Plots of War: Modern Narratives of Conflict 9783110283037, 9783110282870

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Plots of War

Culture & Conflict

Edited by Isabel Capeloa Gil and Catherine Nesci

Band 2

Plots of War

Modern Narratives of Conflict

Edited by Isabel Capeloa Gil and Adriana Martins

ISBN 978-3-11-028287-0 e-ISBN 978-3-11-028303-7 ISSN 2194-7104 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin / Boston Coverimage: ddp images/AP Photo Typesetting: fidus Publikations-Service GmbH, Nördlingen Printing and Binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Contents Adriana Martins Introduction: Plots of War I. Post-memory Narratives

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Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, Roberto Vecchi, António Sousa Ribeiro The Children of the Colonial War: Post-Memory and Representations 11 Patrícia Vieira The (In)Visibility of Colonial Wars in Mia Couto and J. M. Coetzee

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Paolo Jedlowski Public Memories in Italy: Contemporary Narratives about the Italian Colonial Past 32 Caroline Rothauge Remembering the Spanish Republican Exile: An Audiovisual Return II. Othering the Battleground

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Vera Nünning The (In)Visibility of War in British Novels of the Twentieth Century Anne Martina Emonts Unmasking Violence and Domination: Mechtilde Lichnowsky and the 20th Century (Word) Wars 87 Júlia Garraio Porn, Rape and the Fall of the Third Reich: On Thor Kunkel’s Novel Endstufe 99 Shahd Wadi Palestinian Women’s Bodies as a Battlefield

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Contents

III. Emplotting the Nation

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Lara Duarte Addressing Wounds: Whitman Engaged

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Pirjo Lyytikäinen How to Forge a Victory out of a Defeat: Uses of War in Finnish Nation Building 139 Isabel Oliveira Martins The Crusaders: Representations of the American Soldier in the Second World War American Novel 157 Stefano Rosso Making Violence Visible in Vietnam War Narratives: The Case of A Rumor of War 168 Gerald Bär The Subversive and the Sublime: Aspects of the British, German and Portuguese Critical Reception of ‘Anti-War’ Films in the Aftermath of May ’68 177 Editors/Authors Index

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Introduction: Plots of War The construction and the experience of modernity, of its aspirations and failures are inevitably bound up with warfare. References to war are often negatively charged as war evokes mental images of destruction, horror, violence, loss, trauma, and human suffering. Nonetheless, war is also associated with unprecedented scientific and technological developments in various fields and has heralded major societal changes. Representations of war in various media, on the other hand, themselves constitute an aesthetic and ideological battleground. In fact, and since the mediation of traumatic events requires the search for new and effective modes of transmitting the unspeakable and the horrific, modernity has proven fruitful as far as aesthetic modes of representing war and conflict are concerned, and the emergence and consolidation of modernism and postmodernism attest to how aesthetics becomes a privileged site for both dissent and resistance and engaging creativity whenever war is discussed. The positive and contentious associations evoked by war were particularly significant in the 20th century, when, for the first time in humankind’s history, two world conflicts took place. These conflicts, among the many others that broke out around the planet over the century with long-lasting and devastating consequences in geo-political terms, epitomize Hannah Arendt’s assertion in On Violence (1970), that violence was the common denominator of the last century. The first decade of the present millennium was marked by two events that somehow foretold of another century characterized by trauma and suffering. The 9 / 11 terrorist attacks represented a milestone in the history of wars in a time of paradigmatic change¹. They set off a new type of world war, the war on terror, which combines conventional and unconventional features and represents an international joint effort to defeat an invisible and unpredictable enemy. The controversial American invasion of Iraq in 2003 was the second episode in this new age of war that proclaimed the anticipation of another confrontational century, thus stimulating vivid discussion about the plots of war, and about their narrative dimension in textual and visual terms. Even though the expression ‘plots of war’ sends us back to the usual schemes and intrigues underlying any conflict, this volume aims at discussing the representational character of the plots of war, that is to say, the emplotment of war in historic and especially in symbolic terms,

1 On the 9 / 11 terrorist attacks and their spectacular representations, see Dayan (2009).

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which paves the way to examining the configuration of the social and political construction of individual and collective memories of conflicts. This interrogation becomes even more relevant when the imminent passing away of all those who directly experienced the suffering and horror of the two past world wars has raised the question of how future generations would deal with a legacy of violence and how they would remember or forget remarkable events that have shaped the representations of their national pasts. In other words, as never before, reflection on post-memory, memory transfers and the remediation of memory representations becomes so very urgent, particularly when the figuration of the past is increasingly becoming the mediated (and negotiated) representation of what has never been experienced². Besides, it is necessary to take into account that medial constructs of war will increasingly serve to premediate future conflicts with unexpected implications³. What is ultimately at stake here is the complex figuration and mediation of the violence of war in ever more hyper-mediated means with direct consequences on the production of identities and processes of cultural memory. Plots of War: Modern Narratives of Conflict is an international collection of essays that brings together an international group of scholars to share transnational perspectives on memory and trauma and study their aesthetic representations across different media and literature. The book represents an attempt to fill a gap as far as other publications in the field are concerned since, despite the extensive writings produced in recent years on the representation of war⁴, none has so far consistently addressed how the very structure of representation

2 Consider the reflection Assmann (2006) makes about the clash between experience and confessional culture. The latter is related to how second and third generations address the trauma without having experienced it. 3 On premediation, see Grusin (2010). 4 Consider, among others, the following books: Torgovnick (2005) on the effects of war discourse in the aftermath of World War II; Paris (2007) and Heberle (2009) that, despite being transmedial, focus on only one event, respectively the Second World War and the Vietnam War; and Slocum (2006) that addresses a specific medial representation of war. In the domain of communication studies it is worth pointing out Allan and Zelizer’s book (2004), that discusses the politics of reporting after 9 / 11, and examines the specific positioning of journalism and reporting in the wake of recent US interventions. On the social and cultural impact of war and its contentious memories, see the essay collections organized by Carpentier (2007); by Lamberti and Fortunati (2009); and by Silva, Martins, Guarda and Sardica (2010). From the perspective of visuality, consider Saltzman and Rosenberg’s collection of essays published in 2006, which discusses the interaction between art and the mediation of traumatic memory in modernity; and the recent book by Gil (2011), whose second section is entirely dedicated to discussing visuality and violence in cinema and photography.

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is warring (guerroyant in Foucault’s terms), and how this impacts on the mode of emplotment of war narratives across several media. The book deals with the emplotment of war on three levels: the post-memory of conflict, the structure of enmity and its cultural construction, as well as the embedding between narratives of war and nation building. It discusses various (and sometimes conflicting) theoretical premises on the politics of memory and oblivion, highlighting the resilient nature of war trauma and the indelible mark it leaves on individuals who experience it and on further generations that try to cope with and to overcome the, to a greater or lesser extent visible, specters of fear, censorship, amnesia, and forgetfulness. As it becomes a post-memory, in Marianne Hirsch’s assertion⁵, the remembrance of war turns contentious. On the one hand, it is deeply intertwined with representation, and, on the other, as an exceptionally violent event, it challenges the work and the aesthetic modes deriving thereof. Furthermore, since war is both an event and a social construct, the modes of war narrative emplotment derive from and structure the self-awareness of communities ravaged by conflict and strife. In this sense, the plot of war refers both to the structuring of the war narrative and to the social conundrum that war-stricken societies are faced with in post-conflict situations, i.e. that they are bound to narrate the past whilst being framed by former traces in the construction of future peace-building discourses. Therefore, more than representing an instance of contending, war is in itself a contentious object whose effects demand careful examination from aesthetic, ideological, and ethical points of view. The three sections of the volume attempt to provide a response to this demand and are organized around representations of war as experienced through analysis of chronologically varied post-memory narratives (Section I); taking gender and ethnicity into account as markers that reveal how in wartime people’s bodies become surrogate battlegrounds for the waging of institutional violence (Section II); and from a national perspective, inspired by the premise that war is a decisive factor in nation building, in terms of its collective imaginary and politics of memory (Section III). The first section of the book ‘Post-Memory Narratives’ examines how the mediation of deferred war memories operates in terms of (in)visibility in narratives on colonial wars and on the Spanish Civil War through literary texts and audiovisual media. The authors converge in their attempt to unveil from different perspectives how troubling private and collective national memories are confronted and how they have been either obliterated or revealed by official discourses, thus to a great extent determining just what should be remembered and forgotten at different

5 See Hirsch (2002) and (2008). See also Hirsch and Spitzer (2010).

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historical moments in a post-conflict period. In ‘The Children of the Colonial War: Post-memory and Representations’ Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, Roberto Vecchi and António Sousa Ribeiro discuss what recollections of the Portuguese Colonial War owe to private memories and how the second generation, the children of former combatants, are eager to unveil their parents’ and relatives’ war experiences by filling in the gap official representations have left open. The authors claim that most attempts to create a Colonial War memory lie in the artistic sphere through which the huge official silence involving war-related issues is dealt with in ethical and aesthetic terms. In ‘The (In)Visibility of Colonial Wars in Mia Couto and J. M. Coetzee’, Patricia Vieira uses Couto’s and Coetzee’s fictions to reflect on how the trope of blindness contributes to subverting the logic of colonialism that often rests on the visibility of the perpetrator and the invisibility of the victim. By confronting the fictional modelling and role of two colonized blind characters, Vieira demonstrates how both authors use blindness to interrogate colonial patterns of visibility. Paolo Jedlowski’s essay ‘Public Memories in Italy: Contemporary Narratives about the Italian Colonial Past’ discusses how the representations of the Italian colonial past and of the colonial wars were mostly removed from public memory after World War II, and how the colonial past has recently returned to representations as the public sphere feels the need to acknowledge this obliterated past in diverse ways. By considering a wide corpus of fictional, cinematic and photographic narratives, Jedlowski discusses, on the one hand, the politics of public oblivion, and, on the other, examines how the quality of the returned memory may respond to various political agendas. With his essay, Jedlowski calls for a dialogical and self-critical public memory that revisits the past and acknowledges the injustice inflicted on others. Caroline Rothauge’s essay – ‘Remembering the Spanish Republican Exile. An Audiovisual Return’ – enters into dialogue with Margarida Ribeiro, Roberto Vecchi and António Sousa Ribeiro’s text as far as the role played by the political, affective and familial transgenerational processes of cultural remembrance is concerned. The author demonstrates how the generation of the grandchildren of those who endured the Spanish Civil War and coped with exile as Republicans, supported by the political stability democracy has brought to Spain since the 1990s, felt the need to break the ‘pact of silence’ that had favoured the transition to democracy. Rothauge contends that the audiovisual return not only allowed Spaniards to deal with the looming deaths of eyewitnesses, but also to review the Francoist representation of Spanish Republicans, thus contributing to the construction of a balanced collective cultural memory of the fratricidal conflict and of its consequences. ‘Othering the Battleground’, the second section of the volume, gathers essays that tackle the narrative gendering of battlegrounds. In the first three essays, the privileged battlefield is that of literary writings (fictional or non-fictional) onto

Introduction: Plots of War

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which the visibility / invisibility of the war and gender protagonism and / or suffering are projected. The last two texts, even if from different perspectives, reflect on how the female body is converted, on the one hand, into a symbolic ground, and, on the other, into a weapon that is used by adversaries according to their ideological needs. Starting from the assumption that war is a popular topic in most literary genres with varying degrees of visibility / invisibility in terms of representability, in her essay ‘The (In)Visibility of War in British Novels of the Twentieth Century’, Vera Nünning devises four modes of depicting the two world wars in 20th-century British canonical and non-canonical fiction. Through analysis of a large corpus of novels on the two world wars, the author claims the (in)visibility of war can promote or impede the recollection of traumatic memories and the resulting discussion of war experiences. The section’s gendered perspective is also underlined in ‘Unmasking Violence and Domination – Mechtilde Lichnowsky and the 20th Century (Word) Wars’. In this text, Anne Martina Emonts examines the writings of Mechtilde Lichnowsky, a pacifist intellectual who experienced the two world wars and exile from her homeland. According to Emonts, her work encapsulates a verbal struggle against violence and domination. Lichnowsky’s interest in unmasking linguistic strategies of domination aims at denouncing to what extent language might be an act of symbolic violence, warning against the naturalization of violence in discourse. Júlia Garraio’s essay ‘Porn, Rape and the Fall of the Third Reich. On Thor Kunkel’s novel Endstufe’ discusses Kunkel’s controversial novel, bringing to the fore not only the association between Nazism and sexual perversion, but also the general sexual violence perpetrated against women during World War II. She demonstrates how the female body during any war is more than the visible and tangible object of violence. It is the concrete and symbolic ground where physical and ideological violence occurs with everlasting psychological consequences. Through Garraio’s essay, the reader can reflect on the role of sexuality and pornography in Kunkel’s novel and on the ideological implications of such an approach when the reader is led to draw parallels between the historical context focused on the novel and his / her present reality. Shahd Wadi’s ‘Palestinian Women’s Bodies as a Battlefield’ discusses the legitimization of violence against women and their bodies within the framework of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The author talks about the use of Palestinian women’s bodies as a trope of Israeli national discourse as well as how Palestinian women make their bodies signify with the aim of acquiring empowerment in gender, religious, and political terms within and beyond their own communities. The third section of the volume is dedicated to national narratives, and, more specifically, to the ways through which nations are emplotted / built either in a war context or due to war. In ‘Addressing Wounds: Whitman Engaged’, Lara Duarte revisits Walt Whitman’s poetry on the American Civil War to reveal a poet

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deeply engaged with the pain of his brothers divided by a fratricidal conflict. Instead of finding a partisan of one of the factions, she finds a man confident in the future of a unified nation that perhaps needed to undergo the horrors of war to shape its national identity. The belief in the curative power of poetry emerges from Lara Duarte’s essay since, more than a means of addressing wounds, poetry is conceived as a way of dressing them and of creating a cohesive nation able to face the aftermath of a deadly conflict. Furthermore, Pirjo Lyytikäinen discusses in her essay ‘How to Forge Victory out of Defeat: Uses of War in Finnish Nation Building’ the forging of the nationalist project of the Finnish nation on the grounds of an imagined community created by literary representations of historical wars ideologically deployed to heighten nationalist feelings. By focusing her attention on Johan Runeberg’s collection of epic war poems, the author demonstrates how history and fiction can be transformed into rhetorically persuasive foundations for nationalism, especially when this process depends on forging a victory out of a defeat. ‘The Crusaders: Representations of the American Soldier in the Second World War American Novel’ by Isabel Oliveira Martins brings the focus back to America. Through study of the representations of American soldiers in the Second World War American novel, the author examines the tensions and ambiguities between the novelists’ visible desire to denounce the evils of war and the invisible configuration of a positive image of the conflict that contributes to the dissemination of the American creed of war and consequently justifies not only America’s involvement in war scenarios, but also the American soldier’s regeneration whenever his behaviour is compared to that of his enemy. Martins’s conclusions as far as the representations of soldiers in Second World War novels are concerned somehow anticipate Stefano Rosso’s arguments related to the implications of the representation of violence in novels about the Vietnam War. In ‘Making Violence Visible in Vietnam War Narratives: The Case of a Rumor of War’ Stefano Rosso approaches the so-called ‘literature of witnesses’. As the title of his essay indicates, his corpus is that of Vietnam War fiction, and namely Philip Caputo’s and Tim O’ Brien’s works. In his text, Rosso considers and cross-references two dimensions of Vietnam War narratives: the epistemological and the ethical. The former is closely related to the writers’ commitment to depicting war events and violence in detail. This procedure corresponds to the need to teach about the war, to account for every experience lived ‘there’, i.e. in Vietnam, in the middle of the jungle. The latter dimension raises the issue of the accountability of truculent and ferocious acts, since the realism of depictions attains such a degree that the violence might be approached as a source of pleasure. Rosso seeks to demonstrate how both dimensions of the war narratives analysed risk losing out in importance to the construction of a heroic and, in many cases, misogynous image of soldiers who have shared unique, even if atrocious, experiences of war,

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and are represented as heroes similar to those found in Westerns, thus compromising the pretense realistic nature of the literature of witnesses. The last text in the third section is Gerald Bär’s ‘The Subversive and the Sublime: Aspects of the British, German and Portuguese Critical Reception of ‘Anti-War’ films in the Aftermath of May ’68’. Interested in analyzing the relationship between the subversive and the sublime in cinematic anti-war representations and films on the student revolts, Bär examines the critical reception of a wide corpus of films in countries that experienced different historical contexts at the end of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, such as Britain, the Federal Republic of Germany, the German Democratic Republic and Portugal. By confronting diverse cinematographic perspectives on violence and war, and the ethical and aesthetical dilemmas resulting from the visual representation of violence, Bär wonders to what extent the sublime might prove subversive even in recent times when the world was submitted to the live mediatic representation of 9 / 11. In a nutshell, the essays in Plots of War: Modern Narratives of Conflict demonstrate that the dynamics of change and transformation underlying the troubled project of modernity have been deeply shaped by war and violence corresponding to the extent that world peace has thus far proven an unattainable aim. This finding has several implications deserving closer reflection. On the one hand, it somehow attributes an epistemological meaning to war when it is widely accepted that war, due to the atrocity and suffering involved, has no meaning at all, especially when ethical concerns are taken into account. On the other hand, it is impossible to understand and learn from the project of modernity without looking deeper into the wars that informed it. In other words, the examination of representations of war and violence and of the changing nature of their mediated forms are epistemologically and aesthetically fundamental to understanding not only modernity itself, but also the patterns of writing and rewriting beyond it. What matters here are not only the epistemological, political and ideological dimensions of learning from and about the past, but also the aesthetic and ethical perspectives when envisaging the future and the role narrative constructions play in it. This is a future that might well be written differently if processes of cultural memory are informed by Susan Sontag’s belief that remembering is, above all, an ethical act⁶.

6 See Sontag (2003).

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Works Cited Allan, Stuart and Barbie Zelizer (eds.) (2004) Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime (London / New York: Routledge). Arendt, Hannah (1970) On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace & World). Assmann, Aleida (2006) “On the (In)Compatibility of Guilt and Suffering in German Memory”, German Life and Letters, vol.LIX, 2, pp. 187 – 200. Carpentier, Nico (ed.) (2007) Culture, Trauma and Conflict: Cultural Studies Perspectives on War (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing). Dayan, Daniel (dir.) (2009) O Terror Espectáculo: Terrorismo e Televisão (Lisbon: Edições 70). Gil, Isabel Capeloa (2011) Literacia Visual. Estudos sobre a Inquietude das Imagens (Lisbon: Edições 70). Grusin, Richard (2010) Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9 / 11 (London: Palgrave Macmillan). Heberle, Mark (2009) Thirty Years After: New Essays on Vietnam War, Literature, Film and Art (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing). Hirsch, Marianne [1997] (2002) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge / London: Harvard University Press). ––––– (2008). ‘The Generation of Postmemory’, Poetics Today 29.1, 103 – 128. ––––– and Leo Spitzer (2010) Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press). Lamberti, Elena and Vita Fortunati (2009) Memories and Representations of War. The Case of World War I and World War II (Amsterdam / New York: Rodopi). Paris, Michael (ed.) (2007) Repicturing the Second World War. Representations in Film and Television (Basingstoke: Palgrave / Macmillan). Saltzman, Lisa and Eric Rosenberg (eds.) (2006) Trauma and Visuality in Modernity (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press / University Press of New England). Silva, Helena, Adriana Alves de Paula Martins, Filomena Guarda and José Miguel Sardica (eds.) (2010) Conflict, Memory Transfers and the Reshaping of Europe (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing). Slocum, David (2006) Hollywood and War: The Film Reader (New York: Routledge). Sontag, Susan (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Torgovnick, Marianna (2005) The War Complex. World War II in Our Time (Chicago: Chicago University Press).

I. Post-memory Narratives

Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, Roberto Vecchi, António Sousa Ribeiro

The Children of the Colonial War: Post-Memory and Representations¹ 1. The Colonial War and Post-Memory Twentieth-century western history and its political and cultural imaginary are dominated by a legacy of conflicts: two World Wars, the Spanish Civil War, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the under-narrated colonial European wars in the South, be they in Asia or Africa, the more recent war in the former Yugoslavia, dictatorships, torture, concentration camps. We must never forget is the phrase currently associated with these events. However, the production of these never forget processes takes on different public and private expressions. What is visible in this never forget is linked to monuments, commemorations, laws, but also to representations  – to literature, film, historiography, pedagogic, political and media discourse, that is to public narratives which make up public memory; that which is invisible in these histories is linked to the stories of families drawn up from a standpoint of subjectivities and objects such as letters, photographs, souvenirs which together provide the material with which to construct the family memory of the event.² The production of the public memory of an event flows from the committed interaction between what we must remember and what we must forget. Out of this interaction there emerges the consensus which establishes what we must never forget, from which public memory is woven. The production of public oblivion, that is of what we must forget, flows from the interaction between trauma, memory and imagination. This being so, what is publicly declared as what we must forget becomes what can only be remembered in the private sphere. Thus, the testimonials of those who lived through the event stand out as the privileged

1 Research for this text was carried out at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra in the framework of a project financed by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (PTDC / ELT / 65592 / 2006). Apart from the authors, the research team includes Luísa Sales (Coimbra Military Hospital), Rui Mota Cardoso and Ivone Castro Vale (Medical School of the University of Porto), Aida Dias, Hélia Santos, Luciana Silva and Mónica Silva (CES). 2 There have been several studies on this question, particularly since the nineties. Besides the classical study by Maurice Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1994), we refer specifically to Stora 1992; Caruth 1996; Agamben 1998; Muxel 2002.

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Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, Roberto Vecchi, António Sousa Ribeiro

locus in which to apprehend the dynamism of the conflict between these memories, the seriousness and the gravity of the fracture generated and the dynamic relationship between the remembered event and the present. Between 1961 and 1974, Portugal conducted in its then African colonies  – Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau – a protracted Colonial War which was not publicly acknowledged. The memory of this war in contemporary Portuguese society is linked to three particularly vivid and closely connected historical moments: the end of the Salazarist dictatorship, the 25 April 1974, and decolonisation. The magnitude of these events in contemporary Portuguese history, on the one hand, and the scarcity of studies on Portuguese colonial history, on the other, allow for the Colonial War to be viewed as an external event and not as an occurrence which is deeply internal either to Portugal or to the subsequently independent African countries.³ The Colonial War thus becomes incomprehensible, public memory of it becomes inadvisable, it becomes invisible and therefore confined to groups who bear its memory: former combatants and their families. This explains why these groups feel they have been abandoned, their loneliness, the fact that they do not engage in public participation, their feeling of having been left on the periphery of history. But it also explains their need to produce testimony, as a part of the weaving of a memory of war which literature, film and historiography have been engaged in, while ultimately prolonging the idea of detachment from history, due to the contemplation of the war as a personal or generational episode and not as a stage in a long colonial history stretching back in time. Up to the present, these artistic manifestations have been almost exclusively a product-reaction on the part of this group, the memory bearers of the war, against the lapse in the collective memory. In the specifically Portuguese context of Colonial War memory, it is clear that the political and social values of private memory and of collective memory do not coincide given that the production of remembrance and the production of oblivion not only follow different paths but also have different aims. But if we presently witness this situation in the handing down of the testimony of memory from generation to generation, a very similar process took place at the time when the war was being waged. This divorce we now find between what is collective memory and what is private memory of the Colonial War thus prolongs a divorce which was already present during the war years between public dis-

3 There are striking similarities with the situation in French society regarding the Algerian War, as analysed by Benjamin Stora in a study that has been an important reference for us (Stora 1999). For a different, but in some sections equally interesting approach, see Blanchard et al. 2005.

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course on a war which was silenced and which was not officially happening and the private knowledge which the conscripted Portuguese men and their families had of it. Hence again the importance of the testimony, the element apparently capable of enforcing what Primo Levi called ‘the duty of memory’ (Levi 1997), insofar as it establishes a complicit compromise between those who recount  – thus carrying out their function as witnesses – and those who hear – who can no longer say they did not know. In this way, the pact of shared responsibility is generated, inherent to the functionality of literature-witness; also generated is the duty incumbent on the next generation to seek answers to their parents’ issues or the need to achieve a synthesis between the excess of individual memory against the lapse of the collective memory, as engaged in Sérgio Godinho’s well-known composition, ‘Fotos do Fogo’. In the lyrics, the voice that sings asks his child to listen to his war story told while viewing his photo album, as opposed to the public narrative broadcast on TV and which moves the singer to narrate: Chega-te a mim mais perto da lareira vou-te contar a história verdadeira A guerra deu na tv foi na retrospectiva corpo dormente em carne viva revi p’ra mim o cheio aceso dos sítios tão remotos e do corpo ileso vou-te mostrar as fotos olha o meu corpo ileso Olha esta foto, eu aqui era novo e inocente “às suas ordens, meu tenente!” E assim me vi no breu do mato altivo e folgazão ou para ser mais exacto saudoso de outro chão não se vê no retrato […]

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Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, Roberto Vecchi, António Sousa Ribeiro

Eu nesta, não fiquei bem estou a olhar para o lado tinham-me dito: eh soldado! É dia de incendiar aldeias baralha e volta a dar o que tiveres de ideias e tudo o que arder, queimar! no fogo assim te estreias […] Álbum das fotos fechado volto a ser quem não era […] já foi há muitos anos e ainda as mãos geladas [Come closer closer to the fire I’m going to tell you the true story The war was on TV it was in a retrospective a numb body in flayed flesh I saw again the blazing smell of such distant lands and of the unharmed body I’ll show you the snapshots look at my unharmed body Look at this snapshot, here I was young and innocent ‘Yes sir, Lieutenant!’ and then I was in the pitch-dark of the bush proud and full of pranks or to be more precise missing another ground it’s not in the picture […]

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In this one, I don’t look good I’m looking to the side they’d told me: ‘Hey soldier!’ Today we’re burning villages shuffle the cards and deal again whatever ideas you have and if it’ll go up in flames, burn it! That’s your debut in fire […] The photo album closed I’m back to being what I wasn’t […] it was a long time ago and still my hands are frozen]⁴

Or again with the call recorded by António Lobo Antunes’s poignant literary voice, in a chronicle published in the magazine Visão in 2002, and re-published in Terceiro Livro de Crónicas (2006), addressed to his daughter and, through her, to the children of the war, for these to give the narrative of the war whatever continuity they can: Isso regressa como um vómito e tenho de falar nisso. Vocês têm de ouvir, porque eu continuo a ouvir. […] Mesmo que eu escreva isto mal porque estou a escrever com o sangue dos meus mortos. Não posso esquecer. Não consigo esquecer. Eu, o 078902630RH+, não consigo esquecer. […] Eu estive lá. Eu vi. […] Se eu saltar com o rebenta-minas que fique, ao menos, o eco do meu grito. Completem esta crónica, vocês, os que cá ficam. 078902630RH+. Filha. (Antunes 2005 [2002]: 112, 114) [The war returns like vomit – I have to talk about this. And you have to listen, because I can still hear it. Even if I write this badly because I’m writing with the blood of my dead. I can’t forget. I’m not able to forget. I, no. 07890263 ORH+, cannot forget. […] I was there. I saw it. […] If I go up with the mine sweeping truck, at least let the echo of my cry remain. You, who stay behind, complete this chronicle. 07890263 ORH+. Daughter.]

The desire to understand the second generation’s possible narrative of the experience lived by their fathers in the Colonial War, as demonstrated in these examples, is the main aim of the research project entitled The Children of the Colonial War:

4 All translations from Portuguese into English are ours, except if otherwise indicated.

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Post-memory and Representations. After all, who is a child of the war? Someone for whom the war has already become a representation, for the child has no firsthand knowledge of the events, nor is he / she the author of the testimony. Rather the child is the symbolic inheritor of an open sore from which he / she draws up a narrative – a possible testimony, an adoptive testimony in the sense posited by some theoreticians – constructed from fragments of family narratives made up of discourse, snapshots, maps, letters, aerograms and other objects taken from the private domain and also from fragments drawn from public narratives. Thus, this project articulates a rich and complex conceptual constellation: memory and post-memory, testimonies, memory transfer, acknowledgement and representation only insofar as we will focus on those concepts which best communicate with a theoretical reflection related to the projection of trauma onto the cultural horizon. Within this setting, the concept of post-memory has increasingly gained centrality, given the way it has contributed to re-equating the wideranging debate on memory, testimonies and representation. And it can do so not only because it grounds itself in the terms of the debate, but also questions and destabilises them.

2. Post-Memory: How Much Further than Memory? What do we mean when we refer to post-memory? And another, more specific question, located in the Portuguese context with which we are engaging: which post-memory can such a disputed and controversial memory as that of the Colonial War generate, one as yet still unable to generate political memories that can be shared? Problematic in its very morphology, post-memory appears in a number of works on family memory such as that of Marianne Hirsch who, starting from the much cited Family Frames (1997), begins to develop a critical reflection which configures the semantics of post-memory from the starting point of recollections of the children of the Shoah. This is a memory marked by generational distance, that is, the memory of the second generation as the inheritor of witnesses who went through, saw and experienced events marked by unspeakability, by the limits of representing a traumatic experience, especially with the extreme reference to the Holocaust. Thus, and again according to Marianne Hirsch’s and other studies which followed after her ground-breaking theoretical gesture, post-memory becomes first and foremost a moment for reflection on the very memory of an event, as is the case of much of the critical reflection on the children of the dark days of Latin-

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American dictatorships.⁵ In fact, more recent revisions, by Hirsch herself (2006; 2008) and also by the Argentine scholar Beatriz Sarlo (2007), render the category of post-memory more intelligible, not just by re-inscribing it generationally but also by the credit conferred on the very intelligibility of its silence. As a powerful type of memory emerging more from silence than from words, more from fragments than from complete narratives, more from questions posed than from answers, post-memory is configured, in the words of Beatriz Sarlo, as a ‘dimension of inter-subjective remembering’ (idem 392), a type of ‘a posteriori adoptive testimony’ (or, to return to the designation proposed by Geoffrey Hartman [1991], a memory of ‘adoptive witnesses’), which initiates an ethical relationship with the traumatic experience of their parents and with the latter’s pain to which children feel they have become heirs, and it calls for our acknowledgement, firstly within the family, and then in the public sphere. Thus, post-memory might be set up not simply as a founding discourse on the identity of the second generation (the daughter of a former combatant, the son of a political prisoner, the child of one of the ‘disappeared’) but also – and by the opportunities for sharing which it offers – in carrying out a traumatic scene for whoever experienced it. What the debate on post-memory pre-supposes – whether when drawn up from the experience of the children of the Shoah or from its Latin-American forms – is a revision of the protocols for analysing the testimonies and for constructing memories and, above all, a redefinition of their fields and aporias. If the scene was dominated, at least in the post-war and post-Shoah period, by an obsession with a definition of the paradigm of the testimony, the present-day landscape presents other traces of problematisation. These are traces linked to private acknowledgement and the extending of it to the area of public acknowledgement, notably in the judicial sphere, and which constitute the object of studies combining, as is the case of this project, the area of psychiatry and cultural studies and addressing the possibility of the transgenerational transmission of vulnerability to trauma and the possibility of its public representation. In fact, it is the authorial gesture which generates the expansion into the public sphere of a type of pact of acknowledgement and compassion inscribed in the family sphere, in the sense attributed to it by Wieviorka (1999), leading to another type of testimony: an indirect, mediated testimony in which the experience now appears as a representation and which the authorial gesture renders publicly shareable. Thus, the dimension of post-memory would appear out of the unfolding of memory, within a series of problematisations  – and hindrances  – which continues to surround the circumstances of the testimony. It might be said that this

5 See e.g. Kaiser 2006.

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finds its place in the mythological paradigm of Philomela (to recall Geoffrey Hartman’s ‘Philomela Project’, that is, ‘the restoration of voice to inarticulate people’ [Hartman 1991: 169]), a paradigm which continues at the heart of the scene and of the performances which seek to fill in the inexorable lapse in the testimony. This trace becomes extremely evident in ‘post-memory’ literature, with images, words, and sensory remnants of the past coming to the surface.

3. Fragments of the ‘Witness to the Non-Experienced’⁶ But how is this problem of a theoretical nature brought to bear on cases of trauma and post-traumatic syndromes caused by the experience of the Colonial War? The Colonial War is in fact a war as yet awaiting a name – Colonial War, War in Africa, War in the Overseas Provinces – where the inability to name it corresponds on a symbolic plane to an inability to think of it as founding a memory which can be shared. But this is not all. It is the final event in a colonial wandering marked by specific facts and which has not been (not yet, or never) inscribed in Portuguese post-colonialism, despite the maiming, the scars and the real traumas – personal and collective – which are associated with it. In the hundreds of interviews we carried out with the children of former combatants, it became clear that the traumatic impact of the war was projected especially within a family, not so much a community, dimension. But what fuels this family post-memory? First and foremost, it is fuelled by images, for the post-memory of the Colonial War is above all grounded in the vast photo archive which it left in each Portuguese home and in the words written about it or which are uttered, at times by default, making of the war a matter which is not-spoken-of and is activated only by an outside stimulus, as in the first case we presented; at other times through excess, that is, as a very present topic in family life, contrasting with the outside and therefore with public memory, as in the following examples:

6 The concept of a ‘witness to the non-experienced’, which distinctly describes the act of postmemory, refers to the well-known reflection by Maurice Blanchot according to which writing means ‘to be in relation with something that cannot be remembered, to be a witness to the non-experienced, responding not only to the void in the subject but to the subject as a void’ (Blanchot 1990: 140). See also Di Castro 2008.

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I didn’t expect my father who didn’t have a fire-arm at all, who was for ever talking about something else, who didn’t speak about the war, who only spoke of mangoes and bananas and insects and storms, sometimes heard a noise [in the film Platoon]: ‘This is a something or other shot, this is a something else shot; and napalm, this is what I saw …’ […] And then we saw he really had war in him. And then I began to see ‘so, where’s the war?’ And suddenly it seemed the war was just in the soldiers. And for me, as I remembered it, it was nothing like that, the war was in my mother, it was in my mother’s [female] friend […] It was absolutely with us! For many years I thought it was odd not to speak about something that was discussed a lot by my family. The colonial war seems to have been experienced by half a dozen people, it’s not talked about.

Thus, the traumatic experiences of the war seem to have been encapsulated in family ‘vaults’, as can be gleaned quite clearly from pioneering films on the colonial war such as João Botelho’s 1985 film Um Adeus Português [A Portuguese Farewell]. In a disturbed memory context such as this, post-memory might thus simply be yet another occlusion, indeed itself facilitated by the fragmentary nature which fuels it. However, the reflection we have been undertaking on the post-memory of the Colonial War has shown that, in a context such as this – where the belief still prevails that the legitimacy of its representation belongs solely to the bearers of its direct experience –, the constellation testimony-post-memory-representation can operate as a pivotal tool with which to re-think what the Portuguese Colonial War was and what effects – visible or invisible – it determined in the generations that followed, although there is still no consensual narrative as to what this war really was. That period of a continued state of emergency is, where the victims are concerned, further lacking in compassion as an inter-generational pact within the family sphere, which prevents its contractualisation in the public sphere as a result. What is shown by the post-memory of the Colonial War we have been studying – be it in gathering second-generation testimonies, or in the critical appreciation of artistic and cultural production of post-memory (a phenomenon not simply under way but expanding visibly)  – consists also of the fact that the Colonial War in Africa generates, from the children’s viewpoint, a mechanism of acknowledgement, first in the family sphere and then in the public sphere, in the case of authorial gestures. Through familial mythologies which it draws upon and projects onto the outside, becoming communication, the artistic production of children of the war makes concrete the performative dimension of the testimony as a pact shared between the story-teller and the listener and contractualises the compassion inherent to the testimony and the post-memory. Indeed, as analysed by Martha Nussbaum, confession, although not representing the totality of public

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rationality (in political liberalism based on the ‘consensus through intersection’ [Nussbaum 2004: 479]) plays a significant role in shaping collective understanding with regard to socially relevant traumas (ibid. 539) that reconfigure the public sphere. In its outermost manifestations, post-memory generates a new memory which re-signifies the losses and the voids of the past – if only by asking what are the reasons – to create a different possibility in the ethics of representation of the war. What we have in mind are poems such as, for example, the work of Norberto do Vale Cardoso, the son of a former combatant who brought the war home, or that of António Teixeira Mota, who grew up not knowing his father who had died in the Colonial War; films such as A Costa dos Murmúrios by Margarida Cardoso who constructs a representation – her film – on another representation, Lídia Jorge’s A Costa dos Murmúrios, an author from the generation which lived through the war, or Entre os Dedos (2008) by Tiago Guedes, again the son of a former combatant; novels such as As Sete Estradinhas de Catete (2007) by Paulo Bandeira Faria, which re-inscribes in the Portuguese literary imaginary the Colonial War as a war seen through a child’s eyes (Guilherme, the son of an officer in the Portuguese Airforce on a military mission in Henrique Carvalho, Angola); or Daqui a Nada (1992) by Rodrigo Guedes de Carvalho, who explores the dimension of a father’s return from war, but that of an as yet absent father, and the familial consequences deriving from this situation; plays such as Ignara#Guerra Colonial: Fazer o Trabalho de Casa (2008) staged by Teatro Mosca, whose representation is realised by children of the war and whose text is constructed from history textbook materials, documents, essays, literary texts, news items, interviews, photographic collections, making up a kind of anthology of what the authors regard as ‘the basic and inescapable themes of the Colonial War, seen from a post-memory viewpoint, that is, what for us at this time should be said when we speak of the Colonial War’ (as advertised on the poster). Novels, poems, films and, above all, songs founding another memory of war, which, as sung by Xutos & Pontapés, a 1980s rock band who re-inscribed uncomfortable memories of what went on in Africa, proffer the gesture of acknowledgement and compassion: ‘Aguenta essa saudade por alguém / Que ficou para trás” [‘Hold on to that saudade for someone / Who got left behind’] (‘Inferno, The Film – Part 2’, Xutos & Pontapés, 2001. Soundtrack to Joaquim Leitão’s eponymous film), or as Os Delfins put it in a more complex way in their 1988 ‘Aquele Inverno’, written by Fernando Santos, also the son of a former combatant. From the gesture of an author of post-memory configured from fragments of private narratives, which led to the writing of the lyrics of ‘Aquele Inverno’, and of public narratives such as the fragments of João Botelho’s Um Adeus Português, the band filmed a video clip which we regard as an act of public acknowledge-

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ment of the memory of those who lived through this war, creating the climate of compassion required to make a ‘post-testimony’ narrative possible. From a different stance, Pedro Branco, composer, musician and the son of José Mário Branco, has re-written his father’s famous lyrics, ‘A Ronda do Soldadinho’. The lyrics written by his father, that is, by someone who had politically refused to take part in the Colonial War by deserting, was then re-written and sung by his son with deep gratitude for his father’s political gesture on two levels: one pertaining to a public dimension – expressed by his re-using the song – another to an individual dimension – since, because of his father’s stance, he was born in France. Given the importance of the message conveyed by the song at the time and the entire apparatus of censorship which enveloped it, the song as re-presented now by the son’s voice compels us at times, depending on the listener’s generation, to remember what happened, and at other times to learn of the events. With the children, with their parents, with the scattered fragments of that public narrative made up of the shards of what was one of the tragedies of Portugal’s recent history, the construction of a post-memory of the Colonial War is under way, re-signifying the memories which are possible and thus far published. Political, eminently political, ‘The Children of the Colonial War: Post-memory and Representation’ project seeks to construct a cultural, and non-cultural, memory of the Colonial War, so that it may be shared by all and not solely by the generation who was historically unlucky enough to live through and inherit it and so that the memory of the war may be inscribed in Portuguese post-colonialism. Political, eminently political, this project seeks to ensure that our democracy is a democracy endowed with a memory. And, for this reason, with the children’s post-memory, in spite of everything.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio (1998) Quel che resta di Auschwitz. L’archivio e il testimone (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri). Antunes, António Lobo (1997) O Esplendor de Portugal (Lisbon: Dom Quixote). Antunes, António Lobo (2006) ‘07890263 ORH+’, Terceiro Livro de Crónicas (Lisbon: Dom Quixote), 111 – 114. Blanchard, Pascal, Bancel, Nicolas and Lemaire, Sandrine (eds.) (2005) La Fracture coloniale. La société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial (Paris: La Découverte). Blanchot, Maurice (1990) La scrittura del disastro, trans. Franco Facchini and Giorgio Marcon (Milan: SE). Cardoso, Norberto Vale (2006) Fogo Fátuo: Metástases de Infância (Oporto: Ecopy). Caruth, Cathy (1996) Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore / London: Johns Hopkins University Press).

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Carvalho, Rodrigo Guedes de (1992) Daqui a Nada (Lisbon: Dom Quixote). Di Castro, Raffaella (2008) Testimoni del non-provato. Ricordare, pensare, immaginare la Shoah nella terza generazione (Rome: Carocci). Faria, Paulo Bandeira (2007) As Sete Estradinhas de Catete (Lisbon: Quidnovi). Halbwachs, Maurice [11925] (1994) Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Albin Michel). Hartman, Geoffrey H. (1991) Minor Prophecies. The Literary Essay in the Culture Wars (Cambridge / London: Harvard University Press). Hirsch, Marianne [1997] (2002) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge / London: Harvard University Press). ––––– (2006) ‘Immagini che sopravvivono: le fotografie dell’Olocausto e la post-memoria’, in Storia della Shoah. La crisi dell’Europa, lo sterminio degli ebrei e la memoria del XX secolo, ed. Marina Cattaruzza et al. (Turin: UTET), vol. III, 384 – 421. ––––– (2008) ‘The Generation of Postmemory’, Poetics Today 29.1, 103 – 128. Jorge, Lídia (1988) A Costa dos Murmúrios (Lisbon: Dom Quixote). Kaiser, Susana (2006) Postmemories of Terror. A New Generation Copes with the Legacy of the ‘Dirty War’ (London: Palgrave Macmillan). Levi, Primo (1997) O Dever da Memória, trans. Esther Mucznik (Lisbon: Civilização / Contexto). Mota, António Teixeira (2005) Luta Incessante (Espinho: Elefante Editores). Muxel, Anne (2002) Individu et mémoire familiale (Paris, Nathan). Nussbaum, Martha (2004) L’intelligenza delle emozioni, trans. Scognamiglio R. (Bologna: Il Mulino). Sarlo, Beatriz (2007) Tempo Passado. Cultura da Memória e Guinada Subjetiva, trans. Rosa Freire d’Aguiar (São Paulo / Belo Horizonte: Companhia das Letras e Editora da UFMG). Stora, Benjamin (1992) La gangrène et l’oubli: la mémoire de la Guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte). ––––– (1999) Le Transfert d’une mémoire. De l’ ‘Algérie Française’ au racisme anti-arabe (Paris: La Découverte). Wieviorka, Annette (1999) L’era del testimone, trans. Sossi F. (Milan: Raffaello Cortina).

Other References Cinema João Botelho (1985) Um Adeus Português. Madragoa Filmes. Cardoso, Margarida (2004). A Costa dos Murmúrios. Lisboa Filme. Joaquim Leitão (1999) O Inferno. Produtora MGN. Joaquim Leitão (2006) 20,13 – O Purgatório. Produtora MGN. Tiago Guedes and Frederico Serra (2008) Entre os dedos. CLAP Filmes.

Theatre Teatro Mosca (2008) Ignara#Guerra Colonial: Fazer o Trabalho de Casa. Teatro Mosca (2009) Ignara#Guerra Colonial: O Lado Africano.

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Teatro Mosca (2009) Ignara#Guerra Colonial: Conclusão. Teatro Mosca (2009) Dor Fantasma.

Music Branco, José Mário (1969) ‘Ronda do Soldadinho’, Single. Delfins (1988) ‘Aquele Inverno’, in O Caminho da Felicidade. Sérgio Godinho (1993) ‘Fotos do fogo’, in Tinta Permanente. Xutos e Pontapés (2009) ‘Quem é quem’, in Xutos e Pontapés (lyrics: Tim; music: Xutos).

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The (In)Visibility of Colonial Wars in Mia Couto and J. M. Coetzee Colonialism is grounded in a play of appearances, where colonizers dictate the way to interpret phenomena and the very mode of their unveiling so as to justify their position. Thus, blatant socio-economic imbalances are recoded as the white man’s burden to civilize others. Outward impressions such as skin colour, dress codes or a particular accent determine an individual’s place in the strictly hierarchic colonial edifice, where stereotypes and racism are naturalized and described as a response to the attributes of the colonized. J. M. Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Mia Couto’s novella Vinte e Zinco (1999) foreground the central role of appearances in the ideological construction of colonial empires. Both texts focus on pivotal moments in the colonial societies they depict, since the narration takes place at a time of war and social conflict. Coetzee portrays an unidentified empire that has recently seen an increase in attacks by so-called barbarians, whose threat, real or imaginary, leads the state into the cruellest atrocities. Mia Couto’s narrative, as with several other texts by the author,¹ also concentrates on a period of transition in Mozambique’s recent past. The book describes events taking place in the small village of Moebase between 19th and 30th April, 1974, a time when the colonial system is collapsing. The two tales thus dwell on periods of rapid change, when the elusive laws that determine what is apparent and inapparent in the colonial context are in the process of being rewritten. This shift allows for a re-evaluation of what the colonizers had hitherto defined as obvious but also foreshadows the political upheavals of the post-colonial period, when many of the colonial structures of power are kept in place. In this essay, I use Coetzee’s and Couto’s texts as guiding threads for reflecting on the definition of the visible and the invisible under colonialism. My analysis will be guided by political philosopher Jacques Rancière’s notion of the distribution of the sensible, according to which any society is based upon an unwritten understanding of what can be seen or perceived and what remains obscure. What defines visibility under colonialism? What changes when the thin line separating the visible and the invisible is disturbed in times of upheaval? And, finally, is there an inherent value in seeing? I will argue that in these texts we can find an

1 Terra Sonâmbula (Sleepwalking Land, 1992) also focuses on a transitional period in Mozambique, namely the threshold between war and peace towards the end of the country’s bloody civil war.

