardening was at once into a fierce loyalty to Maoist ideals and a habitual resort to physical intimidation and secrecy. He was a brutal organiser of shock forces to harvest grain and secure it for procurement. Yet even he had sufficient loyalty to his fellow villagers after harvesting to leave corn grain in

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the fields that he knew would be gleaned secretly, at night. He also condoned the pre-harvest gathering of green grain for immediate consumption and some secret storage. In the rectification that ended the Great Leap Forward in 1961 he was arrested for commandism and sentenced to reform in a labour camp, but had returned by 1964 and become Party Secretary of the brigade that included his village. He used his position to promote those who had been his supporters and get rid of those who had criticised him. Hatred for him, despite his compromises in the famine, went as far as arson attacks on his house in 1965 and anonymous letters against him in 1967, accusing him of being a capitalistroader, even though he had been a staunch Maoist, since that was the way to attack him successfully during the Cultural Revolution, with the result that the Commune leadership removed him from his post. After the Cultural Revolution he was restored to his post. But when he retired, in the 1990s, he had still not been compensated for his removal in 1967. Rectification of the verdict would, according to one of Thaxton’s interviewees, have angered the villagers too much.3 One way or another, local cadres had to face in two directions, upward in obedience and sideways to fellow villagers’ needs, and even the fiercest upward loyalists retained a modicum of this ambivalence. Just as striking, the immediately responsible cadres and officials, including those in cities such as the one who apologised to the masses and found them ‘really kind’ (chapter 4), were openly accessible to their victims after the turn of regime. To the contrary, German perpetrators immediately after defeat hid. Some were hunted down and killed by resistance forces in the immediate, chaotic months before the occupation forces established order, and tried the main leaders that they had managed to capture at the improvised international court in Nuremburg. Then some further leaders were documented and their hiding places and false names disclosed by Simon Wiesenthal and others, which led in 1966, for instance, to sixteen SS officers being successfully brought to trial in Stuttgart. But the ordinary Nazi organisers and executioners remained hidden, until some emerged as veterans for Neo-Nazi groups in Germany in the 1990s. This is the reverse of the situation after the event in China, where the only trial was of the Gang of Four leaders of the Cultural Revolution. Victimhood in Germany expects compensation and trial by way of apology, whereas in China it expects political correction first and in some cases, now, compensation. On the other hand the beneficiaries of the Third Reich who then suffered firestorms, flight, rape and destitution sought the same status of victimhood and compensation as did surviving Jews, from 1945 onward. As has been argued in chapter 8, this can be understood as a defence against shame, if not against the fact of guilt.

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In the PRC, the famine was suffered. The motif is still self-sacrifice, as it was at the time. Children are grateful for the sacrifice their elders made in their bitter suffering. Whereas in Germany suffering was not continued as the sacrifice for greatness and glory by which Nazi propaganda represented it. It was instead represented as victimhood, even though defeat and occupation were suffered as guilt. Even when the young Berliners represented in chapter 10 openly acknowledged guilt without displacement, without claims of victimhood, they still expressed shame of nationality. It can now be seen that the contrast of transmission is huge. In the PRC the locally responsible cadres and many of those they led admit to their enthusiasm, apologetically or unapologetically, while their seniors in the Party resolve on an admission of error, blamed on a political tendency and its support. The children, enjoying relative prosperity and striving for more in the new opportunities built on the basis of their elders’ self-sacrifices, cannot understand the revolutionary enthusiasm of their elders – both leaders and led – but they are grateful. Their gratitude expresses progression. In Germany, at governmental level there has been an increasingly generous admission of guilt. Both seek to put the past behind them. But in China there is a simpler trajectory of pride in economic achievement. It is a patriotic pride whereas in Germany the patriotism in postwar economic achievement is toned down low because the state violence was not just a political error but a national shame. The nationalist racism of the Nazis continues with a national or ethnic selfquestioning. In the other China which is Taiwan the Party that commanded the terrorising state has apologised and regained command through multi-party elections. Its nationality is now a mixture of claims, as before claiming a truer Chinese civilisation than on the Mainland but also now professing and propounding a distinctive Taiwanese variant. Here there is no mass of perpetrators or beneficiaries of the terror, and the military perpetrators have not been tried. The politics of state violence has been assigned to a past of postcolonial oppression and a whole nation of Taiwanese Chinese and the much earlier Austro-Polynesian natives of the island with which they are mixed is the victim. The Luku victims are commemorated and compensated as exemplary victims of a great inhumanity suffered in the same oppression that made victims of all Taiwanese. Whereas in China, a self-sacrifice in the course of national recovery was taken too far because of a political and ideological error, and in Germany the course of national recovery after one defeat was set back by another war and defeat, making another recovery necessary while enduring a deeper national shame and guilt, in Taiwan a search for a national spirit and its lack of international acknowledgement has accompanied a similar economic miracle as that achieved in the other two. Three nationalisms, but of them the Chinese is most conspicuously political, a political and ideological direction in the designation of responsibility and the reason for suffering.

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In Germany, the nation has been subsumed into an economic community of nations. In Taiwan a post-colonial imposition of a politicised Chinese civilisation has been turned into an emergent variant of that civilisation. In Mainland China, state patriotism has become an ideological justification of a Communist Party and its assertion of modern Chinese civilisation. Three nationalisms, three histories, all written in the progressive mode of all nations as suggested by Benedict Anderson, Anthony Smith and others (setting aside their differences on the question of a pre-existing ethnic substance). The three cases of transmission of state violence create another useful triangulation of contrasts. A crescendo of accepting responsibility and the duty of not only compensation but also of transmitting the shameful history of the German state goes along with preventing any return to its past by forging a progressive future in a European Union. Its counterpoint is Israel’s constant accusation, an aggressive defence against and dread of anti-Semitism in the rest of the world and in particular among Palestinians and its Iranian, Syrian, North African and Arabian neighbours. In Taiwan an eventual acceptance of responsibility and duty of compensation and commemoration declines into a decent forgetting and lack of transmission. In Mainland China, a minor compensation, apology and political correction was immediate but there is little transmission of the losses inflicted by the ‘mistakes’ that have been corrected for four decades. These are, in other words, quite distinct political historicisations within the same historical temporality. The concept of history as something that over time has constantly to be corrected or reconstructed, a temporality of historiography, is the poetic and scientific partner of this political temporality (Koselleck 2002: 208). But when we come to the commemoration of the dead victims, a more basic modification has to be made to the theory of narrative historical temporality.

The Interaction of Temporal Modes Throughout the book, familial reproduction and its rites have been distinguished from the more public, national narrative of progressive history and eternal commemoration, with each being conceived as a distinct temporal mode. Another temporal mode to which both refer, but distinct from either, is the liturgical mode of eternal repetition, against which Benedict Anderson (1991) contrasts the historiographical mode of national narrative. The distinction between the two modes, progressive history and liturgical repetition, is well illustrated in two identifications of Jews, in the idea of a Jewish nation and in the idea of a chosen people in a universalising liturgy, and the ways in which each treats the Holocaust. The command to remember is repeated

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in both, but in the former it is the command to remember the necessity for and the triumph of the foundation of the Jewish state of Israel, whereas in the latter it is the command to remember the one God, creator of the universe, and his covenant with the Israelites.4 In the first, there is a sequence of three great festivals, starting with Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom ha’Shoa), the day on which the Berlin Community of Jews invites luminaries to join in the reading of the names of all Berlin Jews eradicated by the Nazis, a day shared with Israel where the Holocaust dead have been made ‘remembrance citizens’. In Israel it is followed by a seven-day period of mourning after which the second in the sequence of the three days occurs: Remembrance Day for the fallen in the wars of Israeli independence and defence, followed immediately by the celebratory Independence Day. In Israel the Holocaust is remembered chiefly for the few acts of heroic resistance to the Nazi annihilators, especially the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. There is less hospitality to the great mass of the other figures of victimhood, the ghosts of triumph. As Handelman (2004: 97) summarises, the three days together convey the degradation and despair of the Holocaust [which] was the dead end of Jewish existence. Even so, the Holocaust kindled sparks of resistance. The snuffing out of these heroic sparks (the Jewish partisans, the ghetto and camp uprisings) are mourned, but are also celebrated. For in Palestine, among independent and proud Jews returned to their own land and once more battling against seemingly insurmountable odds, these sparks flamed into ramified armed struggle. The outcome was the Jewish state … the only creative response to the Holocaust. Regeneration from annihilation, of first not being able to surmount and then successfully surmounting odds of a similar kind, casts Israel as the land of righteous victims, inhospitable to defeated victims, hospitable to the diaspora only when rising in resistance or where they are buried in the mass graves and now sacred sites of the death camps, visited by Israeli schoolchildren, only as a horror that is acceptable in the repetition of the anti-Semitic fate to be overcome, victoriously by the state of Israel. Kugelmass (1996) describes visits to the death camps by North American Jews as overcoming the necessary psychic numbing in the immediate postwar decades of the generation of adults, a numbing removal from knowledge of the horrors. Visits are, as he argues, a new baseline of a sense of Jewish roots in the old and annihilated diaspora. I would observe that in their renewal of a Jewish belonging they do not include a fellowship with the non-Jewish, including German, visitors whose hospitality to the ghosts of the annihilation is more voluntary. This is emphatically so for visiting Israeli children, accompanied by a teacher and a security serviceman, both of whom keep the children away from other visitors