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aesthesis of blindness that runs counter to the colonizer emphasis on visibility. It is in and through darkness that the most decisive events in the narrative take place and that, in the end, the colonial distribution of the sensible is undone. The contrast between the visible and the invisible is one of the thematic clusters that structure the unfolding of Waiting for the Barbarians and Vinte e Zinco. This trope is played out in various interrelated forms that include the opposition between blindness and sight, metaphorical vision or foresight juxtaposed to a desire to cling to a version of the past constructed by the colonizers or the use of colours in the racist distinction between white administrators and black barbarians. Coetzee’s novel famously opens with a reference to vision: I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire. Is he blind? I could understand it if he wanted to hide blind eyes. But he is not blind. The disks are dark, they look opaque from the outside, but he can see through them. He tells me they are a new invention. ‘They protect against the glare of the sun,’ he says. ‘You would find them useful out here in the desert. They save one from squinting all the time. One has fewer headaches. Look. […] At home everyone wears them.’ (1999: 1)

This passage prefigures many of the events that will unfold in the text. The narrator, a low-ranking imperial administrator who lives in the frontier and has adopted some of the so-called ‘native ways’, is surprised by the sunglasses that Colonel Joll is wearing. Implicit in this dialogue is a hierarchy where the colonel occupies a higher position than the narrator in a continuum that extends from the central administration in the colonizing country, to the barbarians in the outposts of the empire. ‘Home’, or the metropolis, is the source from which the technology to control the barbarians emanates. The sunglasses stand for this technology, in that ‘they are useful in the desert’. However, the reader progressively realizes that the glasses create their own reality, which is not shared either by the narrator or by the native population. Seen through the lens of Colonel Joll’s sunglasses, the frontier is populated by dangerous barbarians, a peril that leads the empire to preemptively strike against the locals, out of a conviction that they are covering up for the rebels. The glasses, designed to enhance vision and protect against the sun, are not an indication of physical blindness but generate a de facto inability to see. Even though Coetzee abstains from providing a transcendental guarantor such as an omniscient narratorial voice, which would unambiguously indicate whether a barbarian attack was, in fact, imminent, the novel seems to suggest that the supposed threat was nothing more than an externalization of the empire’s own fear that its days might be numbered. The empire’s desire to see better than the locals, symbolized by the colonel’s use of sunglasses, turns into a myopia that, the novel seems to suggest, will one day lead to the demise of colonialism.

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In Coetzee’s novel, the barbarians are an empty signifier, a dark spot or a black hole on which the empire projects its sombre fantasies. For this reason, the text does not dwell on their physical appearance, and merely describes them succinctly as having black hair and eyes and a dark complexion, which distinguishes them from the colonizers. Whereas Coetzee creates a prototypical colonial situation, that could have taken place in any of the multiple concrete instantiations of colonialism, Mia Couto’s Vinte e Zinco is grounded in the particular situation of colonial Mozambique. In Couto’s text, once again, events are determined by the interplay of visibility and invisibility, which is determined by the colour of the subjects’ skin. Mozambican society was strictly divided along racial lines, a state of affairs portrayed at length in Vinte e Zinco.² As one of the main characters, Andaré Tchuvisco, succinctly puts it: ‘para os brancos, o preto é santo ou demónio, transitando da inocência para a malvadez sem nunca passar pelo humano’ (1999: 126) [‘for whites, the black man is either a saint or a demon; he transitions from innocence to evil without ever being human’]. In the imaginary of whites, native Africans are viewed as either super- or sub-human, depending upon the circumstances in which they encounter the colonizer. Europeans created various gradations within the black population, as described in the narrative by Dona Graça: ‘O calçado é um passaporte para ser reconhecido pelos brancos, entrar na categoria dos assimilados. / -Existe dois tipos de pretos: os calçados e os pretos’ (47) [‘Shoes are a passport for being recognized by the whites, for becoming assimilated. / -There are two kinds of blacks: the ones who wear shoes and the blacks’]. In order to be visible, i.e., to be ‘recognized’ in the colonial world, the black population has to bear markers of its assimilation into European culture, such as wearing shoes. Conversely, both in Mia Couto’s novella and in Waiting for the Barbarians, those who remain invisible can undergo every humiliation, while remaining covered by a veil of silence. The torture of a barbarian or of a black person, for instance, remains invisible, while a minor offense perpetrated against a colonizer is given great visibility.

2 This situation is described by Mia Couto in his interview with Patrick Chabal: ‘Os brancos da Beira eram profundamente racistas. […] na Beira era quase apartheid em certas coisas. Não podiam entrar negros nos autocarros, só no banco de trás … Enfim, era muito agressivo. No Carnaval, os filhos dos brancos vinham com paus e correntes bater nos negros …’ (1994: 276) [‘The whites in Beira were profoundly racist. […] in Beira there was almost apartheid on certain issues. Blacks could not enter buses; they were allowed only in the back seat … To sum up, it was very aggressive. During Carnival, the sons of the whites would come with sticks and belts to hit the blacks’].

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Beyond the preferential treatment of black Africans who made an effort to adopt European culture, Mozambican society portrayed by Mia Couto also distinguished between these and individuals of mixed heritage. The latter, epitomized in the text by Marcelino, who is referred to as ‘sujeito pardo’ (103) [‘grey person’], were considered to be culturally and ideologically closer to the Europeans, and therefore more visible within the colonial edifice, which is why their rebellion against Portuguese rule was regarded as an act of high treason: ‘Se pedia a um mulato maiores fidelidades ao regime dos brancos’ (103) [‘One demanded a mulatto be more faithful to the regime of the whites’]. According to the colonizers depicted in the novella –Joaquim de Castro and his son Lourenço – patterns of visibility and invisibility are determined by innate biological and metaphysical distinctions. Drawing on Albert Memmi’s terminology, these colonizers are ‘colonialists’, given that they consider colonization to be natural (Memmi 45; 71). Marcelino’s betrayal of the Portuguese is therefore all the more abhorrent to the colonialists, since they interpret it as a crime contra-natura, a deviation from the dissident’s ontological self that goes against the dictates of colonial reason. The naturalization of racism implies that the patterns of visibility in a colonial society are viewed as immutable and that the colonial empire is therefore eternal. The texts by Coetzee and Mia Couto reject the idea of imperial timelessness and suggests that there is but a porous, permeable, and constantly changing divide between the visible and the invisible, or rather, that seeing and blindness, appearance and the inapparent are fluid concepts and the distinction between truth and falsity is sometimes not a matter of fact but a question of perspective. The principles that allow colonialists to distinguish between colonizers and barbarians, whites and Africans, depend upon a particular apportioning of communal space, which determines what is apparent and what should remain unseen. Jacques Rancière has theorized such patterns of allocating visibility as the ‘distribution of the sensible,’ i.e. structures that determine the sense-perception within a community and therefore establish what can be apprehended or experienced in a system (2004: 13). The distribution of the sensible is set forth by those who occupy positions of power within society and who, therefore, decide upon what can and cannot be seen. Rancière highlights the parallel between aesthetics and politics, in that the two shape individual perceptions of social space (2004: 16 – 7).³ Beheld through this lens, colonialism is revealed as a paradoxical

3 Rancière goes back to the original meaning of ‘aesthetics’ in Ancient Greek, where the word referred to what can be apprehended by the senses. ‘Aesthetics’ can then be understood, in the Kantian sense, as the conditions of possibility that determine what presents itself to sense experience. ‘Aesthetics’ determines what can be apprehended or experienced in a given society

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distribution of the sensible in that it is founded upon the sensible itself, namely on the appearance of the colonized and on the colour of their skin. In other words, following a colonialist and racist reasoning, what is visible depends upon the visibility of appearances. According to Rancière, a particular distribution of the sensible can be modified through a process of re-signification that would break away from previous forms of intelligibility and would allow for what is invisible to be seen. Rancière once again teases out the parallels between arts and politics as he states that formal revolutions in arts share with political projects of emancipation the potential to trigger a redistribution of the sensible by unleashing what he defines as ‘heterologies’: ‘The notion of “heterology” refers to the way in which the meaningful fabric of the sensible is disturbed […]’ (2004: 63). Heterologies are elements within a given social arrangement that lead to a questioning of the structures conditioning the perception of shared experience and, therefore, to a remapping of the social landscape. Both Waiting for the Barbarians and Vinte e Zinco depict moments when the colonial distribution of the sensible is radically altered. In these texts, this shift in perspective is catalysed by two blind characters. The barbarian woman in Coetzee’s novel and the Andaré Tchuvisco character in Mia Couto’s text function as heterologies in that their blindness, which was a result of colonial violence, will lead others to reevaluate the empire and to contemplate socio-political scenarios that were deemed impossible in the straight-jacketed worldview of colonialism. Waiting for the Barbarians revolves around the transformation of the narrator from a faithful magistrate into someone who is critical of the empire he used to serve. This shift is triggered by his contact with a barbarian woman who had been tortured and blinded by members of the colonial Third Bureau under the charge of sedition. Even though there is a clear power asymmetry between the local male governor of an imperial outpost and a destitute and maimed barbarian woman, she exerts a strange fascination over him. It seems that her mutilated body, and her blindness in particular, contain the key that will allow the narrator to understand both the barbarians’ stoicism in the face of suffering and the unnecessary violence of the empire: ‘It has been growing more and more clear to me that until the marks on this girl’s body are deciphered and understood I cannot let go of her’ (1999: 31). He tries to interpret the marks of torture etched onto the girl’s body in order to forge a coherent narrative that would explain the laws and actions of the empire. It is only as he is himself tortured later in the novel that the narrator

and is thus closely linked to politics, given that the political is precisely the solidifying of a certain regime of the sensible.

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realizes how empty the imperial trappings of law and order in fact are. The fight against the barbarians, the pain and torture inflicted on the colonized and the permanent state of alert of the colonizers are only ways for the empire to forge a meaning for its pointless existence. What the barbarian woman begins to teach the narrator, through her silences and her blind eyes, is that the colonizer linear narrative of civilization and conquest does not make sense. Her blindness, which stands for her opaqueness vis-à-vis the conquering gaze of the colonizers, shows him that, with all their technological advances, the imperial powers have never really understood the barbarians. This is the moment when the narrator begins to pity not the oppressed barbarians but the misguided colonizers, who made the mistake of believing that they could use violence to fully control a land that was not theirs: ‘how natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack your way into the secret body of the other’ (1999: 42). The obdurate blindness of the barbarian woman, which is part of her mystery, leads to a reconfiguration of what the magistrate could perceive, i.e., to a redistribution of the sensible from his perspective. If the blinded barbarian woman in Coetzee’s text unlocks the secret of colonialism’s ultimate meaninglessness, this remains a pre-political, individual discovery. In fact, according to Rancière, politics emerges only when there is a redistribution of the sensible at the level of a given community. As he states: ‘Politics occurs through specific subjects or mechanisms of subjectification […] whose identification is thus part of a reconfiguration of the field of experience’ (2004: 35). In order for a truly political event to take place, a new social group needs to emerge within a community’s field of perception. In Waiting for the Barbarians, the blinded woman becomes a subject of experience only in the eyes of the narrator, while remaining just another barbarian, bearer of a number of stereotypes, for the rest of the settlement. In Mia Couto’s Vinte e Zinco, in contrast, the reader witnesses the whole colonized population appearing to be a new political voice after the Carnation Revolution in Portugal. This change in perception is initiated by the visions of the blind man Andaré Tchuvisco. Andaré inherits the long literary tradition of the blind seer, the most representative emblem of which is the figure of the Ancient Greek soothsayer Tiresias, whose deprivation of physical sight lent him the ability to metaphorically behold what others ignore: ‘O cego Andaré Tchuvisco: o que ele via eram futuros’ (33) [‘What the blind man Andaré Tchuvisco saw was the future’], and further on, ‘A cegueira lhe deu nova luz dentro dos sonhos’ (133) [‘Blindness gave him a new light in his dreams’]. Blindness is presented as a precondition for Tchuvisco’s insight into the future and the absence of light illuminates his dreams. On 24th April, 1974, Tchuvisco predicts the impending political change in Lisbon and its consequences in Mozambique, which he symbolically describes in terms

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of a flood that will come from the river and inundate the village and the fields with water and mud: ‘Vejo os campos serem arrastados. E vejo as águas, escuras, lamaçosas. As águas têm agora mais terra que a estrada’ (84). [‘I see the fields devastated. And I see dark and muddy waters. The waters now have more soil than the road’]. The flood predicted by Tchuvisco is a sign of the alteration both in the colonial fabric of the country and the irruption of Africans as a new political force in the region. The visions of the blind man thus pave the way for a redistribution of the sensible and the emergence of the colonized as political subjects. Phillip Rothwell interprets the flood narrated by Tchuvisco as a cleansing of Mozambique from the oppressive heritage of colonization and emphasizes the link between water and birth, which would point toward the emergence of the new nation (2004: 92). However, the flood envisioned by the blind man is not made up of pristine water but is tainted with mud and wreaks havoc in Moebase. Given that Vinte e Zinco is Mia Couto’s retrospective depiction of the events surrounding the 25th of April Revolution – the novella was published as part of commemorations of its 25th anniversary, organized by Couto’s Portuguese publisher Caminho –, one might also read this ominous flood as a prefiguring of the violent civil war that engulfed Mozambique in the years following the country’s independence. It is therefore understandable that, when he has his disturbing vision, Tchuvisco cries muddy tears, tainted with soil. In his reevaluation of the moment of liberation, with the sobering hindsight afforded by 25 years of immersion in the new country’s struggles, Couto’s portrayal of the past seems to be bitter-sweet: the novella acknowledges the extraordinary possibilities opened up by independence, which reconfigured the political arena of the country, but already proleptically bemoans the fact that many of these will be forestalled by the leaders of the new country, who will emulate the mechanisms of oppression set in place during colonialism. As the narrator of the novella states about Tchuvisco: ‘Seu medo era esse: que esses que sonhavam ser brancos segurassem os destinos do país’ (133) [‘That was his fear: that those who dreamt of being white would hold the destinies of the country’]. Coetzee’s dysphoric tale of imperial violence in Waiting for the Barbarians and Mia Couto’s depiction of the brutalities of Portuguese colonialism in Vinte e Zinco hinge upon the distinction between the visible and the invisible. In both narratives, it is a blind character who triggers a redefinition of the phenomenal, thus bringing into view what had previously been hidden. As Rancière points out, societies are grounded in a distribution of the sensible that determines what can and cannot be seen. In the two texts, blindness, an attribute of two colonized subjects, works as a heterology that runs counter to the logic of colonialism by disturbing colonial patterns of visibility. Because of a blind woman, Coetzee’s narrator begins to question the distinction between civilized and barbarian,

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while the blind man Andaré Tchuvisco is the first to realize that the line dividing blacks and whites is about to crumble in Mozambique. What the texts imply with their focus on blind native characters is that a valorization of seeing and light is in itself a remnant of a colonial perception of the colour schema, where blindness, darkness and blackness are attributes of a colonized barbarian subject. Coetzee and Couto thus propound a reevaluation of the very notion of seeing. Often, they seem to tell us, true politics is not the visible appearance of a social group but a subterraneous move, an event such as the magistrate’s change of heart or Tchuvisco’s visions, whose consequences may only become apparent a long time after the fact.

Works Cited Coetzee, J. M. (1999) Waiting for the Barbarians (London: Penguin). Chabal, Patrick (1994) Vozes Moçambicanas. Literatura e Nacionalidade (Lisbon: Vega). Couto, Mia (1992) Terra Sonâmbula (Lisbon: Caminho). Couto, Mia (1999) Vinte e Zinco (Lisbon: Caminho). Memmi, Albert (1967) The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press). Rothwell, Phillip (2004) A Postmodern Nationalist: Truth, Orality, and Gender in the Work of Mia Couto (Lewisburg, Pa: Bucknell). Rancière, Jacques (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics (London and New York: Continuum Press).

Paolo Jedlowski

Public Memories in Italy: Contemporary Narratives about the Italian Colonial Past 1. This essay will focus on the representations of colonial wars currently circulating in the Italian public sphere. Italy was present in Africa from the 1880s up to 1943. During the years of its maximum colonial expansion, at the height of the Fascist period, Italy’s overseas colonies included Somalia, Eritrea, Libya and Ethiopia. After World War II, however, the Italian colonial past was mostly removed from public memory, that is, from the repertoire of representations of the past which take shape and circulate within the public sphere¹. One of the most famous examples of the attention given to this past is the novel by Ennio Flaiano, The Short Cut (1994), first published in 1947. The novel is based on the author’s experience during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 – 1936. In the novel, an Italian officer comes upon a young local woman bathing in a stream, whom he rapes and accidentally kills. Then, he tries to cover his tracks. Indeed, nobody is pursuing him, except his own conscience, even if in a gloomy and indirect way. Flaiano’s book has been almost the only Italian novel about Italy’s colonial past for more than fifty years. Even the cinema has never extensively dealt with this theme. Only two movies can be mentioned: one by Giuliano Montaldo, released in 1989, based on the same novel by Flaiano, and The Roses of the Desert directed by the then ninety-one-year-old Mario Monicelli, in 2006. Of course, Pontecorvo filmed The Battle of Algiers in 1966 but this film tells of the colonialism of other powers. On the other hand, foreign films dealing with Italian colonialism were hidden; The Lion of the Desert, a large-budget, international film of 1979, starring world-famous actors, such as Anthony Quinn and Rod Steiger, told of the fortunes of the Libyan Resistance movement and of its old leader, Omar al-Mukhtar,

1 This essay is, in fact, a part of a larger project on public memory and the media. It is grounded in the sociological tradition of studies on collective memories (see Jedlowski 2001). The project’s key concepts are in Jedlowski 2007. I wish to thank Livia Apa, Raya Cohen and Alessandro Triulzi for many discussions on the topic.

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executed by hanging by the Italians during the brutal repression ordered by Marshall Graziani: the film was screened throughout the world but was not distributed in Italy. Indeed, following its success at the last Venice Film Festival, Teza, by the Ethiopian director Hailé Gerima, is currently being screened in Italy. The film is a complex retrospective of the history of contemporary Ethiopia where references to the Italian occupation are present: however, reviews on the film in Italy almost entirely omit the issue. The colonial past has long gone unmentioned in public addresses given in Republican Italy. Among the reasons for this lack of mention was not so much the relatively limited size of Italian overseas possessions – at least, as compared to the colonies of other European powers –, but the Italian non-participation in the debates on decolonisation (Italy lost its colonies with World War II), and the association of colonialism with fascism. Nevertheless, historians approaching the matter argue that military and civil officers, who prevented access to documents, played a significant role and thereby acted as real ‘agents of oblivion’ (Del Boca 1992; Labanca 2002). I do not mean that colonial memory was completely absent. Some memoirs have been produced; some felt regret for the lost colonies; left-wing parties sometimes brought the matter up on the occasion of several international events. Even if the debate was poor, some results were achieved thanks to the pressure exerted by some parties: in 1997, the then President of the Italian Republic, Scalfaro, asked forgiveness to Ethiopia for the suffering inflicted by the Italian occupation and committed the Italian government to returning the Obelisk of Axum (the return, extravagantly defined as ‘a gift’, was actually effected in 2005). More recently, both the Prodi and Berlusconi administrations recognised the right to certain forms of compensation for Gaddafi’s Libya over the Italian occupation. However, most people remained distant from all these events with the public sphere only incidentally concerned with the issue (Ponzanesi 2004; Iyob, Triulzi 2007). The situation has recently changed. Perhaps the presence of a vast number of immigrants in Italy – a large percentage of whom come from former colonies and sometimes even from former Italian colonies – prompted the public sphere to acknowledge this past. The colonial past theme has suddenly arisen in the fiction, rather than from public debates, that are often focussed on other shortterm political concerns. On the one hand, a number of novels written by sons of former Italian colonists and, above all, by migrants coming from former Italian colonies – usually children of mixed marriages – have been published over the last few years. On the other hand, several famous authors have set new stories in places and times of colonialism. The removed past seems to return. Nevertheless, there are different ways of representing it. I shall now mention some examples.

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2. The first is L’ottava vibrazione, a novel by Carlo Lucarelli, published in 2008. The story is set during the days preceding the Battle of Adwa in 1896: advancing from Eritrea, Italian forces tried to invade Ethiopia, but suffered a heavy defeat. The Battle of Adwa was the greatest debacle ever suffered by a European army in the whole history of colonialism; for Africans it is a symbol (as testified by the 1998 film Adwa: an African Victory by Hailé Gerima, which Lucarelli seems to ignore); for Italians it was a long nightmare. Lucarelli is a crime-writer, also very popular in Italy for his TV programmes. He defines himself as a ‘teller of the dark side’ of human nature: the novel revolves around an Italian officer, a child murderer, who gets sexually excited at the sight of blood. It is a recurring theme in the novels of Lucarelli, a writer capable of depicting the perverse contortions of the human psyche like few others. In the novel, the colony is a place where some Italians may satisfy certain desires that they would not otherwise be allowed to fulfil in their homeland. Above all, sexual desires, as native women were forced into prostitution or concubinage. But other desires also emerge: an entrepreneur is able to undertake especially ambitious projects, tradesmen may freely deal in the market, the clerks steal, some officers try to grasp career advancement opportunities; a woman kills her husband under circumstances of impunity that are unlikely to occur in her homeland. As to the natives, they do not speak so much. Of course, the novel is very far from the typical fiction of the Fascist regime, where the ‘colonised’ are only silent walk-ons. Here, some local characters play sizeable roles. Moreover, the reader learns the meaning of some words from local languages. This itself is noteworthy: Italians usually have no idea of what languages are spoken in Africa. Nonetheless, the novel is also far from the so-called ‘postcolonial’ literature, which was able to decentralise speech and hybridise the languages, thereby questioning any hierarchy. The colonisers talk about their venture. A socialist-sympathising soldier recites the verses of a poem: ‘You damn idiots! Don’t you really realize that Abyssinians are the patriots?’. A sergeant abruptly replies: we are the patriots. On the part of entrepreneurs, there are several grounds for the venture. As for the officers, they ‘obey’. The most convinced character is the wife of a colonel: obviously, the ‘niggers’ are an inferior race and ‘we are here to bring civilisation’. These conversations leave no doubts that aggression was perpetrated. Yet, the aspect emphasised in the novel is that Italian colonialism was a ‘ragged’ colonialism: it was inefficient, disorganised and corrupt. The corruption and inefficiency of military and civil colonial administrations in Eritrea are broadly

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documented. What cannot really be inferred from the novel is the fact that colonialism – whether well organised or not – is abominable. Moreover, the comment on the back cover of the book is rather ambiguous when it states: ‘Where a dark page of our history becomes a legend’. The word ‘legend’ suggests something distant and faded, yet heroic, without a pejorative meaning and certainly without encompassing or stimulating any critical reflection. Flaiano’s book had a feature: it made the reader feel guilty. It was not exactly clear about what. It did not explicitly criticise colonialism, but it generated some discomfort. The same cannot be said of Lucarelli’s book. Some discomfort is generated, indeed, but it is associated with certain perversions  – the officer who kills the children – that have nothing to do with colonialism. Colonialism is exclusively the background of the story. The stereotype of ‘Italiani brava gente’ (‘Italians: good people’) is not corroborated, but the image of a disorganised and ragged imperialism contributes to the distortion of the past and to the minimisation of the crimes. The result of the book, as far as the representation of colonialism is concerned, is therefore ambivalent: on the one hand, it arouses certain attention to the topic, which is finally ‘cleared’; on the other hand, it indulges in certain elements of common sense. It activates the memory of colonialism, but it deactivates its critical potential.

3. A different case is Volto Nascosto (‘Hidden Face’), a graphic novel by Gianfranco Manfredi. The novel was issued in 14 episodes between 2007 and 2008 and published by Bonelli, a well-known Italian comic publisher (also publishing Tex Willer and Dylan Dog, some serial products of good and sometimes excellent quality). The target public is made up of young adults interested in the graphic novel genre. Manfredi is also a consolidated artist (the author of songs and novels). He had already developed a best-seller series for Bonelli, Magico Vento (‘Magic Wind’): a Western story whose hero is a half-blood. The ‘goodies’, in Magico Vento, are much more frequently the Indians than the whites; their culture is accurately described and appreciated; they are the ‘defeated’, and thus gain the sympathy of the author and of his public. The idea was to propose the same narrative approach used in describing the American past for depicting the Italian one. Like the American Indians, the populations whom Italy also tried to subjugate rose up and fought; their cultures deserve respect; among them, heroes like Magico Vento

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can be imagined. Volto Nascosto is certainly one of them. He is the leader of gangs of rebels, a man with considerable military abilities, whose charisma is further enhanced by the mask covering his face; he unites Muslims and Christians in the fight against the invaders; he joins Menelik and his wife Taytu and contributes to the defeat of the Italians in Adwa. Manfredi complements every issue with additional historical and bibliographic information. In the first issue, the author informs the readers that the series is based on a fiction story, where history is only the setting for his adventures; but, in reading every comic-book, readers learn about historical events and real-life figures. In the drawings, Massawa, Adigrat or Mek’ele appear as they were at that time. Without being aware, readers learn history. This also partly occurs with Lucarelli’s novel. On the surface, the two works are similar. The difference is that in Volto Nascosto the criticism is overt. Good guys and bad guys are found among both the Italians and among the Ethiopians, Abyssinians or Eritreans. There are peaceful characters and warriors. But there is no doubt that aggression is perpetrated and that it is unjust. Hence, a self-critical memory is promoted here. Readers will shift their easy sympathy for Indians to uneasy sympathy for people whom we ourselves have oppressed. On this ground, curiosity, historical awareness and sense of responsibility can develop. The effect is not diminished by the fact that this process is being promoted by means of ‘minor’ literature. The fact that the public is mostly made up of young people makes it more significant.

4. Another different case is the novel Regina di fiori e di perle (‘Queen of Flowers and Pearls’) by Gabriella Ghermandi, published in 2007. Ghermandi is the daughter of an Italian man and an Ethiopian woman. She was born in Addis Ababa and moved to Italy when she was a little girl. The experience of the author is overtly that of mixed-race. The book is compelling and a complex composition. There is a framework story, and a sequence of other stories is inserted within, with a style that is reminiscent of oral narrative. The framework story is pivoted on a memory shortcoming. The heroine, after a long stay in Italy for a scholarship, in the nineties, goes back to Ethiopia for the funeral of one of the elderly of her family to whom she, as a child, was deeply attached. The elaboration of the mourning, however, turns out to be extraordinarily difficult. It can be surmounted only when she remembers the stories that the old man used to tell her, when she was a child, and the promise she made to

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him to become a storyteller. During the mourning, the cure provided to her by acquaintances consists exactly in telling her stories on Ethiopia’s past: a cure that she initially defies, to which she, later, reluctantly submits and that ultimately turns out to be fortunate. Thus, the novel is on regained, personal and collective memory. Nevertheless, it is a memory concerning a past that is largely shared by Ethiopians and Italians. The stories that the woman hears from her several interlocutors are crowded with Italians. There are Italians of many kinds. Several stories mention yperite – the gas that was banned by the Geneva Convention –, used by the Italians during the Second Italo-Abyssinian War in 1935 – 1936. This is a noteworthy passage: only in the nineties did the Italian General Staff admit this crime. Yet, there is a soldier who wanted to marry an Ethiopian girl at all costs: Fascist laws do not allow him to do it, then he deserts and joins the resistance. There is also a sergeant who helps the married couple. In the stories of the Ethiopians who had gone to Italy after the war, there are Italians who underpay their coloured domestics: there is an old woman who asks her domestic questions such as: ‘Are there cannibals in your country?’, ‘Do you have homes?’, and ‘Do you have hair between your legs?’. When the domestic, exasperated, lifts up her skirt, the old woman shouts at her that she has gone insane. There are also honest Italians, who give fair pay; and those who go back to Ethiopia for teaching. And, above all, there is Mr. Antonio, who had worked in Ethiopia and fell in love with it. He had learnt Amharic. But he never went back to Ethiopia. Initially, he says that he did not do so because that land was no longer Italian. Then he corrects himself: actually, he feels ashamed. There is a passage in the novel in which Ghermandi seems to reply to what Flaiano wrote: a woman who had been a militant in the Resistance tells how, near a spring, she killed two soldiers who were pursuing a kid. But the passage is probably not so important. Ghermandi’s story expresses everything Italians should be ashamed of: but it is not rancour which prevails. As Cristina Lombardi-Diop wrote in the book’s postface, the novel is ‘a gesture towards the elaboration of a memory that, in contemporary Italy, finally marks the time to heal that wound’ (Ghermandi 2007: 251). Reading the novel, our memory is enriched with things that we did not remember or that we remembered in a different way. When anyone who has inflicted injustice hears the stories of people who have suffered such injustice, the memory of his own actions is modified. Shame is not sufficient reparation; but it does also entail viewing things from the other’s point of view.

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5. These references to the colonial past in Italian fiction coexist with other memories of a completely different kind. In this respect, an example is the photographic exhibition entitled ‘The Heroic Deeds of Eritrean Ascari’, on display in Rome in 2004, and promoted by representatives of right-wing Italian parties. The exhibition re-used themes, images and stylistic elements that were typical of the propaganda of the colonial period (Palma 2007). The stance was explicit: a manner to remember the bonds between Italians and Eritreans under the auspices of the superiority of the former and the ‘loyalty’ of the latter. Eritreans were depicted as ‘savages’: but savages who are ‘redeemed’ by the very fact of wearing Italian uniforms; nothing was said about the reasons they had decided to enlist in the Italian army, or the discipline to which they were subject, or the discriminations they suffered. No mention is made of the fact that in the cemetery where they lie alongside the fallen Italian soldiers their graves are separate from the Italian: the Italian graves bear a name, while in the Eritrean section no name is inscribed on the marble. The exhibition on Eritrean Ascari did not receive much attention from the media (for its promoters, having had the opportunity to present it in the manner proposed was already a good result). In any case, this example should be mentioned to point out that the return of the removed colonial past may take place in such a potentially conflictual context. It is not a matter of different ‘interpretations’. Nor of mere historiographic honesty. The problem regards the quality of memory that is put on the line. During colonial expansion, Europeans asserted that they were the most civilised peoples in the world. Yet, it cannot be said that we exported civilisation. As for Italians, we built roads and infrastructure for our troops and our trades, but for the rest, we had a predatory attitude; stealing and corruption were a habit in colonies; justice was exercised, to say the least, summarily. In 1888, General Baldissera, commander in chief of the troops in Eritrea, stated that such land ‘must be ours, because that’s the destiny of inferior races; the blacks will progressively disappear’ (Del Boca 2005: 74). The natives were not citizens. Apartheid regimes were established. Resistance movements were repressed through indiscriminate massacres. All this is today extensively documented. In this regard, I believe that the form of public memory which reviews the past recognising the injustice inflicted on others is the only way through which it is possible to give a sense to our idea of being ‘civilised’ (Jedlowski 2002). Not every kind of memory is the same: this one is a dialogical and self-critical memory. It is not necessary to deny that Europe, and perhaps Italy as well, has exported knowledge and modern institutions to their colonies and contributed to generat-

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ing aspirations and ideals of which they may be proud; but, it is just to be consistent with all these ideals that memory cannot disguise all the negative aspects of colonialism. We stated that we would export civilisation: but civilisation may only emerge out of a self-critical memory.

Works Cited Del Boca, Angelo (1992) L’Africa nella coscienza degli italiani (Rome / Bari: Laterza). Del Boca, Angelo (2005) Italiani, brava gente? (Vicenza: Neri Pozza). Flaiano, Ennio (1994) The Short Cut, trans. by Stuart Hood (Marlboro: Marlboro Press). Ghermandi, Gabriella (2007) Regina di fiori e di perle (Rome: Donzelli). Iyob, Ruth, Triulzi, Alessandro (eds.) (2007) ‘Il ritorno della memoria coloniale’, Afriche e Orienti, 1, 22 – 115. Jedlowski, Paolo (2001) ‘Memory and Sociology: Themes and Issues’, Time & Society, 10 (1), 29 – 44. ––––– (2002) Memoria, esperienza e modernità (Milan: Angeli). ––––– (2007) ‘La memoria pubblica: cos’è?’ in La memoria pubblica. Trauma culturale, nuovi confini e identità nazionali, eds. Marita Rampazi, Anna Lisa Tota (Turin: UTET, XIII-XVIII). Labanca, Nicola (2002) Oltremare. Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana (Bologna: Il Mulino). Lucarelli, Carlo (2008) L’Ottava vibrazione (Torino: Giulio Einaudi). Manfredi, Gianfranco (1997 / 2010) Magico Vento (Milan: Bonelli). ––––– (2007 / 8) Volto nascosto (Milan: Bonelli). Palma, Silvana (2007) ‘Il ritorno di miti e memorie coloniali. L’epopea degli ascari eritrei nell’Italia postcoloniale’, Afriche e Orienti, 1, 57 – 79. Ponzanesi, Sandra (2004) ‘Il postcolonialismo italiano’, Quaderni del ‘900, 4, 25 – 34.

Other References Cinema Akkad, Moustapha (1981 [1979]) Lion of the Desert. Starz / Anchor Bay. Geria, Hailé (1999) Adwa: An African Victory. Mypheduh Films. Gerima, Hailé (2008) Teza. Mypheduh Films. Monicelli, Mario (2006) Le rose del deserto. Cecchi Gori. Pontecorvo, Gillo (1966) La battaglia di Algeri. Criterion.

Caroline Rothauge

Remembering the Spanish Republican Exile: An Audiovisual Return¹ 1. Dealing with the Civil War in Spain After their defeat in the Spanish Civil War, the Republicans were left with only a few options: submission to repressive measures by the adherents of the Nationalist side or flight. The first wave of refugees became noticeable in 1937, when the rebellious troops captured the Basque and Asturias provinces. Due to the advance of the insurgents in Aragón, this wave gained the dimensions of a mass exodus in 1938, which it definitely turned into with the fall of Catalonia in January 1939. Between January and February 1939, nearly 500,000 people  – civilians, representatives of the Republic as well as remaining members of the Republican army – left the Iberian Peninsula for France.² Some of them were to spend the rest of their life in exile as Franco’s almost forty year long dictatorship made it impossible for them to return home. It was not until 1977, when the process of democratization in Spain seemed assured, that the exiles came back in significant numbers (Bernecker and Brinkmann 2006: 236 – 42; Macher 2002: 49). But even then, after Franco’s death on 20 November 1975, it was still not considered opportune to call attention to militant lives and activities of the past. Following an informal agreement, the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship were not broadly discussed but instead deliberately ‘silenced’.³ Under Franco’s sway, the history of the so-called ‘losers’ was officially to be buried in oblivion. Due to this culture of silence, the memories of defeated Spain were banned from the public sphere and mostly restricted to exile (Bernecker and Brinkmann 2006: 151; Reig Tapia 1999: 19). Within Spain, private settings were

1 For a first version of this article see Rothauge 2009. 2 About half of them had returned to Spain by the end of 1939, not least due to the pressure exerted by the French authorities, who were not able to cope with the dimensions of this mass movement (Dreyfus-Armand and Temime 1995: 17 – 22 and 30 – 6; Marin 2005: 82). 3 In Spain, a break with the Francoist regime has never taken place. An unwritten agreement to collectively ‘silence’ the recent past came into effect instead, the so-called pacto del silencio (pact of silence). The notion ‘silence’, though, has to be looked at in a differentiated way insofar as the Civil War and its consequences have been discussed constantly in political circles, but always with the aim of keeping these contemporary historical events out of a wider political and social debate (Bernecker 2008: 185).

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the only place where memories shaped by a Republican point of view could be expressed and passed on (Richards 1998: 2 and 170). But even the transición – the peaceful transition from Franco’s dictatorship to a liberal parliamentary monarchy – did not enable recovery of the history of the ‘losers’ and embed it in the collective memory. Reminiscences of the Civil War, the violence and the social tensions it implied, rather led to the fact that the transición decisively oriented itself towards the principles of consenso (consensus) and reconciliación (reconciliation) (Aguilar Fernández 2002: xx and 163). Therefore, one strove to rhetorically neutralize the past in order to prevent its explosive contents from erupting (Bernecker and Brinkmann 2006: 246). According to this conviction, simplifying interpretations of the Civil War were abetted, which did not only prevent critical discussion (Macher 2002: 114), but also left many of the public discourse taboos untouched: for example the causes for the outbreak of the war, the repressive measures, the mass graves, the prison camps, the forced labourers, the antifrancoist resistance and last but not least the hundreds of thousands Spaniards who felt impelled to leave their country (Rey 2003: 115 f.). This was attended by efforts to suppress memories shaped by Republican convictions in the political and social sphere (Bernecker and Brinkmann 2006: 265; Macher 2002: 82 f.). Furthermore, a tendency to historicize these past events was obvious (Ehrlicher 2005: 3), especially on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of war: The Moncloa-communiqué, dated 19 July 1986 declared Spain’s militant past as unworthy of a common, publicly shared commemoration (Brinkmann 2005: 101) and, in that way, abetted the privatization of remembrance which had already been shaped during Francoism. On the other hand, Spanish historians were politically encouraged and pushed to deal with the subject in numerous symposia, colloquia and their according publications (Ehrlicher 2005: 4). Contemporary witnesses and their relatives did not stand in the centre of attention fifty years after the outbreak of the war, but academics who had not themselves experienced the war. Seemingly scholarly commemorations continuously stressed the importance of ‘objective’ and ‘dissociated’ argumentations as the means one supposedly dealt with a past event that had already turned into history. In that way, Spanish historiography was confined to the role of the passive player (Bernecker 2008: 177; Rey 2003: 115). By the end of the millennium, however, this position, which served to establish a perception of history that had been inspired by political principles, was increasingly criticized (Reig Tapia 1999: 327 ff. and 356 ff.; Ehrlicher 2005: 4 f.). Since then, historical publications and expert conferences have

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engaged widely in tabooed themes and groups of people are accumulating and receiving broad interest unbeknown thus far.⁴ On the societal level, the wish for a different, more critical approach to the shared past becomes obvious as from the mid-1990s. One reason is the memory of generations. Due to the stable Spanish democracy the ‘generation of the grandchildren’, in contrast to the ‘children of the transición’, no longer consider it necessary to stick with the pacto del silencio (Aguilar Fernández 2006: 273; Aróstegui 2006: 80 and 89).⁵ Instead, they feel constrained to preserve the memories of contemporary witnesses – by now threatened with extinction – in order to create a collective cultural memory that would finally enable a balanced and institutionalized form of commemoration seventy years after the end of the Civil War.⁶ In that way, Spanish citizens that endeavour to ‘recuperate the historical memory’ increasingly consult the accounts of witnesses that had before been neglected and seek to correct or even de-legitimize hitherto existing interpretations and perspectives on the conflict.⁷ Another reason for demands for a more critical approach were the conservative right-wing politics dealing with history from the Partido Popular (PP), holding an absolute majority in the Spanish parliament under Manuel Aznar. They provoked reactions on a civilian level that ultimately led to a public debate about the Civil War and the dictatorship (Brinkmann 2005: 106). The position of the PP as well as civil initiatives and their activities then altered the attitude of opposition parties: their turn to Spanish contemporary history was not least based on strategical campaign interests (Brinkmann 2005: 105; Aguilar Fernández 2006: 287 f.). Accordingly, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), which has been in power under party leader José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero since March 2004, sup-

4 This also provokes radically opposed reactions, such as the publications of the former left wing extremist Pío Moa (Bernecker and Brinkmann 2006: 312). 5 The memory of generations can be considered a typical case of the communicative memory, which is generated by everyday communication, functions through biographical memories and refers to a limited timeframe of the recent past, eighty to one hundred years (Assmann 1992: 51). 6 Cultural memory bases itself on media and institutions, it has an official character and refers to events that occurred in a more distant past (Erll 2005: 112). 7 The emergence of the notion recuperación de la memoria histórica in Spain is closely linked to a homonymous association, which was founded by the journalist Emilio Silva in 2002. This association fights for the investigation of the politically motivated cleansings carried out by the Francoists during and after the Spanish Civil War (Bernecker and Brinkmann 2006: 292 ff.).

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ports civilian endeavours to ‘recover the historical memory’– albeit only carefully.⁸ In a period of time in which the last witnesses of the Civil War are dying, individual life experiences, official rhetoric and academic historiography compete within Spanish cultures of remembrance⁹ about the way one should relate to this past event in the future. As it is formed on the basis of everyday life experience, the contents of the communicative memory change comparatively fast, whereas matters that have been formed in the cultural memory are subject to institutionally supported claims on interpretation and cannot be altered so easily. This specific tension expresses itself in Spain today via a multitude of exhibitions, academic conferences, disputes over archives, legislative proposals, posthumous tributes and – last but not least – in the audiovisual media.

2. The Significance of Audiovisual Reconstructions of History The increasing representation of historic phases, events and people in audiovisual productions is not restricted to the Iberian Peninsula. Films envision past experiences in an especially effective way due to their narrative structure, their specific potential to combine image and sound in a naturalistic way as well as their capability to produce empathy. However, as far as German historiography is concerned, they were not often turned into objects of investigation (Schildt 2001: 177; Wilke 1999: 21). Popular representations of history have become short-dated consumer goods in today’s media societies, satisfying needs for entertainment and nostalgia. Furthermore, they oftentimes fulfil an ideological, economical or – in a rather superficial way – a didactical function. All of this makes them appear

8 Until today, exhumations of mass graves dating from the Civil War have been carried out thanks to local initiatives. The Spanish state has hardly assisted them actively or financially, which was supposed to change with the Ley de Memoria Histórica (Law of the historical memory). But many civilian organisations are equally dissatisfied with the result of this draft, which came into effect on 31 October 2007 and had been subject to controversy beforehand (Bernecker 2008: 191 f.). 9 Cultures of remembrance can actually be observed. They are specific to certain groups as they deal with the questions of what should not be forgotten and what has to be remembered in order to found a community (Assmann 1992: 30; Erll 2005: 7, 34 – 7, 46 and 102 f.).

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inadequate for historical research and that is why extensive theories regarding the topic ‘film and history’ have thus far been lacking.¹⁰ Paradigmatic for historical research is the question whether historic sources reproduce the past reality or if they reconstruct it by means of rhetoric or narrative techniques (Hickethier 1997: 63). Manifold scientific and popular forms of discourse about history (Ferro 1991: 20; Hardtwig 1998: 170) – academic works, novels, films, documentaries, TV-series – choose and organize basic historic tendencies according to one criterion: they all equally seek to sustain their interpretation of the facts, which are geared to contemporary needs. In that way, each film is closely connected to its specific social context and possesses a potential value as ‘relic’. Rather than looking for possible new insights one might get into the reconstructed period of time, audiovisual reconstructions therefore prove to be an intriguing object of historical investigation because of the information they provide about the time they were produced in (Stettner 1989: 15 f.; Seeßlen 1992: 65; Rother 1991: 11). This becomes most evident in films with historical subject matters, where the representation and interpretation of a past social reality gives hints for an analysis of the ways it was thought of at the time of production. But audiovisual productions should be considered to be more than ‘relics’ as they are sources of historiography with self-contained significance and effect (Paul 2006: 8 and 14). On the one hand, they pre-form the personal experience of historic and everyday events. On the other hand, popular visions of the past generalize individual memories, producing perceptions of history and hence fulfilling a meaningful function (Hickethier 2005: 354 f., 358 and 363; Landsberg 2003: 148 – 58). According to this, they can be described as an authority mediating between the individual and the collective dimension of remembrance. They even become agencies of the cultural memory (Hickethier 1997: 71) by using the discursive space of the communicative memory as a stage on which historic knowledge is renegotiated via repetition, rearrangement and re-representation of the past (Hickethier 1997: 70; Erll and Wodianka 2008: 4; Jäger 2003). In that way, audiovisual productions re- and de-construct the past actively and may alter historical master narratives or perceptions of history by creating room for alternative interpretations.

10 In this regard, the publications of the sociologist and film theorist Siegfried Kracauer as well as those of the historian Marc Ferro are of importance, because they conceive the medium film as a vehicle of collectively constructed meanings and, in that way, the field of film analysis contributes towards social and cultural history.

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3. Spain’s ‘Audiovisual Memory’ Film and TV productions accomplish ‘memory work’ because they endow historical events with the qualities of actuality and sensuality (Hickethier 2005: 349). They thus represent an important factor in the visually perceptive politics of history and commemoration (Paul 2006: 28). This is especially true for Spain, where audiovisual productions with historical subject matters have become media of collective memory: Whereas the Civil War and the subsequent Francoist dictatorship have long been ‘silenced’ and did not constitute an item of a public discussion, Spain’s recent past has continuously been represented in Spanish film and television. Even before Franco’s death, parts of society continuously picked up contents of the communicative memory of generations. Successfully defying censorship, they achieved more or less popular film narratives as well as images working against the officially propagated suppression of the past.¹¹ The obvious boom of the memorialistic discourse in Spain today has in that way announced itself via the audiovisual media, long before the contemporary debates about the recent past have emerged. Actually, audiovisual representations of history more than ever serve as a mode to cope with the traumatic Civil War and as a source of actualization for dominant interpretations of history. Given this recurrent reference to certain historical events in Spanish audiovisual productions, one needs to analyze the ways in which such cultural products stage and transform the knowledge about the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship both visually and narratively. Furthermore, which constructions of meaning and values do these representations and transformations effect and which concrete guidelines do they offer their viewers? In this regard, the memorialistic embeddedness of today’s film and TV productions dealing with aspects of the Civil War is of particular interest because they address mostly viewers who did not experience the conflict first-hand. How do audiovisual productions with historical subject matters then refer to the past? How do they re-activate elements of cultural memory? Answering to these questions calls for a systematic approach of the complex relationship between film and context. Such an analysis aims at transcending the mere film-immanent analysis of the representational level in order to embrace aspects such as mutual past and present experiences, historically grown perceptual patterns and discourses that have been transmitted via the media (Erll and

11 For example, Carlos Saura’s La caza (The Hunt), released in 1966 or Victor Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) from 1973. Furthermore, the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship have repeatedly been broached by Spanish literature and theatre.

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Wodianka 2008: 6; Paul 2006: 25 and 27). It goes beyond the representation of historical ‘truth’ in audiovisual media by focusing rather on film narratives and images as significant hints for conventions of representation and perspectives of interpretation (Paul 2006: 25). In that way, audiovisual productions with historical subject matters appear in the context in which they function so as to be critically analysed as sources for the construction of memory and the politics of history.

4. Audiovisual Reconstructions of the Republican Exile The following analysis of the way the Spanish Republican exile returned on screen will serve as an example for the way audiovisual productions refer to the past, reconstruct it and by those means possibly develop alternative perspectives of interpretation. The aim is not to extensively analyse all of the audiovisual productions that have dealt with the Republican exile, but to give an impression of how diverse and complex are the forms and procedures with which audiovisual representations actualize past events. In this regard, the credibility through ‘preforming’ genre conventions, authentication through interviews with contemporary witnesses, the canonisation through contexts of mediation and discussion, the re-activation of memory contents through intertextual references, the evocation of experiences through symbolically loaded images and perspectives of interpretation through narrative topoi play a decisive role.

4.1 Credibility through ‘Pre-forming’ Genre Conventions The release dates and television premieres of audiovisual productions that treat the theme of the Spanish Republican Exile reveal that this aspect of Spain’s contemporary history had not been represented in an explicit, extensive and recurrent way in the documentary genre until the turn of the millennium.¹² Obviously, the documentary genre has experienced a renaissance on a global scale. This is even more striking in Spain’s case, where the cinematographic documentary that

12 According to Spanish scholar of film studies Vicente Sánchez-Biosca, no other topic than the Republican Exile has ever been so systematically ‘plundered’ by recent TV documentaries (Sánchez-Biosca 2006: 315).

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dealt with historic themes had practically vanished from existence since its short bloom during the transición (Monterde 1993: 155). The number of historic documentaries on themes of Spanish contemporary history with overtly investigative and critical approaches has risen remarkably in recent years; audiovisual productions that have not only been produced for public TV broadcasters, but for the big screen as well (Heredero and Santamarina 2002: 80 f.). In most cases, these productions want to be understood as serious efforts to bring about the ‘recuperation of the historical memory’. According to their predominant intention to recover themes of Spain’s contemporary history and experiences of people which have long been under a taboo, filmmakers choose to present their work in the documentary genre, which is thought of as allowing a more ‘authentic’ and ‘reflexive’ representation as fictitious formats.¹³ In Spain, this conviction can be traced back to the documentaries of the transición period: these were mainly independent and militant productions and explicitly used to show a partial and committed view on the past and its significance in the present.¹⁴ This particular phase of post-Francoist filmic development is generally understood as the only period in which the reconstruction of historical ‘truth’ in Spanish film was genuinely intended. But the rising dominance of the ‘pact of silence’ on the socio-political level confined this phase in Spanish filmmaking to only a short duration (Albersmeier 1992: 57). Characteristic of transición documentaries was the tendency to use witnesses of the past and ask them about their experiences in the so-called format of cine-entrevista (‘interview-cinema’: Gubern 1986: 175 f.; Sánchez-Biosca 2006: 262). Some of the directors intentionally wanted to serve as the mouthpiece for those who had not had a voice in Spanish society until then. Today, taboo-themes such as the fate of the Spanish Republican exiles are again preferably shown in montage films, which are equally committed to the retrieval of forgotten historical events and people and show a similar interest in contemporary witnesses and their memories. Thus, they obviously establish a formal link to past conventions of representation, whereby the credibility and the accentuated investigative character that is associated with the documentary genre of the transición is supposed to leave a mark on today’s productions.

13 One has to keep in mind that documentaries provide a form of representation that is no more ‘objective’ than feature films: documentaries follow a certain point of view, only showing a chosen fragment of reality, which has furthermore been reconstructed through montage techniques and narrative conventions. 14 As for example in ¿Por qué perdimos la guerra? (Why did we lose the war?; director: Diego Santillán, E 1978).

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4.2 Authentication through Interviews with Contemporary Witnesses An outstanding example for the politically engaged cinema of the transición is the documentary La vieja memoria (The Old Memory), directed by Jaime Camino and released in 1977. In this film, two hours and forty minutes long, already known as well as unknown filmic material, still photographs, maps, paintings and recent shots are cut together. But the main weight of the film undoubtedly lies on the twenty interviewees, about their experiences as key figures in the Spanish Civil War.¹⁵ Camino assembled the statements of contemporary witnesses, which were originally filmed as long monologues, in a way that makes these figures of Spain’s contemporary history – ferociously fighting each other forty years ago – seem to listen and even talk to each other. The audience seems to attend a discussion of a wide political spectrum involved, a discussion which was made impossible as a result of the coup of 18 July 1936 and the subsequent Civil War, the Republican Exile and Franco’s dictatorship. In fact, most of the witnesses Camino interviewed for this documentary still lived in exile while the shooting took place from autumn 1976 till spring 1977 (Crusells 2000: 147 – 51). In re-activating memories that had been suppressed for a long time by means of physically present, directly affected people and their contrasting, sometimes incompatible views on the past, Camino succeeded in expanding the official Francoist perception of history shortly after the dictator’s death.¹⁶ In the cinematographic documentary Los niños de Rusia (The Children of Russia) from 2001, Camino pursues the same aim to cover a wide range of memorialistic tonalities. However, in this film it is no longer key figures in the Spanish Civil War who ‘talk’ to each other, but passive subjects of the conflict: eighteen of the almost 3,000 children evacuated to the USSR because of the increasingly heavy bombing of the Basque Country in the summer of 1937 (Devillard, Pazos, Castillo and Medina 2001: 228). Both montage films show a form of narration that is choral and leaves the impression of a kaleidoscope of contrasting statements and interpretations that are not evaluated. In Los niños de Rusia, this form of

15 The overall twenty interviewees include Dolores Ibarrúri, a symbolic figure of the Spanish Communists, and Federica Montseny, a central character in the Spanish Anarchist Movement before and during the conflict. Further representative figures of the Spanish Republic were interviewed, who are likewise ardent supporters of the right (Crusells 2000: 147 – 51). 16 However, due to the political implications of the transición, a latent ‘centristic’ tendency becomes apparent in La vieja memoria. Accordingly, one can doubt that the rupture of Francoist master narratives here exceeds the socially agreeable level of inspiring reflection (Albersmeier 1992: 59).

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narration is carried to extremes since the contemporary witnesses are not given a name, nor are they introduced, for example in form of a caption. On the one hand, this leads to irritation on the viewer’s side; on the other hand, it enables him / her to engage with the narration without being biased on grounds of pieces of information about people’s residence or job. This underlines Camino’s endeavour for objectivity and impartiality, which is equally confirmed by the fact that an omniscient narrator is lacking to a large extent in both productions, a technique that is often used in documentaries with a didactic intention.¹⁷ Nevertheless, a stronger tendency towards emotionalisation becomes evident in Los niños de Rusia, primarily due to the choice of topic, which is not the Spanish Civil War as a historical event per se, as in La vieja memoria, but the biographies of people who had to live the consequences of the war during their infancy.¹⁸ While in the earlier production archived material sometimes serves as an element of contrast in order to de-legitimize some of the witness statements, they are used in a merely illustrative way in Los niños de Rusia, reinforcing the statements in a dramaturgical way or building transitions when interview material is missing. Only a few historical dates are mentioned in Los niños de Rusia, as a result the spectator is thrown onto his own personal knowledge about the past, at the same time heightening his receptive abilities for the affective content of the narration. Obviously, this montage film constructs a more human view of the Spanish Civil War, which is a contrast to the antiseptic-cognitive readings of the conflict that have so long prevailed in Spain’s official and scientific discourses and frustrated a wide public debate about the past. With regards to content, the legitimization and the authentication of this confrontation of contemporary witnesses are charged with emotions and result from an implicit allusion to civilian efforts to ‘retrieve the historical memory’. This becomes most obvious in Camino’s choice of the protagonists; one of them utters in an interview after seeing the film for the first time: ‘Yo me siento como si hubiéramos resucitado un poco. Estábamos casi muertos, olvidados y enterrados.’ (Josefina Iturrarán in Los niños de Rusia, DVD extras, Entrevistas: 00:05:44 – 52). [I am feeling as if we had been revived a little bit. We were almost dead, forgotten and buried.]

17 Camino can only infrequently be heard asking questions during the interviews. As a narrator he comes into action just a few times in La vieja memoria when he has to tie particular chapters to one another because appropriate witness statements are lacking. 18 This is last but not least due to the fact that three of Camino’s cousins had been part of those children who were evacuated to the USSR (Caparrós Lera 2004: 122).

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4.3 Canonisation through Contexts of Mediation and Discussion The two-piece TV-documentary Exilio (Exile) was conceptualized for the same reasons of memorialistic urgency as Los niños de Rusia. The aim of this production from 2002 was not simply to honour the anonymous exiles, but to reclaim the Spanish Republican Exile in its whole.¹⁹ Exilio does not fulfil this aim, not even in 114 minutes: the quantity of statements incorporated in this documentary creates a counterproductive effect. Contrary to some of the contemporary witnesses in Los niños de Rusia, none of those seen in Exilio can serve as role models or carriers of perspective: there are too many of them, which is of great disadvantage for the film’s flow and its understanding. In fact, it is almost impossible for the viewer to keep up with the information that the different people present from constantly changing places. Even the conventional omniscient narrator does not succeed in summing up the large number of statements and in smoothing out the occasionally abrupt transitions between periods of time or locations. This is why viewers who are not familiar with the subject matter are likely to have difficulties finding their way in the historical context. On the other hand, the television premiere of Exilio was embedded in a vast and mediated discussion about the theme of the Spanish Republican Exile, which might have helped in understanding this documentary. Exilio was produced by the socialist Pablo-Iglesias-Foundation, amongst others. Not only was the president of this foundation, Alfonso Guerra, once vice-president of the Spanish Government, the mastermind behind the TV-documentary Exilio, but he also initiated an exhibition which – thanks again to the funding from the Pablo-Iglesias-Foundation – had collected photographs, drawings, documents and objects relating to the Spanish Republican Exile. The exhibition was inaugurated by the King of Spain in the Crystal Palace of Madrid’s park Retiro on 17 September 2002, many former exiles from Mexico, Belgium, France and Great Britain were present (Exilio, DVD extras, Entrevista Alfonso Guerra, 00:09:40 – 10:00). The documentary Exilio was launched only a few days later on the public TV network TVE-2 (Rey 2003: 118). Though critics qualified this apparently very orchestrated interest of the Socialists in the theme of the exile as opportunistic, especially in view of the growing popularity of the civilian organisations for the ‘retrieval of the histori-

19 Alfonso Guerra, the mastermind behind Exilio, states in an interview that certain figures in the Republican Exile have been honoured sufficiently as far as their individual achievements are concerned (Exilio, DVD extras, Entrevista Alfonso Guerra: 00:01:07 – 22).

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cal memory’ (Sánchez-Biosca 2006: 316), the success of this medial complex as a whole is indisputable. The exhibition had to be extended for two months due to the wide public interest and went on tour throughout Spain afterwards (SánchezBiosca 2006: 316; Bernecker and Brinkmann 2006: 297). A quotation from a letter to the newspaper El País from 29 September 2002 underlines that the outspoken engagement with the Republican Exile was – for some Spaniards – of the utmost importance: Como hija y nieta de republicanos que vivieron el exilio (…), deseo expresar mi satisfacción, que sin duda es la de muchos españoles, por la exposición El exilio, (…) por los documentales que la televisión pública ha ofrecido y por algunas publicaciones aparecidas recientemente en las librerías. (Lasso de la Vega Menéndez 2002) [As a daughter and granddaughter of Republicans who have lived the exile (…), I want to express my satisfaction, which surely coincides with that of many Spaniards, regarding the exhibition El exilio, (…), regarding the documentaries the public television has provided and regarding some publications which have appeared in the bookshops recently.]

It is no surprise then that a corresponding book appeared right on the very day of the exhibition’s inauguration: it was edited by Exilio’s director Pedro Carvajal, funded by the Pablo-Iglesias-Foundation and introduced by a preface written by Alfonso Guerra (Martín and Carvajal 2002). In this book, statements of contemporary witnesses make up a remarkable number of pages. These processes of canonisation, which increasingly frame audiovisual productions, contribute considerably to their being perceived as credible, serious comments with the sovereignty of interpretation. Last but not least, the material included on the DVDs available for purchase often contains information on those people and discussions which shaped a specific production and were decisive for its memorialistic institutionalisation as far as the politics of history are concerned. This underlying intention of Exilio is indeed explicitly mentioned by a narrator at the film’s beginning: ‘Con ellos, con los exilados, tiene la España actual, la de la Constitución de 1978, una deuda impagable. A ellos está dedicado este documento, como reconocimiento y homenaje – y con amor.’ (Fernando Hernández in Exilio: 00:01:39 – 56). [To them, to the exiles, today’s Spain, the Spain of the Constitution of 1978, has to repay a prohibitive debt. To them we dedicate this document, as an acknowledgement and honour – and with love.] It is also confirmed by a detailed interview with Alfonso Guerra and a discussion – amongst others, with the ‘experts’ Carvajal and Camino – about the theme of the Republican Exile and the need for civilian activism in the ‘recuperation

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of the historical memory’.²⁰ Interviews and discussions are likewise included as extras on the DVD. Therefore, Exilio serves as an example for the way audiovisual productions on historical aspects can be framed by institutionalizing events and legitimizing comments, providing credibility and assertiveness to a large extent – despite dramaturgical flaws, as in this case.

4.4 Re-Activation of Memory Contents through Intertextual References Along with the introduction of ‘experts’ – most frequently historians – that have become a convention in documentary formats, the reference to well-known figures of contemporary history on the representational level can be observed increasingly often. The accomplishments, achievements and works of politicians are mentioned, poets or painters that have been put under a taboo during francoism are quoted, turning them into memory figures.²¹ On the one hand, these intertextual references clarify the re-activating potential of the multilayered audiovisual media. On the other hand, they give authority to a fictitious or documentary film plot, which is based on contents of the communicative memory. In that way, a film narrative can be endowed with sovereignty of interpretation in the context of collective remembrance.²² Interesting in this regard is, for example, the way Lluís Companys, president of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War and executed by the Francoists on 15 October 1940, becomes a memory figure in La vieja memoria. He is reconstructed as such with the help of archived pictures and recent shots of the traditional seat of the Catalan government (the Palau de la Generalitat). Furthermore, the declarations made by the 1976 – 7 still exiled president Josep Tarradellas, who praises Companys’s behaviour and character, help to establish Companys as a memory figure. Tarradellas himself serves as a symbol of the Catalan autonomy (Macher 2002: 84) and is represented as worthy president of the Generalitat – only provisionally granted until 1979 – via Camino’s imagery and montage technique.

20 Exilio, DVD extras, Coloquio Beca: 00:01:30 – 02:18 and 00:04:02 – 42. 21 Memory figures are concrete people or symbolic, iconic or narrative forms which serve to emblematise the past and to tie it to the present so that it can enter and persist in memory (Assmann 1992: 37 f.). 22 This corresponds to what Erll identifies as the monumental form of memory rhetorics (Erll 2005: 169 – 176).

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Furthermore, surprising is the high number of references to the poet Antonio Machado in audiovisual reconstructions of the Civil War that have been re-emerging constantly over a large period of time. The poet, who died in French exile on 22 February 1939, is evoked through the figure of a teacher in Camino’s cinema feature film Las largas vacaciones del 36 (The Long Vacations of 36) from 1976 as well as in José Luis Cuerdas blockbuster La lengua de las mariposas (Butterfly’s Tongue) from 1999. In both films, the teacher is explicitly characterized as a Republican and recites Machado’s poem ‘Recuerdo Infantil’ (Memory from Childhood). That means, Machado is rebuilt or reclaimed as a memory figure, with the purpose of helping to establish a forgotten Republican identity.²³

4.5 Evocation of Experiences through Emotionally-Loaded Images Images function as recurrent metaphors for specific experiences, especially those which cannot be handled verbally because they are traumatic or unconscious. As symbolic forms of expression, images can evoke specific memories (Assmann 1999: 218 – 28). This is best exemplified by the way Pablo Picasso’s famous work Guernica is set into operation at the beginning of Los niños de Rusia: at first, the camera focuses on details of this piece of art, while the movement of the camera is accompanied by the fizzling of falling bombs and the buzzing of aeroplane engines. Then, the camera zooms out of the detail view and presents an overall picture of the painting. This is precisely the moment when the first contemporary witness begins to talk: about the bombing of Guernica. Besides the illustrative function of the picture in this opening sequence and besides its metaphorical meaning for the film as a whole – the single statements of the witnesses taken as a whole are meant to provide an overall view of the events of the past –, Picasso’s painting serves here as a concise element of the pictorial memory linked to associations such as war, destruction and the agony of the civilian population. The closing sequence of Camino’s feature film Las largas vacaciones del ’36 underlines the memorialistic significance of the symbolic force of images in an equally impressive way. This film, released in 1976, concludes two and a half years after the outbreak of the Civil War with the fall of Catalonia in January 1939, represented by the withdrawal of the Republican Army and the beginning of the

23 However, Machado’s poem with the Cain-and-Abel-motif serves as a symbol for the Spanish Civil War as a tragic fratricidal war, which has turned everyone involved into victims and, in that way, abets simplifying interpretations of the conflict.

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civilian exile. The credits run over the freeze frame of a road on which Republican soldiers can be seen, accompanied by the sound of the hooves of horses.²⁴ Camino’s report on the shooting for this scene demonstrates the impact it left on contemporary witnesses: Well, when the army, made up of extras in the film, came along the road, two very impressive things happened. There were two village women up on a hill who saw the ragged army coming by, and they wept; they wept because they remembered, even though they knew it was a film. Then, even though we had blocked the road for shooting, a delivery truck suddenly came zooming into the area. The man was delivering bread. We stopped him; the fellow saw an army on the move and he shouted in Catalán, ‘You see, here they are again!’ Coming right after Franco’s death, he imagined that all hell was breaking loose again. (Camino in Besas 1985: 152).

This clearly shows why the memory of the Spanish Civil War was so delicately handled during the transición and why it was thought best to silence it.

4.6 Perspectives of Interpretation through Narrative Topoi It is surprising how often original shots and archived pictures that show Leclerc’s Division entering Paris in August 1944 appear in recent audiovisual productions dealing with the Spanish Republican Exile.²⁵25 With the help of pictures referring to the liberation of Paris, one protagonist of the cinema feature film Soldados de Salamina (Soldiers of Salamis; director: David Trueba) from 2003 is stylized into a ‘warrior of liberty’, whose universal meaning goes back to the argument that he did not only fight in the Spanish Civil War, but also in World War II, as a member of the Foreign Legion supporting the Allied Forces.²⁶ Similar images appear in other productions, for example Exilio and the TV-documentary El sueño derrotado: la historia del exilio (The Shattered Dream: The History of the Exile; directors: Jaime and Daniel Serra) from 2004: shots showing Allied troops marching down the Champs-Elysées, others depicting General Charles de Gaulle saluting

24 The original closing sequence showed a shot of the Moroccan cavalry through a telephoto lens, galloping towards the camera with a Nationalist flag in their hands (Gubern 1986: 173). This sequence was still censored in 1976 and cut out of all copies approved for screening (Hopewell 1989: 154). 25 Some Spanish volunteers had joined General Leclerc’s second tank division, which moved into Paris as the first Allied troop unit in August 1944 (Graham 2008: 170 and 173). 26 However, the stylization of the protagonist Miralles in Soldados de Salamina implies some problematic interpretations of this film’s narrative (Wildner 2005: 550 f.).

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in public and archived photographs showing tanks from Leclerc’s Division which bear names referring to battles in the Spanish Civil War. They illustrate what contemporary witness statements share as a common undertone: the conviction that all Republicans participated in one and the same battle which began in Spain in 1936, was lost in 1939, but was continued in exile on different fronts and only ended for a few of them with their return to a democratic Spain.²⁷ Rhetorically, these films do no longer remain on the level of a tragic discourse that goes hand in hand with confining the members of the Spanish Republican Exile to mere victims only, but incorporates elements of a heroic epic. Despite the physical and psychological hardships they had to endure first in and then outside Spain, the Spanish Republicans are shown as people who continuously fought for their ideals. This view of the Republican exiles expressed by the witnesses by means of the communicative memory seems to become an alternative narration of the cultural memory – as judged by its recent dominance in audiovisual reconstructions of the past. If the contemporary witnesses bemoan something in these documentaries, it is not so much the death toll of the Republicans, but the fact that their fight and its relevance for today’s Spain and anti-fascist Europe have not been adequately honoured.

5. Conclusion To conclude, it should be mentioned that on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the Mauthausen concentration camp on 5 May 2005 Spain’s Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero voiced an official appraisal of the Spanish deportees for the first time. In this same address, Zapatero confirmed the view of exiles in commemorating their agony and their fight for liberty: ‘Hoy, como Presidente del Gobierno de España, de la España democrática, quiero rendir homenaje, recuerdo, memoria y admiración a todos los españoles que sufrieron aquí en Mauthausen en su lucha por la libertad y por la dignidad.’

27 This ‘warriors of liberty’ narrative of the communicative memory explains why the contemporary Spanish witnesses do not differentiate between those who died crossing the Pyrenees, in French internment camps or during the course of the Second World War, fighting (either in the Résistance or with the Allied troops) or assassinated in German concentration camps. It also helps understand why Spanish exiles mostly use the term campos de concentración in order to describe both the French internment camps as well as the nationalsocialist concentration camps (Dreyfus-Armand and Temime 1995: 21 and 126; Graham 2008: 166).

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(José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in Lágrimas rojas: 00:35:28 – 48). [Today, as Chief of Spain’s government, the democratic Spain, I would like to pay honour, remembrance, memory and admiration for all those Spaniards who suffered here in Mauthausen because of their fight for liberty and dignity.] This part of Zapatero’s speech is included in the audio track of another documentary: Lágrimas rojas (‘Red Tears’; directors: Lucia Meler and Victor Riverola, 2006) which can be regarded as another example for those recent audiovisual productions with a narrative that tends more towards heroism than towards victimization.²⁸ Which of these interpretations will assert itself in Spain’s cultural memory has to be seen. But there is no doubt about it: audiovisual reconstructions of the Spanish Republican Exile can be considered as active insurgency against the former undisputed Francoist view of the Spanish Republicans as ‘losers’ and against the prolonged silencing of the past, thus a break with the role of the allegedly passive victim’s role. All forms and procedures of actualising the past via an audiovisual reconstruction described above have eventually made it possible that the Spanish Civil War could be represented and dealt with explicitly. They have shown how cinema and TV productions with a historical subject matter enable changes in traditional interpretations and point of views, as long as the elements of the communicative memory that they contain are legitimized through processes such as ‘pre-forming’ strategies or accompanying effects such as canonisation or mediated embedding.

Works Cited Audiovisual references Camino, Jaime (1976) Las largas vacaciones del 36. ––––– (1977) La vieja memoria. ––––– (2001) Los niños de Rusia. Carvajal, Pedro (2002) Exilio. Cuerda, José Luis (1999) La lengua de las mariposas. Erice, Victor (1973) El espíritu de la colmena. Meler, Lucia and Victor Riverola (2006) Lágrimas rojas.

28 From a historical point of view, Lágrimas rojas is a nuisance: numerous mistakes in German orthography, the seemingly arbitrary montage of archived material, plump SS-officers in reenacted scenes and almost inexistent or not adequately reprocessed bits of information do not match the postulated intention and, above all, the agony of the interrogated contemporary witnesses.

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Santillán, Diego (1978) ¿Por qué perdimos la guerra? Saura, Carlos (1966) La caza. Serra, Jaime and Daniel Serra (2004) El sueño derrotado: la historia del exilio. Trueba, David (2003) Soldados de Salamina.

Printed publications Aguilar Fernández, Paloma (2002) Memory and Amnesia. The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy (New York: Berghahn Books). ––––– (2006) ‘Presencia y ausencia de la guerra civil y del franquismo en la democracia española. Reflexiones entorno a la articulación y ruptura del “pacto de silencio”’, in Guerra Civil. Mito y memoria, eds. Julio Aróstegui and François Godicheau (Madrid: Marcial Pons), 245 – 294. Albersmeier, Franz-Josef (1992) ‘Spanienbilder im postfranquistischen Film’, Hispanorama 62, 55 – 63. Aróstegui, Julio (2006) ‘Traumas colectivos y memorias generacionales: el caso de la guerra civil’, in Guerra Civil. Mito y memoria, eds. Julio Aróstegui and François Godicheau (Madrid: Marcial Pons), 57 – 94. Assmann, Aleida (1999) Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Munich: C.H. Beck). Assmann, Jan (1992) Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: C.H. Beck). Bernecker, Walther L. (2008) ‘Die verspätete Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit. Spanien zwischen Amnesie und politisch-ideologischer Instrumentalisierung’, Peripherie 28.109 / 110, 174 – 195. ––––– and Sören Brinkmann (2006) Kampf der Erinnerungen. Der Spanische Bürgerkrieg in Politik und Gesellschaft 1936 – 2006 (Nettersheim: Verlag Graswurzelrevolution). Besas, Peter (1985) Through the Spanish Lens. Spanish Cinema under Fascism and Democracy (Denver, Colorado: Arden Press). Brinkmann, Sören (2005) ‘Verspätete Erinnerung. Motive und Reichweite der jüngsten Vergangenheitsarbeit in Spanien’, Sozial.Geschichte 20.3, 98 – 114. Caparrós Lera, José María (2004) El cine del nuevo siglo (2001 – 2003) (Madrid: Rialp). Crusells, Magí (2000) La Guerra Civil española. Cine y propaganda (Barcelona: Ariel). Devillard, Marie José and Álvaro Pazos, Susana Castillo, Nuria Medina (2001) Los niños españoles en la URSS (1937 – 1997): Narración y memoria (Barcelona: Ariel). Dreyfus-Armand, Geneviève and Émile Temime (1995) Les camps sur la plage, un exil espagnol (Paris: Autrement). Ehrlicher, Hanno (2005) ‘Kampf und Konsens. Filmisches Erinnern an den spanischen Bürgerkrieg in Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom (1995) und David Truebas Soldados de Salamina (2002)’, Philologie im Netz 34, 1 – 27. URL: http: // web.fu-berlin.de / phin / phin34 / p34t1.htm#lub (accessed 10 September 2009). Erll, Astrid (2005) Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen. Eine Einführung (Stuttgart: Metzler).

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––––– and Stephanie Wodianka (2008) ‘Einleitung. Phänomenologie und Methodologie des ‚Erinnerungsfilms‘’, in Film und kulturelle Erinnerung. Plurimediale Konstellationen, eds. Astrid Erll and Stephanie Wodianka (Berlin: de Gruyter), 1 – 20. Ferro, Marc (1991) ‘Gibt es eine filmische Sicht der Geschichte?’, in Bilder schreiben Geschichte: Der Historiker im Kino, ed. Rainer Rother (Berlin: Wagenbach), 17 – 36. Graham, Helen (2008) Der Spanische Bürgerkrieg (Stuttgart: Reclam). Gubern, Román (1986) 1936 – 1939: La guerra de España en la pantalla. De la propaganda a la Historia (Madrid: Cátedra). Hardtwig, Wolfgang (1998) ‘Formen der Geschichtsschreibung: Varianten des historischen Erzählens’, in Geschichte. Ein Grundkurs, ed. Hans-Jürgen Goertz (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt), 169 – 188. Heredero, Carlos F. and Antonio Santamarina (2002) ‘Raíces de futuro para el cine español. Paisajes creativos en la última década del siglo XX’, in Semillas de futuro: cine español 1990 – 2001, eds. Carlos F. Heredero and Antonio Santamarina (Madrid: España Nuevo Milenio), 23 – 85. Hickethier, Knut (1997) ‘Film und Fernsehen als Mediendispositive in der Geschichte’, in Der Film in der Geschichte. Dokumentation der GFF-Tagung, eds. Knut Hickethier and Eggo Müller, Rainer Rother (Berlin: Sigma), 63 – 73. ––––– (2005) ‘Der Krieg, der Film und das mediale Gedächtnis’, in Krieg und Gedächtnis. Ein Ausnahmezustand im Spannungsfeld kultureller Sinnkonstruktionen, ed. Waltraud ”Wara“ Wende (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann), 347 – 365. Hopewell, John (1989) El cine español después de Franco 1973 – 1988 (Madrid: El Arquero). Jäger, Ludwig (2003) ‘Transkription – zu einem medialen Verfahren an den Schnittstellen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses’, TRANS 15 (2003) http: // www.inst.at / trans / 15Nr / 06_2 / jaeger15.htm (accessed 10 September 2009). Landsberg, Alison (2003) ‘Prosthetic Memory: the Ethics and Politics of Memory in an Age of Mass Culture’, in Memory and Popular Film, ed. Paul Grainge (Manchester / New York: Manchester University Press), 144 – 161. Macher, Julia (2002) Verdrängung um der Versöhnung willen? Die geschichtspolitische Auseinandersetzung mit Bürgerkrieg und Franco-Diktatur in den ersten Jahren des friedlichen Übergangs von der Diktatur zur Demokratie in Spanien (1975 – 1978) (Bonn-Bad Godesberg: Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation). Marin, Progreso (2005) Exil. Témoignages sur la Guerre d’Espagne. Les camps et la résistance au franquisme (Portet-sur-Garonne: Loubatières). Martín, Julio and Pedro Carvajal (2002) El exilio español (1936 – 1978) (Barcelona: Planeta). Monterde, José Enrique (1993) Veinte años de cine español (1973 – 1992). Un cine bajo la paradoja (Barcelona: Paidós Ibérica). Paul, Gerhard (2006) ‘Von der Historischen Bildkunde zur Visual History. Eine Einführung’, in Visual History. Ein Studienbuch, ed. Gerhard Paul (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), 7 – 36. Reig Tapia, Alberto (1999) Memoria de la Guerra Civil. Los mitos de la tribu (Madrid: Alianza). Rey, David (2003) ‘Die Franco-Ära in der medialen Geschichtskultur Spaniens. Bürgerkrieg und Diktatur in Kino und Fernsehen seit 1975’, Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte 4, 113 – 159. Richards, Michael (1998) A Time of Silence. Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco’s Spain, 1936 – 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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Rothauge, Caroline (2009) ‘Spanische Republikaner im Exil. Eine audiovisuelle Rückkehr’, in Exil, Entwurzelung, Hybridität (= Exilforschung. Ein internationales Jahrbuch, Bd. 27), ed. Claus-Dieter Krohn and Lutz Winckler (München: text + kritik), 150 – 167. Rother, Rainer (1991) ‘Vorwort. Der Historiker im Kino’, in Bilder schreiben Geschichte: Der Historiker im Kino, ed. Rainer Rother (Berlin: Wagenbach), 7 – 15. Sánchez-Biosca, Vicente (2006) Cine y Guerra Civil española. Del mito a la memoria (Madrid: Alianza). Schildt, Axel (2001) ‘Das Jahrhundert der Massenmedien. Ansichten zu einer künftigen Geschichte der Öffentlichkeit’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 27.2, 177 – 206. Seeßlen, Georg (1992) ‘Sissi – Ein deutsches Orgasmustrauma’, in Zeitmaschine Kino. Darstellungen von Geschichte im Film, ed. Hans-Arthur Marsiske (Marburg: Hitzeroth), 65 – 79. Stettner, Peter (1989) ‘Film – das ist Geschichte, 24mal in der Sekunde. Überlegungen zum Film als historischer Quelle und Darstellung von Geschichte’, in Film – Geschichte – Wirklichkeit, ed. Geschichtswerkstatt e.V. (Hamburg: Ergebnisse), 13 – 20. Wildner, Ralph (2005) ‘Javier Cercas: Soldados de Salamina und Verfilmung von David Trueba’, in Erinnern und Erzählen. Der Spanische Bürgerkrieg in der deutschen und in der spanischen Literatur und in den Bildmedien, eds. Bettina Bannasch and Christiane Holm (Tübingen: Gunter Narr), 547 – 562. Wilke, Jürgen (1999) ‘Massenmedien und Zeitgeschichte aus der Sicht der Publizistikwissenschaft’, in Massenmedien und Zeitgeschichte, ed. Jürgen Wilke (Konstanz: UVK Medien), 20 – 31.

Internet Sources: Lasso de la Vega Menéndez, Carmen (2002) ‘Cartas al director. El olvido de los perdedores’, El País (29.09.2002). URL : http: // www.elpais.com / articulo / opinion / olvido / perdedores / elpepiopi / 20020929elpepiopi_9 / Tes (retrieved 10 September 2009).

II. Othering the Battleground

Vera Nünning

The (In)Visibility of War in British Novels of the Twentieth Century From Antiquity onwards, war has been one of the most important topics of literature – just think of Homer’s and Vergil’s depictions of war and its consequences in their two great works, the Iliad and the Aeneid. Though difficult to depict in genres like plays, war remained a popular topic in most literary genres. Of course, the degree of (in)visibility of war seems to lend itself more to a representation in the visual arts, in photography, painting, video and film. I want to argue, however, that literature can and does deal with war in very interesting ways, and that its presentation fulfils a host of various functions especially in novels, which can provide insight into our ways of treating – and avoiding – the horrors of war throughout the centuries. In the following, I want to delineate four different ways of dealing with the two world wars in British fiction of the twentieth century. In two sections (part I and IV), I shall deal with canonical texts which show different ways of exploring the topic of war, which, nonetheless, is often not of primary importance to the novels.¹ Interestingly enough, though, the presentation of wars takes centre stage in two subgenres or larger bodies of texts which were very popular at the time of their publication: the novels published during the ‘War Literature Boom’ at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, and those stories (be they novels, biographies or autobiographies) that deal with the ‘Battle of Britain’ – those conflicts fought out mainly by pilots during the summer of 1940, when Hitler tried to invade Great Britain. Although both bodies of texts were (and partly still are) hugely popular, they have largely been neglected by literary critics, since they – specifically those pertaining to the Battle of Britain – do not belong to the canon. Moreover, both genres differ greatly in the presentation and interpretation of war. In the following, I deal with these different strands of literature and present four stories of the depiction of two wars in British literature.

1 If we look at the second part of the century, and if we include the lives of civilians who become entangled in warlike actions, we encounter a few outstanding novels by authors like Ian McEwan, Michael Frayn or Rachel Seiffert; the depiction of war plays a more prominent role, however, in a number of historical novels of lesser renown, which I will not deal with here; see, for instance, Paul Scott, The Raj Quartet (1966 – 74); to which he later added Staying On (1977) as a ‘postscript’, or William Boyd, An Ice-Cream War (1982).

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1. The First World War, Part I: Fragments of the Canonical Story The First World War certainly seems to be a subject matter of outstanding importance. This war, in which more people were killed than in all the wars of the nineteenth century taken together, was a traumatic experience for many Britons, and an important catalyst for the discarding of Victorian values. Many Britons felt they were witnessing a harsh and decisive break in history; they experienced something which Samuel Hynes has called ‘the sense of a gap in history’ (Hynes 1990: xi), a gap which made it impossible to revert to the comparatively ordered and meaningful world of the nineteenth century. As well as other Europeans and Americans, Britons had joined this war, which was to cost 650,000 lives on the British side alone, enthusiastically, quite often harking back to medieval values of chivalry; they expected heroic fights, even duels between fighter pilots. The reality turned out to be different; and with the death of tens of thousands in the battlefields of the Somme, elation gave way to desperation. As can be witnessed in the works of the ‘war poets’ of the time, the first response was mainly favourable – which is embodied in those works which Rupert Brooke managed to write before his early death in 1915²  – and then gave way to an increasingly critical stance, for example in poems written by soldiers like Richard Aldington, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon. The literary reception of the war in poems thus began as early as 1915, and is still recognised in literary histories, which usually consider those canonical works. The poems published between 1916 (the beginning of the critical reception of the war) and 1918 also influenced the later perception of the war. They established the image of the ‘lost generation’,³ a generation of promising young men who were sacrificed for a meaningless war, a generation which died on the battlefields or came back traumatised, unable to deal with the requirements of their new civilian lives. This image also marks the presentation of the war in the writings of ‘high modernism’, in which the war is certainly to be found, though nearly invisible. Key topics like propaganda, death, and traumatisation are present in works like T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). The very first lines ‘April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land’ (Eliot 1988: 29) refer not only to

2 His sonnet ‘The Soldier’ (‘If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England’) became immediately famous (cf. Brooke 1974). 3 See, for instance, Owen 1987.

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Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, they also point to the First World War – at the beginning of the 1920s everyone knew that most of the drawn out attacks on the Western Front were launched in spring. The depiction of war is even more pronounced in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1924 – 28), which is set during the war and places the relationships between the main characters in front of a scenery marked by times of war. But in spite of this, the war is not put centre stage, it rather serves as a backdrop against which the experiences, deceptions, sufferings and feelings of the main characters are placed. A different approach to the war is marked out by two novels by Virginia Woolf, which at first sight seem to have nothing at all to do with the First World War: To the Lighthouse (1927), and Mrs. Dalloway (1925). In To the Lighthouse, the war is all but invisible. Nonetheless, it is mentioned in a strange, but memorable way in the experimental middle section of the novel, ‘Time Passes’. Whereas the first and the third part of the novel deal with the lives and experiences of the Ramsays and describe one afternoon and one morning in their summer house on the coast of Cornwall, the very short second part is concerned with the passage of roughly ten years. In contrast to Woolf’s usual concentration on the perceptions, thoughts and feelings of her characters, in this passage, very few human beings are present. It mainly consists of a description of the summer house slowly falling into decay. Events in the lives of the main characters are only given in brackets, which pertains to the war as well: ‘[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.]’ (Woolf 1927: 207).⁴ Although the war makes itself felt even in the remote village, it is shut off by the narrating instance, which refuses to deal with the sorrow and suffering of the remaining members of the family. Even the number of the victims seems to be of no interest – though the carelessness with regard to the dead also highlights the disregard of the lives of individuals among in charge. The war is more important, albeit at first sight nearly invisible, in Woolf’s earlier novel Mrs. Dalloway, the social criticism of which was masterfully pointed out by Alex Zwerdling as early as 1986.⁵ As the first critical reactions to this novel show, the importance of the war is easy to miss. After all, the plot takes place on one day in June 1923, five years after the end of the war, and it revolves around

4 See also: ‘[Mr. Carmichael brought out a volume of poems that spring, which had an unexpected success. The war, people said, had revived their interest in poetry.]’ (208) The middle section also gives fleeting sayings and thoughts of characters like the charlady, who are invisible in the other two parts. 5 I owe many of the ideas in the following passage to this path-breaking book.

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the perceptions, impressions and memories of a few characters in London. Clarissa Dalloway, the protagonist, mainly thinks of her past and her earlier feelings for Peter Walsh, whom she is going to see that evening; if it is possible to make out another focus of her thoughts, it is the great party she is going to give in the evening. Nonetheless, the war is present in a number of ways, the most important of which is embodied by Clarissa’s double, Septimus Warren Smith. Though she never meets Septimus or gets the chance to talk to him, she is connected to him not only through the characteristics they share – such as the love of poetry, and their ambivalent attitude to privacy and communication. Moreover, at exactly the middle of the day and the middle of the book (page 104 of the Hogarth Press edition, which has 208 pages) they are mentioned in the same sentence: It was precisely twelve o’clock; twelve by Big Ben; whose stroke was wafted over the northern part of London […] and died up there among the seagulls  – twelve o’clock struck as Clarissa Dalloway laid her green dress on her bed, and the Warren Smiths walked down Harley Street.

The Warren Smiths have to be there in order to meet a doctor  – for Septimus is, without anyone knowing it, shell-shocked. The reader has encountered his strange perceptions before, without being able to understand him or knowing why he thinks and sees things which cannot actually have happened. When he is first introduced as a pale man wearing a shabby overcoat, we are confronted with the sentence ‘The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?’ (17), which can in retrospect be understood as the question Septimus asks himself at that moment. His perception of a passing motor car illustrates his difficulties: [A] curious pattern like a tree, Septimus thought, and this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames, terrified him. The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames. (18)

Later on it becomes clear that he is somewhat disordered – he thinks that trees and leaves are alive, is beckoned by branches, talked to by birds, and met by someone called Evans, whom nobody else seems to see. This is contrasted by the plight of his wife Lucrezia, whom he married during the war in Italy; she is worried but still unable to understand, and clings to the statement of his physician, Dr. Holmes, that there was ‘nothing whatever seriously the matter with him but [that he was] a little out of sorts’ (25; see also 27). It is only half-way through the book that readers realise what lies behind Septimus’ troubles:

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[W]hen Evans was killed, just before the Armistice, in Italy, Septimus, far from showing any emotion or recognising that here was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably. The War had taught him. It was sublime. (96)

But by that time the reader has learned to distrust Septimus’ opinion of himself. His situation is definitely not ‘sublime’, and he is anything but ‘feeling very little and very reasonably’. His attacks of panic, which are rendered in a disturbing way, without any comments, come more and more often, and he obviously lives in a world of his own, in a world to which the laws of nature do not apply. This moving history of Septimus is given even more importance in one of the rare generalisations of the heterodiegetic narrator of the novel: ‘London has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith; thought nothing of fantastic Christian names like Septimus with which their parents have thought to distinguish them.’ (94) Moreover, the novel makes it very clear that at present there is no hope for those soldiers who have been shell-shocked. When Septimus goes to Harley Street, he is met by a thoroughly materialistic, narrow-minded physician oozing conventionality and self-complaisance. In this case, the narrator is even more explicit, reverting to the old rhetorical figure of personification in order to characterise Sir William Bradshaw’s principles: ‘Proportion, divine proportion, Sir William’s goddess’ (110), who is helped (and made worse) by her ‘sister’, ‘Conversion’ (111). Septimus’ story ends with his suicide, which marks his rational attempt to get rid of the tyrannical treatment meted out to former soldiers by ignorant officials. The inadequacy and inhumanity of this is emphasised at the end of the book, in Clarissa’s epiphany, in which she divines Septimus’ fate, and in the tittle-tattle at the party, when people talk about a parliamentary bill in which provisions for the shell-shocked are to be included. In Mrs. Dalloway, the war is not an actual presence, but a memory. Memories have destroyed the ability of Septimus to deal with his surroundings, and memories mar the lives of characters who are only thought of fleetingly: ‘The War was over, except for someone like Mrs Foxcroft […]; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed; but it was over; thank Heaven – over’ (6). This attitude of negating the continuing presence of the war is, however, undercut by the way it is presented; the war has not ended for many characters, and a sentimental attitude that is embodied by a Mr Bowley, who has tears in his eyes when he sees loyal citizens in front of Buckingham Palace, is not going to help at all: ‘poor women, nice little children,

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orphans, widows, the War – tut-tut’ (23).⁶ Memories of the war, many passages of the novel show, still wield a destructive influence, and to ignore them does injustice to relatives as well as serious damage to veterans. It is therefore questionable whether Samuel Hynes is right when in his influential book on the First World War he claims that ‘one fact was accepted – that for most of the Twenties the war had not been significantly imagined, in any form’ (Hynes 1990: 424).⁷ The war is imagined – but not in the way we are led to expect.

2. The First World War, Part II: The All But Forgotten Story Hynes’ statement makes sense, however, when one compares the ‘literary’ novels of the 1920s to those works about the war that were published from the late ’20s onwards. Though this is usually not deemed worthy of consideration in most literary histories, at that time war literature began to form a subgenre of its own in several Western countries. The continuing presence of the war began to give rise to a veritable ‘War Literature Boom’, of which Erich-Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front [1929 / 1929]) is still quite popular; and literary texts became part of a more encompassing debate on the war.⁸ Many works fulfilled one of the following two functions: they either reflected processes of memory or they influenced or even created them. While the classical works of ‘high modernism’ mostly reflect, modify or criticise existing memories of the Great War, the ‘War Boom’ novels of the late 1920s and ’30s served to create new ways of remembering the traumatic experience. In the hundreds of war novels published in Europe and the United States, the war is not presented obliquely, but made visible in a very immediate way. This focus on

6 In Mrs. Dalloway the war also mars the life of the governess of Clarissa’s daughter, Miss Kilman, who, because of her German background, lost her job as a teacher during the war scare and now finds it difficult to fit in. 7 The First World War continues to be a topic for ‘literary’ novels and short stories. Quite often, there are different concerns as well. Barker (1991 – 95), for instance, provides an account which is full of details as far as the daily life of those times is concerned; she even tells the story of the meeting between Sassoon and Owen in a hospital. However, Barker is mainly interested in the experiences of women, and in their way of dealing with (and mastering) the challenges and difficulties brought about by the war. 8 The following account is based on Erll (2005: 237 – 50). A more detailed account is given in Erll 2003.