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and from local populations and thus encourage among the children a sense of their continuing to be hated.5 But the point here is a contrast in the Jewish commemoration and civic ritual of return in the pilgrimage to death camps. The ‘return’ to the camps and to Israel links but does not merge this modern secular liturgy with the eternal religious liturgy. Putting the sequence of three public events in the Israeli calendar was decided upon so that it could be calibrated with the Hebrew liturgical calendar. But it could not be inserted into it. So, Holocaust day is five days after the last day of Passover, the celebration of liberation from slavery and entry into a land promised by God. The civic sequence repeats emancipation but in another history, this time by human heroism not by divine promise. In the calendar of the command to remember God’s word, the Torah is read through week by week every year. In the course of this annual round there are high and holy days, one of which is the day of mourning and fasting, called Tisha B’Av, the anniversary of the destruction of both the first and the second temple, in which all subsequent calamities, including the Shoah, are recalled. Before that, on the Passover, Jews are instructed to experience Exodus as if they were there themselves, and this can include recalling family stories of the Shoah and survival. An additional service of mourning is added to Passover, but it is especially profound on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, another day of fasting. It includes a martyrology of the deaths of ten sage Jews at the hands of the Romans, but it can also include the Shoah.6 Thus the event of the Nazi annihilation of the Jews of Europe appears in both the state civil calendar and in the religious liturgy. The Shoah is a recent and terrible example of the suffering of ‘the chosen people’. A state’s foundational mythology is made archaic by its calibration with the eternal repetition of the word of God and the failures of His people to keep their side of the covenant with Him, in which biblical mythology is treated as an analogue into which all historical events are fitted. But the state’s public events are a modern civic archaism in a separate calendar. In its identification with Israel, but in acknowledgement of its also being a German institution, the Berlin Jewish Community’s leadership insists on German and Hebrew to the exclusion of Yiddish That exclusion repeats the refusal of David Ben-Gurion to grieve and instead to ‘use’ the Holocaust, a success rewarded with his election as the first Prime Minister of Israel. He had made clandestine migration of refugee survivors to Palestine the top priority for the whole Zionist movement and it became the basis on which he achieved for himself overall and unrivalled leadership of the movement. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s he had talked about turning the Jewish tragedy into a Zionist redemption. The actions of the refugee-survivors themselves were acknowledged in his news-making pronouncements only when they engaged

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in a hunger-strike, tried to swim ashore or were killed in the attempt to reach the land of their Zionist destiny. Their transformation from defeated dregs into new pioneers was prefigured in the name given them by Zionists: ‘summit climbers’ (ma’apilim). Idith Zertal (1993) finds strong evidence of BenGurion’s horror at what he saw on visits to concentration camps. And the same horror can be found in accounts by soldiers of the Jewish brigade recruited in Palestine to fight with the British forces in Europe. But Ben-Gurion refused to grieve in public. The qualities necessary for survival through that horror were said by most Zionists to be despicably selfish and defeatist, wrong for the new Jew being created for the new state of Israel. Zertal nicely describes the survivors who migrated to Israel as ‘absent presences’, shadows in Israeli public space in the 1950s. They are counterparts of the Palestinian ‘present absentees’, as the expelled were known in the bureaucratic language of the Custodian of Abandoned Property that made space and provided furniture for European Jewish immigrants. They are the disavowed past of the new, Israeli Jew. For survivors, on the other hand, Israel could become a way of standing up to an enemy, replacing abject survival from the crushing power that made them lifeless witnesses and sometimes helpless helpers in the physical obliteration of everyone else in the camps.7 Israel is therefore a disavowing home for its ghosts. Each to their own ghosts. The anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, 27 January, is the non-Jewish Holocaust Remembrance Day; Yom ha’Shoa in the Jewish secular calendar comes later in the year. But at least in Germany, the 9 November anniversary of Kristallnacht (the night of assault on Jewish synagogues and shops in 1938) is shared by Jewish and non-Jewish Germans. And in Berlin, the son of the first post-Nazi cantor of the Community and chair of the Community Board at the time of our interviews ran the government-funded reminder of the Nazi regime called Topographie des Terrors. Its main site of reminder is the basement of the Gestapo headquarters, beside the rubble of the rest of the building. In addition, other sites throughout Berlin mark the points where victims were gathered for deportation. The victims commemorated in this way are not just the Jews of Berlin, but all the many others – political prisoners, gypsies, homosexuals. In our interview with him (24 July 2002), he remembered that the headteacher of his high school had been in the resistance during the war. He also told us that his mother, entirely Jewish, had survived underground through the help of what he called ‘good’ Germans. At the school, the anniversary of Kristallnacht was marked by the showing of relevant films. As chair of the Community Board he was conscious of presenting to the general public just one of many minorities in Germany, of whom Palestinians are another, with equal validity. Here is an example of Jewish voluntary hospitality.