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the war is in tune with the life of the ‘Golden Twenties’, which, looked at closely, were not marked only by a rise in consumer culture. After all, most families had lost some of their own; many women mourned for sons or lovers either lost on the battlefield or traumatised beyond recognition. Wounded veterans were seen everywhere in the streets, and deprivation and suffering had scarred the lives of those who went on living after 1918. In this atmosphere, the war – or rather, conflicting memories of the war – became the focus of a ‘war books controversy’, in which a host of people were concerned with the question of whether the novels presented a ‘true’ picture of the war. Whereas early spy novels and ‘mainstream-fiction’ like John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga (1906 – 21)⁹ used the war as a setting and an ingredient, novels by authors like Erich-Maria Remarque and Frederic Manning centred on the war itself. They formed a subgenre that attracted a huge interest in Europe and the USA – between 1928 and 1930 hundreds of war novels were published and translated for a reading public eager for war stories. In Great Britain, these novels largely embodied a pacifist view,¹⁰ which differs from the films popular at the time. What is important about these novels is that they were understood as interventions in a more general critical debate about the war. The participants in this controversy were not just novelists, but also politicians, teachers, journalists, veterans and many others whose lives were still being influenced by the war. The main issue was the degree to which particular books were able to convey an ‘authentic impression’ of the wartime experience. As the heated debate shows, literature was expected to fulfil a specific function and tell the ‘true story’ to those who had not participated in it and re-create as well as shape the memory of the war. Whatever their literary merits may have been and whatever their authors may have intended, these novels about the war came to function as media for the formation and transformation of collective memory (cf. Erll 2003). The story they tell is, roughly, the following: a young soldier arrives at the (Western) front, fights, loses some of his best comrades, is disillusioned and either dies or comes back to a society into which he does not fit any more. One challenge was provided by the heterogeneity of the war. On the one hand it was a major historical event, an event that was part of world history. At the very

9 Though nowadays the works of Woolf, Joyce and others are deemed canonical, at the time more conventional writers like Arnold Bennett and H.G. Wells were more renowned. John Galsworthy was even awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. 10 This may be due to the political atmosphere; Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald (1929 – 31) even appointed a pacifist as minister of war; and important politicians like Winston Churchill (who played a quite different role in the Second World War) showed themselves not to be in favour of the war.

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least, the topic of the ‘lost generation’ had to be considered. It did not make sense to remember the war only with reference to a personal history; the larger frame of the collective memory had to be taken into account as well. On the other hand, placing the war into a general, more abstract frame of collective memory and national history did not make sense; it had to be remembered as an individual experience as well. This challenge is met in different ways in different subgenres, but all of them are characterised by an attempt to relate individual experiences to larger frames of reference, such as a ‘British tradition’. One attempt at telling the ‘truth’ about the war is marked by literary memoirs of those who had been soldiers themselves, authors like Edmund Blunden (Undertones of War, 1928), Robert Graves (Good-bye to All That, 1929) and Siegfried Sassoon (Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, 1930). All of these make use of the genre of (fictionalised) autobiography, telling their lives in a very personal way, establishing themselves as individuals who want to provide insight into their lives and to account for their actions. As autobiographers they show themselves willing to be judged by the audience, and it might even be said that they need this recognition.¹¹ The communicative mode is thus a very personal one; it is marked by homodiegetic narration, that is by a character who has been part of the story he tells, allowing his audience to participate in his personal memories. The mode of narration is realist in Ian Watt’s sense of ‘formal realism’, giving many details which serve to invoke the impression of reality, and providing insights into the daily life of the soldiers and the atmosphere pervading their lives at the front. These details pertain to the frame of the individual memory; they seem to authenticate personal experiences. On the other hand, these stories are related to a more general, collective memory. There are a host of intertextual references to the style and genre conventions of the pastoral, and to specific works of literature which belong to that tradition, which is thought to be typically English.¹² Sassoon’s work evokes the time-honoured ideal of the English Gentleman, thereby referring to a way of life that was felt to be particularly English. The ‘gap in history’, the perceived radical break with the past is bridged in these works which link the memories of the war with an old British tradition. It has to be noted, however, that Victorian ideals, particularly hero-worship and the glorification of doing one’s duty for one’s

11 This new view of the autobiographical pact, which takes into account theories by Paul Ricoeur, Judith Butler and Jerome Bruner, is both elucidated and illustrated by Schäfer (2011). 12 Often, this is not even done in a very serious mood; Graves’ text in particular parodies the genre in a way which nearly turns the war into a farce. This might seem to be disrespectful, but it can also be related back to Shakespeare.

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country, remain anathema; the connections with the past refer to non-military ideals and to values and genres which belong to the sixteenth and eighteenth century, which were remembered – in contrast to the seventeenth and nineteenth century – as periods of peace and stability. The novels which fictionalise life at the front also use the conventions of memoirs: They evoke the effect of truthfulness, trying to establish an effet de réel, providing many details of daily life as well as using the register, dialect and even slang of the soldiers. This was done with great efficiency by Frederic Manning in his The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929), which gives the impression of providing a truthful account of soldier experiences. The main character is even called ‘John Bullock’, and thus reminiscent of ‘John Bull’, the stereotype of the typical Englishman, which was used in countless stories and caricatures lovingly poking fun at ways of thinking and behaving that were thought of as English. The use of the name harks back to the eighteenth century, which abounds with caricatures of John Bull, but in addition to that, numerous intertextual references to key texts of British literature – in particular Shakespeare’s Hamlet – place Manning’s work in a tradition which promises stability and continuity. Probably the most striking characteristic of the ‘war books controversy’ was the heterogeneity of the positions that were taken. The old generation had a different stance than the younger one, the degree of involvement in the military action (front life of soldiers, military leadership, civilians) led to quite disparate views on the war, and social class, ideology and even the gender of the participants in the debate contributed to divergent perspectives on the ‘truth’ of the war. It was a field of hotly contested memories, and each group had their own views on who was allowed to think of themselves as belonging to the ‘lost generation’, and who was to be held responsible for the suffering. Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero (1929), for instance, reads like an accusation not only of the older generation which had sent their children into a meaningless war; it also acidly blames those who did not take part in the suffering at the front: the civilians, women, and young men who stayed at a home that Aldington marks as ‘feminine’. Aldington is probably writing against those successful modernist writers who stayed in England – such as T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, and Ezra Pound – who were mostly non-combatants. These authors are not only exempted from any claim to participating in the ‘lost generation’, they are even characterised as enemies. In spite of the particular writers who probably were the targets of Aldington’s novel, the work functioned as a catalyst, widening the gaps between the camps of those who wanted their suffering to be remembered by the following generations. Women tried to make their contributions known as well, as Evadne Price did (alias Helen Zenna Smith) in the novel Not so quiet … (1930), which places itself in the tradition which Erich Maria Remarque had established in his internationally

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best-selling novel. The many different viewpoints which were antagonistically presented – be it in favour of soldiers, civilians, women, the young or the old generation – and their involvement in the debate turned the stories of the war into sites of contest. The novels fought over and established diverse memories, thus changing the image the war had previously acquired almost beyond recognition.

3. The Second World War, Part I: The Omnipresent But Neglected Story Memories of the Second World War are fraught with contradictions as well. There are innumerable perspectives on the conflict, and the remembrances of soldiers and civilians as well as of other witnesses – for instance women – do not add up to a coherent whole with regard to this war either. But in contrast to the memories of the First World War, which had been contested, but which were united in their critical attitude to the war and emphasised the suffering of those who had come into contact with it, the Second World War, which was even more destructive, costing even more lives,¹³ has been partly idealised. In the following, I will refer only to the memories of aerial warfare to which the positive representations are restricted. While the battles fought on the ground turned out to be very difficult to idealise, aerial combat has been cast in narratives dominated by the notion of ‘knights of the air’. The pilots appear as heroes in the traditional pattern of warlike masculinity, sporting technical competence and unwavering bravery as well as a strict code of honour. The most important event that served to permeate the myths about the pilot and aerial combat was the ‘Battle of Britain’, which took place in the summer and autumn of 1940, when the Royal Air Force successfully warded off the German bombing campaign. It was mostly fought by very young pilots who were instantly immortalised.¹⁴ The texts and genres that idealise the Battle of Britain are manifold.¹⁵ Since the patterns, stereotypes, plot lines, ways of characterisation and prevailing metaphors are of a striking similarity, the following examples will draw on different

13 The Second World War was, in terms of the soldiers dying in it, five times more deadly than the Great War. See Kennan (1999: 3). 14 In this context, Churchill’s famous words played an important role: ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few’ (Churchill 1940). 15 The following passage is the revised version of a lecture that Jochen Mevius and I held at a conference about the visibility of war in Schloss Rauischholzhausen, in the summer of 2005. Mevius (2009) wrote an outstanding dissertation about this topic.

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genres and include (auto)biographies and works of children’s literature which appeared between the 1950s and the turn of the millennium – and quite a few of the details I discuss here pertain to popular war films as well. An important feature of all of the idealised accounts is the invisibility of violence. Metaphors of sport and hunting are employed to gloss over the fact that human beings are the victims of combat; furthermore, the material is manipulated in such a way as to suggest that violence has only been directed against machines. In the recently reprinted biography of Douglas Bader this use of metaphors comes to the fore: ‘O.K., chaps,’ he called. ‘Take this quietly. Don’t attack until I tell you.’ Rather like a huntsman who has sighted shy game, he began stalking them turning [his squadron] south […]. Still the Germans weaved in a ragged undisciplined tangle like unwary rabbits at play. […] Only McKnight was quick enough to fire; he caught one as it darted in front and the 109 did not lift its nose like the others but went tumbling down the sky like a broken thing that had lost the grace of flight (Brickhill 2001: 230, 235).

What is involved here is a double concealment: First, the act of aggression is cast in terms of sportsmanship, evoking the impression that the battle is merely a game. Secondly, the death of the pilot is erased; what is mentioned instead is the falling down of ‘a broken thing that had lost the grace of flight’ – and thus not worthy of preservation. The human body in the machine is invisible; the machine itself is not even cast as an animal – which would be in concord with the beginning, where the metaphors of the huntsman and of the ‘rabbits’ establish the field of hunting – it is just ‘a thing’, and a broken one at that, one that is not worth anything any more. This combination of metaphor and metonymy is typical for quite a number of idealised versions of the Battle of Britain: Metaphors of sport imply fair competition, while the broken machines stand metonymically for the wounded bodies of dead pilots. The nature of the fight is often treated as a highly individualised affair, with opponents seeking each other out and fighting as equals. Most accounts present some basic rules of fairness; they even re-introduce the notion of the duel into modern combat. In his novel Spitfire Parade (1941), William E. Johns presents a typical depiction of such a fight: His third victory that day was a straightforward duel which was won fairly and squarely by superb flying and accurate shooting, and only after the longest and most difficult combats in all his experience. The victim was a Messerschmitt 109; the pilot was cruising about, apparently looking for trouble in much the same manner as Biggles. They spotted each other at the same time and turned towards one another, so there was no question of pursuit.

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The German seemed to be as anxious for conflict as Biggles […]. Not that he minded. If the Hun were a better man than he – well, it would be just too bad (Johns 1952: 216 f.).¹⁶

This depiction highlights the individual opponents, who adhere to an ethics – and aesthetics – of combat unrelated to the cruel reality. It is suggested that both men are eager for the fight; both are ‘looking for trouble’. Moreover, uneven numbers or the quality of the machine or of the weapons do not seem to play a role, it is just ‘a straightforward duel’, which is won by the one who is the ‘better man’, who is the more competent pilot and the better marksman. Wounds or death are not only invisible here; they do not come into the story at all. The possibility of death is not even mentioned, it is erased and substituted by ‘[i]f the Hun were a better man’, and this, ‘well, it would be just too bad’. Moreover, fictional accounts use a number of devices to downplay the losses. In many narratives, only a few pilots are wounded in action  – and more often than not, these events are in retrospect even given a positive interpretation. What is more, the wounds inflicted are neither disfiguring nor lasting (cf. Johns 1952: 136, 180). Certain injuries which were common to pilots  – such as large scale burns – do not occur.¹⁷ If the death of a fighter pilot is presented at all, it is usually depicted as quick and painless. The romanticised image of the individual pilot plunging to doom makes it possible to construct narratives that invest death with dignity and grandeur. Furthermore, according to fictional genre conventions in the kind of popular literature that is analysed here, it is highly unusual to let a character who is central to the narrative die, which provides quite a number of characters with an aura of inviolability.¹⁸

16 Although Richard Hillary deconstructs a number of myths of the Battle of Britain in his autobiography, he sums up this view on aerial warfare in a similar vein: ‘I realized in that moment just how lucky a fighter pilot is. He has none of the personalized emotions of the soldier, handed a rifle and told to charge. He does not even have to share the dangerous emotions of the bomber pilot who night after night must experience that childhood longing for smashing things. The fighter pilot’s emotions are those of the duellist – cool, precise, impersonal. He is privileged to kill well. For if one must either kill or be killed, as now one must, it should, I feel, be done with dignity. Death should be given the setting it deserves; it should never be a pettiness; and for the fighter pilot it can never be’ (Hillary 1998: 97). 17 See for instance Higgins (1999), for an account that depicts heavy losses and other elements jarring with the myth – like friendly fire – but skirts the issue of injury and disfigurement. 18 Other characters also become ‘unkillable’, as notions of genre and reader expectations prevent their demise. For the mechanisms rendering literary characters open or immune to victimisation, see Fraser (1976, 51 – 83).

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The idealisation of the Battle of Britain also relies on the image of individual pilots. There are three aspects of this image which have to be taken into consideration: Firstly, the pilot is bestowed with many attributes of the heroes of adventure tales; secondly, he becomes a character that transcends the military hierarchy, and thirdly, the group he belongs to is presented as an ideal society of equals. The construction of the pilot as a mythical character often begins with the depiction of his appearance. Even in autobiographical accounts, many characters appear as prototypical heroes: Another squadron of Spitfires had already arrived, their pilots sipping mugs of tea in a group nearby. Bader strolled over and asked ‘the form’ from a slim, handsome flight lieutenant, elegant in white overalls and with a silver name-bracelet round his wrist. ‘Haven’t got a clue,’ said the debonair young man, who had aquiline features like a matador, a thin black moustache and a long, exciting scar down the side of his face, the type of young blade, Bader thought, who would make a young girl think of darkened corridors and turning door handles (Brickhill 2001: 169).

In (auto-)biographies as well as novels, pilots sport a traditional image of masculinity: They are courageous, fair, friendly and loyal – with the usual trappings, such as good looks and elegance thrown in. Even if they are disfigured – which is a quite unusual feature – this only adds to their attractiveness; the scar is ‘exciting’, and its description is followed by the sexual desire that kind of man would arouse in young ‘girls’. More important, however, is another kind of attraction: the attraction that flying has for the young pilots.¹⁹ This involves a change of perspective, which shifts from the pilot as a combatant to a harmless civilian who loves flying. This effect can be enhanced by various techniques; sometimes the peace-time occupations of the pilots are stressed, and sometimes the sheer beauty of the view: What a sight! The colour, the different shades of green of fields and woods, the bright roundels on the Spitfires; this is something very close to my idea of beauty. No doubt I would incur the derision of the self-styled intellectuals and pacifists, but I bet they have never felt as totally happy and wonderful as I do at this moment. This is what being a fighter pilot is all about. (Wellum 2002: 108)

The ‘fighter pilot’ is thus turned into an aesthete appreciating the beauty of the view, someone who is able to do something many young people dream of, someone who is innocuous and at ease with his surroundings. ‘This is all what

19 See Deere (1999: 14f) and Wellum (2002: 4) for examples.

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being a fighter pilot is all about.’ War, death, and suffering have become invisible in the face of the visibility of the beauty of the British landscape seen from above. In most narratives supporting an idealised image of the Battle of Britain, the group of pilots forms a closely knit community, while at the same time respecting each other. Problems that might cause tensions between the individual and the group are either successfully dealt with or become invisible. Cowardice, nervous breakdowns and rivalry between pilots – problems which were quite common – are treated in the same cavalier fashion as disfiguring wounds; they do not occur.²⁰ In addition, in numerous books pilots appear as mythical characters outside the boundaries of the military structure. In order to be compatible with the ideal of Englishness, many features of which are embodied in the positive image of the Battle of Britain, the heroes have to be shown as individuals, not as members of a standardised, highly regulated air force. In keeping with the English distrust of strict hierarchies, pilots are generally depicted as ‘officers that do not take kindly to discipline’ (Johns 1952: 11); the conformity necessary to the military remains invisible. While it has been frighteningly easy to find contemporary popular British responses to the Battle of Britain which are still marked by the kind of idealisation depicted above, it has been rather difficult to come up with contrasting views which deconstruct this quite obviously one-sided and untruthful account of the war. This is not to say that the idealised accounts uniformly sport all the features of the myth; they rather select some, and interpret some others in a way which is in keeping with their genre and does not seriously impair the idealisation of the Battle of Britain. The depiction of violence, for instance, may appear more drastic, and the narratives of the knightly duel may give way to representations of aerial sniping and ambush,²¹ but heroic pilots are still at the core of most popular narratives, preserving a myth that seems to be exempt from the horrors of war. Popular, critical responses to the Battle of Britain are rather rare. So far, I have only been able to make out Derek Robinson’s long novel Piece of Cake (1983), which has also been turned into a successful TV series, and seems to contradict each and every facet of the idealised account of the Battle; and the Julian

20 In mythic representations, there are no events that incapacitate a pilot or tear up a group. Especially fear and cowardice remain unrepresented, the only exception being characters who manage to get the better of their weaknesses. See Johns (1952: 162 – 82) for a prototypical account of such a metamorphosis. 21 This might be in keeping with a general trend towards the more blatant depiction of violence and a less pejorative attitude towards violence on the part of the (reading) public.

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Barnes novel Staring at the Sun (1986), which, however, only deals with the war in passing. In spite of revisionist accounts like those of Barnes and Robinson, it has to be born in mind that the overwhelming majority of narratives about the Battle of Britain are still informed by the myth of a heroic fight. There is a steady output of accounts that perpetuate the idealised image and align it to the needs of a changing audience without altering its core elements. As far as popular presentations of the war are concerned – for instance in films and computer games – the myth of the heroic battle survives more or less unscathed. Thus, it does not come as a surprise that many idealised narratives of the battle are still very popular and have been reprinted dozens of times.²²

4. The Second World War, Part II: Fragments of a Canonical Story Since there are nearly no negative descriptions of the Battle of Britain, Barnes’ revisionist stance is worth looking at, even though only short episodes of his novel deal with the Second World War. At the centre of those, however, is the deconstruction of the image of the pilot as a hero. It becomes clear quite early that Sergeant-Pilot Prosser suffers from severe psychological damage – he is unable to face combat again. Being small and non-descript, rather unfriendly and not very communicative, Prosser does not live up to the expectations of the family, into whose home he has been quartered. But Jean, the daughter, only blames herself when Prosser does not behave in the way expected of him: ‘Perhaps heroes who flew Hurricanes required special questions’ (21). Later on, Jean has to learn that even the most successful actions of pilots are unfair. When a German pilot once acts according to the image of the duellist, Prosser’s reaction is derisive: ‘Who d’you think you are? Bloody knight in armour?’ (27) When asked what bravery is, Prosser can only come up with haunting images which do not include a scrap of ‘fucking dignity’ (28). Only his early vision of a pilot’s ideal suicide seems to conform to the idealised depiction of the ‘glorious’ way for a pilot to die: When the whole thing started I used to see myself somewhere near Dover. Sunshine, seagulls, the old white cliffs gleaming away – real Vera Lynn stuff. Anyway, there I’d be, no

22 For a detailed account of those works, which analyses a huge number of novels, (auto) biographies, histories and children’s books, see Mevius 2009.

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ammo, not much juice left, and suddenly a whole squadron of Heinkels comes along. Like a great swarm of flies. I’d intercept, get right in among them, fuselage like a colander, then I’d pick out the leader of the battle group, fly straight at him and smash into his tail. We’d both go down together. Very romantic (Barnes 1987: 28ff).

When Jean thinks this is ‘very brave’, he debunks the heroic image by summarising it as both stupid and wasteful. Prosser is eloquent, however, on the subject of fear, which does not only affect the psyche but also the body – and he makes it quite clear that there is no way to recover from it: Then comes the bit when you start to notice it. Probably because you notice other people noticing it. […] So you think, I’m not having them calling me windy, so what you might start doing is drift off from your formation, get into a bit of cloud and fire your guns. […] I didn’t crack – at least, not how everyone thinks of it. Things just run out after a while. The stocks are exhausted. There isn’t anything left. People tell you it’s just a question of having a break and recharging the batteries. But there are a lot of batteries that won’t recharge. Or not any more (Barnes 1987: 48 – 51).

The rather rare use of the second person singular in this passage can fulfil two different functions: on the one hand, this mode directly addresses the protagonist Jean (and, at one remove, the reader), thus making it possible for her to identify with him. On the other hand, it displaces his own memories; putting a distance between himself and the ‘you’ of the narrative, it marks Prosser’s attempt to dissociate himself from the person who experienced such humiliating fears. Barnes’ revision of the popular image of the pilot as a hero is rather exceptional. More often than not, ‘literary’ novels concentrate on the battles which are fought on the ground and on the experiences of soldiers as well as civilians. I would like to argue, though, that these are only rarely the most dominant topics of such novels, which are often concerned with a host of other issues as well. The Second World War is at the centre of four novels that I will discuss at least briefly. Martin Amis’ Times’ Arrow (1991), Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), Michael Frayn’s Spies (2002), and Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room (2001). Amis’ novel has been praised as a daring and successful experiment; it deals with the horrors of the Holocaust, which are neither invisible nor belittled in this work. The impression of the war is quite different from all the other representations in contemporary narratives, because Amis turns the chronology of events upside down; ‘Times’ Arrow’ is given a different direction, and what has happened first is narrated last. Thus the people dying in the gas chambers get their lives back during the novel, and children retreat into their mothers’ wombs. The presentation of the Holocaust is achieved by a complete turn of the events, which

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may arguably be an appropriate way of trying to face its horrors, which defy any description within the usual narrative frames. Above all, however, Times’ Arrow is an experiment in the presentation of history, and an experiment in the narration of time, which raises questions which go beyond even the terror of the Second World War. There is no ‘typical’ way in which the Second World War is presented in ‘literary’ novels, but one could argue that Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) and Michael Frayn’s Spies (2002) deal with it in two contrasting, but, nonetheless, somewhat similar ways. In Atonement, the description of life during the war  – both of a common soldier fighting in France and of a nurse stationed in England – takes up a large space. The atonement alluded to in the title does not refer to a war crime; on the contrary, the greatest, and, in terms of its consequences, the worst mistake the protagonist Briony makes as a child happened just before the war, when she misjudged a situation involving her sister and a young man, which she saw from the window. Due to her false, but nonetheless sincere accusations, the young man falls into disgrace and is subsequently imprisoned; he is recruited without being allowed to see the woman he wants to marry again. Slowly Briony realises that she has ruined the life of the couple, and vainly tries to atone for her mistake throughout her own life. Interestingly, the book is presented in a modernist way of narration, with Briony as the most important focalizer. Due to its multiperspectivity, however, we also get long passages from the point of view of the soldier trying to come back to England. The presentation of war, with the rather high probability of the two lovers never meeting again, certainly plays a large role. Arguably even more important, however, are the more general topics of guilt, atonement, memory and the role of art. In the last part of the novel, ‘London 1999’, the narrative mode changes to a homodiegetic narration, told by the old Briony, who has turned into a novelist, remembering and musing about what has happened and how she dealt with her largest problem ‘these fifty-nine years’: ‘[H]ow can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? […] There is nothing outside her. […] The attempt was all’ (McEwan 2002: 371).²³ The war is thus narrated from a distance, through the lenses of several instances: the various focalizers who experience the horrors of the war at the time, the heterodiegetic narrator who largely remains covert but who nonetheless orchestrates and narrates what happens, and the old

23 There are numerous other implicit and explicit metafictional comments in the novel. Briony also raises the question of the truth of the lovers’ fate, suggesting that the reading public would not tolerate their not meeting again (cf. McEwan 2002: 370). For a very good discussion of the main features of this novel see Wolf (2001: 291 – 311).

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Briony, who turns out to be the homodiegetic narrator and writer of the novel. What is more, the focalizer Briony turns out to be unreliable: her description of the lovers’ meeting after the war never took place ‘in reality’, since the soldier died in France; it is just the older novelist’s fantasy, who inserted this episode into her ‘novel within the novel’, which seems to be the only way for her to assuage her guilt.²⁴ In many ways, Michael Frayn’s novel Spies (2002) stands for a different approach to the war. Again, the war provides the setting for the huge bulk of the novel, and its effects on people’s daily life are given in some detail. However, the protagonist of Frayn’s work self-consciously tries to evoke and remember what happened during the war in retrospect. Similar to Kazuo Ishiguro’s protagonist and narrator Stevens in the novel The Remains of the Day (1989), the narrator takes a journey and slowly finds out what he did not understand at the time itself; by trying to catch and narrate fleeting memories, he establishes ‘some order in it all, some sense of the connections’ (Frayn 2003: 6). Evoking the atmosphere of the time and trying to truthfully narrate what he saw as a child, the old Stephen is able to make sense of his former impressions, which, at the time, seemed to vacillate between an exciting spy novel and a bewildering experience: through the attempt of putting his memories into words, he slowly realises his part in a tragic constellation, involving a love affair and the precarious existence of a deserted soldier, who literally went underground. The daily life of civilians under the conditions of war forms the backdrop of this novel, which is presented through the distorted lens of a young and imaginative child, who deals with the rather harsh surroundings by placing the events in the frame of an adventure story. Again, the consequences of the war are visible, but they are both distorted by the perspective of Stephen as a child and by his belated conscious attempts to evoke what, he fears, no other living being may remember. Since everything is both recalled from memory and filtered by the old Stephen who wants to understand his own role in what happened, the novel seems to revolve around his reflections on the workings of memory and his ways of coming to terms with his past (and, again, his involuntary mistakes) rather than daily life in times of war.²⁵ Rachel Seiffert’s approach to the war in her novel The Dark Room (2001) differs rather pointedly from the works discussed so far, since she places centre stage the suffering induced as a consequence of the Second World War. Her narration is more fragmented, for she tells three different stories which are not

24 For a discussion of the narrative situation in Atonement see Phelan (2005: 322 – 36). 25 This turn from (national) history to the (individual) memory of events seems to be a recurrent feature in contemporary British literature. See Birke (2003: 143 – 58) and (2008).

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linked by particular characters or events, an incoherence which highlights the fragmentation of the experience of war. The first two stories narrate the lives and sufferings of children during the time of war; the first one revolves around the fate of Helmut, a partly disabled child, who helps a photographer, and, unlike his parents, survives a bombing in the dark room which provides the title of the book, and the second tells the story of Lore (who is the focalizer of this story) and her four siblings, who fend for themselves and manage to travel from the south of Germany to Hamburg, where they are finally met and – as far as is possible – cared for by their grandmother. Those two parts of the novel thus highlight the many deprivations, difficulties and extraordinary sufferings of a number of children, who, apart from their afflictions, have little in common: Helmut, who is not very capable and intelligent, stays alone in Berlin, while the lively, self-sacrificing Lore looks after her siblings during her odyssey through wartime Germany. The third story approaches the war from a different angle: here, the protagonist Micha becomes obsessed with the idea that his grandfather, whom he had always thought of as a loving and caring man, might well have been a war criminal. The importance which he attributes to that suspicion and his subsequent attempts at finding out the truth seem, on the one hand, to be the only honest way to deal with the situation and, in the end, acknowledge – and atone for? – the guilt of his grandfather. On the other hand, Micha’s quest not only upsets the life of the people he visits in order to question them (who turn out to have been collaborators), he also neglects his pregnant girlfriend Mina and his own family as a result of his obsession. Thus, even the life of the second generation after the war is marred by this traumatic event. There are three aspects of this novel that I would like to emphasise: firstly, more than the others I have discussed here, Seiffert’s work centres on the bewildering, fragmented experiences of the war itself, particularly on those of children who suffered without even understanding why their lives were uprooted in such a radical way. Secondly, the novel does not point to anyone who might be made responsible for the war. It rather highlights the pains of those who cannot be blamed, at least not within the framework of the story. Interestingly, those that have to go through the most traumatising experiences could be held responsible as well – if it were not ridiculous to hold children who knew nothing of their parents’ doings responsible for them. Lore and her siblings are, as the reader comes to understand, the children of leading Nazis; they are alone because their father has fled and their mother has been discovered in their hiding place in a village in the south of Germany. Even more disconcertingly, the only friendly young man who does not try to exploit the children, but instead helps them along, is Thomas, who is not only excruciatingly thin and has obviously been traumatised; he probably just pretends to have been imprisoned in Buchenwald and might just as well have

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been a Nazi himself. In this novel, however, he is presented as a haunted, suffering young man – one of the few good-hearted people the children encounter. Thirdly, the novel raises the question of the representability of the war. The fact that photographs often show something that does not correspond to the (fictional) facts and certainly are not able to capture the reality of the war is emphasised in several stories, which turns the unreliability of photography, along with the traumatising experiences of war, into leitmotifs of the novel. The photograph on Thomas’ passport testifies to something that is not true. The most pronounced use of photographs is probably made in the first story, where three kinds of photographs turn out to be unable to document the fictional reality. The photographer’s portraits of Helmut’s family are obviously hiding the most important fact of his existence: that his arm is lame, which accounts for his being treated as a disabled simpleton. Helmut’s own photographs of a station in Berlin, which might tell the truth about the thinning population and the enforced departure of men, do not bear witness to anything of the sort. And when Helmut takes some photographs of a dramatic scene, in which gypsies are badly ill-treated, these are unable to capture the movement, the injustice and the dramatic import of the whole event. The ‘dark room’ of the title thus refers not only to the photographer’s dark room in which Helmut survives, it also refers to the darkness which inevitably surrounds the chaotic, bewildering and fragmented experiences of war, which even the best works of art can highlight only fleetingly.

5. Conclusion While Seiffert’s book casts a gloomy light on the question of whether the war can be made visible at all, there are significant differences between the representations of war in the four stories of the wars I have tried to sketch. With the exception of Seiffert’s work, the ‘literary’ novels I have discussed are not concerned with the war in such a pronounced way as the popular works – there is no major subgenre in contemporary ‘high literature’ we might call ‘war novels’. ‘Literary’ novels rarely focus on the war; even those novelists that choose times and places of war as a setting of the story usually concern themselves not only with the presentation of war, but also with a number of different issues. For them, it is not the particular story of this or that war that is presented, it is rather the experience of war itself. Even those that give quite precise geographical locations and dates, like Ian McEwan, are concerned with a wide spectrum of issues, ranging from the chaotic experiences of a soldier and the remorse of a nurse trying to atone for what she did as a child, to the importance of (mis)perceptions, the influence of

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memory and the role of art. Quite often, the war is evoked by presenting the memories which still determine the lives of the characters, while in some cases the ‘fictions’ of memory, and the belated insight into what happened earlier seems to be more important than the experience of the war. Though Spies is set nearly exclusively in times of war, the war itself is a minor concern, compared to the experiences of the boys and the workings of memory which make it possible to achieve a new insight into one’s own mind after decades. Though ‘literary’ novels thus provide a whole range of different approaches to war both as far as the content and the use of genre conventions are concerned, their presentation of war does not result in a critical intervention in the larger debate about war. Let me hasten to add that they certainly present many innovative angles, forming their material in fascinating and original ways; but when one focuses on their presentation of war, they rather criticise, weigh, modify and balance existing ways of envisioning war, which they quite often put to different uses within the context of their stories. They are concerned with the particular, with individual experiences of war, which, at best, embody a general facet of human nature in the face of an ever-present conflict, as McEwan wrote in an essay: ‘At its best, literature is universal, illuminating human nature at precisely the point at which it is most parochial and specific’ (McEwan 2005: 6). Quite often, this involves concentration on major facets of the human condition, which are evoked by means of the presentation of experiences of war. More often than not, these works do not focus exclusively on the war itself; they rather raise a whole range of important questions, with the result that the visibility of the war is diminished by the light cast onto other issues. The popular texts which focus on the First and the Second World War respectively, fulfil different functions. As far as the ‘War Boom Literature’ is concerned, the novels are not geared at presenting facets of the human character, they rather aim at a (in the view of the respective authors) true and just, or just an interesting and exciting presentation of the war, which is achieved by the story of the experiences of different characters. The heterogeneous positions embodied in the ‘War Boom Novels’ of the 1920s and 1930s turn them into a part of the popular debate on the First World War. Taken as a whole, these works mark a shift from the critical recollection of the war to the formation of new memories. Many of these novels do not form autonomous works of art; they do not conform to modernist aesthetics, but they try to achieve particular results. In the words of Virginia Woolf, they are not self-contained aesthetic wholes, which widen our horizons, they rather give in to preaching and make us want to ‘join a society, or, more desperately, to write a cheque’ (Woolf 1950: 99). Even more disconcerting are the works that contribute to the popular image of the Battle of Britain. It is difficult to make out a ‘higher’ aim apart from present-

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ing a fascinating, readable story. This is not to deny that the (auto-)biographers attempt to provide a truthful insight into the lives and experiences of the characters – but they mostly remain within the bounds of the established image. Though they sometimes consciously demystify certain aspects of the war, in the end they overwhelmingly support the idealised account of the battle. In the majority of these works, there is no general criticism of the war – all of the lessons learned at such great costs from 1916 onwards seem to have been unlearned. In these stories, the war itself, the battles are centre stage, and the whole machinery provides the dashing young heroes with their chance to prove themselves and to make their impact on the world. The visibility of the war could scarcely be more pronounced. But this effect is achieved, paradoxically, by the invisibility of that which is most characteristic of wars: wounds, suffering and death. In popular literature, the visibility the First World War attained in the ‘war books controversy’ has given way to an image of the Battle of Britain which presents a frightening blend of visibility and invisibility, and makes it possible to idealise war once more. This pervasive ideal influences the perception of the Second World War as a whole. Especially British representations of World War II often smack of a kind of nostalgia, recalling gallant deeds by patriotic Englishmen. There may be more involved than just national pride, however, for the universal acceptance of the pilot as a hero seems to point to a general need for narrating war as a sanitised undertaking, silencing the elements that make it unbearable and creating the vision of a glorious time. The ethics of such undertakings are more than just questionable, but established genre conventions; reader expectations and the politics of the market seem to combine in an unholy alliance which continues to favour idealising narratives of the myth of the Battle of Britain in popular literature. With regard to Great Britain, we are left with contradictory stories of the visibility of war. While the suffering of huge numbers of people during the First World War dominated the popular novels of the late 1920s and 1930s, the presentation of the Battle of Britain points into a different direction, combining a heightened visibility of heroes with the invisibility of pain and death. Almost every insight derived from the suffering caused by the First World War, which destroyed the glorification of patriotic deeds, heroism and military glory in a seemingly irreversible way, appears to have been forgotten as far as the war in the air is concerned. With regard to ‘literary’ novels, there is more continuity. Although some novels place a great emphasis on the experience of the war itself, in most works the depiction of the experiences of the war is not as pronounced as in more popular genres. Those novels that refer to the First and Second World War and have been discussed here

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are multifaceted, shedding light on many questions of human existence, which rather impedes the visibility of the wars themselves.²⁶

Works Cited Aldington, Richard (1929) Death of a Hero (New York: Covici). Amis, Martin (1991) Time’s Arrow, or, the Nature of the Offense (New York: Harmony Books). Barker, Pat (1991 – 5) Regeneration-Trilogy, 3 vols. (New York: Viking Press). Barnes, Julian [1986] (1987) Staring at the Sun (London: Macmillan). Birke, Dorothee (2003) ‘Krisen der Erinnerung: Erinnern, Erzählen und Identität in Kazuo Ishiguros When We Were Orphans und Eva Figes’ Nelly’s Vision’, in Literatur – Erinnerung – Identität, ed. Astrid Erll, Marion Gymnich and Ansgar Nünning (Trier: WVT), 143 – 58. ––––– (2008) Memory’s Fragile Power: Crises of Memory, Identity and Narrative in Contemporary British Novels (Trier: WVT). Blunden, Edmund (1928) Undertones of War (London: R. Cobden-Sanderson). Boyd, William (1982) An Ice-Cream War (London: Hamish Hamilton). Brickhill, Paul [1954] (2001) Reach for the Sky: The Story of Douglas Bader, Legless Ace of the Battle of Britain (Annapolis: Bluejacket Books). Brooke, Rupert (1974) Four Poems [of] Rupert Brooke : Drafts and Fair Copies in the Author’s Hand (London: The Scolar Press). Churchill, Winston (1940) Britain’s Strength: Speech by the Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill, in the House of Commons, August 20, 1940 (New York: The British Library of Information). Deere, Alan C. [1959] (1999) Nine Lives (Manchester: Crécy). Eliot, T.S. (1988) The Waste Land and Other Poems (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). Erll, Astrid (2003) Gedächtnisromane: Literatur über den Ersten Weltkrieg als Medium englischer und deutscher Erinnerungskulturen in den 1920er Jahren (Trier: WVT). ––––– (2005) ‘Der erste Weltkrieg in Literatur und Erinnerungskultur der 1920er Jahre’, in Kulturgeschichte der englischen Literatur, ed. Vera Nünning (Tübingen: Narr), 237 – 50. Figes, Eva (1987) The Seven Ages (London: Fontana). Ford, Madox Ford (1982) Parade’s End (London: Penguin). Fraser, John (1976) Violence in the Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Frayn, Michael [2002] (2003) Spies (London: Faber and Faber). Galsworthy, John (1999) The Forsyte Saga (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Graves, Robert (1929) Good-Bye to All That: An Autobiography (London: J. Cape). Higgins, Jack (Harry Patterson) [1998] (1999) A Flight of Eagles (New York: Berkeley). Hillary, Richard [1942] (1998) The Last Enemy (Short Hills, NJ: Burford Books).

26 It may be, however, that the experience of war, the placing of man against a violent fate, is achieved in a more visible way in other genres – in poetry, or in works which are not concerned with a particular war, but with suffering, violence, and the experience of war itself. The Seven Ages (Figes 1987) is one of those novels which deal with war and healing without referring to any specific war.

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Hynes, Samuel (1990) A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: The Bodley Head). Ishiguro, Kazuo (1989) The Remains of the Day (New York: Randon House). Johns, W.E. [1941] (1952) Spitfire Parade (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Kennan, John [1998] (1999) The First World War (London: Pimlico). Manning, Frederic (1977). The Middle Parts of Fortune (London: P. Davies). McEwan, Ian [2001] (2002) Atonement (London: Vintage). ––––– (2005) ‘Literature, Science and Human Nature’, in The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, ed. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press), 5 – 19. Mevius, Jochen (2009) Repräsentationen der Battle of Britain und die Konstruktion nationaler Identität (Heidelberg: University Dissertation). Owen, Wilfred (1987) Anthem for Doomed Youth (London: The Woburn Press). Phelan, James (2005) ‘Narrative Judgements and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative: Ian McEwan’s Atonement’, in A Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. James Phelan und Peter Rabinowitz (Malden: Blackwell), 322 – 36. Remarque, Erich-Maria (1970) All Quiet on the Western Front, trans. A. W. Wheen, (London: Putnam & Company Ltd). Robinson, Derek (1983) Piece of Cake: A Novel (New York: Knopf). Sassoon, Siegfried (1930) Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (London: Faber & Faber). Schäfer, Stefanie (2011) ‘Just the Two of Us’: Self-Narration and Recognition in the Contemporary American Novel (Trier: WVT) Scott, Paul (1966 – 74) The Raj Quartet 4 vols (London: Heinemann). ––––– (1977) Staying On (London: Heinemann). Seiffert, Rachel (2001) The Dark Room (New York: Pantheon Books). Smith, Helena Zenna (1930) Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War (New York: E.P. Dutton) Wellum, Geoffrey (2002) First Light (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Sons). Wolf, Werner (2001) ‘Ian McEwans Atonement als Synthese aktueller Trends im englischen Erzählen der Gegenwart’, Sprachkunst: Beiträge zur Literaturwissenschaft 32.2, 291 – 311. Woolf, Virgina (1925) Mrs Dalloway (London: Hogarth Press). ––––– (1927) To the Lighthouse (London: Hogarth Press). ––––– (1950) ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’, 18.5.1924, in The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays. (London: Hogarth Press), 90 – 111. Zwerdling, Alex (1986) Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: University of California Press).

Anne Martina Emonts

Unmasking Violence and Domination: Mechtilde Lichnowsky and the 20th Century (Word) Wars The subject of death and of surviving wars both in the past and in the present concerns every human being on the planet and nobody can escape from this reality. In his recent book Man in the Dark (2008), Paul Auster discusses the subject of the (in)visibility of war in literature and in the media in a most impressive way: as an urgent alert for peace. Having read Mechtilde Lichnowsky’s books, this is my understanding of Paul Auster. Nearly 100 years earlier, in 1914 / 15, during the first year of World War I, Mechtilde Lichnowsky (1879 – 1958), a German writer (very few researchers and readers of German expressionism or Karl Kraus still recall her name), wrote these words: ‘Und was ist es mit dem Tod? Er ist öffentlicher geworden –.’[And what about death? It has just become more public –.]¹. She caused a minor scandal among her colleagues at the time with these words, to which I will refer later again. The very narrow path between naturalization of violence and non-violent convictions of the expressionistic Oh, Mensch!-generation [Oh, Mankind!-generation] is known and has been discussed extensively. I would like to bring forward Mechtilde Lichnowsky’s provocative statement: nowadays, death just became even more public. In her introduction to Violence, Culture and Identity (2006), Helen Chambers proposes that ‘Violence is to be understood in its discursive as well as material forms’ (Chambers 2006: 11). In his recent book Vertrauen und Gewalt [Confidence and Violence] (2009), Jan Philipp Reemtsma considers two types of violence: physical and non-physical. However, he emphasizes the violence targeted at the human body (Reemtsma 2009: 101 – 140). I intend to focus on the one hand on Mechtilde Lichnowsky’s opinion about the issue of how discourse produces violence, and on the other on how violence is represented in her texts. I have named her strategy, her criticism against the violence present in language, an ‘unmasking’ process, and it is my intention to illustrate how this occurs, always keeping in mind both ‘material’ and symbolic violence. Of course, the general question of how violence becomes part of the daily discourse (‘naturalization’) underlies my reflections. Other aspects to be taken into consideration on such a sensitive matter mainly derive from Mechtilde

1 See Lichnowsky (1914 / 15: 126 – 128).

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Lichnowsky’s œuvre being regarded as a machtkritischer Diskurs [critical discourse against power]. As I will be discussing texts written in German, it is useful to point out that the German term Gewalt means violence as well as power and force, even authority. The analysis of the ‘violence’ phenomenon is not new. During the 20th century alone, a line can be drawn from Norbert Elias’ dichotomy between violence and the process of culture up to Jan Reemtsma (Reemtsma 2009) – without forsaking Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ideas on pain (Philosophische Untersuchungen), Walter Benjamin (Kritik der Gewalt), Hannah Arendt (On violence), Susan Sontag (Regarding the Pain of Others), Pierre Bourdieu (La Domination Masculine) and many other philosophers who reflected about the communicability of violence. How to make the invisible visible? How to speak about the unspeakable? In Mechtilde Lichnowsky’s case, her pacific attitude as an intellectual is corroborated by her biography. Her life and her literary success were apparently deeply marked by the two World Wars of the 20th century. Mechtilde Lichnowsky was the wife of Carlmax [Karl Max] Lichnowsky, German ambassador in London from 1912 to 1914. He is still recalled as the one politician who tried to avert the beginning of the First World War right until the very end. In the aftermath of his death in 1928, Mechtilde Lichnowsky having lived at first in exile in the South of France, later emigrated voluntarily to England in 1946, as a British subject² by her second marriage in 1937. For over twenty years, she remained a close friend of Karl Kraus (1874 – 1936) and was very close to him during the time he wrote his own major anti-war works. Carlmax Lichnowsky had distributed a last minute underground written warning trying to avoid the outbreak of war, but he was exposed and banned from the German political scene until his death in 1928. He later compiled his manifesto and other documents and published them under the title: Auf dem Wege zum Abgrund [On the Way to the Abyss] (1927). The Nazis counted him among the Novemberköpfe [Heads of November], and hence a traitor to the German nation. After World War II, the Lichnowsky family lost all their possessions in what is today the Czech Republic, and no member of the Lichnowsky family remained in Germany. Despite both the 20th century’s wars and the political oppression, from right to left, affected the lives, careers and works of German writers from that generation, especially female, Mechtilde Lichnowsky ‘had it all’ up to her near total extinction from the literary canon.

2 In 1937, Mechtilde Lichnowsky married Sir Ralph Harding Peto in the South of France. He died in 1945.

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In this essay I would like to show the spectrum of how war and violence are reflected in some of the texts of Mechtilde Lichnowsky’s œuvre and which are her closest contexts. She did not denounce war or spoke publicly about it in a direct manner like Karl Kraus did with his apocalyptic satire Die letzten Tage der Menschheit [The Last Days of Mankind] (1922); or later as Egon Erwin Kisch in his work as a reporter. She was no patriotic war correspondent like Alice Shalek³, who was attacked by Karl Kraus, as he interpreted her texts about war as propaganda for violence (Kraus 1922: 159 – 162). His own works may be deemed anti-war literature and his way of denouncing violence was to show violence in authentic images or texts directly addressing the public and letting them speak for themselves (see illustration beneath).

Fig 1: The photo shows the execution of Cesare Battisti, a Reichstag deputy who sided with Italy and fought in the Italian army. Obviously, Kraus chose this photo in reference to the crucifixion of Jesus. The violence of the act committed contrasts the shocking brutality with the happy faces of the spectators. (Kraus 1922)⁴ (© Library of Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach; Sigla K: Rara, No G 84. 1867)

3 Vd. Schalek (1915). The book contains beautiful pictures of the Tyrol mountains and is written like a tourist guide to the War. Shalek’s genre was the travel report: the Tymkrol War seemed to be just another voyage. 4 Battisti was taken prisoner on the battlefield and executed, that means murdered, after a summary trial. The photo circulated as a postcard, which was used by Kraus for his book. Detailed information I owe to António Sousa Ribeiro, University of Coimbra.

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His Reklamefahrten zur Hölle [Advertising-Trips to Hell], from which an audio document remains of Kraus reading his own texts as if he were a sports commentator commenting on a tourist visit to a battlefield – is the most brutal satire on violence ever heard.⁵ Not to mention Kraus’ Dritte Walpurgisnacht [Third Night of Walpurgis], written in 1933. Although his incipit says: ‘Mir fällt zu Hitler nichts ein’ [Nothing occurs to me about Hitler] the attacks on Nazi-brutality in language and praxis are pervasive throughout the work primarily because the mental atmosphere does not even allow for satire anymore. Mechtilde Lichnowsky never described violence in a material, physical form. She shows in her literature how symbolic violence is present in language and how this might turn into cruel material reality. First, I point out which of Mechtilde Lichnowsky’s texts testify to the 20th century wars. Second, I will demonstrate how far this author submits the historical facts of violence to further scrutiny: symbolic violence and oppressing dominance which happen in and through spoken and written discourse. Specifically, superficial ‘talk’ is unmasked pitilessly. Mechtilde Lichnowsky belonged to a generation of authors whose first literary successes and ‘coming outs’ took place during the years of 1913 to 1921.The subject of Death is present in nearly all of her early works. In that aspect, she surely was a child of her time. She was even frequently attacked by critics because of her verbal radicalism: she is said to show ‘brutality’ in relation to the characters in her novels, as Ludwig von Ficker once told her. (Ficker 1988: 282) Another critic wrote: ‘Sie sieht scharf, überscharf; die Art, wie sie die Körperlichkeit eines Menschen wiedergibt, hat etwas Verletzendes.’ [She sees sharply, too sharp; the way how she reflects the physical / body of a human being has something hurting in it / is hurting] (Meyer 1918: 216). Let me point out some examples from ‘War in Mechtilde Lichnowsky’s Œuvre’. Ein Spiel vom Tod [A Play of Death], a drama in which Death is the main character, was written in London, still in the German Embassy, on the eve of World War I. There is Der Stimmer [The Tuner], a novel of 1917, in which a brutal verbal mother-and-daughter-war is described against the background of war and revolution. In Kindheit [Childhood], written, better still, concluded while in exile in France during 1934; Mechtilde Lichnowsky commits to memory how far her own family story is related to the French / Prussian War 1870 / 71. And furthermore in her novel Delaïde, published in 1935, the main character Dalaïde goes insane and dies of a broken heart by World War I.

5 First edited in Die Fackel, 23 (1921) Nr. 577 – 582, 96 – 98.

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World War II, as a subject, is not openly dealt with in her later books.⁶ Even had she lived longer than 1958 – deeply injured by her German people and having lost nearly everything – it is unlikely that she would have spoken out against the word war any more. She dedicated herself to writing exclusively about literature, often with a type of pedagogical attitude. Her ethos demonstrates that by writing and reading books, and respecting our language, we are once again able to read the world and live decently.⁷ The representation of the violence of war in her texts is rare. Only once did she contribute, as most expressionists did, with a text which explicitly mentions the theme of war: in the Zeit-Echo of 1914 / 15. In her most famous expressionistic poem ‘Aus Pferderücken fließt’ the suffering of army horses is portrayed. From their backs flow blood and matter: that is how the poem starts. She does not speak about the suffering of human beings – she describes the suffering of the horses, caused by men, who ‘took paradise away from them’ (Lichnowsky 1914 / 15: 128). Nevertheless, the poem is preceded by a ‘letter to the editor’ revealing a rather unusual outlook on the war as mentioned above: Mechtilde Lichnowsky pretends to have a rather ‘cool’ attitude towards killing and death – because the fact and presence of death became ‘more public’. As with all texts by Mechtilde Lichnowsky, we have to be watchful of her unusual application of the usual categories. Her oscillating style makes it possible to speak on the same page in different tongues: the ‘letter to the editor’ begins with a light small-talk-tone, switching to an ironic remark about Richard Wagner, then progresses to the use of her tools of cold objectivity (‘Der Krieg ist ein Handwerk’ [War is a trade]) and, finally, to imitation from a cruel ironic distance of the futuristic pathos of War in the German language, she writes: Wie mit Expressen rücken aus Nebeln zu Eisen verhärtete Träume der Industriepriester aneinander und gelangen lebensfähig ins Freie. […] Schon zu Platten und Rädern verarbeitete Metalle schwitzt die Erde aus den Werken. Rohre schießen sich selbst ans Tageslicht. Tiere halten ihr Leder den neu entzauberten Maschinen hin. [Like express trains out of the mist are approaching dreams of the industrial priests, having hardened to iron and reaching into the open air, able to live. The Earth is sweating out factories metal already finished as

6 Mechtilde Lichnowsky, La Chair faite Verbe [The flesh turns Word], complete typescript, DLA (= Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar), A: Lichnowsky, 81. 7496. It was finished in London, 1948. The incipit says: ‘Je vais chez les serpents’ [I am going to the snakes]: together with the title and seeing the snake as a symbol for the fear of evil, we can count this unpublished text also among Mechtilde Lichnowsky’s works on violence and domination. 7 She shares this radical thesis with Paul Auster, to whom I’ll refer later again in this matter, and also with the authors of the film Der Vorleser [The Reader], based on a German novel by Bernhard Schlink.

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plates and wheels. Tubes are shooting themselves up to daylight. Animals offer their leather to the new enchanting machines.] (Lichnowsky 1914 / 15: 126)

The violence and conflict among human beings, which language generates, is Mechtilde Lichnowsky’s topic. She thus deals with the danger inherent in conflicts in communication, or, as she puts it: ‘Die gefährliche Wertlosigkeit des Redens’ [The dangerous futility of talk] (Lichnowsky 1924: 184). In her 1921 romance Geburt [Birth], Albert, the main character but most of the times an attentive observer is made to describe the violent ignorance of a husband. Onkel Johnny ist der deutsche Ehemann: unhöflich mit seiner Frau, weil zu ehrlich und sich selbst zu treu. Woher mag das kommen? Diese Ehrlichkeit ist keine Tugend, also ist kein Grund vorhanden, sie für Wahrheitsliebe mit der dazugehörigen Selbsterkenntnis zu halten. Sie ist ungefähr wie der Totschlag [homicide], das heißt Mord ohne Absicht zur Tötung, in diesem Fall Wahrhaftigkeit ohne die Absicht, die Wahrheit zu suchen. [Uncle Johnny is the German husband: not polite to his wife, because he is too honest and too true to himself. […] This kind of honesty is not a virtue […]. It is more or less a homicide, that is: murder without intention to murder, in this case truth without intention, to seek the truth.] (Lichnowsky 1954 [1921]: 111)

As in many other of her texts, similarly in Delaïde, Mechtilde Lichnowsky pitilessly describes the lack of communication between the sexes. However, the war between the sexes which is visible in the language is not the main battlefield of this German female writer. Favouring frequently an androgynous view on life, she focuses on the genesis of violence in daily discourse in her main book, Der Kampf mit dem Fachmann [The struggle with the expert] of 1924, which Karl Kraus, Theodor W. Adorno, Kurt Tucholsky and others appreciated very much. She focused on empty phrases, on the instrument which fosters the ruthless domination of the partner in a conversation, and, more generally on the hindrance of all communication. Language causes injuries, psychical and physical, and even destroys social networks. In Fachmann, Mechtilde Lichnowsky denounces the ‘daily Word War’ between the amateur and the expert, a metaphor of those who (mis)use their status, title, uniform or position, and have a kind of thirst for power, not to communicate, but to prove, by not listening to and by not understanding the other, that they ‘know it better’. They have a diploma and based on this they think of themselves to be right, having no notion of themselves and without noticing that they are regurgitating empty phrases and conventions learned once upon a time. In Mechtilde Lichnowsky’s philosophy, the expert is born between vanity and stupidity. ‘Patridiots’ (Lichnowsky 1924: 37) for example, and people who divide the world into ‘men’ and ‘women’. People who pretend to ‘help’ to hide their thirst for power,

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the State being the biggest Fachmann [expert] – in short, the ‘Struggle with the Expert’ is a long power-critical discourse, anticipating Austin’s theory of speech acts and knowing that bad words bring about bad praxis. ‘[S]o wie ich spreche, so handle ich.’ [Like I speak I act] (Lichnowsky 1924: 177) Mechtilde Lichnowsky calls them the ‘talkers’, those who reproduce phrases ‘durch mechanisch eingeatmeten Zeitungsstil’ [by newspaper style mechanically breathed in] (Lichnowsky 1924: 181) – suggesting already in 1924 that the language of the media penetrates our discourse. Her impressive incipit about the struggle metaphor shifted to discourse, delighted her contemporaries: ‘die Kunst, ein Kampf mit der Wirklichkeit, und kein Gegner wurde noch so blutig geliebt wie dieser’ [art, a struggle with reality, and no enemy has ever been loved so bloodily] (Lichnowsky 1924: 7). And she will fight, all her life, her battle against the lack of logical speech and verbal violence. The ‘struggle’ metaphor is fashionable for the time: as a consequence of Darwinism, there is Ernst Jünger writing his Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis [Struggle as an Interior Experience] (Jünger 1922); there is Adolf Hitler with Mein Kampf [My Struggle] (Hitler 1923), these among many others. And there is Mechtilde Lichnowsky’s verbal struggle against domination. She also left us a linguistic analysis of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, unmasking sentence by sentence, the poverty of his confused brain.⁸ Even during World War II, probably in 1941, she writes a portrait of Adolf Hitler without mentioning his name and publishes it in Dolf Sternberger’s Die Wandlung in 1948: ‘Werdegang eines Wirrkopfs’ [Curriculum of a confused mind]”. Here, she establishes a connection between verbal and physical violence. ‘Bemerkenswert dünkt einen, daß niemand da ist, der ihm [dem Wirrkopf] das richtige Wort zuruft, eins, das genau so paßt und anprallt, wie die Faust auf eine bestimmte Stelle des Kiefers.’ [It seems remarkable, that there is nobody, who will shout at him the right word, a word, which fits exactly and crashes, like the fist on a certain area of the chin] (Lichnowsky 1948: 611).⁹ Until her death in London in 1958, she goes on fighting the remains of Nazilanguage in daily discourse: in her opinion, there are words which turn ‘unhygienic’ by misuse and should not be reused (Lichnowsky 1958: 112f). Contrasting frequently the honesty of animal-language with the human betrayal of language, Mechtilde Lichnowsky left us a considerable legacy for peace in literature – magically forgotten: of no use for power-owners. In 1949, Mechtilde Lichnowsky, living since 1946 in London, publishes Worte über Wörter [Speech about Words]. Most

8 Typescript probably written in exile (France): Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, A: Lichnowsky, 81.7629. 9 Mechtilde Lichnowsky has been corresponding with Sternberger since 1940: vd. DLA.

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of the text was certainly written before and during World War II. Her ‘Word War’ goes on, making Nazi-language and language of war visible, not the War itself. ‘Schlechtes Deutsch graust mich, und mir graut vor Menschen, die ihre Muttersprache vergewaltigen.’ [Bad German is a horror for me, and people horrify me, who rape [!] their mother tongue.] She writes, making quite clear, that language can ‘rape’ whoever is listening. ‘Rape’ is the word she uses for all examples of language betrayal by the Nazis and their writers (Lichnowsky 1949: 122 and 268). Obviously, the narrow nexus between ‘rape’ and ‘mother’ is intentional. As an example of military language, she analyses the word ‘Feindflug’ [enemy-flight] – which is an illogical construction of the Nazi-language, and consequently not translatable into English. (Lichnowsky 1949: 46) She calls such words ‘un-words’, like the war-word ‘Entwarnung’ [diswarning] or the related verb ‘entwarnen’ [to diswarn]. Also this word is not translatable: it is not logical to say ‘diswarn’; people have been warned about the bombs which will fall – or not. I can love a person, writes Mechtilde Lichnowsky, but I cannot ‘dislove’ a person. Whether we agree with Mechtilde Lichnowsky’s ‘linguistic turn’ or not  – I have pointed out some instances of how far war, in this case World War II, is simultaneously visible and invisible in Mechtilde Lichnowsky’s texts. Thus, unmasking linguistic strategies of domination or, in other words, denouncing that language might be an act of violence. One of Mechtilde Lichnowsky’s main theses is that the lack of logic and fantasy causes the sickness of a society. And this is frequently the motiv in her texts. She also calls it, ‘the blindness of the soul’ [Seelenblindheit], a disease which means ‘Agnosis’: people are unable to recognize words or to relate words to the objects, to their meanings and functions. In several of her books this motiv appears, shifting the root meaning of the word for a psychic disease to a metaphor for an individual state of mind or even a mass-phenomenon. To prove the timeliness of Mechtilde Lichnowsky’s point of view, I will briefly shed light on the mental context in which she may be placed. I have mentioned earlier her affinities with Karl Kraus, both with his Die letzten Tage der Menschheit and his Dritte Walpurgisnacht. He called the Nazis the ‘Worthelfer der Gewalt’ [helpers of violence with words] (Kraus 1989 72). We may also think about Aus dem Wörterbuch des Unmenschen (Sternberger, Storz and Süskind 1945 / 6) or about LTI (Klemperer 1947). There have been  – after both of the 20th century’s World Wars – different attempts to find an approach to the unspeakable. In a way, Mechtilde Lichnowsky foreruns Ludwig Wittgenstein, who wrote Ich wollte nämlich schreiben, mein Werk bestehe aus zwei Teilen: aus dem, der hier vorliegt, und aus alledem, was ich nicht geschrieben habe. Und gerade dieser zweite Teil ist der wichtige. Es wird nämlich das Ethische durch mein Buch gleichsam von Innen her begrenzt;

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und ich bin überzeugt, daß es, streng, nur so zu begrenzen ist. [I wanted to write, that my work consists of two parts: of the part, that is in front of you, and the one of all the things, I did not write. And this second part is especially the important one. Because: the ethical is confined by my book from inside. And I am convinced, that it is, seriously, can only be confined like this.] (Ficker 1988: 196).

In her Fachmann-book Mechtilde Lichnowsky drafts, for example, a philosophy of pain (Lichnowsky 1924: 87ff), reflecting upon the impossibility of communicating pain – very close to Ludwig Wittgenstein, who asks in his famous § 245 of his Philosophische Untersuchungen [Philosophical Investigations]: ‘Wie kann ich denn mit der Sprache noch zwischen die Schmerzäußerung und den Schmerz treten wollen?’ [How can I enter with language the space between the utterance of pain and the pain itself?] (Wittgenstein 2003:146).¹⁰ Wittgenstein, in my opinion, is working on his own experience or trauma of war with these words. We shall never be able to prove this, but I am convinced of it having understood what he did not say. In how far texts, reports, in words and images, are able to ‘show’ violence? And up to what extent are they acceptable? We know Susan Sontag’s approach to the problem. We have seen films and documentaries and photographs about the holocaust; we digest the daily overdoses of blood in TV; we read about violent video games and their potentially harmful consequences. What is the difference? In Paul Auster’s novel The Man in the Dark the main character, reflecting on how these two different perceptions of war in the USA came to happen after ‘9 / 11’, utters: ‘The question is: at what point did the two stories begin to diverge?’ (Auster 2008: 50). Trying to answer my own and Paul Auster’s questions and bearing in mind Mechtilde Lichnowsky and the other writers previously mentioned, I share the views of those who struggled to speak about the unspeakable for ethical reasons: violence does not tolerate aesthetization of any kind. That would mean, for example, the prohibition of violent video games, and any other soft pulp and cheap stereotypes, verbal and visual ones, would be wiped out of war-reports in the daily news broadcasts. ‘Nichts ist verblüffender als die einfache Wahrheit, nichts ist exotischer als unsere Umwelt, nichts ist phantasievoller als die Sachlichkeit.’ [Nothing is more amazing than the simple truth. Nothing is more exotic than our surroundings.

10 See in this context Wittgenstein’s paragraphs 255, 256 and 257 and Emonts 2009: 425ff and Schnell 2005 about the trias violence, pain and memory. In Mechtilde Lichnowsky’s expressionistic contribution to the aforementioned Zeit-Echo, she also dedicates a paragraph of her ‘letter to the editor’ to pain (Lichnowsky 1914 / 5: 127).

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Nothing bears more phantasy than objectivity.] wrote Egon Erwin Kisch in his preface to Der rasende Reporter (Kisch 1925 [1924]: VIII). Where is the ‘Schmerzgrenze’ [limit for bearable pain]? What makes the difference, for example, between the representation of a rape, pornography and erotica in films or texts? There is no longer a way to escape into our little world (Auster 2008: 97). Paul Auster speaks of the ‘sickening violence of a story’ (Auster 2008: 122), the war as a metaphor for life (Auster 2008: 159) – like Mechtilde Lichnowsky did 100 years before him: ‘Ist der Krieg furchtbarer als das Leben? Aber auch nicht schöner.’ [Is war more terrible than life? But also not nicer.] (Lichnowsky 1914 / 15: 127). Auster reflects on what is happening in our brains when confronted with the violence of a TV image of a dead soldier: ‘Titus is no longer quite human. He has become the idea of a person, a person and not a person, a dead bleeding thing: une nature morte.’ (Auster 2008: 176) And he draws a contrastive line between the media and books: Escaping into a film is not like escaping into a book. Books force you to give something back to them, to exercise your intelligence and imagination, whereas you can watch a film – and even enjoy it – in a state of mindless passivity (Auster 2008: 15).

He describes the ‘insomnia of the just’, alluding several times to Camus, and surely thinking about Les Justes. ‘Civil War’ has turned to his decisive metaphor for life (Auster 2008: 177 and 179). ‘And the weird world rolls on.’ (Auster 2008: 180) Helen Chambers asks: Have we – having long lost the joy of spontaneous aggression identified by Elias in early modern society, and conclusively stifled at the latest by Freud round 1900 – negotiated a position where ersatz violence has to be extreme to make an impact, and where the violence of the word is being regularly deployed as a weapon, whose force is not adequately recognized?” (Chambers 2006: 25f).

Violence has no words. Similar to love. Human narratives are a huge attempt at approaching the unspeakable, ineffable, unutterable. The so called media, especially in its new formats, seduce us into believing that we have come closer to the ‘real thing’, to the more ‘authentic’; that we have improved communication. We just have not. We carry on looking at bloody bodies with no facial expression whatsoever. There is no katharsis any more. And ‘material’ violence is increasing all over the world. This is as true as it is trivial. What can be done? We have to work on our traumata. We have to, as Paul Auster proposes:

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keep our eyes open to the horror for his sake, to breath him into us and hold him there – in us, that lonely, miserable death, in us, the cruelty that was visited on him in those last moments, in us and no one else, so as not to abandon him to the pitiless dark that swallowed him up (Auster 2008: 175).

Let me now close the circle with Mechtilde Lichnowsky’s proposal, namely her final sentence of Worte über Wörter [Speech on Words] which might show us one of the possible strategies for this painful path: ‘Was ich erhoffe? Nichts als Ehrfurcht vor der Sprache. Vielleicht wäre noch die Vorsicht zu erreichen, die man bei Bahnübergängen walten läßt.’ [What I hope for? Nothing but respect for the language. Maybe, we could reach the kind of prudence we have in the case of railway-passages.] (Lichnowsky 1949: 320).

Works Cited Auster, Paul (2008) Man in the Dark (New York: Henry Holt). Chambers, Helen (ed.) (2006) Violence, Culture and Identity, Essays on German and Austrian Literature, Politics and Society (Oxford / Bern / Berlin / Bruxelles / Frankfurt am Main / New York / Vienna: Peter Lang). Emonts, Anne Martina (2009) Mechtilde Lichnowsky – Sprachlust und Sprachkritik, Annäherung an ein Kulturphänomen (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann). Ficker, Ludwig von (1988) ‘An Karl Kraus, Brief v. 23.11.1920’, in Briefwechsel, 1914 – 1925, Bd. 2 (Salzburg: Müller; Innsbruck: Hoyman). Jünger, Ernst (1922) Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (Berlin: Mittler). Kisch, Egon Erwin (1925) Der rasende Reporter (Berlin: Erich Reiss). Kraus, Karl (1922) Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (Vienna, Leipzig: Verlag ‘Die Fackel’). Kraus, Karl [1933] (1989) Dritte Walpurgisnacht (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). [Karl Max] Fürst Lichnowsky (1927) Auf dem Wege zum Abgrund, Londoner Berichte, Erinnerungen und sonstige Schriften, 2 Vols. (Dresden: Carl Reissner). Lichnowsky, Mechtilde (1914 / 15) ‘Ein Brief’, in Das Zeit-Echo, Ein Kriegs-Tagebuch der Künstler [Echo of Time, A War Diary of the Artists], 1914 / 15, 1. Jg., H. 9, 126 – 128. ––––– [1921] (1954) Geburt (Esslingen: Bechtle 1954). ––––– (1924) Der Kampf mit dem Fachmann, (Vienna / Leipzig: Jahoda & Siegel). ––––– (1935) Delaïde (Berlin: S. Fischer). ––––– [1941] (1948) ‘Werdegang eines Wirrkopfes’, in Die Wandlung, 3 (1948) 606 – 615. ––––– (1949) Worte über Wörter (Vienna: Berglandverlag). ––––– (1958) Heute und Vorgestern (Vienna: Berglandverlag). Meyer, Paul (1918) ‘Die neuen Erzähler’, in Das Junge Deutschland, Jg. 1, 1918, 216. Reemtsma, Jan Philipp (2009) Vertrauen und Gewalt (Hamburg: Pantheon). Schalek, Alice (1915) Tirol in Waffen, Kriegsberichte von der Tiroler Front (Munich: Hugo Schmidt Verlag).

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Schnell, Ralf (2005) ‘Sprache der Gewalt – Gewalt der Sprache’, in Gewalt und kulturelles Gedächtnis, Repräsentationsformen von Gewalt in Literatur und Film seit 1945 (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag) 41 – 54. Wittgenstein, Ludwig [1958] (2003) Philosophische Untersuchungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp).

Júlia Garraio¹

Porn, Rape and the Fall of the Third Reich: On Thor Kunkel’s Novel Endstufe Both the image of the Third Reich as a sexually repressive and conservative society and its counterpart (Hitler’s Germany as a highly eroticized country) are part of a long tradition of using sexuality to understand Nazism. Most of such approaches tend to establish an association between moral rottenness, pathological sexuality and National Socialism, i.e., they assume that ‘abnormal’ sexuality is a key to explaining abnormal politics. Andrea Slane links the diverse efforts to approach Nazism through sexuality to the ‘20th century’s liberal humanist preoccupation with sexual explanations for human behavior’ as well as to a ‘mostly conservative tendency toward reading acts of immorality willy-nilly across different moral registers’ (Slane 1997: 148). Such readings therefore take many forms and are present in the most diverse genres and political and ideological landscapes, as can be inferred from the following indiscriminate examples: Gunter Grass’s introduction of what some critics perceived as pornographic elements into his Danzig Trilogy (Die Blechtrommel, 1959; Katz und Maus, 1961; Hundejahre, 1963), the use of pornography in Israeli Stalag’s fiction², the depiction of sexual abuse and sadomasochism in the movie Il Portieri di Notte (Liliana Cavani, Italy, 1974) and Jonathan Littell’s use of incest and homosexuality in Les Bienveillantes (2006). According to Dagmar Herzog, five main strands can be observed in the context of the literature, film, journalism, and popular culture that ‘emphasize Nazism’s purported sexual perversity’: (1) ‘morbid decadence and sadomasochism as hallmarks of fascism’, (2) ‘fascism as intrinsically homoerotic’, (3) ‘fascism as femininity gone awry’ (which explains Nazism’s grasp of power through Hitler’s attraction to women ), (4) ‘Hitler’s own gender-bending as the key to his ability to seduce the nation’ and (5) ‘fascism (and even the Holocaust itself) as the titillating backdrop for hardcore pornographic fantasies’. Not surprisingly many of the works conveying such readings were the target of heated controversy. As Herzog claims, although such approaches may lend attention to certain issues that have not been privileged by

1 Research funded by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia: Project ‘The Representation of Violence and the Violence of Representation’ (POCTI / ELT / 61579 / 2004), Centro de Estudos Sociais / Universidade de Coimbra. 2 The Stalag fiction is a short-lived genre of Israeli fiction that flourished in the early 1960s. It consisted of pornographic accounts of imprisonment, generally of Allied soldiers, sexual brutalization by SS female guards and the prisoner’s eventual revenge (usually rape and murder).

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scholarship so far, they (or at least some of them) may lead to dangerous inaccuracies, which, among others, include tarring some groups (for example, homosexuals and women) with fascism, universalizing the potential for pleasure in evil (thereby evacuating all historical specificity in the analysis of Nazism), and glamorizing and eroticizing violence and its perpetrators (Herzog 2005: 11 – 14). Like many of the previous readings of the Third Reich through sexuality, Thor Kunkel’s³ Endstufe [Final Stage] (2004) also sparked intense controversy.⁴ This German novel was commercialized on two grounds: innovation, out of its supposed radical approach to Nazism through pornography, and historical reliability gained by the long historical research undertaken by the author. None of these seemed to win over critics. In Germany, reviews were overwhelmingly negative and the novel was accused of bad taste, bad writing, pornography, revisionism and glamorizing Nazism (see, for example, Detje 2004; Kämmerlings 2004; Krause 2004). Even the authenticity of the porn-movies (the Sachsenwaldfilme), at the centre of the plot, was eventually challenged. A report by the television broadcast 3sat Kulturmagazin suggested that they were from the fifties, and not from the Third Reich, as Kunkel assumed (Heineman 2005: 64 – 5). The author claimed to be the victim of a public auto-da-fé orchestrated by some left-wing guardians of the politically correct and by a literary establishment unable and unwilling to tolerate his deviation from the ‘dogmas’ of World War II (WWII) representations (Kunkel 2004b, 2005, 2007a, 2007b).⁵ Considering how Endstufe follows in the tradition of associating Nazism with sexual license, my aims in this paper are to examine how sexuality and pornography are used in the novel and to expose the function and the ideological consequences of such an approach.

3 Thor Kunkel (1963, Frankfurt am Main) studied film and fine arts in San Francisco. He lived for 5 years in London and in 1992 he moved to the Netherlands. In 2002, he moved to Berlin. After his debut novel, Das Schwarzlich-Terrarium [The Blacklight-Terrarium] (2000) was awarded the Ernst-Willner prize in 1999, he was seen as a raising talent in German literary circles. His reputation was severely damaged by the controversy surrounding Endstufe. 4 A brief presentation of the controversy surrounding the publication and reception of Endstufe in 2004 is presented by Elisabeth Heineman (2005: 63 – 65). 5 Kunkel’s anger and resentment for what he called his ‘public execution’ were foremost targeted at the influential journalist and author Hendryk Broder. Broder had published a demolishing review of the novel in Der Spiegel (Broder 2004).

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1. The Third Reich as a Familiar Consumer Society Clearly influenced by motives and strategies of the roman noir, Endstufe mixes science, occultism, pornography, war and politics. Set in decadent and hedonistic, privileged social circles of Nazi Germany, Thor Kunkel’s novel portrays a leisure class obsessed with pleasure and technology, bringing the reader to places like Berlin, Berchtesgaden, Libya, Italy and the United States. In 1940, when the German military might seemed unchallenged, three opportunists with a propensity for corruption (Ferrie, an upper-class scientist of the SS, Pfister, a former Lebensborn gynecologist, and Holsten, a former Babelsberg cameraman who had deserted on his way to the Eastern front) engage in the production of porn-movies. These would be used, among other ends, to amuse the troops, to be traded for war materials and to try to secure its producers a safe haven in the postwar world. The central character is another scientist from the SS, Karl Fussmann, who by chance becomes the protagonist of one of the movies. Falling madly in love with his co-star, Lotte, a prostitute with cinema ambitions, he begins an odyssey to win her, which leads him to a Berliner upper-class brothel and, later on, after several adventures in North Africa and imprisonment, to a devastated Germany, from where he rescues his beloved. The two adventure in the United States together and the novel ends somewhere in Las Vegas, not far from the location where atomic tests are taking place in 1959. There is a clear attempt to proceed with an historical reconstitution of the German wartime society in the novel. The plot integrates important historical events (for example, Rommel’s Africa campaign). Famous personalities from the period, mainly from the artistic and mundane milieu, appear in the background (among others, the sculptor Arno Breker, his favorite model, Stührk, Conte Ciano, Mussolini’s son in law, the photographer Charlotte Rohrbach and Mrugowsky, the famous SS doctor condemned to death at the Nuremberg Medical Trial). The narrative also incorporates slang no longer in use (‘Ananaskopf’ for ‘Asian’, for example). Even some fictional places are nothing but obvious mirrors of historical locations (see, for example, the resemblances between the novel’s Der Germanische Harem and the legendary upper-class brothel Salon Kitty). However, this historical reconstitution does not promote a sense of detachment from the present. The reader is struck, not by the gap between the fictional world created in the text and the world in which the novel was written (the twenty first century), but by the similarities between the two. The German society portrayed in the first part (when the German home front is still untouched from Allied attacks) is characterized by a disturbing level of familiarity for the modern reader. The overwhelming presence of contemporary brands (Bayer, Coca-Cola, Hugo Boss, Nivea), the description of the SS-Hygieneinstitut

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in Berlin as a typical top scientific department (with daily life marked by harsh rivalry among scientists competing for funding for their research projects and the inevitable gossip), and the many references to a growing fascination for robots and artificial intelligence are just some of the most obvious and effective strategies that foster that sense of normality. Even the way the characters talk about their political leaders seems to be taken from a contemporary gossip magazine about the rich and famous (Hitler’s gastronomic preferences, Göring’s and Goebbels’s sexual exploits, Frau Goebbels’s concerns about her looks, etc.). The genocidal ideology of the regime is perceptive in the text (for example, in the jokes about Jews or in the comments on German superiority). However, it emerges not as something alien, but as an element fully incorporated into a familiar consumer society. The characters, all of them racially acceptable to the regime and (with the exception of Holsten) Nazis, drink Coca-Cola and Martini, attend fashion shows, admire Hugo Boss clothes (among them are SS uniforms), go to wild parties, snort cocaine, have apartments equipped with the newest household commodities, travel around and look for sexual pleasure. Professional opportunities, money and social prestige, not fanatic belief, brought them to work for Nazi organizations like the SS. Fussmann perfectly exemplifies a certain disposition towards corruption that enables him (and other characters) to live under a criminal regime without moral misgivings. There is no doubt that he  – just like the others  – is fully aware of what is going on in the concentration camps: Böhme informs him that medicines invented by his colleagues are being tested in Dachau (Kunkel 2004a: 198) with the same scientist referring to other medical experiments on Polish clergymen (Kunkel 2004a: 206). Fussmann, however, reveals no sign of outrage at such procedures. He only reacts to the brutality of the regime where it threatens his personal safety, his bank account or his love and sexual life. He perceives Gestapo controls as merely tiresome routine procedures that prevent trains from arriving on time and concentration camps as the embodiment of his terrible destiny only if the authorities learn of his activities as a porno actor. In his ability to remain indifferent to the suffering of others and to profit from the opportunities offered by the system he is presented not as an exception, but as the rule. Not even the very young are immune to corruption and viciousness. When a group of boy scouts by chance interrupts the filming of a porno-movie, the leader, a young teenager, takes advantage of the situation to extract extra money: he cynically plays the role of a gentleman (claiming to care for the well-being of the ‘lady in distress’, Heidi, the porno-actress) to openly blackmail Ferrie, reminding him of concentration camps (Kunkel 2004a: 65 – 67). Money and sexual pleasure, not any specific political ideology, appear in the novel as the key to grasping the social realities of the Nazi period.

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Kunkel openly attempts to make Germany in 1940 – 41 look like America at the beginning of the twentieth-first century: a highly sexualized leisure and consumer society enjoying all that money can offer while its soldiers fight wars abroad in ‘undeveloped’ regions of the planet. For Kunkel’s characters, war is something of no major interest to their daily lives. Before being sent to the African war front, Fussmann perceives the images from the Eastern front as something unreal, as a sort of film made in Babelsberg. Many of the comments made by several characters – including by some German politicians talking to Conte Ciano at the brothel (Kunkel 2004a: 230) – that reduce the war to a competition for natural resources, especially oil, and as a means of boosting the economy and fighting unemployment, also sound ever so familiar to the modern reader. Nazism is thus perceived as a form of capitalism based on an alliance between progress, technology and hedonism. Within the logic of the novel it therefore comes as no surprise that the main characters head to the United States. Just like many scientists who, after working for Nazi Germany, joined the American war effort during the Cold War, Fussmann and Lotte find their new ‘ideological home’ in America. The perception of the Third Reich as an Americanized society is neither new nor rare, nor can it be equated with a single ideological stance. The claims that Nazism was in itself a form of capitalism go back to the political debates prior to the Machtergreifung, when they were usually associated with the communist critique of National-Socialism (see, for example, John Heartfield’s 1932 famous photomontage ‘Der Sinn der Hitlergrusses’). In the novel, not the left, but the elite of the regime itself voices similar views. Ferrie reminds Holsten that Flick, Krupp, Thyssen and Bosch brought Hitler to power and that they were the ones financing the war (Kunkel 2004a: 45). The same perception emerges from the chapters about the Wochenscheuen and the Rheinschiene, two groups of spoiled rich children of the regime’s elite (Kunkel 2004a: 80 – 85, 86 – 90). Readings of the Third Reich as a consumer society are frequent in scholarship. In 1981, Hans Dieter Schäfer, for example, presented a well-known study in which he claimed that the best approach to understanding Nazis’ control over Germany during the ‘years of peace’ was precisely the existence of a consumer society dedicated to the private sphere (family, commodities, leisure, cult of the body, relaxed sexual codes) in a continuation of the twenties (Schäfer 1981). However, while Schäfer was not promoting a critique of capitalism – his thesis was that tolerance for a certain social ‘normality’ allowed the regime to pursue its abnormal political aims –, Kunkel’s novel is driven by a clear anti-American stance. In Endstufe, the United States is an enemy of Nazi Germany, but not different in kind. American power is portrayed as the natural heir of Nazi Germany in its use of technology and disregard for human life. Details like the fact that both countries used their own soldiers to test new medicines (Kunkel 2004a: 37, 586)

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are intended to stress the correlation. Both countries are presented as rival capitalist economies fighting for world domination and the exploitation of the weak. The geographical setting of the novel is quite important for that purpose. The Eastern and the Western fronts are absent. Instead, an important part of the plot takes place in North-Africa, where the German Realpolitik (deceiving the Arabs with slogans of freedom in order to gain control over their oil) is presented as similar to the French, British and American policies in the region.

2. Pornography: a Strategy to Create Historical Continuities Sexuality is the most important strategy used by Kunkel to connect the Third Reich with its enemies. Differing from approaches that reveal Nazism’s uniqueness through sexual perversion and violence, Endstufe confronts the reader with expressions of sexuality that look quite ‘unexceptional’ for modern standards: the powerful take advantage of their status to get lots of sex, the ‘rich and young’ engage gaily in orgies with plenty of drugs, home made films show sexual intercourse performed in exchange for money. Pornography is clearly intended to stress the continuity between Nazism and the winners of WWII. The porn-movies at the center of the plot are exhibited to German troops in North-Africa to distract them from boredom and are sold for war materials to a Swedish buyer and to Arab sheiks against oil concessions. During the fall of Berlin they help stimulate the libido of Soviet rapists. An American officer, John Schinder, is fascinated by them and plans to shoot similar ones with black American soldiers and German Aryan women as a way of demoralizing the Werwölfen (Kunkel 2004a: 535). From his perspective, reeducation means showing the Germans that they have lost the war and, in the context of widespread poverty that marked the first years of occupation, the best and easiest way to do it is to make German women sexually accessible to everyone, particularly to those perceived both in Germany and in the US as racially inferior. Also quite important is the fact that the main actress in those movies is Lotte, a prostitute who dreams of becoming a cinema star in Babelsberg. This enthusiastic Nazi was sure that her future would depend on her ability to seduce Goebbels and show him her sexual abilities, which she considers to be a normal procedure in the cinematic milieu. She claims that in Hollywood she would have to use similar strategies to convince the American Jewish producer Harry Cohn (Kunkel 2004a: 143). After the war all her former beliefs in Nazism rapidly give way to an enthusiastic devotion to America. Her hatred of the plutocracy is replaced by anti-communism. In the fifties, she works as a porn star in

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Las Vegas before becoming a sort of Goddess of luxury for a secret and influential upper-class American religious sect. In an interview, Kunkel said that he got his inspiration for Endstufe from the following words: ‘Wer mit Pornographie beginnt, der endet in Auschwitz. Das Fleisch, das ihr zeigt, ist gerade gut genug, um missbraucht, gefoltert und verbrannt zu werden.’ (Kunkel, 2007b) [‘Who begins with pornography ends in Auschwitz. The flesh that it shows is precisely good to be misused, tortured and burnt.’] (Kunkel, 2007b). Kunkel claims that left-wing Sartre is the author of these words.⁶ Armin Mohler, a far-right writer and philosopher associated with the German New Right, whose famous essay Sex und Politik (1972) is also referred to by Kunkel in the same interview, attributes the statement to Sartre’s friend and former personal assistant Jean Cau in ‘La terreur pornographique’ (1969) (Mohler 1972: 76). Cau, who began as a left-wing writer before becoming a prominent critic of socialism, produced in ‘La terreur pornographique’ one of his most vituperative pamphlets against the left. Here, he reduces the sexual liberation movement to pornography and, by identifying the latter with political revolution – Mao and Lenin are therefore referred to as pornographers  –, he aims at discrediting the cultural and political values of ’68. He picks one of the most emblematic images of the Holocaust  – detainees forced to stand naked in front of concentration camp guards – to denounce ’68 as a product of the same principles that produced Auschwitz. For him, no major difference exists between those detainees and the women whose bodies are objectified in pornography: Pornographes de tous les pays, je vous le dis: si l’homme n’est plus qu’un animal qui rampe, grogne et grimpe sa femme, si vous ne flattez plus en lui que son sexe, si vous ne déchaînez plus en lui que la bête, Auschwitz n’est pas loin. La partouze sociale s’achèvera en tuerie. Avec la peau des cadavres nous ferons des abat-jour, puisque la viande, telle qu’elle s’étale dans vos revues et vos magazines, est tout juste bonne à être vendue, méprisée, torturée, tuée et brulée. Et vous remarquerez que les femelles que vous proposez à nos sexes n’ont plus de regard. Comme des déportés. (Cau 1969: 6) [Pornographers of all countries, I tell you: if man is no more than an animal that crawls, grunts and screws woman, if you only flatten his sex, if you do not unleash upon him more than the beast, Auschwitz is not far. Social orgy will consummate massacre. With the skin of corpses, we will make lampshades, since the meat, as your magazines show, is just as good at being sold, despised, tortured, killed and burnt. And you will observe that the females you propose for our sexes have no gazes anymore. Just like the deported. (Editors’ translation from French into English)]

Mohler, quoting extensively from Cau’s text (Mohler 1972: 76 – 7), develops a strong critique of the sexual liberation movement and of what he believes to be its

6 My efforts to trace the sentence in Sartre’s oeuvre proved fruitless.

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cultural and social expressions (the degradation of sex into a consumer product and the invasion of the public space by pornographic images and discourses). His ultimate target, however, is the left (including the German SPD and some policies undertaken by Willy Brandt’s government), which he holds responsible for the Sexwelle (Mohler 1972: 25 – 31). In the 1960s, as the New Left student movement interpreted Nazism as a sexually repressive era and accused the conservative society of the Federal Republic of perpetuating the cultural mindset of the past, sexual liberation could be regarded as an antifascist imperative and as a worthy endeavor of the left (Herzog 2005: 2). For Mohler, sex and politics are also interconnected spheres. He comes, however, to opposite conclusions. Just like Cau, he associates sexual liberation, not with forces that could overcome the legacy of Nazism, but with the ideological environment that once made Auschwitz possible and that could ultimately bring about the collapse of Western civilization. What is striking in these discussions is the use of the Holocaust as a rhetorical device. In Cau and Mohler, Auschwitz becomes an abstract concept for the objectification and dehumanization of the human body and thereby loses its historical context and specificities, becoming a universal category for power relations, human degradation and political menace. The way Kunkel uses pornography as a metaphor to approach Nazi Germany also contributes to the erasure of the defining character of the Third Reich. It does not allow for grasping the specificities of that period. On the contrary, it stresses the continuities with the regimes that fought and prevailed over Nazi Germany, it universalizes pornography and, along with it, Nazism as a defining phenomenon of the twentieth century.

3. A Question of Narrative Perspective? This tendency to overlook the particularities of Nazi Germany lies at the core of the controversy surrounding Endstufe. The most serious political accusations made against the novel were that it ignored the Holocaust and the carnage on the Eastern front, and that it focused on the German suffering inflicted by the Allies (the air war, the mass rapes and the American occupation), often using vocabulary associated with the German crimes.⁷ Although the main characters work for institutions directly involved in the deportation and extermination policies of the Third Reich, it is striking that precisely the events which are regarded as emblematic of the German history in the period 1941 – 1945 (the extermination

7 See, for example, Hendryk Broder’s review of the novel (Broder 2004).

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squads during the invasion of the Soviet Union and the gas chambers) are absent from the novel. References to the Eastern front rarely go beyond what was being reported by the propaganda (the few exceptions are mention of the spreading of sexually transmitted diseases among German soldiers and brief allusions to the concentration camps). Kunkel alleged that such absences had nothing to do with any hidden radical right-wing agenda but were due to his attempt to offer an innovative approach to the Third Reich. Refusing what he considered a typically moralist German post1945 literature and its lack of black humor, he claimed to have been influenced by Anglo-Saxon novelists like Thomas Pynchon (Kunkel 2005). He also repeatedly invoked A Clockwork Orange (both Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel and Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 cinematographic adaptation) for its representation of violence: it adopts the point of view of the perpetrator and it stresses the tenuous lines separating victims from perpetrators (Kunkel, 2007b, 2007c). Kunkel said that he did not want to write a novel from the perspective of the modern reader, for whom the Holocaust is the key reference in WWII, but through the eyes of those who at the time were seduced and blinded by the regime. Pointing out the narrative structure of his text, the author accused the critics who denounced him as a revisionist of mixing up fiction with reality (Kunkel 2004b). Many controversial assertions in the novel are indeed made by discredited characters. They are to be found in Pfister’s and Fussmann’s letters, dialogues, monologues that offer glimpses of the character’s inner life and in chapters devoted to Holsten’s voice. Endstufe mostly follows the point of view of the four male characters, anti-heroes who had incorporated the racist ideology of the regime into their daily lives, got benefits from the political situation, indulged in a hedonist life of parties, sex and drugs and for whom the war in the East and the destiny of the Jews were simply of no interest. According to this logic, the invisibilities of the novel should denounce how large sectors of the German population did not oppose the regime’s agenda and were willing to collaboratively render its crimes invisible. The problem is that the narrative modes cannot be held accountable for all the invisibilities and controversial assertions. Although most of the chapters have a third-person limited narrator close to the perspective of one of the four male characters, sometimes the narration includes information not known by the character. That information, however, tends to be not about the victims of Nazism, but about crimes and grasping Allied policies: for example, how the air war and the alliance with Stalin boosted the American economy (Kunkel 2004a: 465) and how, immediately after German defeat in North-Africa, France and Britain clashed over the oil concessions (Kunkel 2004a: 455).