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Among the non-Jewish population, there may be a similar pull of response to the fact that there should be Holocaust remembrance. Few of them attend the public events or visit Jewish museums, but some, in their school outings, in their own reading, in their visits to concentration camps or the Berlin Jewish Museum, do something similar to what the Vietnamese villagers did, though in the temporal mode of state redemption of guilt. They voluntarily entertain personal stories and domestic details of the lives of that uncanny other – an alterity of other Germans that are not like them but to whom they can draw near. It may well be the norm in Germany to identify the grandparental generation as victims, displacing by dilution the victimhood of the annihilated Jew, but there is also, in some Germans, the moral virtue of identifying with another, distanced but fellow victim of the Third Reich along with a heartfelt, voluntary revulsion for the Nazi loyalties of their parents or grandparents. By contrast, though the White Terror in Taiwan still holds a place in the narrative of the emergence of a distinct Taiwanese Chinese nationality, it takes only a small place in Taiwanese school textbooks. The family stories of victims of the Luku Incident have no place for the Incident as such. Instead, the survivors harbour a residual anti-Nationalist politics and more than that a reserve of experiences and moral inclinations that remains a moral judgement on current politics. This shows how the families engage, as families, in both modes of transmission and judgement. Very many Jews may feel the power of the command to remember yet avoid both liturgical and public events, insisting on the validity of their own sense of being Jewish (Feuchtwang 2005). In their family repair, Jewish Berliners who came from Russia are certainly transnational. The coordinates of their sense of family are in Germany, in the ex-USSR, and in Israel. Their retelling of family stories are certainly historical, but they serve as substance of family reproduction, internalised in each generation along with the voices of particular figures towards whom each member feels answerable in their own way. Baruch creates for himself and his children the voice of his paternal grandfather Solomon to whom he is answerable for the inherited responsibility of comprehending God through mathematics, and what he calls the heathen, non-Jewish, elements in the history of Judaism. He accepts the obligation to reach out through his familial reproduction of voices and to act first as a decent human being, and only then as a Jew. In this way, familial reproduction inflects the more general and public, secular history. It goes beyond the nation and the chosen faith, yet it is always compromised by the particular of being Jewish. This entails the mutual exclusion in his wife Julia’s reproduction of her Jewish identity and her mother’s and sister’s insistence on denying it in favour of their Christian and anthroposophical identity. The particular, the singularity of who is selected in family relatedness for reproduction, fractures what had previously been a family, and limits the basis, as it must, from which to reach out to others whose voices, when they are heard, are those of categories of humanity.

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In the anonymous repair of neglect of ancestors, forgotten in the restored genealogy of the Quanzhou village, familial reproduction unites those responsible for the ‘mistakes’ of the Great Leap Forward, with its victims absorbed into ‘the forgotten’ out of tactful respect for the shame of their families. It is an equivalent of the Party-State patriotic account of the famine as an effect of mistaken politics that has been corrected as ‘we’ the Party have always been able to correct our mistakes. But the cadre in the northeastern village who remembers his enthusiastic support of the Great Leap as madness and now only cares for his network of reciprocal relations (chapter 5), or the cadre in a northern village8 who is like Chen Wansheng, the cadre in the Quanzhou village, in that both now serve the people by attending to ancestors and gods, have all turned away to other standards of responsiveness, familial and cosmological, against which political responsiveness can be found wanting. In this way the eternal and familial temporalities reflect upon as well as inflect the secular progressive and political temporality of state patriotism into a kind of self-criticism. But they remain in another mode, suspect as ‘religion’ or ‘superstition’ in the secular historical mode. After the Luku Incident, though under Taiwanese state law there was no trial of the perpetrators of their torture, imprisonment and loss, two of the surviving victims, using the other mode of mediation between life and death, said that General Gu Zhengwen, miserable and alone in his old age, was getting his just desert (bao ying) (chapter 6). This is the equivalent for the abiding hatred of Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kaishek), expressed by the widow of one of the executed Luku men who felt helpless but had wanted physically to attack him because he had beaten people to death. To her, he was the responsible perpetrator. But for those not closely related to victims in generations since his military command of Taiwan, there is little to educate or bring to mind what happened, let alone in either mode to condemn or feel pity for the ghosts that for a few still haunt the landscape around Luku. In the cosmological mode, the victims of the Luku Incident have recovered their family ghosts by means of the rituals of rescue from purgatory, and one family by the transformation of a household deity into a public temple deity and his spirit medium reaches out to anyone who can find effective response in pledges to their god. In general, Buddhist humanitarianism has flourished since the end of the regime of military command and it flourishes in Taiwan’s reach to the rest of the world, including earthquake victims on the Mainland. Here, the Taiwanese historical mode merges with or is reinforced by a cosmological mode of transmission. Finally, the family mode of transmission contains archives of documents and stories that can supply yet another political change in each country: in Germany a Jewish German identity that fully participates in the creation of Germany and its place in the world, with lessening reference to Israel,

Beyond Bad Death   225

acknowledging good Germans as well as racists; in the PRC, pressing for a more open appraisal of the mistakes that caused the famine and therefore a more disputable historiography and an increasing willingness to voice different political and moral judgements; in Taiwan, removal of the continuing taboos of the civil war against ‘Communism’ with the result of a further reaching out to the Mainland from a distinctive creation of Taiwanese identity. In these ways, the rehabilitation of ghosts and the family repair of disruption can join forces, moving between the two temporalities.