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4. Wartime Sexual Violence and Racial Stereotypes Once again, sexuality (sexual violence in particular) is fundamental to revealing how the narrative strategies themselves cannot alone explain the erasure of the specificities of Nazism in the novel. The moment when, during the battle for Berlin, the porn-movies are used to stimulate the libido of Soviet serial rapists culminates in the on-going association between the objectification of the female body in pornography and sexual violence against women. The first porn-movies are Pfister’s sexual fantasies about degrading, humiliating and physically abusing women. The movie Der Fallensteller and the plot for Waldeslust are actually fictions of rapes. The Waldelust script is full of acts of abuse and of derogative vocabulary about women (the female character is always referred to as Nutte, Dirne [whore] and Beute [booty]). The woman is enslaved, forced to work for the rapist, to cook for him, to eat only leftovers, to walk on a leach (Kunkel 2004a: 126 – 130). There is a correlation between these fantasies and Pfister’s own therapeutic procedures (he takes advantage of his power as a doctor to extract free sex with patients in despair). The process of turning these fantasies into film also indicates some violence (see Heidi, the underage prostitute and porn-actress). However, what was fantasy or female sexuality performed through coercion (need of money in the case of Heidi, cinema aspirations for Lotte, or the patient’s desire to get pregnant) is replaced by overt sexual brutality during the battle for Berlin. The Soviets do not fantasize about or pretend to rape women, they do rape and murder those who resist, thus turning Berlin into an ‘open air brothel’, into a scenario of a ‘porno-film of the worst kind’ (Kunkel 2004a: 496 – 7). Important feminist scholarship and campaigns against pornography have repeatedly accused pornography of not only stimulating violence, but of being itself a form of violence against women (see, for example, Dworkin 1981). Influential feminists have even blamed wartime rape on pornography (see, for example, MacKinnon 1994). Although Kunkel assumes a correlation between pornography, violence against women and wartime rape, which is so dear to many feminists, his novel reveals, as critics have noted, ‘no hint of exposure to feminist debates regarding pornography’ (Heineman 2005: 68). Unlike most feminist critique, Endstufe tends to favor a vocabulary that conveys sexual pleasure in violence, and not the disgust, pain and fear of an unwilling woman. Contrary to feminists who privilege the victim’s perspective of abuse and rape (see Dworkin’s 1990 novel Mercy), the novel remains male-oriented. When the Soviets attack the apartment (chapters ‘Desinfektion’ and ‘Geschlossene Blende’), the third-person limited narrator adopts Holsten’s point of view, even integrating his inner voice. Mete’s

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suicide, the neighbor’s rape and Lotte’s attempted rape are therefore not presented through their own perspective, but through the only German male in the room. The Soviet rapists who enter the apartment emerge as racially and culturally inferior brutes obsessed with the idea of having sex with Germans, an image that suggests some of the infamous caricatures published in the weekly Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer. Although Holsten’s perception of the rapes is likely to have been influenced by Goebbels’s intensive propaganda about the Red Army as a horde of Untermenchen, the narrative mode is not enough to justify for the recurrence of racial stereotypes in those chapters.⁸ In the section introducing the rapes (Kunkel 2004a: 495 – 497), an omniscient narrator also conveys such undertones. He begins by quoting Ilya Ehrenburg (1891 – 1967), the well-known Jewish Soviet war propagandist, when he compares Germans with microbes (a quote surely intended to establish a link between Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda and the Soviet anti-German wartime pamphlets). The narrator even inserts the famous sentence instigating Soviet soldiers to rape Germans into the text, words whose authenticity is challenged by some historians. Ehrenburg’s pamphlets were marked by an appalling dehumanization of the Germans (Germany usually referred to as a blond witch), and thus part of the context that led to the brutality committed against German civilians. Nonetheless, no serious historical research would explain the mass rapes with the words of a propagandist. Kunkel simply reinforces the legend around Ehrenburg as the instigator of the rape of German women (a legend that goes back to Goebbels’s propaganda), thus avoiding any insightful confrontation with the role of that writer in the Soviet war machinery and the political interests that determined the evolution of Kremlin propaganda in the last months of the war.⁹

8 According to Rowohlt, the publishing company that was supposed to publish Endstufe, ‘content and aesthetic matters’ led to the novel’s withdrawal from publication at the beginning of 2004 (the text was then published by Eichborn). Kunkel said that the editor’s decision to drop Endstufe had to do with the rapes. On his homepage, the author alleges that Ulrike Schieder (a Rowohlt’s reader) contended that the description of the rapes should not raise sympathy for the victims, and that the novel demonized the Soviets, ignoring historical evidence that Red Army officers often gave their victims food and were kind towards children (Kunkel 2007a). 9 For an overview of the role of Ehrenburg in Soviet war propaganda see, for example, chapters III and XIII of Antony Beevor’s work on the Battle for Berlin (2002). Beevor describes the scale of the rapes, suggesting the reasons that led to such brutality and gives information on the way the Soviet authorities dealt with the situation. He convincingly argues that for the Kremlin, Ehrenburg was nothing but a useful and dischargeable journalist: his texts were promoted when the goal was to instigate soldiers to fight fiercely, but when the political aims changed

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In the third paragraph of the above mentioned section, the narrator claims that ever since the dawn of mankind women were sexually subjugated in wartime. The examples he presents do not however suggest a universalization of wartime rape (as is advanced in feminist classics like Susan Brownmiller’s Against our Will. Men, Women and Rape); on the contrary, they reinforce racial stereotypes. Wartime rape is portrayed as a sign of primitivism, something characteristic of the animal world, a Paleolithic custom. The sexual violence (rapes, forced prostitution, etc.) perpetrated in the previous years against Slavs and Jews by German troops in the East, the region where the rapists came from, is never mentioned. Instead, Genghis Khan is invoked. This tendency to depict wartime rape as an attribute of the Other, as the expression of a barbarian and primitive Orient, is reinforced by the mention of Valentine de Saint-Point (1875 – 1953). She is referred to as a female writer converted to Islam, who absolved wartime rape (Kunkel 2004a: 495). However, while her conversion dates from 1918, those polemic words are to be found in a 1913 text, the Manifeste Futuriste de la Luxure (1913), which in the novel is simply called Manifest der Lust. It is as if the narrator is trying to efface the European context in which Saint-Point made her explanation of wartime rape (European Futurism, Paris), perpetuating instead orientalistic prejudices relating Islam and the Orient to savagery, violence and brutal luxury. It comes as no hazard that the only allusion in the novel to the Arabs fighting in the Allied armies depicts them as torturers and rapists of women and sheep (Kunkel 2004a: 518). Consequently, Kunkel’s novel diverges radically from famous Western German feminist understandings of the rape of German women by members of the Allied forces. Works like Helma Sanders-Brahms’s movie Deutschland, bleiche Mutter (1980) and Helke Sander’s documentary BeFreier und Befreite (1992) convey a universalistic explanation for wartime sexual violence as a sign of women’s victimization in patriarchy (rape being understood as an act of male’s domination and exploitation of women). Definitely any attempt to explain situations of rape in war contexts where the racial dimension is so crucial (as on the European Eastern front in WWII) falls short if the gender problematic is over focused and the way ethnic identities and rivalries lead to and are expressed through sexual violence is ignored, as Pascale Bos convincingly argues in her critique of Sander’s universalistic approach to the rapes (Bos 2006: 1007 – 1010). Endstufe, however, does not present gender and the national dimensions as complementary aspects in its understanding of wartime sexual violence. In contrast, the novel clearly

(i.e. when the authorities turned their attention to the creation of a pro-Soviet German entity in the post-war) his services were soon discarded.

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privileges and reinforces the national and racial explanation: Berliners are raped because of their national identity, i.e., they are victimized mainly as Germans in the hands of barbarians. The indifference of the foreign press towards the sexual violence and some journalists’ cynical remarks telling raped women to thank Hitler are denounced by the narrator as further proof of Allied cruelty towards Germans, without ever addressing the gender question. The way sexual violence and pornography is used in the novel becomes therefore quite problematic. Some paragraphs bring to mind certain racial stereotypes and images that were very common in the nationalistic discourse from the wartime and the post-1945. The East emerges as the incarnation of a barbarian Orient: Russians are serial rapists and Arabs and Berbers are savages obsessed with the idea of having sex with blonds. The Americans are presented as arrogant and unscrupulous individuals consumed by money and sex. It is not only Ferrie, under his new identity, who makes a joke of reeducation. The American officer Schinder, who made fun during the liberation of Dachau telling the prisoners ‘Der Offen is aus’ [The stove is off] (Kunkel 2004a: 532), uses his power to enrich himself through the sexual exploitation of German women. As is suggested by his violent harassment of Johanna, his methods go beyond monetary and psychological coercion. Reeducation emerges as a caricature of itself, and occupied Germany as a big American brothel.¹⁰ If we take Lotte as a reference for the denunciation of sexual threat, then the novel becomes even more problematic. Although she had experienced sexual violence and exploitation at the hands of Nazis (her SA boyfriend, and her later Gestapo pimp), men from the Allied forces seem to be even more menacing. After escaping Soviet rapists in Berlin, Lotte reappears in a bar in Frankfurt am Main popular among GIs, where Fussmann encounters her with clear signs of severe physical abuse. By conveying an extremely negative image of the German population under Nazism, Endstufe diverges radically from traditional revisionist discourses that question the dimension of the crimes committed under the Third Reich and / or try to find ‘good aspects’ in Nazism. The novel also differs drastically from approaches which are structured around the dichotomy between a faction of murderous fanatics and a majority of ‘ordinary good Germans’, an image that is so common in post-Reunification popular culture. However, Kunkel’s attempt to portray how so many Germans were able to live in a criminal regime without

10 Although the image of the Americans in the West became increasingly positive in the post-war, during the occupation there was much ostracism of fraternizers. For many Germans, fraternizing with American officials and prostitution became a metaphor for the occupation of the nation (see, for example, Heineman 1996: 380 – 388).

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moral misgivings becomes problematic. The novel denounces all sides as guilty of appalling crimes against humanity in WWII and blames the Allies for imposing a vision of History that either silenced or justified their brutality as self-defense or as necessary steps to defeat evil. It further suggests that the Americans were the ideological heirs of Nazi Germany in their cult of technology, promotion of imperialist policies and disregard for human life. Elisabeth Heineman therefore accused Endstufe of telling an international story which is a ‘claim of German sexual geopolitical innocence’ (Heineman 2005: 68). Endstufe is structured around continuities that cannot be ingenuously interpreted as a mere denunciation of the human potential for crime, abuse and genocide (i.e. the suggestion that similar crimes could happen under different ideologies in other parts of the world). It suggests, in fact, that in the precise historical context of WWII there was no significant difference between Nazi Germany and its enemies.

Works Cited Beevor, Anthony (2002) Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (New York: Penguin Books). Bos, Pascale (2006) ‘Feminists Interpreting the Politics of Wartime Rape: Berlin, 1945; Yugoslavia, 1992 – 1993’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31: 4, 995 – 1010. Broder, Henryk (2004) ‘Steckrüben der Stalinisten’, Der Spiegel 7 (09 – 02 – 2004). Brownmiller, Susan (1975) Against our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon & Schuster). Cau, Jean (1969) ‘La terreur pornographique’, Nouvelles Littéraires (16 – 10 – 1969) Detje, Robin (2004) ‘Sieg Geil. Leider doch ein Skandal: Thor Kunkels Roman Endstufe’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (01 – 04 – 2004), http: // www.buecher.de / shop / Buecher / Endstufe / Kunkel-Thor / products_products / detail / prod_id / 12609323 / (accessed 1 April 2009). Dworkin, Andrea (1981) Pornography. Men Possessing Women (London: The Women’s Press). ––––– (2005) Mercy (London: Secker & Warburg). Heineman, Elisabeth (1996) ‘The Hour of the Woman. Memories of Germany’s “Crisis Years” and West German National Identity’, The American Historical Review 101:2, 354 – 395. ––––– (2005) ‘Gender, Sexuality, and Coming to Terms with the Nazi Past’, Central European History 38, 41 – 74. Herzog, Dagmar (2005) Sex after Fascism. Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Kämmerlings, Richard (2004) ‘Ein Ekelreigen. Keine Geschmackssache: Thor Kunkels Roman Endstufe’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (03 – 04 – 2004), http: // www.faz.net / s / Rub79A3 3397BE834406A5D2BFA87FD13913 / Doc~EB18D9BD6286C4A1A852BF0DDE142E666~ATpl ~Ecommon~Scontent.html (accessed 10 April 2009). Krause, Tilman (2004) ‘“Wir sind schon Schweine”: Thor Kunkels NS-Porno ist eine Orgie der Geschmacklosigkeit’, Die Welt (29 – 03 – 2004), http: // www.sandammeer.at / rezensionen / kunkel-endstufe.htm (accessed 21 August 2009). Kunkel, Thor (2004a) Endstufe (Berlin: Eichborn).

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––––– (2004b), ‘Offener Brief Thor Kunkels an die Herausgeber des SPIEGEL’, http: // www.sandammeer.at / rezensionen / kunkel-endstufe.htm (accessed 21 August 2009). ––––– (2005) ‘History, Porn, and Adverstising. Jake Purbright interviews German literary upstart Thor Kunkel for 3AM’, 3 A.M. MAGAZINE, http: // www.3ammagazine.com / litarchives / 2005 / jan / interview_thor_kunkel.html (accessed 4 April 2009). ––––– (2007a) ‘Die Causa Kunkel’, http: // www.thorkunkel.com / ?page_id=51 (accessed 25 April 2009). ––––– (2007b) ‘FAQs: Die nackte Wahrheit. Die 24 am häufigsten gestellten Fragen an Thor Kunkel’, http: // www.thorkunkel.com / ?page_id=29 (accessed 25 April 2009). ––––– (2007c) ‘Melancholie& ratio: 20 Bücher, die Sie vor Ihrem Tod lesen sollten’, http: // www.thorkunkel.com / ?page_id=49 (accessed 25 April 2009). MacKinnon, Catharine A (1994) ‘Turning Rape into Pornography: Postmodern Genocide’, in Mass Rape: The War Against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, ed. Alexandra Stiglmayer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), 73 – 81. Mohler, Armin (1972) Sex und Politik (Freiburg: Rombach). Schäfer, Hans Dieter (1981) ‘Das gespaltene Bewußtsein. Über die Lebenswirklichkeit in Deutschland 1933 – 1945’, in Das gespaltene Bewußtsein. Über deutsche Kultur und Lebenswirklichkeit 1933 – 1945, ed. Hans Dieter Schäfer (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag), 114 – 162. Slane, Andrea (1997) ‘Sexy Nazis and Daddy’s Girls: Fascism and Sexuality in Film and Video since the 1970s’, in War, Violence, and the Modern Condition, ed. Bernd Hüppauf (Berlin / New York: de Gruyter). Vogel, Sabine (2004) ‘Das Sexte Reich’, Berliner Zeitung (17 – 04 – 2004), http: // www. berlinonline.de / berliner-zeitung / archiv /.bin / dump.fcgi / 2004 / 0415 / feuilleton / 0050 / index.html (accessed 11 April 2009).

Shahd Wadi

Palestinian Women’s Bodies as a Battlefield After the attack on Gaza in December 2008, some photos of t-shirts used by Israeli soldiers gained widespread coverage in the international media. These kinds of t-shirts are usually printed as customized clothing for different Israeli army units and usually carry slogans and images chosen by them. The most common photo is a t-shirt from the sniper’s unit, which has an image of a pregnant Palestinian woman (veiled of course), holding a gun with a rope and is exactly inside the bull’s eye targeting her and her pregnant womb, under it a slogan saying: ‘1 shot 2 kills.’ According to Ha’artz (Blau 2009), an Israeli newspaper, this is not the only shocking t-shirt which completely dehumanizes Palestinians. Furthermore, I would add that the majority of the images on the t-shirts feature women and their bodies as the focal point of the conflict. The veiled and pregnant woman in the picture is an unknown mysterious danger; the rope of the gun can also be seen as an umbilical cord which connects the gun to her womb; the womb then becoming the centre of the conflict. The majority of slogans Ha’artz mentions portray women’s bodies as the threat; we can see that in examples such as the slogans: ‘Better use Durex’ next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby. Another image shows a weeping mother with a teddy bear in her hands with the slogan: ‘Let every Arab mother know that her son’s fate is in my hands.’ Maternity and the multiplication of Palestinians is also pictured as the danger that must be destroyed. Rape also appears widely in these images, such as in the t-shirt that has an image of a soldier next to a woman with bruises and the slogan: ‘Bet you got raped’. Another has a soldier raping a girl, and the slogan: ‘No virgins, no terror attacks.’ These images do not only dehumanize Palestinians and legitimize violence towards them, but also legitimize violence against women and their bodies, regarding them as dangerous, and so needing to be controlled. Women in different conflicts are usually regarded as war objects, and thus deemed war targets, not as ‘enemies’ but as the enemies’ ‘property’. In this essay, I will be asking: is it an exaggeration to say that Palestinian women’s bodies appear in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the weapon, the battlefield and the target? And I further question: whose weapon? Which battlefield? And whose target? The same Palestinian women’s bodies can speak different languages, and I mean by languages, the different social, cultural and political codes that they transmit while being observed and while themselves the observers. They are (de)

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coded differently in the Israeli discourse, in the Palestinian national discourse and within the Palestinian women’s narratives, becoming the conflict itself. In the Israeli discourse the relationship between the two sides of the conflict is represented metaphorically as a man-woman relation where Palestine is the woman, and Israel is the man, the colonizer is seen as the Patriarch. Golda Meir,¹ for example, described Palestine as the ‘undesired bride’ (Kassem 2007: 118). On the other hand, the Palestinian discourse usually describes Israeli invaders as Al-Mughtasibon which literally means the rapists or the rapists of the land, thus equally associating the land with women’s bodies, which is a common metaphor within many colonized countries. Palestine or the land is always a woman, not to mention how in political discourses, art and literature² ‘she’ is usually the mother of all. Hanan Mikha’ilAshrawi (Najjar and Warnock 1992: 260) confirms that: ‘Women find their way into literature  … not as portraits of themselves, but as the embodiment of the unattained, the perfect goal: fertility, lush land, the womb of society, Palestine itself’. The connection between Palestine and woman lies in the need to fulfil a desire. According to Mary Layoun (2001: 148) ‘the fulfilment of desire is possession and control of the land-as-woman.’ Furthermore, Layoun explains that ‘there is a premier obstacle to possession-of-the-woman / land as national fulfilment’; the obstacle is that the land / woman is occupied, and so there is a continuous aspiration of ‘the fulfilment of national and sexual desire.’ (Layoun, 2001:148).³ In her famous text, The Laugh of the Medusa, Hélène Cixous suggests that woman’s body is her language and her medium of expression: ‘it’s with her body that she vitally supports the “logic” of her speech […] she physically materializes what she’s thinking; she signifies it with her body’ (Cixous 1997: 351). Cixous’ words can be applied to the narrative language of Palestinian women, who also use their bodies to describe the occupation. Kassem (2007) notices that while men used the ‘official’ language of the media to describe the Israeli occupation of Palestine in 1948, using terms such as: ‘when Israeli occupied the land’, women use different language such as: ‘when they entered’, which in the Palestinian tradition conveys the image of sexual penetration.

1 Meir was the Prime Minister of Israel at the beginning of the 1970s, and Israel’s first woman to hold that position. 2 See for example the paintings of Ismael Shamout, the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, like so many Palestinian artists; Palestine appears in their work as a woman / mother. 3 Mary Layoun presents this vision within her analysis of Michel Khleifi’s film Wedding in Galilée, a Belgian / French coproduction released in 1987.

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Leilet Al-Dokhleh (literary the entrance night) is the term used to describe the night when the bride loses her virginity, which also according to tradition is the end of purity and naivety. The process of losing virginity also involves blood and pain, which some Palestinian women are not prepared for and do not expect. All of this is connected with the occupation in Palestinian women’s language and narrative about the Nakba (the year in which they lost their land). The historical events are directly attached with the ‘herstory’ of the body, as one woman narrates: ‘I was still virgin when the Jewish entered’ (Kassem 2007: 121). Not only is the language of Palestinian women a place where the body can exist, but also their memory is a ‘memory of a body’. Thus, Palestinian women have created a resistance language, refusing to accept the dominant languages of the colonial as well as the patriarchal. The bodies of both Palestinian men and women are important parts in the conflict, and so are always subjected to pain and torture. Yet despite the fact that bodies of both sexes have – in many cases – suffered the same consequences of the conflict, the social understanding and (de)coding of male or female bodies are not the same. According to Julie Peteet (2000), men’s bruises and scars resulting from torture or violence by the Israeli forces are signs of attaining ‘masculinity’. For men, going to prison and being tortured mean moving to a higher place in the community. But what is women’s status after having suffered violence, torture and prison? How are they seen and represented by their community? Their place in society becomes indefinite rather than heroic (Peteet 2000). Palestinian men fear their kin women would get physically in touch with stranger men, and / or get raped and so will put the family ‘honor’ at risk. At the same time, any Palestinian individual resisting the occupation is considered a hero. This double standard leaves women in an ambiguous place. Thaqafet Al-‘ard or the culture of honor – which is only and directly related with women’s bodies  – is often used by the Israeli forces as a weapon against Palestinians. Palestinian female political prisoners were often sexually abused, or threatened with what is considered in their society as ‘honor’ to get their confessions and to limit their participation in the resistance. Female prisoners were often tortured in front of their fathers or in front of the other male political prisoners; Palestinian male prisoners were also threatened with their women’s ‘honor’ / bodies. The men’s ‘honor’ is directly connected with the bodies of their female kin, and so women hold responsibility for protecting the family ‘honor’ as well as the national ‘honour’. Frantz Fanon (1967) suggests that the colonizer conquests women in order to destroy the resistance of the entire nation. Israel knows well the power it can deploy through leveraging the ‘culture of honor’, as Nadira Shalhoub Kevork-

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ian (apud Augustin 1993:118) confirms: ‘The Israeli authorities don’t even have to imprison me, all they need to do is to spread nasty rumours about me which reflect on my sexual reputation as a woman.’ The autobiography of Aysheh Odeh (2007), a former Palestinian female political prisoner who spent years in Israeli prisons, mentions that some questions during the interrogation were related with her sexuality rather than her political life: ‘How many men have you slept with? Do you want us to believe you’re still virgin?’⁴ (Odeh 2007: 63). She mentions that she was tortured for a whole night just to say: ‘I am a bitch’ ten times. It is significant that she preferred to put up with the torture rather than saying a sentence which in her mind might harm her ‘honor’. The narration of the rape is also remarkable: though Odeh crosses the cultural restrictions by writing about her rape, the whole act is mentioned in a single short sentence: ‘Azrael tried to get through my womb with a stick.’ (Odeh 2007: 149). The fact that she was raped with a stick is also significant; it shows that the rape is not sexual, but is used as a war weapon. By colonizing Palestinian women’s bodies Israel colonizes the whole Palestinian population. In 1948, when Jewish troops started to occupy Palestinian villages, they spread rumours about their brutality as a way to frighten villagers and so to take over the villages. Though a lot of rape incidents were reported, rumours about rape cases were far higher than the figures of rapes that actually happened. Many Palestinians ran away from their villages, worried about their ‘honor’. According to Kitty Warnock (1990: 23) for some men ‘saving their women from rape was more important than defending their homes.’ But as Peetet explains (1993: 51): By the early 1980s, the jil al-thawra (the generation of the revolution born in the diaspora) were quick to criticize this concept of honour … The concept of ‘ird ‘honour’ was enmeshed with ard ‘land’ as a play on words and meanings … (they) fostered new symbols of a Palestinian culture of resistance. One such symbol was the slogan al-ard abl al-‘ird ‘land before honour’.

As a result, women started to talk openly about their torture and rape in occupation prisons, turning their narratives into a language of resistance of the power used over them and their bodies, by both the occupier and their society. As a result new behaviours were adapted in society, Rawda Basir (apud Najjar and Warnock 1992: 90) confirms:

4 My translation – all further English versions of Arabic texts, listed in the bibliography, are also my translation.

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An important step towards liberation was our liberation from the fear of rape. By publicizing that Israeli interrogators had raped them with sticks, two of those first women prisoners arrested after 1967 asserted that it was one of the enemy’s acts and not something they should personally be ashamed of.

Speaking badly about the female prisoners was considered in many occasions a betrayal of the whole nation. On the contrary, many prisoners were considered and treated as heroes. As Fairouz Arafa (apud Mhana 1992: 114) a former prisoner said: ‘After I came out of prison, a zafa⁵ was made for me. They were all happy, and my father asked me to get out and shake hands with the men. I heard them say: “you must be proud of her”.’ Shaking hands with men does not only mean a considerable place in the society, a sign that her father is proud and not ashamed of her imprisonment, but it is also a clear symbol of the necessity of breaking the physical borders in society, especially as a way of resisting the occupation. The concept of honor has started to have different meanings, as Leila Khaled confirms: ‘we try instead to say that honor means more than virginity, that there is honor in recovering our homeland’ (apud Morgan 2001: 211). On many occasions, Palestinian women ‘acted’ indifferently towards the ‘culture of honor’, they let their bodies exist without fear of harming their honor, and were hence resisting the colonization of their bodies. Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2007: 12) narrates the story of Um Rami, a yogurt seller who transformed her pot into an object of resistance. Just a few days after her son’s killing by the occupation forces, she had to get back to work, passing through the checkpoint everyday to reach Ramallah. A soldier asked her to lift her dress up to see if she was hiding something. A Palestinian man started shouting: ‘get back woman, what a shame!’ Um Rami gently and simply lift up her dress, exposing her body and uncovering the fear of a weapon used against the Palestinian women called ‘honor’. Rihab Isawi, as well, transformed her body into a subject of resistance, as she narrated: ‘They threatened me that I will be raped by a Druze if I don’t confess, when the interrogator threatened me with that […] he looked at me indifferently and with a sarcastic smile on his face. I simply started to take of my clothes.’ (apud Tawil 1988: 120). Their bodies are no longer weapons used against them, their bodies are finally their own, they are their own bodies. Firial Salem was mocked by an Israeli soldier when she lost her left eye, her teeth and broke her face while preparing an explosive; he asked her if she would ever be able to look in the mirror again. Firial replied: ‘I am not sad that I lost my left eye, from behind this glass that replaced it, I can see more, more clearly

5 A musical procession usually for weddings and other celebrations.

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and more beautifully’ (Tawil 1988: 111). Firial made us wonder, will Palestinian women be able to transform the ‘chops’ of their bodies into ‘shatters’ of resistance? Khadija Abu Arquob answered this question when she took out a plastic bag with ‘shatters’ of her black hair, which had been pulled out during her torture and handed them to the judge (Tawil 1988: 43). Thus, she transformed chops of her body into her own weapon of resistance. The ‘culture of honor’ restricted the participation of Palestinian women in the resistance, but women tried to find ways to get rid of these restrictions in order to become active agents of resistance. One way was using the veil. Palestinian society considers veiled women as the best protectors of their ‘honor’, their communities would not need to worry about their ‘honor’ as it is protected by their veils. Veiled women have more freedom to get out of the house and to participate in the resistance. Furthermore the veil gave Palestinian women freedom in the physical resistance; their bodies were directly related with their role in the Intifada, which was related with the physical movement and physical confrontations of the Israeli army, as it was their responsibility to confront the soldiers and to free the young men from their hands. The veil also transmits a cultural essence and a cultural difference; it is the symbol of a national identity when necessary, as was the case in Algeria and Iran, it was the prison that liberated women and the nation⁶. In 2000, a young woman Shafa’a Al-hindi was physically forced to take off her veil by Israeli soldiers, and replied by spitting in a soldier’s face, who hit her on her head causing her to lose her sight. For her, the veil was not simply a cover for the body and for honor, the veil of Al-hindi was her freedom. A few days after the incident, she appeared on international television where the whole world could see her without a veil, thereby confirming that her veil is her own way to ‘unveil’ her liberty that the occupation has ‘veiled’ (see Wadi 2000). Many Palestinian women also consider the veil as a symbol of cultural resistance, confirming national heritage and identity. Despite that, the veil has taken a dangerous direction when the Islamic movement took advantage of it and of the Intifada. According to Rema Hammami (1991: 78), Hamas did so:

6 The veil can act as a different symbol depending on the historical moment and context. In Algeria the veil was used as a symbol of resistance against the French colonization who tried to demolish it. In the 1970s, veiled Iranian women were a symbol of resistance to the Shah, the veil that was a symbol of women activism and resistance is today used as their oppressing prison.

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by trying to ‘nationalize’ elements of its social program, to make them part of nationalist ideology. And the specific means it used to achieve this goal was women. What the movement did, using the opportunity presented by ‘the intifada culture of modesty’ was to start proclaiming that the wearing of hijab (veil) by women was a nationalist duty, it was part of the culture of the Intifada, a way of showing respect for the martyrs.

This confirms that women’s bodies were subjected to political definitions and were even battlefields of conflicts even within the different political parties in Palestine. Palestinian women’s bodies are also one of the most important concerns of Israel, due to demographic issues. Fertility rates in Palestine, specifically in Gaza, are the highest in the Middle East. The high Palestinian fertility rates are perceived as a threat to Israel’s existence as Golda Meir once expressed in fears of a day when she ‘would have to wake up every morning wondering how many Arab babies have been born during the night’ (apud Yuval-Davis 1987: 61). As a result of Israel’s demographic preoccupations, it invests intensely in infertility treatments and research leaving it as the country with the highest rate per capita consumption of in vitro fertilization worldwide. National health insurance covers artificial fertilization for the first two children. It is also the only country in the world where the health insurance covers artificial fertilization for single mothers who wish to have babies. On the other hand, national health insurance does not cover contraceptives and the law limits access to abortion (Matta 2007). And while Israel always encourages Israeli women to have more children, Palestinians urge their women to do the same. Despite the differences, the two discourses meet at one single point, making both Palestinian and Israeli women as using the words of Trinh Minh-ha (1989: 37), ‘wombs on two feet […] a specialized, infantproducing organ.’ Samiha Khalil⁷ mentioned that she dedicated a prize to people with the most children: ‘I realize that having many children constitutes a burden on women, but we are in a battle for survival, and the Israeli concern with our birth-rate is to be taken seriously. Israelis want our land without Palestinians on it’ (Najjar and Warnock 1992: 47), a statement that Muna Rishmawi commented upon: To change this type of consciousness Palestinians have to feel that their survival as a people is not under threat. Childbearing practices will change when Palestinian women are confident that they will not lose their children to disease or war’ (Najjar and Warnock 1992: 177).

7 Leader of the women’s organization In’ash El-usra, she was the first Arab woman to run for president in 1996, losing against Yasser Arafat.

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Peteet (1991: 184) explains that ‘women do not actually bear children for the nation, but by conceiving of and talking about fertility and reproduction in these terms they gain a sense of contribution to the national struggle.’ As a Palestinian woman (apud Peteet 1991: 185) confirmed proudly: ‘We Palestinian women, we have a batin ‘askari [literally, military womb, figuratively: we give birth to fighters].’ Yet, this sense of contribution to the resistance is also mixed with a feeling of resignation as we can sense in the words of one of them: ‘we Palestinian women, we give birth to them, we bring them up, and we bury them for the revolution’ (apud Peteet 1991: 185) or as another put it: ‘My body is not a weapons factory. It is my body.’ (apud Morgan 2001: 274). For the different political parties in Palestine, the ‘mother’ figure plays one of the most important roles in the conflict which is to ‘make’ children. Islah Jad noticed that the Islamic Movement Hamas makes this point rather blatantly when they mention that: ‘In the resistance, the role of the Muslim woman is equal to the man’s. She is the factory to produce men’ (apud Loomba 1998: 216). Hamas, however, contradicts its own political discourse regarding women’s social mssion (read ‘women’s bodies’) in the conflict as the mere bearer of fighters. Indeed, the first Palestinian woman suicide bomber, also a mother, carried out the operation with the support of Hamas and was the first mother to use her body as a weapon against the occupation. The information about Istish’hadeyat (the Arabic word used respectively to name ‘female suicide bombers’, and which does not have the negative connotation that the expression ‘suicide bomber’ has) shows that most of them had some difficulty in finding a political party which would support their operation. Most of the movements think that there is no necessity for women to participate in this role. Amal Amireh (2005: 230) affirms that ‘the female suicide bomber’s body is far from being dormant or inactive, passively waiting for outside help. It is purposeful, lethal, and literally explosive  … this body moves away from home, crosses borders, and infiltrates the other’s territory. It is a protean body in motion.’ The act of being a female suicide bomber contradicts the role that Palestinian patriarchal national discourse assigned for her: a factory for children, while also clashing with the image the occupier has for her: a war object. She gives a voice to her body by exploding it, taking the advice that Cixous (1997: 350) gave to all women: ‘your body must be heard.’ In an interview, a suicide bomber trainee stated: ‘I have to tell the world that if they do not defend us, then we have to defend ourselves with the only thing we have, our bodies (my italics)’ (Jaber 2003). She was thereby affirming the words of Minh-ha (1989: 36): ‘we do not have bodies, we are our bodies.’ Intifada comes from the verb ‘intafada’ which means to shake off, often the body or part of it. I end this essay by wondering whether it is possible to re-write,

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re-invent, re-imagine and re-body Palestinian women’s bodies. Is there a way of decolonizing our bodies, thereby initiating an Intifada of the body?

Works Cited Augustin, Ebba (1993) Palestinian Women. Identity and Experience (London: Zed books). Cixous, Hélène [1975] (1997) ‘The laugh of the Medusa’ in Feminism: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, Warhol, Robyn R. and Herndl, Diane Price (eds.) (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), 345 – 362. Frantz, Fanon (1967) Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press). Hammami, Rema (1991) ‘Women’s Political Participation in the Intifada, A Critical Overview’ in Mutamar Al-Intifada wa Ba’d Qadaia Al-Mar’a Al-Ejtima’ia (The Conference of Intifada and Women’s Social Issues) (Ramallah: Lajnet Dirasat nasaweia & Markez Bisan), 73 – 83. Layoun, Mary N. (2001) Wedded to the Land? Gender, Boundaries, and Nationalism in Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press). Loomba, Ania (1998) Colonialism / Postcolonialism (London: Routledge). Matta, Nada (2007) ‘Al-nasaueiat Al-Israeliat bi Sadad Haq Al-Auda Al-filistini’ (Israeli Feminists Discuss Palestinians Right to Return) in Kitabat Nasawia: ma bain Al-Qam’ wa aswat felestinia muqawema (Palestinian Feminist Writings: Between Oppression and Resistance), ed. Shalhoub-kevorkian, Nadera (Haifa: Mada Al-karmel), 245 – 273. Mhana, Itimad (1992) ‘Fairouz Arafa’ in Sho’oun Al-mar’aa , 3, June 1992, 111- 118. Minh-ha, Trinh T (1989) Woman Native Other (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Morgan, Robin (2001) The Demon Lover (New York: Washington Square Press). Najjar, Orayb Areef and Warnock, Kitty (1992) Portraits of Palestinian Women (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press). Odeh, Aysheh (2007) Ahlam Bel Horia (Dreams of Freedom) (Ramallah: Muwatin – The Palestinian Institute of the Study of Democracy). Peteet, Julie M. (1991) Gender in Crisis: Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement (New York: Columbia University Press). ––––– (1993) ‘Authenticity and Gender. The Presentation of Culture’ in Arab Women: Old Boundaries, New Frontiers. Tucker, Judith E. (ed.) (Bloomington: Indian University Press), 49 – 62. ––––– (2000) ‘Al-Jendar Al Thakary wa Toqous Al moqawama fy Al-Intifada Al-Ula. Al-Siasat Al-thaqafia lal Onf’ (Male Gender and Rituals of Resistance in the Palestinian Intifada: A Cultural Politics of Violence) in Al-Rojola Al-Mutakhaiala: Al-Hawia Al-thakaria wal Thaqafa fi Asharq Al-Awsat (Imagined Masculinities: Male Identity and Culture in the Modern Middle East), Ghassoub, Mai and Sinclair-webb, Ema (ed.) (Beirut: Dar Al Saqi), 123 – 147. Kassem, Fatma (2007) ‘Al-logha Wa-tarikh Wal-nisa’a- Nisa’a Filistiniat fi Israel Iasefn Ahdath Al-nakba” (Language, History and Women – Palestinian Women in Israel Describing the Events of Nakba) in ##itabat Nasawia: ma bain Al-Qam’ wa aswat felestinia muqawema (Palestinian Feminist Writings: Between Oppression and Resistance), ed. Shalhoubkevorkian, Nadera (Haifa: Mada Al-karmel), 105 – 144.

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Shalhoub-kevorkian, Nadera (ed.) (2007) Kitabat Nasawia: ma bain Al-Qam’ wa aswat felestinia muqawema (Palestinian Feminist Writings: Between Oppression and Resistance) (Haifa: Mada Al-karmel). Tawil, Raymonda (1988) Sajinat Al-Watan Al-Sajin (The Prisoners of the Home Prison) (Jerusalem: Mu’asasat Al-Thaqafa Al-Filistinia). Yegenoglu, Meyda (1998) Colonial Fantasies. Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (New York: Cambridge University Press). Yuval-Davis, Nira (1987) ‘The Jewish Collectivity’ in Women in the Middle East, ed. Salman, Magida et al. (London, Khamsin – zed books), 60 – 93. Wadi, Farouk (2000) ‘Al Huria men wara’a Hijab’ (Freedom behind the Veil) in Al-ayyam, Ramallah, 17.11.2000 Warnock, Kitty (1990) Land before Honour, Palestinian Women in the Occupied Territories (New York: Monthly Review Press).

Internet Sources: Amireh, Amal (2005) ‘Palestinian Women’s Disappearing Act: The Suicide Bomber through Western Feminist eyes’, in The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies, 5, spring 2005. http: // web.mit.edu / cis / www / mitejmes / (accessed on 3 February 2009) Blau, Uri (2009) ‘Dead Palestinian babies and bombed mosques – IDF fashion 2009’, in Ha’artz. com. http: // www.haaretz.com / hase##spages / 1072466.html (retrieved on 20 March 2009). Jaber, Hala (2003) ‘Cover story: The Avengers’ in The Sunday Times, 7 December 2003. http: // www.timesonline.co.uk / tol / news / article1035967.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1 (retrieved on 20 March 2009).

III. Emplotting the Nation

Lara Duarte

Addressing Wounds: Whitman Engaged Contemplating the scene in the cavalry camp below his third-storey window on 10 July 1863, Walt Whitman felt impelled to capture what he saw in writing: Still the camp opposite−perhaps fifty or sixty tents. Some of the men are cleaning their sabres (pleasant to-day,) some brushing boots, some laying off, reading, writing−some cooking, some sleeping. On long temporary cross-sticks back of the tents are cavalry accoutrements−blankets and overcoats are hung out to air−there are the squads of horses tether’d, feeding, continually stamping and whisking their tails to keep off flies. I sit long […] and look at the scene−a hundred little things going on−peculiar objects connected with the camp that could not be described, any one of them justly, without much minute drawing and coloring in words. (PP 730)¹

Whitman first turns his gaze, for a few brief moments, to the soldiers in camp but is then seemingly distracted by the clutter scattered all around and his eyes begin to wander from object to object. Feeling overpowered by ‘a hundred little things’ and unable to connect with the scene before him, the Poet who would ‘contain multitudes’ (PP 87) and ‘merge in the general run’ (PP 24) with everything in the cosmos, pulls back, retreating behind the excuse that he is unable to do justice to what he sees ‘without much minute drawing and coloring in words’. This is the despondent Whitman, the faltering writer that arrives in Washington at the beginning of 1862, but who by the end of the American Civil War would have written enough material to produce 85 chapters (Specimen Days) and 43 poems (‘Drum-Taps’) on the war years, and would later declare ‘My book and the war are one’ (3:628) in the poem ‘To Thee Old Cause’ (1871), included in the ‘Inscriptions’ section of the fifth edition of Leaves of Grass (1871 – 72). What of the ardent lover of the universe, the promiscuous empathizer, partaker of all? What of the bravado and quasi-arrogant convictions of the ‘greatest poet’ (PP 10) who, according to the 1855 preface, conquers all? More importantly,

1 Unless otherwise indicated, Whitman’s prose is quoted from Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (1982), ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: The Library of America), abbreviated as PP. All selections from Leaves of Grass are quoted from Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum (1980), ed. Scully Bradley, Harold Blodgett, Arthur Golden, and William White, 3 vols. (New York: New York University Press), and cited by volume and page. The passage is taken from Specimen Days, which was initially published in 1882 in a volume entitled Specimen Days & Collect. Specimen Days comprises notes, sketches, and essays written during the American Civil War and is, in the words of George Hutchinson – ‘the closest thing to a conventional autobiography Whitman ever published’ (Hutchinson 1998: 678).

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how does Whitman go from detailing and then fusing the atoms of the universe into a cohesive whole in the first edition of Leaves of Grass to being unable to draw minutely and colour in words, getting lost in the clutter of individual parts, and then back to extolling the virtues of et pluribus unum as he does in ‘Song of the Banner at Daybreak’? And all between those shores, and my ever running Mississippi with bends and chutes, And my Illinois fields, and my Kansas fields, and my fields of Missouri, The Continent, devoting the whole identity without reserving an atom, Pour in! whelm that which asks, which sings, with all and the yield of all, Fusing and holding, claiming, devouring the whole (2:464)

For Whitman, America was much more than a motionless landscape pictured from a distance. It was, as these verses show, ‘whole identity without reserving an atom.’² Every atom, every particle of matter counted in the moving human panorama that Whitman saw before him, a shifting, living kaleidoscope of meaning and endless possibility to the poet’s all-encompassing eye. According to the 1855 preface, the power of the poet can be attributed to the fact that ‘he sees the farthest’ and ‘has the most faith’ (PP 9) in the triumph of the self-evident truths he lays bare, namely, that most universal of truths proclaimed right at the beginning of ‘Song of Myself’: ‘Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul. // Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen, / Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn’ (1:4). The poet sees what others do not: that from physical sight proceeds spiritual sight (‘from the eyesight proceeds another eyesight’ [PP 12]) and yet ‘one eyesight’ does not ‘countervail another’ (PP 14). Armed with this knowledge, ‘the greatest poet’ calls upon himself not only the role of visionary, or ‘seer’ (PP 10), but also of supreme being (‘Supreme’ [PP 14], as the reference in the preface to the ‘curious mystery of the eyesight’ (PP 10) suggests. Whitman frequently employs and subverts Biblical images and typology to shift the traditional locus of power from God and Christ to the common man whom the poet represents. Thus, just as the eyes of the all-commanding Divinity are all-knowing and all-penetrating (‘all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do’ [Heb. 4.13]),³ so too the poet’s eyes are capable of beholding all: ‘Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded, / I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no’ (1:9). God, the

2 My italics. 3 Cf. also ‘For the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth’ (2 Chron. 16.3) and ‘The eyes of the LORD are in every place, beholding the evil and the good’ (Prov. 15.3).

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Bible reminds us, is even able to see inside the womb;⁴ so too the greatest poet, according to Leaves of Grass (cf. section 7 of ‘The Sleepers’),⁵ whose omniscient vision covers also the bowels and joints. The poet’s sense of sight ‘is removed from any proof but its own and foreruns the identities of the spiritual world’ (PP 10). In the words of the 1855 preface, a ‘single glance’ of the poet’s ‘mocks all the investigations of man and all the instruments and books of the earth and all reasoning’ (PP 10). In short, for Whitman, eyesight is, in fact, insight. Unlike Ralph Waldo Emerson who, in his essay ‘Nature’, recalls standing on bare ground in the woods, head ‘uplifted into infinite space’, before, characteristically, turning to spirit – ‘all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all’ (Emerson 10) −, Whitman’s panoptic perspective is rooted in the human body, indeed, in the very physical image of an eyeball in its socket, alluded to as ‘the space of a peachpit’, into which ‘far and near’, ‘the sunset’ and ‘all things’ enter with ‘electric swiftness’ (PP 10). As in ‘Song of the Banner at Daybreak’, the poet ‘fuses,’ ‘holds,’ ‘claims’ and / or ‘devours’ everything on which he lays eyes, secure in the knowledge of the essential unity of soul and spirit. In the last section of ‘Song of Myself,’ the poet, tellingly, sounds a ‘barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world’ as he crosses paths with a ‘spotted hawk’ before bequeathing himself to the dirt underfoot, spanning heaven and earth in one fluid movement. There is no hindrance as ‘softly and duly without confusion or jostling or jam’ (PP 10), all objects flow naturally into the retina of the poet’s eye, producing an image in the form of words. Clearly, this was not the case in 1863. By Whitman’s own admission: (a) at the start of the war, he was depressed; and (b) the war saved him. One might expect the poet of unity to be profoundly troubled by a divided America, but thankful for it? How could he possibly, having

4 In the words of King David: ‘My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. / Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them’ (Ps. 139, 15, 16). 5 ‘The soul is always beautiful, it appears more or it appears less, it comes or it lags behind, It comes from its embower’d garden and looks pleasantly on itself and encloses the world, Perfect and clean the genitals previously jetting, and perfect and clean the womb cohering, The head well-grown proportion’d and plumb, and the bowels and joints proportion’d and plumb’ (1:118 – 19)

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witnessed the ‘butchers shambles’ (PP 722, ‘A Night Battle, Over a Week Since’, Specimen Days) of the aftermath of battle, view the national crisis as the consummation of Leaves of Grass and justify beating the drums of war as enthusiastically as he does in ‘Beat! Beat! Drums!’? Many years later, Whitman would tell his good friend Horace Traubel that going to Washington to provide much needed care, solace and encouragement to the ailing and dying had been ‘necessary’, the result of a ‘call from something within’ that he ‘could not disregard […] something inestimably eloquent, precious: not always observed: […] a folded leaf’ (2001:180). He would also explain to Traubel that his ‘work in the hospitals’ was like a ‘religion’, adding by way of explanation: A religion? Well−every man has a religion: has something in heaven or earth which he will give up everything else for−something which absorbs him, possesses itself of him, makes him over into its image: something: it may be something regarded by others as paltry, inadequate, useless: yet it is his dream, it is his lodestar, it is his master […] What did I get? Well−I got the boys, for one thing: the boys: thousands of them: myself: I got the boys: then I got Leaves of Grass: but for this I would never have had Leaves of Grass−the consummated book (the last confirming word): I got that: the boys: the Leaves: I got them. (2001: 187)

‘The boys’ gave him Leaves of Grass, is what Whitman tells Traubel. Significantly, the play on words in the second part of the passage culminates in the equalising of ‘the boys’, ‘the Leaves’ and ‘myself’: ‘the boys: the Leaves: I got them.’ With this in mind, the key to understanding the Poet’s attitude – and therefore unfurling the leaves / Leaves − may well lie in the folds of the descriptions of his ‘specimen’ cases, the very ‘boys’ he tended to, for they guaranteed the existence of Leaves of Grass and Leaves of Grass, as his own. An introductory footnote to Specimen Days confirms that Whitman considered the ‘war of attempted secession’ the ‘distinguishing event’ of his lifetime. The war began in 1861, but it was only in late 1862 that Whitman directly experienced it for the first time. On 16 December 1862, he learned that his brother, Lieutenant George Washington Whitman, who had enlisted in the spring of 1861, had been wounded at the battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia, and promptly set off to find him, beginning by searching the hospitals in Washington. He finally located his brother, on the mend from a shrapnel wound to the cheek, on the camp grounds of Falmouth, just across the Rappahannock River from the battle site. What he witnessed in the camps, in the hospitals, and on the battlefield in the week he remained at his brother’s side, moved him enough to want to do more to help the sick and wounded. ‘I do not see that I do much good to these wounded and dying’, he confesses in ‘After First Fredericksburg’, ‘but I cannot leave them’ (PP 713).