Coda Visiting the Jewish Museum in Vienna in 2004, I stood in front of a photograph. It was a picture of the funeral of my paternal grandfather, David Feuchtwang, who served as Chief Rabbi and died in office in 1936. Unremarked by the caption, standing behind the coffin, looking vulnerable and leaning slightly backwards is my father. It was the year before I was born. I am one of the few, if not the only visitor to the museum, who recognises him. He is my secret, but it is I who am the bigger secret, since I was not there and no visitor could identify me with the picture that I secretly identify with myself. This was the death of an ancestor, named and not forgotten. The next day I visited my grandfather’s grave in the Jewish cemetery. It was a death before the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany, an individuated death with full Jewish and high Viennese pomp. In this remembrance, I am a secret of a secret that could also be described as an irrelevance. The picture was part of an exhibition of what had been lost: ‘Vienna, city of Jews’. It is not for Jews, but about Jews, just as the Berlin Jewish Museum is. But the Berlin museum is much more prominent, bolder, larger and much more visited.9 The Jewish Museum in Vienna was founded in the 1920s by a Jewish ethnologist to contain a record of a ‘present’ that could be passing in the fullness of the history of the city. For instance, it originally exhibited a fully furnished living room of a typical Viennese Jewish bourgeois family. Of this, in the restored Jewish museum, just some china remains that might have been on its linen or rug-covered tables but is now in a large and otherwise empty space within a vitrine – a quiet reminder of the loss. My familial link is not the point of the picture. But it is evoked, in and by me. That is the difference, even without ritual, the evident gap between the familial and the civic mode of remembrance. Outside is the memorial for the annihilated Jews of Vienna in Judenplatz by Rachel Whiteread. Her memorial solidifies their loss, that they are too numerous to be named, as a reminder. It is a cast of the empty space where there had been books, where there once was a wall, so that what you now see

226   Conclusion

are not the spines of the books with their titles but the other ends where they might have been opened. In its roof, not visible, there is the hollow of a gas inlet. The only names on the memorial are those of the death camps. Here the dead who could be named if they had surviving families are remembered without the reminder of an inscribed name or caption. Mourners have left long-lasting night light candles in their little glass shelters on the steps of the platform on which the lost library stands. But these could as well be candles for the mass of the anonymous lost. They remain known because of a historical event. What draws the visitor is the somewhat religious – but not like any previous religion with its eternal liturgy, its sages, prophets, martyrs, heroes and gods – aura of the calamity of human doing, a historically documented myth-event of mass killing. When we are reminded of such a death, not a second death – the first being physical, the second being the person and the name of that person – but beyond because it is on such a large scale and it is known as a historical event, we are vaguely and ominously turned into a ruin of forgetfulness. Since we cannot forget completely, we are the ruins of that loss. We are the ghosts, for that moment. The event is a creation of demons of the history of the present, to add to the demons of all exclusive national narratives and we are its momentarily tormented ghosts. This book has been about what people retrieve from such moments, familially and historically, how they have been able to avoid or to entertain their ghosts and their collective historical demons.

Notes   1. For instance, the Zafimaniry of Madagascar (Bloch 1999).   2. And it is the same in the cases where compensation is itself the legal issue. Most protests in recent years have been about the unfair and corrupt appropriation of urban or rural land by combinations of developers with local government, paying a low price (compensation) to residents before having them removed and sharing the huge profit of rent or resale at a much higher price. The protest is never confined to the legal issues. It is always also political. As it was also for the victims of dirty needles from which villagers contracted HIV AIDS selling their blood to blood bank companies. In Henan province, they formed defiant self-help solidarity groups, turning their stigma and the indignity of being treated as a rural surplus population into the dignity of sustaining each others’ lives by activism (Shao Jing and Mary Skoggin 2009).   3. I thank Ralph deeply for allowing me to read a 2005 typescript of his book.   4. The distinction between a liturgical order that can absorb historical events and a narrative order of making history, such as the Zionist narrative, was beautifully suggested to me by reading Yerushalmi (1996).

Beyond Bad Death   227   5. This was shown in the television documentary made by Yoav Shamir, Defamation, broadcast in England by More 4, 13 January 2010.   6. Many thanks to my dear sister Nicola for her instruction on these matters.   7. This is how a survivor of Auschwitz, Cordelia Edvardson, describes finding a home in Israel during the Yom Kippur War at the end of her book, Burned Child Seeks the Fire (1997).   8. Thanks to Hu Zongze for telling me about this man, from his doctoral research in Hebei.   9. Vienna is not Berlin. Nor is it like pre-war Vienna, a European centre of invention, discussion, controversy – including political party platforms for elections of members of the board of the Jewish Gemeinde. Now it is full of political tact, avoiding controversy to the point of neutrality if it can, by making compromises between conflicting interests: the headquarters of the OPEC, mainly Arab oilproducing states, and of the Palestine Liberation Organisation are in Vienna but on suffrance that they do not raise their profile by attacking Israel. The rather large Jewish, mainly Russian and eastern European, community in Vienna also keeps a low profile.

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Index 2: 28 (28 Feb 1947 state massacres in Taiwan) 116, 139 abandoned pasts 11, 19, 95, 96 Adenauer, Konrad 155, 157, 158 Agamben, Giorgio 31–3 aggravated indifference 9, 28, 33, 40, 76, 77, 88, 103 ambiguity, intolerance of 23, 38, 40, 41 Anderson, Benedict 219 answerability 175, 188fn2 anti-Semitism 20, 24, 35, 153, 154, 159, 161, 163, 164, 187, 188, 213, 218 apology 5, 10, 45, 46, 50, 75, 84, 208, 214, 218 archive 8–9, 16–17, 43, 133, 149, 178–9, 181 avoidance (of guilt or shame) 15, 147, 170, 195, 198, 203, 204 Bakhtin, M.M. 188fn2 bao ying. See just desert Baosheng Dadi (deified doctor and his temple in Quanzhou) 98–99 bare life 31, 32, 40 See also death in life Becker, Jasper 38 Béja, Jean-Philippe 90fn13 Bernstein, Thomas 45, 89fn2 Bewältigung. See overcoming Bhabha, Homi 24 Bo, Yibo 27 Bodemann, Michal 177, 183, 184, 185, 188 Bonnin, Michel 90fn13

Bossen, Laurel 91fn14 Bourdieu, Pierre 189fn4 Brenner, Michael 161, 189fn8 Burleigh, Michael 39 caesurae 10–1, 46, 209, 215 cannibalism 27, 37, 38–9, 41, 81–2, 86–7, 90fn12, 100, 105 Carrithers, Michael 155 Carsten, Janet 189n1 Chang, Jung (and Jon Halliday) 89fn7 Chang, Kang-I Sun 47 Chang, Xiangqun 8, 67fn17, 89fn4, 90fn13 Chen, Boda 74 Chen, Dachuan 47, 116, 117, 119, 134 Chen, Fenghua 132, 133 Chen, Shuibian 121 Chen, Wansheng 100, 216, 224 Chen, Yun 48 Chiang, Ching-kuo 118 Chiang, Kaishek 118, 119, 126, 134, 224 Chuang, Ying-chang and Wolf, Arthur 113 civil war of Chinese Nationalists and Communists 9, 22, 31, 46, 47, 62, 116, 155, 225 civilisation 30–31, 32, 37, 46, 95, 218, 219 class 8, 9, 20, 30, 31, 34, 36–7, 38, 40, 42fn3, 45, 79, 80, 81, 89fn3, 214 class struggle 26, 27, 31, 45, 56, 76, 80, 81, 89fn3, 214

236   Index

Cold War 9, 25, 117, 139, 155, 160, 187 commemoration 5, 9, 11, 13, 17, 28, 45, 46, 55, 100–1, 113, 121, 133, 155, 156, 157–8, 163, 165, 211–12, 218, 219, 221 See also under ritual; temporality Communism/t 4, 9, 10, 18, 36, 47–8, 52, 61, 62–4, 72, 81, 106, 117, 119, 155, 156, 163, 164, 169, 201, 202, 225 Communist bandit (gongfei) 44, 46, 117, 119 Communist spy (feidie) 48, 143 Communist wind (gongchan feng) 47, 66fn10, 80, 82, 83 Community (Gemeinde) of Jews 21, 162–3, 166, 171, 227fn9 comparison 3, 20–22 cults of affliction 43 Cultural Revolution 10, 19, 22, 27, 35, 37, 45, 47, 56, 59, 60, 78, 82, 87, 98, 99, 100, 105, 106, 217 cuowu. See mistakes Darieva, Tsypylma vi, 5–6, 7, 20, 181, 187, 193, 194 Davidson, James 37 death in life 22, 33, 41 See also bare life defence (against guilt) 156, 192, 204, 217 demons (and demonization) 23, 31, 34, 36, 40, 41, 44, 48, 226 Deng, Xiaoping 48, 49, 61, 89fn3 denial 36, 154, 180 See also disavowal Derrida, Jacques 8–9, 43 Dikötter, Frank 71, 74, 78, 82, 89fn7 Diner, Dan 42fn3 dining halls (in the Great Leap Forward) 71, 74, 75, 79, 80, 83, 86, 97, 101 disavowal 24–5, 36, 222 doubling 24–5, 32, 33,

See also substitution Douglas, Mary 32 Dudbridge, Glen 37 Dutton, Michael 72, 75, 88fn1, 89fn9 economic miracles 10, 14, 155, 218 Edgerton-Tarpley, Kathryn 81 Eichmann, Adolf 158, 161 Elon, Amos 180 Elwert, Georg 157 enthusiasm (revolutionary) 18, 26, 27, 71, 72, 77, 78, 79, 82, 86–7, 88, 93, 218 Erhard, Ludwig 155 eugenics 30 See also purification event 3–4, 9, 11, 16, 17–9 exception, state of 28, 31, 32, 33, 40, 41, 41–2fn2, 44, 45, 46, 47, 72, 88fn1, 209, 212 excessive violence 28, 212 exorcism 23, 34 family being 16, 188 figures 195–6 ghosts (forgotten ancestors, rejected kin) 98, 109fn9, 211, 224 myths, stories, vignettes 15, 16, 130, 181, 188, 189, 203, 199, 204, 221, 223 repair 11, 15, 16, 210, 212, 223, 225 See also under temporality Farquhar, Judith 45, 97, 106 Federation of Jewish Communities (Germany) 153, 159, 162, 165 feidie. See Communist spy, under Communism Feinstein, Margaret Myers 160, 161 Fest, Joachim 39, 42fn8 Flower, John 91fn15, 104 forgetting 55, 121, 149, 171, 219, 226 Freud, Sigmund 8 Friedman, Ed (et al) 78