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By and by, in the midst of severed body parts – ‘at the foot of a tree, within ten yards of the front of the house, I notice a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, &c., a full load for a one-horse cart’ (PP 712) – he found that the devastation gave him a sense of purpose: ‘Some of the men were dying. I had nothing to give at that visit, but wrote a few letters to folks home, mothers, &c. Also talk’d to three or four, who seem’d most susceptible to it, and needing it’ (PP 712). After a week on the front, Whitman obtained special passes from the army, including one signed by General Sumner, to travel back to Washington and before sunrise on Sunday, 28 December 1862, began the first leg of his return trip, riding alongside injured soldiers on a train to Aquia Creek landing, before catching a steamer up the Potomac. ‘On the boat I had my hands full’, he recollects in ‘Back to Washington’, ‘One poor fellow died going up.’ (PP 712). Whitman did not intend to sojourn in Washington for too long, a week to ten days at most, to visit some of the Brooklyn boys confined to the hospitals, he told friends, but quickly realised, as he confessed to his mother in the first letter he wrote upon settling into a boarding house, that he could not go back to the comforts of his previous life when ‘hundreds of thousands of good men’ were living and had had to live for a year or more ‘with death and sickness and hard marching and hard fighting […], for their continual experience.’ ‘Really’, he remarks, ‘nothing we call trouble seems worth talking about.’ (1961: 59). With the renewed sense of perspective provided by the war, Whitman was determined from the start to ‘write the story’ of the ‘unknown heroisms’ and ‘firstclass desperations’ of those who soaked ‘roots, grass and soil, with red blood’ yet ‘no formal general’s report, nor book in the library, nor column in the paper embalms’ (PP 724). All he witnessed was carefully recorded. As Whitman explains in his first footnote to Specimen Days, he found he just could not stem the flow of words, filling dozens of notebooks with ‘impromptu jottings’ (PP 689) to later help him recollect people, feelings, sights and occurrences. These, he felt, formed a ‘special history’ of the war years, ‘full of associations never to be possibly said or sung’ (PP 689). Both Whitman’s prose and his poems about the war are, in his own terms, ‘dripping and red’ (2:507, ‘The Artilleryman’s Vision’), or ‘blood-smutch’d’ (PP 670, Specimen Days), and often glaringly vivid, as when he recounts the unimaginable suffering of a rebel soldier ‘mortally wounded top of the head […] the brains partially exuded’ (PP 745) who lay on his back where he fell for three days, unable to do more than move one of his heels in the same repetitive motion; or when he comes upon a New York man, shot through the bladder at Bull Run, lying in a pool of bodily fluid: ‘He had suffer’d much−the water came out of the wound, by slow but steady quantities, for many weeks−so that he lay almost constantly in a sort of puddle−and there were other disagreeable circumstances. He had suf-

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fered much−’ (PP 717). There is no doubt that Whitman’s unflinching gaze can be disconcerting, startling even. It is also sharply accurate. The sights and sounds in the hospitals, at a time when medical care left much to be desired and typhoid fever, malaria, diarrhea, and postoperative infections such as pyemia, septicaemia, tetanus and gangrene were rampant,⁶ are accurately rendered by Whitman. The reportorial quality of much of his prose during this period certainly belies the distress he felt in the face of so much pain. The suffering he saw inevitably left an indelible mark as a letter penned to his mother on 26 May 1863 reveals: It is curious: when I am present at the most appalling scenes, deaths, operations, sickening wounds (perhaps full of maggots,) I keep cool and do not give out or budge, although my sympathies are very much excited; but often, hours afterward, perhaps when I am home, or out walking alone, I feel sick, and actually tremble, when I recall the case again before me (PP 1214).

The suffering did not, however, stop Whitman from recognising that what he witnessed in the hospitals and medical stations also justified the ideals of union and comradeship he had chanted in his early poetry, helping to assuage the mounting fear that his country would not absorb him as affectionately as he had absorbed it. As David S. Reynolds points out in his cultural biography of the age of Whitman, ‘the Civil War would give him the sense of completion he lacked’ (1996: 406). The soldiers he saw in the war hospitals, ‘saved him and saved America by displaying all the qualities he associated with ideal humanity’ (Reynolds 1996:426), allowing him to continue the poetic mission begun in 1855. There is much evidence to show that Whitman was beset by feelings of personal inadequacy and profound uncertainty in the years immediately preceding

6 For an account of the deficient standards of care, cf., The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War, ‘The Great Army of the Sick’ 75 – 123, from which the following excerpt has been extracted: ‘American doctors, by and large, were poorly trained and woefully underequipped (Harvard Medical School, for example, did not even own a microscope until 1869). The cause and prevention of disease were unknown. Typhoid fever, malaria, and diarrhea, the three most prevalent and deadly killers of the Civil War, tore through every hospital and camp, spread by infected drinking-water, focally contaminated food, and disease-transmitting mosquitoes. Meanwhile, attending physicians ascribed the ills to such imaginative and fantastical causes as “malarial miasms,” “mephitic effluvia,” “crowd poisoning,” “sewer emanations,” “depressing mental agencies,” “lack of nerve force,” “exhalations,” “night air,” “sleeping in damp blankets,” “choleric temperament,” “decay of wood,” “odor of horse manure,” “effluvia of putrefying corpses,” and “poisonous fungi in the atmosphere”.’ (Morris 2000: 90 – 91)

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the Civil War, as he struggled to come to terms with the failure of his poetry to capture the imagination of his fellow countrymen at a historical moment when the nation was seemingly coming undone. The war, however, afforded Whitman the satisfaction of taking on a ‘tender “wound dresser” role that was both patriotic and emotionally satisfying’ (Reynolds 1996:414), in the words of one of his best-known biographers. Unable to turn his back on the suffering he witnessed in the ‘slaughter-house’ (PP 723) of war, Whitman secured a part-time job as a copyist in the Army’s Postmaster’s Office and, in his spare time, busied himself with the task of attending to the ill, Union and Secession soldiers alike, taking care to record everything he experienced. Thus begins the second most productive period in the Poet’s life. Whereas the first, leading up to and including the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) and roughly spanning the period up until the publication of Crossing Brooklyn Ferry (1856), was one buoyed by supreme confidence, the latter was born of uncertainty, doubt, despair and an acute awareness of mortality, personal wounds caused by internal and external strife, needing to be addressed. He suggests as much in the second letter written from Washington, to Ralph Waldo Emerson, from whom he hoped to get letters of introduction to key figures in the Washington establishment in his bid to find a job.⁷ In the letter, Whitman reports he has arrived in Washington ‘wretchedly poor, excellent well’ and adds: ‘realizing at last that it is necessary for me to fall for the time in the wise old way, to push my fortune, to be brazen, and get employment, and have an income− determined to do it, (at any rate until I get out of the horrible sloughs)’ (1961: 161). What Whitman means by the ‘sloughs’ has been the subject of some speculation. Roy Morris, Jr, presumes Whitman was referring to ‘family matters, money concerns, or his old depression’ (2000: 76) and while all that may be true, for the noun can be taken to mean a marshy area or swamp, hence conveying a feeling of degradation, despondency, or helplessness, it is of interest to note that the word ‘slough’ – with an alternative meaning − also features prominently in the opening paragraph of the programmatic 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass,⁸ in which Whitman speaks of the need for America to attain political, cultural and literary independence.

7 The letters were intended for Secretary of State William Seward, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, and Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner. 8 The 1855 preface is the mission statement, the declaration of intentions, of Whitman’s body of literary work. Many of the ideas and expressions found in the preface – transcribed, revised and / or paraphrased – were incorporated in the poems of Leaves of Grass.

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According to this paragraph, America is in a transition stage: it awaits calmly (‘accepts the lesson with calmness’ [PP 5]) for its old ‘skin’ (‘slough’ [PP 5]) to fall away, with one eye on the past (‘perceives that the corpse is slowly borne from the house’ [PP 5]) and another on the future (‘to the stalwart and well-shaped heir who approaches’ [PP 5]). The process of renewal of America (later to be likened to ‘exfoliation’ in ‘The Great Unrest of Which We Are a Part’, Specimen Days [PP 921]) is compared to the shedding of skin in the natural world, a process permitting growth and signalling increased maturity. The supremely confident tone of the whole volume, set by this opening paragraph and best exemplified by the opening lines of Song of Myself,⁹ clearly conveys the Poet’s belief that he was representative of a new era, one that had turned the page on the past – here depicted by a corpse being ‘borne from the eating and sleeping rooms’ of a house even as a ‘wellshaped heir’ (PP 5) walks towards it, suggesting the imminence of a mysterious rite of passage from the old forms into the new. However, the emancipatory fancy – note that the wellshaped heir and corpse’s paths never cross – that sustained Whitman’s initial afflatus, depended as much on the ‘I’ as on the ‘you’ with which it identified, relying heavily on a positive response by the American public to the Poet’s apostrophes. As David Haven Blake underscores in Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity, the function of the apostrophe is to bring ‘the audience into Whitman’s poems, making it both present and complicit in his poetic identity,’ creating the impression of a ‘shared but fictive performance involving the poet and his reader’ (2006:87); and both, poet and reader, ‘are authenticated’, Blake reminds us, ‘through their implied relationship with the other’ (2006:87). For Whitman, lack of authentication would then, it follows, imply loss of self. As well documented by David S. Reynolds, although Whitman continued to write, as the first reviews of the 1855 edition Leaves of Grass began to appear, it quickly became apparent that his work had not been absorbed by the American public as he had announced it would be in the 1855 preface and ‘serious cracks’ began to emerge in his previously confident stance, as the second edition reveals, ‘pointing to a faltering of his poetic programme’ (Reynolds 1996: 349). Despair drove Whitman to telling measures. Apparently feeling the need to project himself with recourse to another’s already established reputation, Whitman published Emerson’s letter of 21 July 1855, greeting him at the beginning of a ‘great career’, in an appendix to the 1856 edition − without obtaining the

9 In the 1855 version, the opening lines of the poem read: ‘I celebrate myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.’ (1:1)

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Concordian’s permission (1856: 345). He further included an open letter of reply to his ‘dear Friend and Master’ presenting him with ‘thirty-two poems’ (1856: 346), or effectively bestowing, as Reynolds points out, ‘Emerson’s blessing on twenty poems he hadn’t even seen’ (1996: 355). There was more to indicate Whitman’s underlying anxiety, such as the omission of the prophetic 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, its final line – ‘The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it’ (PP 26) − altered and included in the poem ‘Poem of Many in One’ in the 1856 edition as ‘The proof of a poet shall be sternly deferr’d till his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it’ (1:204). Nothing could mask the negativity, the postponing of hopes and aspirations, in the letter to Emerson and in certain passages of the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass, most notably the poem ‘Respondez!,’ one of the most cynical pieces ever written by Whitman. In short, the muted response of his audience together with the apparent disintegration in the pre-war environment of the ideals he associated with American democracy and the ‘common people’ (PP 5) propelled Whitman into a ‘disappointed and self-critical posture’ that ‘the gloom and self-questioning’ (Reynolds 1996: 349) of the later poems ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’ (1859) and ‘As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life’ (1860) would make painfully evident. It is during this time that Whitman scribbles the following note to himself: Depressions Everything I have done seems to me blank and suspicious.−I doubt whether my greatest thoughts, as I supposed them, are not shallow−and people will most likely laugh at me.−My pride is impotent, my love gets no response.− the complacency of nature is hateful−I am filled with restlessness.−I am incomplete. (1984: 167)

The impotence felt by Whitman is especially apparent in the darkness of ‘As I Ebb’d With the Ocean of Life’, with its admission of self-doubt and frustration, some of the lines in section four, describing a dead corpse washing up on the shore, considered so bleak by James Russell Lowell, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, that they were omitted from the first version of the poem, published as ‘Bardic Symbols’ in April 1860: ‘(See! from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last! / See, the prismatic colours glistening and rolling’) (2:322). Here too we hear the laughter of his detractors, ‘Peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written’ (2:320), and the anxiety of disruption, for jetsam and flotsam is the predominant image in the poem. The only thing with which the poet can identify is washed up debris, negating Whitman’s heroic self-creation of himself as the bard of democracy and ‘arbiter of the diverse’ (PP 9). The poet who had once exalted the ‘blab of the pave’ (1:9) is ‘aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I have not

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once had the least idea who or what I am now’ (2:320). The self-assured extoller of human contact and lover of all humanity who ‘loosed’ his voice ‘to the eddies of the wind’ (1:2) now stands ‘baffled, balk’d, bent to the very earth’ (2:320), chastened by his own helplessness. Whitman questions himself, and finds himself wanting, no longer able to speak directly to the reader as in ‘Song of Myself’, his cocky and self-assured ‘I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles’ and ‘Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, / Missing me in one place search another, / I stop somewhere waiting for you’ (1:83) now a dejected and submissive ‘Wash’d up drift’ seeking validation: ‘We, capricious, brought hither we know not whence, spread out before you, / You up there walking or sitting, / Whoever you are, we too lie in drifts at your feet.’ (2:322) Arriving at the front in this frame of mind, Whitman realised that the debris that had overwhelmed him in ‘As I Ebb’d With the Ocean of Life’  – the ‘chaff, straw, splinter of wood, weeds […] / Scum, scales […] left by the tide’ (2:319) −, indicative of his own falling apart, was reflected in the shattered bodies of the soldiers around him, the fallen heroes whose sacrifice – initially for no more than an ideal – would lead to renewal. Like the Poet in ‘Song of the Banner at Daybreak’, Whitman can say that the call to battle is ‘ironical’ (2:464) because it leads to a destruction – a tearing asunder – that is ultimately a great act of union. What we have here is sparagmos, or dismembering, preceding enlightenment – the realisation, as in ‘Rise O Days from your Fathomless Deeps’, that the suffering of mortal flesh made self-aware is a necessary prelude to rising up stronger. In other words, death, justified by reconciliation, as in the poem named exactly that, ‘Reconciliation’: Word over all, beautiful as the sky, Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost, That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world; For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead, I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin−I draw near, Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin. (2:555 – 56)

After the war, Whitman would tell Horace Traubel that all he had witnessed between 1862 and 1865, all the ailing men he visited in Washington hospitals – 80,000 to 100,000 men, according to one estimate (Reynolds 1996: 425)  – had deeply ‘engaged’ him, ‘enlisting all [his] powers, thoughts, affections: the doubts, anxieties, dubiosities: the to’s and fro’s, the ups and downs’ (2001:179 – 80), taking him from ‘surfaces to roots’ (2001:183). The war had ultimately restored his faith

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in progress, freedom and unity and, he felt, in the ‘noble character’ (PP 8) of the ‘average man of the land’ (PP 954, Democratic Vistas [1871]): There were years in my life−years there in New York−when I wondered if all was not going to be bad with America−the tendency afterwards−but the war saved me: what I saw in the war set up my hope for all time−the days in the hospitals … not chiefly the facts of battles, marches, what-not−but the social being-ness of the soldiers−the revelation of an exquisite courtesy−man to man−rubbing up there together. (2001: 187 – 88)

Down at the front, in Culpepper, Virginia, in February 1864, watching the columns of men with ‘their usual burdens’ advance in unison, filing past him ‘with often a laugh, a song, a cheerful word, but never once a murmur’, Whitman sees ‘the majesty and reality of the American people en masse’ (PP 740). A few months later, he reflects on the courage of the individual soldiers he has encountered, remarking: ‘Of the many I have seen die, or known of, the past year, I have not seen or known one who met death with terror’ (PP 1213). Whitman considers ‘the average soldier, north and south’ the ‘golden swordblade of the war’, a ‘poem in itself’, heroic in nature and full of ‘noble consideration’ for others (2001:185). In the sparagmos of the soldiers he saw pathos akin to none, except perhaps Christ’s. Bull Run he considered a ‘crucifixion day’ for Lincoln (PP 711). A fallen soldier in ‘A Sight in Camp at Daybreak Gray and Dim’ has a face like the ‘face of the Christ himself’ (2:496) and when a dying soldier asks him to read a passage from the Bible, he chooses to read from one of the gospels the story of ‘latter hours of Christ, and the scenes at the crucifixion’ (PP 731). Whitman had gone where his strife-ridden heart had taken him, to those with whose pain he could identify − to the soldiers − and their courageous camaraderie, their selflessness, had restored his faith in his hopes for America. The qualities he had sung in 1855, he now found among the wounded and in the rank and file in the theatre of war. Having allowed the ‘priceless blood’ of the wounded ‘redden the grass’ (2:481, ‘The Wound Dresser’), he could now finally ‘troop forth replenish’d,’ taking his place in the ‘average unending procession’ (1:60) he had chanted in ‘Song of Myself’, safe in the knowledge that he had confronted dissolution, embraced doubt and been rewarded: I consider the war of attempted secession, 1860 – 65, not as a struggle of two distinct and separate peoples, but a conflict (often happening, and very fierce) between the passions and paradoxes of one and the same identity − perhaps the only terms on which that identity could really become fused, homogeneous and lasting (PP 999, ‘Origins of Attempted Secession’, Collect).

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Works Cited Allen, Gay Wilson (1969) The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman (New York: New York University Press). The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha. Oxford World’s Classics. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Blake, David H. (2006) Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1971) The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. I, ed. Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Hutchinson, George (1998) ‘Specimen Days (1882)’, in Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York / London: Garland Publishing, Inc), 678 – 81. LeMaster, J. R. and Donald D. Kummings (eds.) (1998), Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities. Vol. 1877 (New York / London: Garland Publishing, Inc). Morris, Jr., Roy (2000) The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Reynolds, David S. (1996) Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Vintage Books). Whitman, Walt (1856) Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, New York), in The Walt Whitman Archive, ed. Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, (accessed 4 May 2009). ––––– (1961) Walt Whitman: The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller, vol. I (New York: New York University Press). ––––– (1980), Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum (1980), ed. Scully Bradley, Harold Blodgett, Arthur Golden, and William White, 3 vols. (New York: New York University Press). ––––– (1982) Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: The Library of America). ––––– (1984) Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier, vol. I (New York: New York University Press). ––––– (2001) Intimate with Walt Whitman: Selections from Whitman’s Conversations with Horace Traubel, 1888 – 1892, ed. Gary Schmidigall, The Iowa Whitman Series (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press).

Pirjo Lyytikäinen

How to Forge a Victory out of a Defeat: Uses of War in Finnish Nation Building The important role military exploits and military victories play in enhancing national identities has often been emphasized. E. J. Hobsbawm mentions the proven capacity for conquest as one of the three criteria allowing ‘a people to be firmly classed as a nation’ (Hobsbawm 1992: 37, 38). But, if we believe Ernest Renan and recognize that forgetting, mistakes and even forgery are essential in nation building, the actual history does not really matter. In Hobsbawm’s (1992: 12) formulation of Renan’s words, ‘getting its history wrong is part of being a nation’.¹ In the light of literary history, in fact, it seems evident that the most influential of nationally inspired representations of war are free fictional constructs forged out of available historical material, representations that are based or claimed to be based on historical events but that use them freely for their own purposes, these often being far removed from any conscientious history writing. Even when representing actual as opposed to mythical wars, a combination of amnesia, selective memory, and ‘well-meaning’ forgery seems to be the rule. Literary representations, with their relative freedom to fictionalize even what is believed to be historical, play a crucial role in building imagined communities called nations, to borrow Benedict Anderson’s expression. The fictional character of national symbols helped smaller aspiring nations to bypass the criteria for being classed as a nation. Ethnic groups or territorially defined communities which had never been independent states challenged the idea spread by representatives of the well-established great nations that smaller (proto)nationalities or ethnic communities were not viable and were doomed to disappear (see Hobsbawm 1992: 34 – 37), and launched their nationalist projects by exploiting whatever facts, myths or imagined signs of nationhood they could produce. Although the inspiring influence of Herder, connecting language and nationhood, bypassed other criteria, the other requirements imposed themselves sooner or later. In the light of the inventive power of imagining nations, however, they were more a challenge to the imagination than a real hindrance to aspirations. Small nations felt the need to shape their national identities in the same terms as their more powerful neighbours, including descriptions of their glori-

1 Renan writes: ‘L’oubli et je dirai même l’erreur historique, sont un facteur essentiel de la formation d’une nation et c’est ainsi que le progrès des études historiques est souvent pour la nationalité un danger” (Cited in Hobsbawm 1992: 12.).

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ous performance in war  – even if this meant, in a sense, forging victories out of defeats on the battlefield: showing the victorious essence of the nation even when historical circumstances, accidents or traitors to the national cause gave advantage to the enemy. Besides, the glory of martyrdom had been successfully exploited to awaken the nationalist pathos ever since ancient Greece (especially in the interpretation given in the nineteenth century to the battle of Thermopiles), and the struggle against ‘oppression’ was, in a sense, ethically a better position than glorifying conquests. In this essay, I will take up the major Finnish example of the nineteenth-century practice of presenting historical wars in literature to enhance nationalist feelings. By analysing The Tales of Ensign Stål, a collection of epic war poems published in 1848 and 1860 by Johan Ludwig Runeberg (1804 – 1877), one of the founding texts of Finnish nationalist literature, I will trace patterns that govern nationalist representations of war. I consider my example to be illustrative of a larger field of nationalist literature, where the interplay between history and fiction creates rhetorically convincing foundations for nationalism. To a great extent, relying on the idea that ‘nothing is more international than literary nationalism’² makes the field unified despite the diversity of nations. The varying ways in which established or aspiring nations adapt and transform particular factual and cultural circumstances to fit them into the framework of nationalist discourse show much flexibility in details but manifest a common ethos and share a basic ideology. In the case of war literature, the described war symbolizes the national struggle and glory, giving a very value-laden picture of war. Apart from the fact that the early nationalist literature tends to create highly idealized pictures of nationally valued topics (see Tosh 2004: 49), it also reflects the general understanding of war. In nineteenth-century philosophy and political literature, war is usually seen as not only a necessary but also a valued positive phenomenon, which brings out the true virtues of a nation – even if the war is not won. Furthermore, descriptions of the nation at war seem to set a model for the national community as such: images of war describe the ideal functioning of the national community. In what follows, I will spell out these structures and their main aspects as expressed in Runeberg’s war poems and, occasionally, point out some of their ideological uses in critical moments of national history.

2 I am modifying Pascale Casanova’s statement about the national state (Casanova 2004: 36). The international character of nationalism in its various forms is, of course, widely recognized in studies on nationalism, e.g. Hobsbawm 1983 and 1992, Anderson 2006 [1983, 1991].

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Paradoxes of Language and History It is almost impossible to overestimate the impact of The Tales of Ensign Stål on Finnish nationalist thinking and the entire subsequent war literature in Finland. Its author, the Finland-Swedish poet J.L. Runeberg, had already established his fame as a poet and master of nationally inspired idylls, but the publication of his historically inspired war epics was an immediate and unprecedented success. The collection was understood as the patriotic work in the country’s literature; to Runeberg’s friend Johan Wilhelm Snellman (1806 – 1881), the most influential (Hegelian) ideologue of the Finnish national movement, it was the fulfilment of expectations: finally a work imbued with patriotic pathos and describing an important event in national history (see Karkama 1989: 157). Runeberg’s work, which opens with the poem that provided the words for the national anthem, was to become the patriotic bible of Finland. Though written in a time of peace but in memory of the most recent war (1808 – 1809), it was to serve also in times of war. This happened for the first time in the Finnish Civil War (1917 – 1918), which followed the country’s declaration of independence in 1917, in the midst of the revolutionary turmoil of the collapsing Russian empire. Later, during the Second World War, these epic poems were used as evidence of the valour of Finnish soldiers when Finland was attacked by the Soviet Union (1939). Copies of it were distributed to troops leaving for the front, but it was used on the home front as well; it became once again a bestseller during the war. The collection also attained international fame, although it is now mostly forgotten except in Finland and Sweden. Its use in Nazi propaganda sealed its subsequent disrepute in Germany. Two editions of the poems in German appeared in Nazi Germany during the war: even there the work was employed as a propaganda weapon to enhance the effort against the Soviet Union. From the Finnish national point of view it is somewhat paradoxical that a collection of poems in Swedish acquired a central place in nationalist lore. The historical background, Finland having been a Swedish province for centuries before becoming an autonomous Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire in 1809, with a Swedish-speaking upper class and education system and a Finnish-speaking rural population, explains the lack of authors writing in Finnish (even those of the educated class who spoke Finnish mainly expressed themselves in Swedish) – although the publication of the Kalevala (first version in 1835, ‘final’ version in 1849) based on Finnish folk poetry had enhanced the development of literary Finnish. Nevertheless, it was not evident that members of the Swedish-speaking educated class could function as representatives of Finnish ethnic nationalism. This meant that instead of choosing a linguistic criterion for building their national sense of identity (and imagining a common community either with Sweden or the Swed-

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ish-speaking rural population in coastal areas of Finland), many of the Swedishspeaking educated class and particularly its leading members chose to be or to become Finnish. One of the first Finnish nationalists, A. I. Arwidsson (1791 – 1858), who was later expelled from Finland due to his overly radical nationalism, had formulated the well-known phrase which became the slogan: ‘Swedes we are not, Russians we don’t want to become, let us therefore be Finns.’ As a result, Finnish nationalist literature was born Swedish-speaking  – with a mandate to become Finnish. The prominent authors wrote in Swedish but gave the literature a Finnish national mission that reflected the nationalistic and national-romantic thinking of the time. Literature was to describe and define Finnishness and the Finnish people – in Swedish. Later, with the Finnish translations of Runeberg’s Tales, this linguistic background was no longer of importance: many generations of Finnish schoolchildren learnt the translated version by Paavo Cajander (this translation from 1889 was not the first or only one but has been the most popular) and probably never laid eyes on the original poems. The other paradox of The Tales is its historical subject matter. Runeberg, when conceiving the idea of singing the military glory of the nation, chose as his theme the most recent war in Finnish history, known as ‘The Finnish War’. This contest between Sweden and Russia, part of the wider Napoleonic wars in Europe, was fought from the autumn of 1808 to the spring of 1809. It was not, by any means, a nationally inspired war. The Russian tsar, Alexander I, initiated the conflict to force his stubborn brother-in law, King Gustaf Adolf IV of Sweden, to break his alliance with England and join the Continental blockade: Alexander had agreed to this when he met with Napoleon in Tilsit in 1807. In this war, Sweden lost Finland to Russia. The war was, in many respects, an inglorious defeat for the Swedish-Finnish army. It is an irony of history that the defeat was transformed, by the first great national poet of Finland, into a manifestation of the valour and patriotism of Finnish soldiers. But national history is invented history and a poet is allowed to take even more liberties than the nationalist writers of history.

1. The Soldier and his Poet: Learning to be a Nationalist Ah, who could tell the slaughter-tale, / The ills our fathers stood? (Runeberg 1925: 5)

What Runeberg was really up to was transforming an ‘old-fashioned’ dynastic war between two armies into a national war, with national identities involved in it. The new type of war mobilizing whole peoples, which had become a reality

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after the French Revolution, had not, however, reached Northern Europe by the time of the Finnish War.³ The change was possible because Runeberg had, by the time he began writing the poems, adopted the national-romantic thinking of his age and because he had a source book, the extensive history of the Finnish War called Historia öfver kriget emellan Sverige och Ryssland åren 1801 och 1809 (1842) by Gustaf Montgomery, which gave him a framework in which to separate the ‘traitors’ who were responsible for the overall defeat from the heroes who established the military glory of the nation. The ideological agenda of the collection is openly given at the beginning of The Tales. Runeberg’s epic war poems are presented as the tales of a veteran of the Finnish War. In the framing poem (the second poem of the collection, following the national anthem) the figure of the poet is presented as a young student who is experiencing a national awakening. After having read a book on the Finnish War he (the speaker of the framing poem) affirms that he now sees his people in a new perspective and identifies with them in a new way: ‘I saw a people who their all / Could yield, save honor glorious;– / Saw troops in frost and hunger’s thrall, / That yet could fight victorious’ (Runeberg 1925: 12). The important terms, ‘honor’, ‘glory’ and ‘victory’ are all there and the supernatural endurance is alluded to as well. The war is presented as the people’s war, as the business of the whole nation, in harmony with the new idea of war emphasized by Carl von Clausewitz, among others (Dudink and Hagemann 2004: 5). The would-be poet wants to hear more about the war and turns to an old war veteran, ensign Stål, who lives in the same house but whom the student has thus far disregarded and even abused. The student learns to appreciate this simple man of the people as an emblem of true Finnish patriotism and bravery. Ensign Stål and his stories become the inspiring source of the poems. The framing poem states that the book was inspired by the heroic people and given as a gift to the native land.⁴ We can see that the ethos and pathos of the framing poem reveal the didactic function of the whole collection: the reader is supposed to imitate the student in

3 This has been emphasized in recent histories of the Finnish War, whereas the fact was blurred during times of nationalistic history writing. See Lappalainen et al. 2008. But, in the light of post-nationalist history writing, it is doubtful if it existed anywhere, except in idealistic poetry and as part of a nationalist politics of memory (combined with amnesia regarding unsuitable aspects) which flourished a generation after the Napoleonic wars (see Planert 2001): Planert concludes (2001: 132) that nations are forged by ideological ‘memories’ of wars, not by wars. This forging is essentially Runeberg’s intention in The Tales. 4 It is important to note that Runeberg uses the expression ‘fosterland’ (native land) throughout the poem, except here where he makes it more concrete; the term ‘fosterjord’ that he uses at this point refers to the very soil of his country.

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his attitude towards the men of the people. As such, a framing poem like this is a typical device of the period⁵ but here it manifests a nationalist move as well: choosing new ideals and models. This can be connected to what Hayden White calls ‘choosing a set of ideal ancestors’, which characterizes the processes of socialization. This ‘ancestral substitution’ is understood here ‘as a request for individuals to act as if they were actually descended from historical or mythical models in preference to any model that might be provided by genetic inheritance.’ (1972: 8, 11) It was demanded of the Finnish upper classes and especially those descended from Swedish-speakers that they identify with the Finnish-speaking population, the common people and their patriotic zeal. The collection does not strictly keep up the fiction of being stories that the ensign tells the poet. In fact, many of the poems are in outright contradiction to this supposition. But its agenda, to enhance Finnish patriotism by recounting the people’s past glory, required the framing poem. The poet seems to acquire the authority of speaking in the people’s name by pretending to speak in the voice of their chosen representative. The whole collection is carefully constructed to serve the ideologically coloured vision of the author. The facts of the poet’s real sources of inspiration differ from the information that the framing poem gives, although it was often taken quite literally (Wrede [1988] still feels the need to combat these illusions). Contrary to the tenacity of public opinion, it has been proven that all the poems are essentially fictional even when their protagonists are historical persons (Wrede [1988] summarizes the former evidence and adds his own contributions to this unending effort by literary scholars to attack commonly-held beliefs). In fact, the literary tradition of representations of war, especially in classical literature (Runeberg was a teacher of Greek and Roman letters) is prominent as the background of the poems. The way that Runeberg’s diverse sources of inspiration were combined manifests, however, the nationalist agenda behind the works: the way of reading the sources is as important as the sources themselves. The Romantic as well as Classic conceptions of literature, which emphasized the finding of universal essences instead of realism in the modern sense, permitted Runeberg (and other national writers of the era) to disregard any unsuitable aspects of historical wars. Runeberg took as his foundation individual heroic acts, depicting common soldiers and (lower) officers fighting fiercely for their country. The probable non-existence of proper nationalist feelings of belonging (either to Sweden or to Finland), in contrast to other motives for fighting or not fighting in this war,

5 It has a direct correspondence in J.W.L. Gleim’s Preussische Kriegslieder von einem Grenadier (1758) and in some Swedish predecessors as well (Wrede 1988: 57 – 58).

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did not prevent Runeberg from seeing everything from this perspective. However, the nationalist motivation Runeberg gives to his characters remains somewhat ambivalent. Some of the characters described are Swedish (not Finland-Swedish) officers whose loyalties belong to the Swedish crown. The reception of the poems also reflects this ambivalence: in Sweden, Runeberg’s great work has been read as Swedish patriotic poetry. In Finland, on the contrary, the reception has more or less disregarded the Swedish elements by emphasizing the Finnish-nationalist interpretation of the collection. As to the depressive aspects of the Finnish war, Runeberg found them to be a challenge rather than a hindrance. He was affected morally by Montgomery’s opinion (which was shared by many) that while the common people tried to do their best to fight the enemy, the upper command was either incompetent or corrupt making futile the sacrifices of the people. This gave Runeberg the overall framework of his poems. It is known that many officers and civil servants collaborated with the enemy (in actual fact, prominent among the ‘traitors’ was Runeberg’s own father-in-law) but interpreting their action as treachery stems from the nationalist perspective that Runeberg adopted. Runeberg thus emphasized the heroism shown by common soldiers and faithful officers without denying the overall defeat and disaster. To ‘save’ the glory of the nation it was necessary to name the ‘alien’ culprits of the ultimate defeat who ruined the victorious efforts of the true patriots and heroes. These heroes would have won the war but for the traitors, cowards and incompetents, whom Runeberg found exclusively amongst the highest commanding (Swedish) officers and their ‘head’, the Swedish King himself. Runeberg makes the wartime Swedish king, Gustaf Adolf IV (deposed after the war), the target of murderous satire in his poem ‘The King’. From today’s perspective it is not difficult to accept that many in the Finnish upper classes adopted a defeatist attitude during the war and were ready to shift their loyalties from the (exceptionally incompetent) Swedish king to his more successful brother-in law, Tsar Alexander I. They did not view it as a ‘national’ question. A full century of campaigns that Swedish kings had lost on Finnish soil at the expense of Finns and Finnish territory made many Finns consider it not only inevitable but even desirable that Russia would take the whole land this time. Furthermore, Swedish military strategy – retreating and avoiding battles; as such, quite normal for the period – discouraged both soldiers and civilians.⁶ But understanding ‘Realpolitik’ is not a virtue for national poets and the description

6 The reasons for this strategy are explained in the later histories of the war (see Tommila 2008 and Lappalainen et al. 2008) but Runeberg’s poem reflects the perplexity it caused in Finland.

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of the banalities of war had no appeal as a literary subject to national romantics. What mattered, though, was that the subject be based on real history, so that it could be seen to represent a real war (however purified). Nationalistic thinking needed ideal historical manifestations of the spirit of the nation, and Runeberg’s poems provided an impressive poetical presentation of them.

2. The Ideal Game of Blood Who measured all the outpoured blood / And all the fortitude? (Runeberg 1925: 5)

Today, the reader can still feel the poetic qualities of Runeberg’s poems and be emotionally engaged with their characters and their fates, but the image of war in the collection sounds false and devoid of any realism. Nevertheless, this idea of war, which to contemporary Western sensibilities is (or should be) one of blindness to human suffering and which glorifies or perpetuates practices that we would wish to ban, was a common conception at the time of Runeberg. The ethics of war that Runeberg relied on and that he shared with most of his prominent contemporaries did not object to war or to seeing wars in terms of glorious exploits rather than plagues on societies. The idea that peaceful life would ultimately destroy the vital energies or the physical and spiritual force of the nation was a Hegelian message zealously disseminated in Finland by Runeberg’s friend Snellman. But it must be remembered that Runeberg was not primarily interested in glorifying war as a real phenomenon of which he had no experience and which he conceived of more or less according to conventional (even primarily classical) literary representations of it: he was more or less using the conventional imagery as a tool and foundation for his patriotic vision. The scenes of war could illustrate his ideal of patriotism and more noble humanity. This does not, however, make the images as such more innocent; it only reveals the double-faced procedure at work in these descriptions. Runeberg’s image of war in The Tales seems to rely centrally on two metaphors: war as a game and war as divine service. Both work together by focusing on the positive aspects of war and silencing any (possible) voice that might raise the horrors of war into view. War in Runeberg’s poems is represented as an exciting game, a game of blood and arms, it is true, but viewed wholly in a spirit of adventure that avoids any real reflection on the subject from the point of view of human fear or suffering. Here, certain parallels exist with today’s popular films and literature. In The Tales, the ‘game of blood’ forms a frame of reference which is comparable to contemporary

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sports discourses. The sufferings of the soldiers in war are mentioned to enhance their bravery: they suffer from cold, hunger or fatigue but they don’t give up and when it comes to fighting, they are all the more fierce because of these toughening conditions. This is, obviously, a very masculine game. Most of the poems describe and define the ideal masculinity, which is here equated with the ideal patriotism – in a way familiar to everyone but only recently questioned in gender terms.⁷ The most important tenet is a no fear principle. If more realistic and more recent descriptions of war usually speak of mastering fear, in Runeberg’s idealized scenery fear is practically non-existent on the battlefield.⁸ It is only mentioned in terms of a suspicion or insult: feeling fear as such is shameful in this world. In the poem ‘Sandels’ the eponymous officer is suspected of cowardice because he does not arrive on the battlefield in time. He is, in fact, acting according to an honour code that seems nonsensical to the modern reader and that is not understood by his men either, but to show that he is not a coward, he feels he has to risk (stupidly, the modern reader would say) his life by posing himself on his white horse as a glaring target for the enemy. The fact that Runeberg had picked up the detail of the white horse of a Russian commander from Montgomery’s history and assigned it to his Swedish officer makes the event even more ironic. According to Runeberg, courage is the great principle in war and courage springs from love, the love of one’s own country. In Runeberg’s world, there is no place for hatred as a motive for fighting: even the enemy is respected. This is part of the game-like aspect of this world: the adversary is seen to follow the same rules and it, or its best “players”, can even be admired (this happens in the poem ‘Kulneff’). Courage is more important than reason; the bravado Runeberg depicts is impulsive, it springs from the emotional layers of the self. A retreat, even a strategic retreat, does not belong to this poetical world of war as a possible reasonable option. The manoeuver of retreat which failed but which could have succeeded (the strategy worked well for Russia in 1812) comes up in the poems only as a shameful action of the upper command. In this vein, the poem ‘The

7 The anthology Masculinities in Politics and War. Gendering Modern History (2004), which I have used as my main reference here, takes up the key issues and summarizes some of the research done in the area. 8 The recent research on the subject, to the contrary, emphasizes the naturalness of fear and the difficulties of learning to suppress it. Goldstein (2001: 253) crystallizes the issue: ‘Contrary to the idea that war thrills men, expresses innate masculinity, or gives men a fulfilling occupation, all evidence indicates that war is something that societies impose on men, who most often need to be dragged kicking and screaming into it, constantly brainwashed and disciplined once there, and rewarded and honored afterwards.’

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Baggage Driver’ is about an old soldier who is notoriously slow as the army is retreating but when the order is finally given to engage the pursuing enemy is the first to be ready for battle: ‘the cart that hindmost lagged, when North departing, / Now stood turned about, with horse hitched up for starting’ (Runeberg 1925: 259). Runeberg’s ideal of a soldier (or masculinity) also includes a no pain principle: continuing to fight when hurt. This parallels the rules of masculinity in sports, which Michael A. Messner analyses in his study Power at Play (1992: 72 – 76). Fighting to the end, being willing to fight even when wounded, is a mark of excellence. Runeberg’s poem ‘Döbeln at Juutas’ creates a most pathetic picture based on this theme. The commanding officer Döbeln (who has risen from his sick-bed to lead the battle) is riding past his troops lined up for review before the battle. He notices a particularly pallid soldier in the line and asks in wrath: ‘Who are you, peasant? Speak! What is the matter? / And does a glimpse of death your courage shatter? / Your cheek is white! Are you a weal poltroon?’ But the youth shows his breast with a fresh wound glowing on it and answers: ‘Sir General, late in battle have I gained it, / and chance too much have bled since I obtained it, / And so my cheek still holds its pallid hue; / If I can add yet to our hero-story, / I glad will fall; but let me seek the glory; / For since your coming feel I strength anew!’ (Runeberg 1925: 158). The ultimate sacrifice and the highest virtue, of course, are already implied in this: pro patria mori is the fulfillment of an ideal. It is not just dying but dying as a hero, dying in battle, with one’s weapon in one’s hand and fighting until the last drop of blood. This is a death game where the greatest honour for the individual is dying in the right way, not surviving. In the atmosphere of the poems, the reader begins to sense that surviving is an accident, and that dying is the true goal. Individuals are there for the community, for the nation, and if they can sacrifice themselves for the nation they have fulfilled their supreme duty and attained the essence of being a member of the community. Runeberg’s poems strongly contribute to imagining the nation in terms of willing sacrifices, in terms of duties – not of rights.⁹ This also sheds light on the only kind of suffering that is focused on in The Tales, namely the mourning of dead heroes. On these occasions, mourners are

9 The initial idea promoted by the French Revolution about a balance of rights and duties and the democratic ideal of fraternity and equality had been lost under the conservative trends of nationalism. Since Anderson, this aspect of nationalism and the question ‘what makes the shrunken imaginings’ (related to nationalism) engender the sacrifices even when the rights do not balance them, have been the focus of attention (see the introductory articles in Dudink et al. 2004).

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affected by the proximity of the sublime. The mourning is attenuated by a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment, and becomes a joy reminiscent of the Christian’s feelings while contemplating the death of the Saviour.

3. God-blessed War Thou Triumph-giver, be all thanks to Thee! (Runeberg 1925: 162).

The metaphors of harvesting and divine service are the most conspicuous and recurrent images given to warfare in Runeberg’s poems. The harvest of war, of course, is a commonplace or topos not peculiar to Runeberg. It is important ideologically: giving the image of war the connotation of a quasi-natural process makes war a necessity. Furthermore, combining the harvesting metaphor with the metaphor of divine service seems to make war both inevitable and sacred. It bestows war with God’s blessing, with positive value in the universe ordered by God. In the poem ‘The Veteran’ an old veteran of previous wars puts on his old uniform and goes to witness a battle as if going to church: ‘to the old man’s thinking, / God’s service hour was here,– / If not inside the temple, / The service should be near’ (Runeberg 1925: 43). The battle, led by General Adlercreutz, is fought while he is sitting and watching. Men on both sides die but he calmly enjoys the spectacle: ‘He would behold God worshipped / By Adlercreutz to-day’ (Runeberg 1925: 44). In the end, the Finnish troops prevail and he thanks the soldiers saying that he never before saw such noble action: he is glad to discover that there are still heroes in his country. The old man gets a better emotional lift from seeing the fighting than from hearing his priest – as if the battle were a holy ceremony more true to God’s words than a Sunday service. To be precise, this is true of patriotic wars and, as a consequence, adds to the sacred character of patriotism and makes the feeling of national belonging comparable to the fellowship in God shared by a congregation of believers. It does not replace the old religious sense of belonging but is added to it as an equal part of identity; the two communities are merged together in religious patriotism. All the heroic acts, which most often lead to the hero’s death, are represented as moments of sublimity. The person, however simple or comical he has been in his daily life, is elevated to a higher sphere by the inner glow of his patriotism. Runeberg has even a clear preference for destitute heroes, as Wrede (1988: 35) underlines. The love of one’s country is described as the most sublime emotion; it makes a man godlike – even outwardly. The contrast is at its greatest when the

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character acting heroically is devoid of any natural or cultural advantages. The most famous and popular of Runeberg’s heroes is a simpleton named Sven Dufva who is the laughing-stock of the whole army until his habit of misunderstanding and doing everything contrary to orders turns a looming defeat into victory. Sven is advancing when ordered to retreat, and dies while holding a bridge all alone against an enemy assault before the main body of the Finnish army arrives. He who had done nothing successfully before is the hero of the day. The general, Sandels, comments: ‘That bullet knew far more than we, it knew the place to hit: / it left unhurt the poor lad’s head, which was not of the best. / And found itself a worthier mark, his noble, valiant breast’ (Runeberg 1938: vv 106 – 108).¹⁰ Needless to say, the character is entirely fictitious (but has a Roman prototype). Still, numerous have been the efforts of scholars and amateurs to find a real-life model for poor Sven. These sublime moments transform the individual and lift him to a higher level of humanity. Runeberg’s hierarchical ideal of human accomplishment is strict. Individualistic desires should, in this conception, give way to familial love and familial love should yield to a love of one’s country and people (Karkama 1982). There is the (above-mentioned) tendency to emphasize the importance of dying for one’s country at the expense of simply defending one’s country (and surviving). Following the idea of Hayden White that choosing to die for one’s values is what distinguishes humans from animals, we might see Runeberg’s heroic patriotism as an affirmation of humanity on quite another level as well.¹¹ The girl in the poem ‘The Cloud’s Brother’, who finds her heroic lover shot dead, expresses this scale of values while standing before the hero’s body: ‘More than living, I have learned, was loving, / More than loving is like him to perish’ (Runeberg 1925: 37). Here, the pure ideal has completely superseded any realism. This humanism of poetic heroic death is a symbolic form representing the Human ideal  – and a sublimation of real human feelings, the all-too-human side of man. But for Runeberg the patriotic aspect of sacrificing one’s life is the most important: it is patriotism and not just humanism that is the highest value in The Tales. Patriotic heroic death is a personal and national victory; it turns even a defeat into a manifestation of the glory of the people. During times of war, this myth

10 I use the translation by Charles W. Stork in this example, while that of Clement Burbank Shaw, which I use in other citations, does not in this particular case render the original very well. 11 White (1972: 235): ‘It is a characteristic of sociocultural systems that they sometimes seem to choose, self-consciously and programmatically, not to survive, if survival entails abandonment of the lifestyle constituted by their dedication to ideal values, goals, norms, or aspirations’.

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of heroic self-sacrifice always seems to become sacrosanct (see Goldstein 2001: 324 – 325). This explains the popularity of Runeberg’s poems during the World Wars. The high ideal combining patriotism with religion makes sense of what is otherwise only a horror or a horrible necessity.