Index   237 friend and enemy (internal division) 22, 46, 76, 86, 88fn1, 104 Fulbrook, Mary 158, 163 Gemeinde. See Community generation gap 10, 50, 51, 60 gesture (as icon) 139 ghosts 23, 34, 40, 41, 98, 115, 126, 127, 134, 135, 170, 181, 209–11, 211–12, 213, 220, 222, 224, 225, 226 hungry ghosts. See orphan souls Goldhagen, Daniel 159, 191, 192 gongchan feng. See Communist wind, under Communism gongfei. See Communist bandit, under Communism graves (and tombs, graveyards, and mass graves) 98, 113, 114, 115, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 134, 158, 161, 166, 180–81, 189, 197, 210, 220, 225 grievance 8, 12, 16, 43, 60, 139, 215 Gu, Zhengwen 48, 62, 117, 119, 120, 134, 224 Grünberg, Kurt 154 Guanyin, salvation god, 37 guilt 20, 45, 46, 154, 156, 158, 159, 165, 168, 169, 170, 171, 186, 190, 191, 202, 203, 212, 218, 223 Handelman, Don 211, 220 Hasselbach, Ingo 171 Hausen, Karen 158, 170 Heimat 11, 17, 41, 157, 172, 196, 198, 201, 203, 204 television series 170, 203, 204 Hershatter, Gail 86 Herz, Deborah 180 Herzfeld, Michael 76 Himmler, Heinrich 39 history 10, 12, 14, 36, 86, 113, 135, 170, 219, 221, 223, 226 family 175–7, 178, 187, 188, 199, 223 local 15, 145–6



mythic 13, 156 Party 56–7 political 16 politics of 60, 121, 171–2 revisions of 9, 46–7, 56, 64, 118, 120, 156, 165 school 11, 53, 56, 59, 153–4, 156, 159–60 See also temporalities Hitler, Adolf 24, 30, 42fn 8 Hoffman, Eva 139 hospitality to strangers and ghosts 173, 210–12, 220, 222 human (honest, straightforward) (laoshi) 59, 88, 104 humanity 28–9, 33, 35, 36, 37, 40, 95, 104, 107, 108, 122, 178, 212, 223 and subhumanity 22, 23, 28, 29, 33, 34, 35, 40 human relations (renyu ren guanxi) 95, 104 (renqing) 103, 104 intellectuals (zhishi fenzi) 12, 22, 24 intelligentsia 7, 16, 60, 116 interviews 5–8, 14–15, 44, 49, 61, 92, 118–20 irony 77, 78, 88, 105, 106, 173, 192 Jewish Cultural Union (Berlin) 165–7 Jewish Museums 159, 223 Berlin Jewish Museum 167, 200 Vienna Jewish Museum 225 Jones, Steve 85 Judt, Tony 172 just desert (deserved fate) (baoying) 134, 224 Kang, Xiaofei 42fn7 Kantorovicz, Ernst 31 kinship 19, 113, 140, 175–6, 177, 180, 188–9 See also family Kipnis, Andrew 94, 102, 108fn4 Klemperer, Victor 214 Kohl, Helmut 159, 165, 167

238   Index Koselleck, Reinhart 219 Kugelmass, Jack 220 Kwon, Heonik 211 Lamley, Harold 135fn1 Lan, Bozhou 120, 121, 122 Laoshi. See human Lefort, Claude 36 Li, Denghui 46, 118 Libeskind, Daniel 167, 200 life, gift of, 32, 42fn4, 94, 104 life stories 16 Lifton, Robert 25 Lin, Adela 135fn4 Liu, Shaoqi 27 Liu, Xin 103 Lora-Wainwright, Anna 85, 90, 108fn1, 108fn3 Lü, Xiaobo 72, 77 Ma, Yinjiu 120, 135, 140 MacFarquhar, Roderick 45 Mann, Thomas 24 Mao, Renfeng 48 Mao, Zedong 36, 74, 80, 89fn7, 96 melancholia 8, 12 memory autobiographical 13, 14, 141 cultural 13 genealogical 11, 89fn10 public 13, 14, 43, 44, 47, 52, 55, 60 semantic 13 social 9, 13, 14 See also remember Merkel, Angela 171–2 Merridale, Catherine 143 mistakes (cuowu) 56, 82 Mo, Yan 66fn11, 104, 105, 106, 107 Möllemann, Jurgen 167–8, 171 Neswald, Elizabeth 205fn1 Niang Niang (fertility goddess) 100 Novick, Peter 139

Opa war kein Nazi 191–2, 193, 198, 201, 203 orphan souls (hungry ghosts) 41, 98, 108fn9, 210, overcoming (Bewältigung) 155 Palestinians 161, 168, 172, 219, 222 Pan, Jie 90fn12 perpetrator 8, 18, 19, 20, 46, 135, 154, 158, 165, 170, 192, 195, 204, 215, 217, 218, 224 pingfan. See rectify injustice Postone, Moishe 42fn5 pride 46, 87, 218 projection 23, 24, 28, 37, 38, 41 purification 25, 30, 33, 40, 214 race 9, 29–30, 31, 35, 40, 42fn5, 156, 214 race war 29 racialisation 30, 42fn3 Rauschning, Hermann 35, 42fn8 recognition 8, 10, 14, 15–7, 43–4, 60, 133, 189fn4, 215 rectify injustice (pingfan) 119, 133 Reisz, Edgar 170, 203, 204 remember command to, 174, 219–10, 221, 223 times of bitterness and think of sweetness (yiku sitian) 49, 50, 90fn13 reserve (reserved from public transmission) 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 65, 188, 223 Resnais, Alain 160, 179 Rezzori, Gregor von 24 ritual(s) 14, 17, 95, 98, 100, 101, 114, 129, 187–8, 210–11 commemorative 120, 211, 221 death 17, 115, 121 political 34, 36, 50, 87, of succession 31–2, 43fn4 See also under temporalities

Index   239 sacrifice (xisheng) (including self-sacrifice) 9, 25, 28, 32, 34, 36, 37–41, 42fn8, 59, 73, 76, 77, 94, 101, 102–3, 104, 108, 210, 218 samples 5 Santner, Eric 170 Schmitt, Carl 28, 41fn2, 41–2fn2, 88fn1 Schoenhals, Michael 34 Sebald, W.G. 155 self-destruction 25 self-sacrifice. See under sacrifice self-strengthening campaigns 9, 30–1, 34, 37, 38–9, 40, 72, 77 Seybolt, Peter 79 shame 20, 38–9, 41, 62, 72, 86–8, 90fn12, 92, 99, 118, 156, 157, 171, 172, 173fn3, 201, 204, 210, 213, 217, 218, 219, 224 Shangdi Gong (‘Supreme God’ in Luku) 128–30 Shih, Fang-long vi, 7, 44, 90, 145 Short, Philip 99 social feelings 13 See avoidance; defence; denial; disavowal; guilt; pride; shame sovereignty 23, 28, 29, 31–33, 41fn2, 42, 48, 88fn1 Spielberg, Steven 160, 183 splitting 23, 25, 27, 28, 36, 40, 76, 85, 89fn7 Stafford, Charles 102 Steinmüller, Hans vi, 41fn1, 108fn5, 172, 190 Su, Tong 106, 107 Su, Zhenzhang 138 subhumanity. See under humanity substitution 77, 85 See also doubling Tang, Degang 90fn12 targeted violence 9, 23, 26, 33, 35, 44, 76–7, 213 Taussig, Michael 37 temporalities (times) 12, 14, 17, 212, 225

of commemoration 17, 121, 134 of family reproduction and repair 16, 133, 134, 212 ironic 173 liturgical 219, 221 progressive, narrative, historical 16, 133, 156, 157, 161, 173, 219, 219, 221, 224 ritual, eternal, liturgical 17, 34, 108, 210, 219, 221, 224 Thaxton, Ralph 216–7 Third Reich (Nazi) 4, 18, 25, 30, 35, 39, 40, 153 Tian, Zhuangzhuang 56 Topographie des Terrors 222 transmission 3, 10, 11, 12, 13–5, 153 trauma 12–3, 121, 122, 134, 186 uncanny, the, 169, 170, 181, 223 victim (as a category) 8, 13, 18–9, 20, 21, 43, 44, 59–61, 118, 121, 133, 154, 155–6, 158, 159, 163, 164, 169, 170, 172, 185, 191–2, 195, 203, 204, 213, 215, 217, 218, 220 victimisation 192, 214–5 See also targeted violence voices 176, 183, 210–11, 212, 223 Wang, Liang 90fn11 Wang, Mingming vi, 6 Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, Susanne 90fn11 Welzer, Harald (et al) 191 See also Opa war kein Nazi Wemheuer, Felix 59, 72, 104 White Terror (in Taiwan) 4, 17, 44, 46–47, 48, 54, 60, 64, 116–8, 121 (in Russia) 177 xisheng. See sacrifice Xu, Youyu 57 Yan, Yunxiang 67fn20, 102, 103 Yang, Dali 27, 76, Yang, Jisheng 57, 65 yiku sitian. See under remember

240   Index Introduction Yu, Chien 114 Yu, Hua 56 Yue, Gang 37, 105, 106 Zertal, Idith 222 Zhang, Ning 90fn12

Zhang, Yanxian 44, 55, 60, 61, 64, 118, 120, 133, 137, 138 Zhen, Willa 93 zhishi fenzi. See intellectuals Zionism and anti-Zionism 164, 214