4. An Imagined Model for the National Community Runeberg was writing in a time of peace and did not himself anticipate the uses his poems might have in times of war. When he wrote, there were no prospects for Finnish independence on the political level, let alone possibilities for military action. Any political or military nationalism that the poems could later inspire was out of question in a country controlled by the suspicious administration of Tsar Nicholas I. Runeberg himself refrained from open political activity.¹² In a sense, he was not really describing the Finnish War; he was forging a patriotic epic to reveal the internal essence of his people and, at the same time, setting a national ideal to be followed – not on the battlefield but in the fight for national cultural goals. The image of the people at war was to inspire every youth – in the way that the poet figure, the student, is inspired in the framing poem – to love and serve his people by cultural work; collecting folklore and writing poems, for example, were considered to be among the most important national activities at the time. The rhetoric of the poems was aimed at the educated classes and the youth of the nation. If the simple soldiers whom Runeberg describes in the poems have loved Finland enough to risk their life for it, should not the more lucky descendents who need not fight in a war, also do what they can for their country? This was, basically, Runeberg’s message. It evokes the supreme sacrifice that citizens are supposed to be willing to make for the nation (see e.g. Hobsbawm 1992: 9) in order to forge the imaginary unity of the Finnish people which had, in Runeberg’s time, only been a goal and an ideal pertaining to the small educated minority. For Swedish-speakers, it was also an admonition to disregard the old cultural ties with Sweden and the existing linguistic community connecting Finland-Swedes

12 Runeberg’s political agenda or the lack of it is still controversial. The prominent Finnish historian Matti Klinge has written a book called Poliittinen Runeberg [The Political Runeberg] (2004) where instead of nationalist politics he emphasizes Runeberg’s conservative attitudes and his avoidance of any friction with the Russian administration. Wrede (1988) emphasizes Runeberg’s essentially apolitical patriotism and criticizes Klinge (who had already earlier expressed similar views of Runeberg) for seeing Runeberg as an opportunist.

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to it. Runeberg defined the new alliance as that between the Finnish common people and the educated classes of Finland, regardless of which language they spoke. If we think that Runeberg’s war poems also convey the notion of an ideal national community, the role that death and real courage play recedes into the background. Instead, the images of social and gender relations that The Tales present to the reader as implicit models become salient. The overall patriarchal structuring defines the gender roles and informs the passing of tradition from fathers to sons or from old men to young. Furthermore, the social relations within the army seem to offer a model for the social hierarchy within society as a whole. In so far as the description of war depicts a world of ideal masculinity, it sets the standards of manhood for the society in general. The framing poem defines the (male) audience: young students who are expected to become ‘soldiers’ of the nationalist cause. The myth of learning from old men, who supposedly pass on a (mythical) national tradition, is a gesture establishing the ‘subjective antiquity’ (Anderson 2006, 5) of the newly invented nation. The democratic element of this transmission should not be forgotten: it is a man of the people who is the teacher. The socially inferior (and initially despised) ensign is given the role of Nestor, the wise old man who merits being listened to. Compared to older ways of thinking about social hierarchy the new national romanticism downplays the old hierarchical structures of society. Imagining national communities creates a bond of brotherhood between the classes.¹³ But this bond does not mean subverting social hierarchies as such. Runeberg’s poems combine the idea of being brothers on the (national) battlefield with the idea of a social hierarchy where the (well-fed) officers serve by leading and commanding and where even the poorest never aspire to anything more than serving the nation. This idealism carries the notion of moral discipline which does not question social hierarchies: placing individual needs before those of the nation is treason, asking for bread when you are asked to die is individualistic. The role of women is marginal in the poems but when women appear they are there to reinforce the national values and the masculine virtues of the soldiers. We saw that Runeberg establishes a hierarchy of emotions which makes roman-

13 Anderson (and others after him) has emphasized this aspect of fraternity, the idea of a nation as ‘a deep, horizontal comradeship’ (2006: 7), and this seems to confirm his idea of aligning nationalism with phenomena like religion. In some ways, the old sense of religious communities, which could still be evoked as an idea, functions as a model. Whatever the real hierarchy of the Church, it was ideologically presented as compatible with the idea of equality as God’s children. And religions, as well as nations, incite people to die for them.

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tic love secondary: it is to be superseded by patriotic love. In a sense, this also functions to build a parallelism between these two passions. The same kind of parallelism has often been exploited in national imagery: to become a lover of the native land is superior to loving a woman (Landes 2004: 101 – 102). Only two poems in The Tales feature female protagonists. One describes an old soldier’s widow Lotta Svärd (whose name was given to the Finnish women’s paramilitary organization that supported the army during World War II). She has remained in the army after her husband died on the battlefield and has now adopted all the (brave) soldiers as her children: she supports them by providing food, tobacco, etc. To summarize, she is a traditional mother figure and the only representative of the civilians who followed the troops (in real warfare, this has been an essential and not a very respectable side of the coin, which is usually passed over in silence; see Goldstein 2001: 342 – 346). In Runeberg’s ideal world, she is a blameless helper and motivator whose courage is praised. Especially famous is the poem ‘The Cottage Maiden’ describing a poor tenant girl waiting for her fiancé to return from battle. As he is not amongst those who come back she thinks he is dead but her mother consoles her: the fiancé is alive because she, the mother, had advised him to hide before the battle. The girl is not happy to hear this. Instead, she goes to the battlefield to see if he is among the dead and, failing to find him, says to her mother that she wants to die; she would have preferred a dead fiancé to a traitor. He has preferred his love for her to his patriotic duty but she would have sacrificed him and her love to her native land. The role assigned to this poor girl (as with the mourning girl from the poem ‘The Cloud’s Brother’ already mentioned) is, once again, a traditional role for women in war: to enhance and uphold the system of masculinity that demands men sacrifice themselves for the country. The supportive roles given to women in Runeberg’s poems correspond to the roles reserved for them in national affairs in general. The nation, like war, is men’s business. But not all men qualify: the cowardly and incompetent are as harmful in all national affairs as in war. The nation must have leaders who think in national terms. Even if Runeberg is not openly political, the poems evince an implied political message. In The Tales, the most powerful social and military figures are presented as the traitors responsible for the defeat. Many of the socially powerful remained, even in Runeberg’s time, ‘traitors’ to the national cause: the country’s higher authorities were not supporters of nationalism. Instead, Runeberg appealed to the middle-class cultural elite who aspired to form the core of a new national community and were willing to act as the ‘officers’ of a national comradeship as well as to those students who, like the poet-figure in the framing poem, lend their ear to the voice of national tradition and values and

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become ideologues and the militant force that can arouse the people to see who they ‘really are’.

5. Conclusions The development of nationalism seemed to demand the acceptance of patriotic myths as unquestionable truths. Nationalism works by creating myths transformed into realities; it needs the imaginary bonds and upholds them as sacred truths. The same ‘truths’ are, to a great extent, still officially proclaimed on solemn occasions but the spirit is hardly there. But it is evident that those who enthusiastically engaged in the nationalist movement in Finland had no doubts about their dearest tenets. There is much evidence of quite literal readings of Runeberg’s poems, even among literary scholars: Runeberg was felt to imitate the reality even if we tend to think that he largely created it. However, the changing times affected attitudes towards him. But even the many attacks on Runeberg’s heritage did not shatter the status of Runeberg’s tales definitively; he was needed in times of war and his war poems regained their prestige once again in 1939 when war threatened the national existence. The time when the state and the nation truly needed the supreme sacrifice of one’s life and an unquestioning patriotic spirit brought The Tales to the forefront. It may be questionable if soldiers made any profitable use of the pathetic poetry describing a remote historical war, which had little in common with the realities of modern warfare, but the popularity of the poems during the war is undeniable. And, when a new national bible of war literature, the 1954 novel Tuntematon sotilas [The Unknown Soldier] emerged, its author Väinö Linna, a Finnish World War II veteran, despite making fun about the discrepancy between Runeberg’s visions and every-day war only updated rather than destroyed the basic ethos of national heroism. Even the pattern of forging a victory out of a defeat plays a role in it. Nationalist fictions forge a glorious history for a nation even despite the known historical past. Nationalist literature and history writing share complicity in the ideological processes of shaping the history the nation needs. Even if we admit that we inevitably always construct our reality by narrating and presenting it, we can, from the point of view of our present, see past constructions in a critical light. It is, however, important to scrutinize the whole process. War poetry and war fiction, which see the fulfillment of a national obligation in war heroism, may enhance nationalist enthusiasm in a general way but also give a special place of prestige to war. Furthermore, glorifying war and placing war at the centre of national mythology emphasizes male heroism and maintains hierarchical and

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patriarchal forms of social order even or exactly when the wars they describe are interpreted allegorically. But, above all, they hypnotize their readers into seeing a natural genealogy and natural bonds where there are only wilful decisions, and often incite enmities based on arbitrary differences or on mythical-historical events seen through very subjective lenses. The ethical pathos that arouses people to love their country seems – in didactical schemes and images like the ones used by Runeberg – to be a higher duty transcending egoistic concerns about one’s own life and family, but if it breeds hatred of other peoples, war, and the destruction of the very people one is supposed to love, it loses its ethical grounding. In view of today’s ongoing conflicts and wars, we might conclude that efforts to see the horrors of war instead of its glory, would be the ethically better choice and would, hopefully, help to influence the choices real people make in accepting or rejecting social systems, by promoting solutions that avoid conflict and war, whenever possible.

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict (2006) Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition of Anderson 1983, 1991 (London / New York: Verso). Casanova, Pascale (2004) The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, Mass. / London: Harvard University Press). Dudink, Stefan, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh (eds.) (2004) Masculinities in Politics and War. Gendering Modern History (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press). Dudink, Stefan and Karen Hagemann (2004) ‘Masculinity in politics and war in the age of democratic revolutions, 1750 – 1850’, in Masculinities in Politics and War. Gendering Modern History, ed. Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh (Manchester / New York: Manchester University Press), 3 – 21. Goldstein, Joshua S. (2001) War and Gender. How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hagemann, Karen (2004) ‘German heroes: the cult of the death for the fatherland in nineteenthcentury Germany’, Masculinities in Politics and War. Gendering Modern History, ed. Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh (Manchester / New York: Manchester University Press), 116 – 134. Hobsbawm, E. J. (1992) Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger (eds.) (1983) The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Horne, John (2004) ‘Masculinity in politics and war in the age of nation-states and world wars, 1850 – 1950’, Masculinities in Politics and War. Gendering Modern History, ed. Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh (Manchester / New York: Manchester University Press), 22 – 40.

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Karkama, Pertti (1982) Vapauden muunnelmat: J. L. Runebergin maailmankatsomus hänen epiikkansa pohjalta (Helsinki: SKS). ––––– (1989) J. V. Snellmanin kirjallisuuspolitiikka. (Helsinki: SKS). ––––– (2007) Kadonnutta ihmisyyttä etsimässä: johdatusta Johann Gottfried Herderin ajatteluun ja herderiläisyyteen Suomessa (Helsinki: SKS). Klinge, Matti (2004) Poliittinen Runeberg (Helsinki: WSOY). Landes, Joan B. (2004) ‘Republican citizenship and heterosocial desire: concepts of masculinity in revolutionary France’, in Masculinities in Politics and War. Gendering Modern History, ed. Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh (Manchester / New York: Manchester University Press), 96 – 115. Lappalainen, Jussi T., Lars Ericson Wolke and Ali Pylkkänen (2008) Suomen sodan historia 1808 – 1809 (Helsinki: SKS). Messner, Michael A. (1992) Power at Play. Sports and the Problem of Masculinity (Boston: Beacon Press). Planert, Ute (2001) ‘Wessen Krieg? Welche Erfahrung? Oder: Wie national war der “Nationalkrieg” gegen Napoleon?’, Der Krieg in religiösen und nationalen Deutungen der Neuzeit, ed. Dietrich Beyrau (Tübingen: Edition Diskord), 111 – 139. Runeberg, Johan Ludvig (2004) Vänrikki Stoolin tarinat– Fänrik Ståls Sägner, [orig. Swedish 1848 and 1860, and Finnish trans. Paavo Cajander 1889] (Helsinki: WSOY). ––––– (1925) The Songs of Ensign Stål (Fänrik Ståls Sägner). National Military Song Cycle of Finland, trans. Clement Burbank Shaw (New York: G. E. Stechert & Co). ––––– (1938) The Tales of Ensign Stål, sel. and trans. Charles W. Stork (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Tommila, Päiviö (2008) Suomen autonomian synty 1808 – 1819 (Helsinki: Edita). Tosh, John (2004) ‘Hegemonic masculinity and the history of gender’, Masculinities in Politics and War. Gendering Modern History, ed. Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh (Manchester / New York: Manchester University Press), 41 – 58. White, Hayden (1972) ‘What is a Historical System’, Biology, History and Natural Philosophy, ed. Allen D. Breck and Wolfgang Yourgrau (New York / London: Plenum Press), 233 – 242. White, Hayden (1999) Figural Realism. Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore / London: The Johns Hopkins University Press). Wrede, Johan (1988) Se kansa meidän kansa on. Runeberg, vänrikki ja kansakunta (Jyväskylä / Helsinki: Gummerus). Wretö, Tore (1980) J. L. Runeberg (Boston: Twayne Publishers).

Isabel Oliveira Martins

The Crusaders: Representations of the American Soldier in the Second World War American Novel The 20th century has witnessed some of the most terrible conflicts ever fought in the history of humanity. However, the Second World War still remains as the one main event that not only changed the world order and established a new one, but also played a central role in the way Americans define their place in the international arena and their vision of themselves. Popularly regarded in the U.S. as the ‘Good War’, the second major conflict of the last century corresponds almost entirely to America’s creed on war and vision of American exceptionalism. According to Ward Just (1970: 7), ‘American wars are never undertaken for imperialistic gain (myth one), American soldiers fight in a virtuous cause (myth two) for a just and goalless peace (myth three)’. Ward Just also argues that the popular mind holds on to the idea that ‘American wars are always defensive wars, undertaken slowly and reluctantly, the country a righteous gentle giant finally goaded beyond endurance by foreign adventurers.’ Thus, whenever the U.S. is engaged in a war, the rhetoric used to defend it has to be very persuasive in order to convince public opinion of its necessity and positive outcome. Characteristically, this is done in a manner that fits almost fully the model of war propaganda already put forward by Harold Lasswell (1971: 77-101) in his 1927 study of the propaganda techniques used during World War I by the various nations involved, including the United States. Basically, one of the most important aspects is the so-called rhetoric of opposite poles – Good vs. Evil – or Satanism. The enemy has to be clearly identified as the guilty party and depicted as being on the side of Evil as well as being shown to be barbaric, aggressive and totalitarian, that is, the face of Satan. Naturally, in opposition, the side of Good is connected to a democratic and civilized opponent – in this particular instance played by the Americans. One can speculate that this rhetoric of contrast is undoubtedly well accepted among Americans because to a certain extent the whole construction of the nation followed the same matrix of Good vs. Evil. Such bipolar discourse has always been present in American history, whether taking the form of puritans vs. dissenters, men vs. nature, white men vs. Indians or colonials vs. England. Moreover, such a strategy betrays an ethnocentric view of the world in which, for instance, the use of atrocity stories helps emphasize the disparities between

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two or more contending forces, as Ronald Reid (1976: 281) argues: ‘Ethnocentric appeals emphasize the threat of the barbarians to one’s superior culture.’¹ In World War I, this rhetoric of opposition could be based on simple premises to prove the malevolent character of the Germans by using news reports such as those relating the story that German soldiers had cut off the hands of Belgian babies and carried them along as souvenirs. This and other stories were later proven false. When Americans became ‘involuntarily’ engaged in World War II, the propaganda discourse and techniques used had to be more ingenious, although the very same premises could and would be used. In propaganda technique, rhetorical opposition should also be connected to the idea of victory nourished through a triumphant discourse which, in turn, has to amplify every success, otherwise people will not believe in the cause and the necessary and crucial determination to fight will be lost.² Moreover, if this concept is connected to the idea of American exceptionalism, a case can be made that the role of Americans in the war has to be shown to be particularly relevant. This essay focuses on the representations of American soldiers in some American World War II novels in order to show how these representations may have reinforced the (invisible) creation of a positive image of the war despite the visible intention of their authors, who sought to denounce the war as a violent and degrading event. The vast number of American novels written about the war vouch for the importance of this event in American culture and history, but that same number seems to prevent a systematic study from which general conclusions can be drawn. The novels I refer to only represent a sample of a broader study covering American authors who were direct participants in the war and who wrote either during the war or in the following fifteen years (Martins 2005). The emphasis on opposition is a useful way to study these novels because images of both the enemy and the Americans are ultimately created in them. In these depictions a series of other references such as what the Americans are fighting for and how they behave both as warriors and as human beings are also introduced. In the end, this is quite helpful in shaping a particular image of the Americans. On the other hand, novels dealing with this war can be subdivided according to the different war theatres in which American soldiers were involved,

1 Lasswell used the same type of argument: ‘The collective egotism, or ethnocentrism, of a nation, makes it possible to interpret the war as a struggle for the protection and propagation of its own high type of civilization’ (1971: 67). 2 According to Lasswell again: ‘The illusion of victory must be nourished because of the close connection between the strong and the good. If we win, God is on our side. If we lose, God may have been on the other side’ (1971: 102).

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mainly the Pacific, the Italian / Mediterranean and the Western European fronts. In fact, the geographical differences between these fronts determined different types of military engagement and different kinds of novels. In the Pacific, the war theatre was situated either on islands or in the middle of the ocean and in the latter to the confined space of battleships, submarines and aircraft. As direct confrontation with the enemy, the Japanese soldier, was mostly impossible, the writers concentrate on the actions of American military men either in conflict within or beyond themselves, whether with their superiors or with the aggressive environmental conditions they had to face on the different islands. In the end, the general image of the American points towards one that expresses themselves as heirs to the intrepid pioneers, either surviving the wilderness (in which the Japanese soldier is depicted as an animal), which generally serves to emphasize their role as conquerors or defying arbitrary authority within the military system. In the Italian / Mediterranean theatre, the Americans find themselves in a dual position. On the one hand, they face the Italians who at the time of the American invasion of Italy were officially out of the war and who are simultaneously friends (the people) and enemies (some Italians continued to fight for Fascism) while, on the other hand, the Americans were actively fighting against the Germans who had stayed behind to engage in military resistance. These circumstances create a group of war novels in which American soldiers are either depicted as liberators or as conquerors. Finally, in the Western European theatre the enemy was quite visible – the Germans, the military and the whole German people, with whom the American soldiers engaged not only in military confrontation but also in ideological conflict. In the group of novels dealing with this war theatre, one could anticipate the expected antagonism – Americans vs. Germans – to be the perfect set-up for the rhetoric of opposition (Good vs. Evil) already mentioned.³ Particularly in novels written after the end of the war and at a time when the German concentration camp atrocities were already in the public domain, one might also anticipate the Germans being shown as the embodiment of Evil and the Americans as their right-

3 The following novels on the Western European war theatre were studied in the abovementioned work by Martins, 2005: Stefan Heym, The Crusaders, 1948; Irwin Shaw, The Young Lions, 1949; Martha Gellhorn, Point of No Return, 1989, originally published in 1948, with the title Wine of Astonishment; Ned Calmer, The Strange Land, 1950; Glen Sire, The Deathmakers, 1960; Edward Loomis, End of a War, 1958; John Cobb Cooper, The Gesture, 1948; and John Hersey, The War Lover, 1959.

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ful opponents – the crusaders or liberators. Nevertheless, there was a dilemma that was not quite so clearly visible in confrontations with the other enemies. The Japanese could be (and were) stereotyped as belonging to a very different and distant civilization with its own system of beliefs and they could be shown as villains because, after all, they were the perpetrators of Pearl Harbor. However, they are never depicted as real opponents to American civilization since they are represented as being an inferior race.⁴ The Italians could also be ambiguously depicted as part of a backward Europe that had somehow promoted Fascism, which in any case was regarded as a softer version of Nazism.⁵ But the Germans belonged to a nation that was part of Western civilization and to a country regarded as having a higher culture that shared basic common values with America. This presented a conundrum since American writers, although feeling compelled to condemn the war, were aware that in doing so they might be accused of indirectly conniving with Nazism. Thus, they had to show just what the differences after all were. Although there are nuances in the way such a task is achieved, most novels concerning this war theatre display essentially two strategies: they depict American characters, soldiers or officers, as men with faults, limitations or even vicious personalities, but who, in the end, are redeemed either by the actions of other individual Americans who stand for ‘the last hope on earth’; or they contrast the American characters with representations of even more violent and degrading German characters, whether military or civilian. American military engagement on the Western European front began with the invasion of Normandy, on D-day, June 6th 1944, continued with the fight to release the different parts of Europe occupied by German forces and finally ended either with the liberation of several concentration camps in German territory or when American forces met up with the Russian armies. Accordingly, most novels are set in these scenarios, although a few deal with Americans who do not come into direct contact with their German counterparts.⁶

4 For a more comprehensive study on this topic see Martins 2009: 201 – 211. 5 This conception is visible, for instance, in the following observation: ‘We’ve all got a better side I don’t care who we are. No, I’ll dissociate the Nazis from that. What is it about the Germans that makes them unfailingly the best examples of everything evil? Even the Italian fascists had something comic about them, consequently something human. Their leaders were the most ridiculous of all.’ (Calmer 1950: 64). 6 Such is the case of John Cobb Cooper’s The Gesture, John Hersey’s The War Lover, and Ned Calmer’s The Strange Land. The first two books deal with service in the American Air Force stationed in England. The third, although set in German territory, deals mainly with actions within the American army in opposition to a group of American war correspondents and there

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Taken as a group, the novels display American progress through European territory by positive representations of the American military contrasted with the enemy, embodied mostly through singled-out characters. In Glen Sire’s The Death-Makers, a story precedes the main narrative and tells how the Eskimos hunt for wolves: They melt small patches of ice, then set the handles of their hunting knives down into the water, which quickly hardens to ice again around the handles, until they are set as if they were placed in concrete. The blade of the knife is all that is visible, its double edge honed to a razor sharpness. All about the ice fields, the Eskimos place their knives and tip them with the blood of seal or walrus or even, for want of that, some of their own. And then they go home and wait. […] They [wolves] gather around these blades and, as they ravenously lick at the blood, their jowls drooling, it seems to them that they are lapping at a delicious, everlasting fountain. Faster and faster their tongues work, and the supply of blood grows, and greedily they gulp it down. Until, finally, they are exsanguinated, and the blood that has been so delicious is in their own bellies, and it is their own blood, and they have eaten themselves (Sire 1961: 8).

This story works as a metaphor for what Sire considers the essence of any war – an action in which in the end everybody is a ‘death-maker’. In point of fact, most of the novels follow this kind of assumption, although they also try to convey some meaning about what seems to be a terrible waste. Ultimately, Glen Sire’s novel does indeed apply the metaphor but almost entirely to the Germans, and in particular to one German officer. The author structures his work around the advance of American forces through the Rhineland. The central opposition is between the German, Wehrmacht Lieutenant Raeder, and the American, Captain Joseph Brandon. Raeder’s vicious character juxtaposes Brandon from the very beginning. Brandon has serious doubts about the act of killing in which he is involved, being an eternal defender of the value of life and seeing himself as a ‘Man’ that has been caught up in the middle of a terrible war. As he observes: He had always found it impossible to hate the enemy. He could not personalize his hatred of Germans; he could not want to kill them because he hated them. […] he had hosed them with the big tracers, watching parts of their heads and bodies shatter and come off in

is never any direct confrontation with German characters, either civilian or military. The main issue in these works is how several American characters deal with the situation of war as well as with having their individual freedom restricted when inserted into the military system. On the whole, the image of Americans is quite favourable since in all of them there are always American characters who redeem the possible lower actions of other compatriots, or who stand for the values that the Germans, although never being effectively confronted, are shown to be the complete negation of.

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chunks, and as he was doing it he was sick at what he was doing and had a feeling that he was caught in something that was hugely amiss, and that his only absolution was that twenty million other men were doing it (Sire 1961:56).

Raeder, on the other hand, never contemplates such reservations. He considers himself first and foremost a soldier, a kind of robot that has to kill in order to win and who makes Brandon his personal enemy. He reflects: ‘Nothing is hopeless for a real soldier. A real soldier picks a last battle and he dies in it, and he is never defeated. A real soldier never stops believing he is right.’ (Sire 1961: 279). All through the last months of the war, and even after it has ended, the German lieutenant is shown committing various atrocities that disrespect the most elemental human values including responsibility for the killing of several hundred prisoners who had been forced on a last road march by S.S. guards. In contrast, the American captain is always unsure about his role as a death-maker, and has a serious concern for the welfare of the men under his command although some of these are shown to be capable of violent and degrading actions like Raeder’s. But the definitive difference between the Americans and the Germans comes when they are confronted with the ultimate face of Evil. In this case, not the concentration camp, but the finding of the corpses of the prisoners who had been force-marched: Three miles on the other side […] they saw the Konzentrationslager prisoners, lying dead alongside the road, in their uniforms with the great, clownish-looking black and white stripes. There were neat bullet holes in their heads. […] The bones and joints of the prisoners bulged knobbily out of the soft, pajamalike material of the uniforms. The skin of the emaciated corpses was drawn taut over the bony, skeletonized features of their faces, and the women showed no sign of breasts beneath their flimsy garments. Although the bodies looked wasted, as if they had been dead for a long time, new blood still showed moist in the recent wounds. It was clear that they had been shot as they fell in exhaustion from the forced march. One man was slumped over where he had been urinating (Sire 1961: 216).

A major turning point for Brandon as well as for other American soldiers, this discovery prompts the captain to utter what seemed to have been impossible for him before: Brandon said nothing, […] but he was aware of wanting to find the men who could have done this. He had read about it, he had heard the Colonel talk about it, but now, seeing them lying by the road and bleeding, stretching for as far as he could see, he was glad for the gun in his hand, and for the thousands of guns that followed him (Sire 1961: 216).⁷

7 This kind of observation can also be found in other novels: ‘To the end, the Germans stuck to the contradiction which their particular manic conception resolved: they were only little

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But at the same time and precisely because of this event, Brandon does not turn into a ruthless man. On the contrary, he feels he has to counterbalance the evil he has encountered with a kind of humanity which is finally expressed when he decides to wave a white flag to the German troops now commanded by Raeder, given that the war has been officially declared ended. Raeder brutally shoots him and in this final act of violence Brandon dies, but not before he is also able to throw a grenade that kills Raeder. But while the German dies thinking about death, ‘exsanguinated’ just like the wolves, Brandon is able to believe in love for he dies while remembering his wife’s face (Sire 1961: 285 – 288). This kind of difference between Americans and Germans keeps reoccuring in other war novels. Whether a private or an officer, typically the American protagonist (or protagonists) is shown as a human being with serious doubts about his role in the war. Most of them are not professional soldiers; they are civilians who were recruited into a war they feel compelled to reject. Actually, one can assert that in the majority of these novels the higher ranking officers of the American Armed Forces represent the blemish of American society. There is a very clear difference made between commanders who just ‘command’ and those who are leaders of men. And the reservations expressed by nearly every central character are only dissipated when they are confronted with the bestiality of the enemy, which is mostly epitomized in an encounter with the concentration camps. In Martha Gellhorn’s novel, Point of no Return, the protagonist is Jacob Levy, the only Jew in an infantry battalion commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Smithers. The depiction of their progress through European territory has a ‘point of no return’ when they face the nightmare of Dachau.⁸ Levy has never been aware of his condition as a Jew, seeing himself just as another American private, until he is confronted with the camp. At that moment everything changes and the last shreds of his desire to understand Germans, including the civilian population, dissipate: They knew what was going on; they lived there; they heard it, saw it, smelled it. If they’d had any human feelings, they’d have pulled the people out of the train; they’d have attacked the barbed wire where it was open to anybody with fields around it, and let the prisoners out. The Nazis would shoot them for trying, but that was when you had to get shot. If you didn’t,

men, on the one hand; they were greater than anyone else, on the other. […] There was (sic) no arguments against national schizophrenia. The only argument lay in tanks and guns and planes and men and guts and endurance.’ (Heym 1948: 490) 8 This ‘point of no return’ corresponds to an expression used to designate the moment in which pilots know they have to return or else they will not have enough fuel to get back to base safely.

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if you sat in your house and didn’t notice or thought Dachau was okay or were too sacred, you were filth the way the S.S. guards were, only slimy hiding filth (Gellhorn 1989: 321 – 322).

In the end, he takes justice into his own hands and kills three German civilians by running them over with his jeep. Although this is shown to be a futile gesture, because his act does not produce any kind of change, his behaviour becomes ‘justified’ since his anger was aroused by the sight of pure Evil embodied by the concentration camp and after all, as he now regards himself as a Jew, he therefore comes to symbolise the object of Nazi brutality. This sort of situation is repeatedly used in other novels. In Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions, there is also a Jewish character, Noah Ackerman, who becomes the symbol of all humanity and, in the end, dies at the hands of another violent German character, Christian Diestl (who in turn had an even more brutal example of a Nazi officer, Lieutenant Hardenburg, as his commander). From this whole cruel scenery of war emerges another important American figure, Michael Whitacre. He is a New York intellectual whose life seems to have no purpose and who wants no responsibilities until he finally meets Noah and because of him, and in particular because of Noah’s death, undergoes a process of spiritual evolution.⁹ This culminates with him killing Diestl, who is the embodiment of inhumanity as becomes quite clear in Diestl’s last thoughts: This time it is not a simple, understandable war, within the same culture. This time it is an assault of the animal world upon the house of the human being. […] We made a cemetery a thousand miles long and a thousand miles wide. Men, women, children, Poles, Russians, Jews, it made no difference. […] and, now, after that, we have made the final mistake. We are losing the war. The animal is slowly being driven into his last corner, the human being is preparing his final punishment (Shaw 1990: 509 – 510).

Stefan Heym’s The Crusaders is paradigmatic of this idea. Heym’s work follows the action of an infantry division from D-day until the liberation of the fictional Paula concentration camp. Its main protagonist is Lieutenant David Yates, a German language teacher at Coulter University. He is not a Jew although there is one under his command, Sergeant Bing, who acts as a kind of consciousness for Yates since he is depicted as the most idealistic character. Ironically, Bing will be killed by mistake by an allied plane as he is trying to get the Germans to surrender. In this long book, the author presents several American and German

9 ‘A war was more bearable when you were surrounded by hundreds of other men and all responsibility was out of your hands, and you knew that trained minds somewhere were busy with your problem’ (Shaw 1990: 697).

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characters. On the side of the Americans, there are some dishonorable figures that exhibit an array of bad qualities – racism, bigotry, violence and greed. Some of them die, but others survive although they are explicitly condemned. But in opposition to these characters, there are other Americans, including Yates, who, after uncovering the misdemeanours of some of his compatriots, stand for what in the end corresponds to the mythical American war creed put into practice: They were average men, without rank and name. But they had that remarkable American quality: They were able to put their foot and say, Wait a minute, Bud. Don’t push us around. Let’s see what this is all about. Perhaps they didn’t say it in these words. But they felt it, and they acted on it, and they stood fast, and many of them gave their lives. And this collective attitude came about in spite of the difference of personal background – in spite of the fact that some didn’t know what it was all about, […]; that some of them did; that most were afraid, and few weren’t; that all of them were miserable and cold and tired and worn with nerves frazzled. In the hour of crisis, they proved themselves citizens of the Republic (Heym 1948: 398).¹⁰

But the real and effective contrast is made once again with several German characters and particularly with those who are in Paula Camp. Germans are repeatedly shown as brutal, vicious and barbaric and as cowards that hide behind the mask of not being ‘responsible’. But in the camp they cannot evade the atrocious dimension of their acts. Heym’s detailed description of the varied kinds of torture used by three characters  – the commander in charge of the camp, Schreckenreuther, his aide, Biederkopf, and the physician, Valentin – borders on the almost absurd.¹¹

10 The same kind of idea is also present in Shaw’s work. Captain Green, the American officer who has to restore order in the concentration camp they encounter, is described by Michael Whitacre in the following words: ‘He felt an enormous respect for the dusty little Captain with the high, girlish voice. Everything in Green’s world […] was fixable. There was nothing, not even the endless depravity and bottomless despair which the Germans had left at the swamp-heart of their dying millennium, which could not be remedied by the honest, mechanic’s common sense and energy of a decent workman’ (Shaw 1990: 798). 11 Valentin ‘believed that the first step in learning how to eradicate the disease was to learn how to create it; and he never got over the first step. He took the prisoners, preferably women because of the frequency of cancer of the breast, cut them and tried to infect them, kept the wound open and festering, grafted cancerous tissue from men and mice […]. Since his human guinea pigs were inferior anyhow, and in most cases died before he could achieve tangible results, he did not waste anesthetics on them.’ (Heym 1948: 437) Schreckenreuther’s role is described as follows: ‘He was not particularly cruel – that is, he wasn’t cruel for cruelty’s sake; he got no fun out of it. He used it only for educational purposes, and when he was in a good mood, he would explain to his staff that the prisoners must be considered as children. They were either of an inferior race or, as enemies of National Socialism, of an inferior mind;

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The recurring use of this type of description stresses implicitly if not explicitly the difference between Germans and Americans although writers were seriously concerned that Nazism might not be an ideology that could only originate among the German people. The depiction of Americans in these novels is then chiefly concerned not with soldiers but with individual human beings who, despite their many flaws, still carried with them the inheritance of their forefathers and were able or fortunate enough to transform words into deeds. In other words, they were men who in fact could claim they had a ‘mission’ – the crusaders. Martha Gellhorn, who had been to Dachau as a war correspondent, expressed these same fears and ideals in an Afterword to the 1989 edition of her novel: More than forty years on, I know that my fear of Dachau was justified. If men could do that there, men could do it again anywhere, when sanctioned by the State. And they have. […] The Nazi formula for war has also been copied […]. Standard operational procedure nowadays; no rules; anything goes. I see Lieutenant Colonel Smither’s battalion as the last fortunate soldiers (Gellhorn 1989: 331).

After all, American goals, the goals of the ‘righteous gentle giant’, are or should be unpolluted and innocent and all American actions should be undertaken in the name of Good / God, for the benefit of mankind. The belief that there is a kind of messianic appeal that springs from confidence in a country with a moral calling to uplift the rest of the world was quite clearly fulfilled and renewed with American intervention in World War II. In sum, the novels analysed in this essay testify to the the formation and transformation of collective memory; in this capacity they have played an (in)visible and (in)voluntary role in the propagation of America’s creed on war.

in both cases, like children, not fully responsible. And a good father must punish his children. There were many methods […]. He had his opus bound in fine parchment that one of his guards made from the tattooed skin of some prisoners. They had to be skinned after they were dead; Schreckenreuther insisted on that.’ And finally Biederkopf ‘used the concrete mixer. He would pick a fat Jew, a recent entry, and put him and some good-sized rocks into the drum of the machine. Then he would start the whole thing rolling. The punishment was not applied against the fat Jew, naturally; of him, soon enough, only scraps of flesh and splinters of bone were left. The punishment was given to those men who had to scrape out the drum; and Biederkopf saw to it that the job was done thoroughly. He was a stickler for cleanliness’ (Heym 1948: 432).

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Works Cited Calmer, Ned (1950) The Strange Land 8th edn (New York: The New American Library). Cooper, John Cobb [1948] (1975) The Gesture (New York: Second Press). Gellhorn, Martha [1948] (1989) Point of No Return (New York: New American Library). Hersey, John [1959] (1960) The War Lover (New York: Bantam Books). Heym, Stefan (1948) The Crusaders (Boston: Little, Brown and Company). Just, Ward (1970) Military Men (New York: Alfred A. Knopf). Lasswell, Harold [1927] (1971) Propaganda Technique in the World War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press). Loomis, Edward (1958) End of a War (London: William Heinemann). Martins, Isabel Oliveira (2005) ‘The Good War’: Perspectivas e Contributos do Romance de Guerra Americano (Lisbon: doctoral degree thesis, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences). ––––– (2009) ‘ “The Only Good Jap is a Dead Jap”: Representations of the Japanese in the Second World War American Novel’, in Success and Failure: Essays from the 29th APEAA Conference at the University of Aveiro, 17 – 19th April 2008, ed. by Anthony Barker, David Callahan and Maria Aline Ferreira (Aveiro: Universidade de Aveiro), 201 – 211. Reid, Ronald (1976) ‘New England Rhetoric and the French War, 1754 – 1760: A Case Study in the Rhetoric of War’, Communication Monographs 43, 259 – 286. Shaw, Irwin [1949] (1990) The Young Lions (London: Hodder and Stoughton, New English Library). Sire, Glen [1960] (1961) The Death-makers (Greenwich, Connecticut: A Crest Reprint).

Stefano Rosso

Making Violence Visible in Vietnam War Narratives: The Case of A Rumor of War Before you leave here, sir, you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteenth-year-old American boy. (Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War) Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories. (Tim O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone)

1. On ‘Realistic Accounts’ Most of the more than two thousand works of fiction on the Vietnam War still depend on a realistic-mimetic model.¹ If you try and read them, you feel as though the experimentalism of Modernism and Postmodernism had never existed. In most cases, realism is perceived as the inevitable essence of the war story, as the ontological status of war stories, as a non-aesthetic mode, as the only authentic way to narrate the war experience. This attitude–which we may call here ‘the naïve realism of witnessing’ and which dates back to the First World War (and somehow to the Iliad)–can be detected both in autobiographical novels and in memoirs. Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War, published in 1977  – the title comes from the Gospel according to St. Matthew, 24:6 – 13 –differs from the other memoirs originated by the Vietnam War because of its overt aim to give a ‘more authentic account’ of the conflict in East Asia (Caputo 1977: passim). Caputo, however, is an anomaly in the Vietnam Generation: most of his fellow writers are in the first instance witnesses and only in the second instance writers.² Caputo, on the other

1 The research for this essay was conducted in the extraordinary archive of ‘The Imaginative Representations of the Vietnam War Special Collection’ of the Connelly Library directed by John Baky at the La Salle University in Philadelphia, and in the excellent Library of the Kennedy Institute of the Freie Universität in Berlin. For extensive bibliographical data on the fiction, culture and criticism of the Vietnam War, see Rosso (2003: 257 – 80). For the best bibliography of the printed works of fiction on the Vietnam War, see Newman 1996. For the most updated volume of criticism on Vietnam War literature, film and art, see Heberle 2009. I wish to thank here Susanna Perzolli for her valuable suggestions. 2 Criticism on Caputo’s A Rumor of War is quite extensive. See, among others: Styron 1977, Myers 1988, Beidler 1991, Spanos 2003. As for Caputo’s self-reflexive statements, see Caputo 2000a and 2000b.

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hand, had previously worked in journalism as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune – with a group of his newspaper colleagues even winning the Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1972. His Vietnam experience dates back to when he was a soldier in Vietnam in 1965 – 66, and later a reporter covering the Fall of Saigon in April 1975. Therefore, his A Rumor of War took eleven years to come to light; since then it has been translated into 20 languages, has sold more than two million copies and is still available in American bookstores.³ Caputo’s account covers the period in which he was actually in Vietnam, that is, long before President Johnson’s ‘escalation’ (1968) and is based on the repetitive assertion that it is not a novel, but a ‘soldier’s account’ (Caputo 1977: xiii) based on notes taken ‘in country’ and letters written home (to ‘the world’). Therefore, he stresses the importance of chronological time which he very soon deconstructs by means of generalizations, didactic assertions and diegetic prolepsis. Similarly, Caputo claims the superiority of the realistic model he contradicts quite often throughout his story. In fact, he is quite aware of the limits of realistic time when he mentions his traumatic experience: I was twenty-four when the summer began; by the time it ended, I was much older than I am now. Chronologically, my age had advanced three months, emotionally about three decades. I was somewhere in my middle fifties, that depressing period when a man’s friends begin dying off and each death reminds him of the nearness of his own (Caputo 1977: 182).

The historical setting is the period when Americans were still quite optimistic about the possible outcome of the war. The narration of the war experience proper is preceded by a short prologue aimed at directing the reader’s point of view and is followed by Caputo’s description of the Fall of Saigon, with the clear goal of providing the story with a historical and perhaps ‘moral’ ending. In the first part of the memoir, ironically entitled ‘The Splendid Little War’, Caputo displays a narrative behavior typical of Vietnam War narratives, stressing the feeling of frustration of the American soldiers arriving in Indo-China. His first person narrator goes back to the personal motivations of the college student who enlisted in the Marines in 1960, motivations related to ‘the patriotic tide of the Kennedy era’ (Caputo 1977: 4) and to his rebellion against dull lower middleclass life in the Chicago suburbs, and then moves on to his departure for Vietnam,

3 Since A Rumor of War, Caputo has published about 15 novels, none ever equalling the success of his first. In 1980, a mini-series with the same title and directed by Richard T. Heffron was produced and was a moderate success.

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five years later, when the American involvement had not yet become tragic, and Americans actually thought it would be a ‘splendid little war’. Nevertheless, in those days when ‘The loss of even one man was an extraordinary event’ (Caputo 1977: 154), the narrator emphasizes the abysmal discrepancy between the myths of war heroism and the actual experience in Vietnam. Such a discrepancy is expressed by means of a comparison – both serious and ironic – with John Wayne, the actor who, more than any other, has become the icon of western and war movies, as we can see in many works on the Vietnam War. One should remember that 1968 saw the release of The Green Berets, a movie directed by and starring John Wayne, the only commercially successful movie in favour of the American involvement in Indochina.

2. John Wayne and the Spectacularization of War In order to understand the mythical significance of John Wayne as an icon it should be enough to recall that in March 1970, during a demonstration in New York, a group of building workers marched behind banners celebrating ‘The Duke’, that is, the nickname used by John Wayne’s friends and fans. If you check slang dictionaries, you learn that it was in this period the verb ‘to johnwayne’ was introduced into the American language and meaning ‘to act heroically’ (Dickson 1994: 278). In the years to follow the syntagm ‘John Wayne syndrome’ was also introduced to refer to the behaviour of some veterans who became involved with extreme right-wing paramilitary groups after the end of the Seventies. In 1979, US Congress granted the authorization for the ‘John Wayne medal’ for bravery, and the picture of the actor was later used on a poster inviting young men to enlist.⁴ It is not surprising that after 9 / 11 John Wayne went back to the top of the list of the most popular movie stars and that in 2004 a mail stamp (37 cents) bearing his image was issued. Thus, it is also hardly a coincidence that Ron Kovic, lamenting the loss of his sexual organ in the commercially successful Born on the Fourth of July (1976), feels compelled to refer to John Wayne: Gone. And it is gone for America. I have given it for democracy  … I have given my dead swinging dick for America. I have given my numb young dick for democracy … Oh God! Oh God I want it back! I gave it for the whole country, I gave it for every one of them. Yes, I gave my dead dick for John Wayne. Nobody ever told me I was going to come back from this war

4 See on this point, Slotkin (1992: 519 – 20).

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without a penis. But I am back and my head is screaming now and I don’t know what to do (Kovic 1976: 112, my emphasis).

Caputo avoids the grotesque crudeness of Kovic’s text, but he refers to John Wayne quite often. For example, he tells of an officer yelling to his men ‘I don’t want anyone going in there thinking he’s going to play John Wayne’ (Caputo 1977: 44), or he sadly remarks about his anything but heroic predicament: ‘So much for Hollywood and John Wayne’ (Caputo 1977: 30), or later in the memoir, he says ‘I was John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima. I was Aldo Ray in Battle Cry’ (Caputo 1977: 255).⁵ At the most dramatic points of his experience, Caputo emphasizes the central role of the cinematographic mythopoiesis to which John Wayne belongs perhaps more than any other 20th-century icon: ‘we could see only the drama of the operation. It was as though we were in an open-air theater, watching a war movie’ (Caputo 1977: 67). Elsewhere, the narrator says that he saw his actions ‘as if I were watching myself in a movie’ (Caputo 1977: 288). The spectacular dimension of violence that can be detected in previous conflicts (even before the First World War), becomes more central during the Vietnam War not only because it is the first ‘television war’, but also because of the myths of movie spectacularization (war movies, westerns and so on) that fed the Vietnam Generation.⁶ The war witnesses display their spectacularized narcissism which refers to ‘phantasies of personal heroics’ (Caputo 1977: 73) in terms that are definitely more visual than narrative, showing the deep influence of cinema and TV on writing. Though Caputo has no more illusions about the public motivations of the American intervention (defending ‘democracy’, fighting against Communism and so on), he still recognizes the obscene fascination that the ‘dirty war’ holds for him and for his buddies.⁷ After having acknowledged his nostalgia for the year spent in Vietnam, he writes very explicitly:

5 The two war movies cited by Caputo were famous ones directed by Allan Dwan (1949) and by Raoul Walsh (1955). 6 One third of the 1,700 movies released between 1941 and 1945 were war movies. Between 1948 and 1968, 1,200 war movies were released (see Gibson 1994: 18). As for the westerns, the figures vary but are extremely high: only in 1958, 54 western movies were released and in 1959 eight TV prime time TV programs out of ten were westerns (see Cawelti 1999: 1). 7 On the fascination of war and violence, see the extremely incisive pages in Michael Herr’s Dispatches (Herr 1977: passim).

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Anyone who fought in Vietnam, if he is honest to himself, will have to admit he enjoyed the compelling attractiveness of combat. It was a peculiar enjoyment because it was mixed with a commensurate pain. Under fire, a man’s powers of life heightened in proportion to the proximity of death, so that he felt an elation as extreme as dread. His senses quickened, he attained an acuity of consciousness at once pleasurable and excruciating. It was something like the elevated state of awareness induced by drugs (Caputo 1977: xvi-xvii, my emphasis).

Caputo’s narrator quite often stresses the centrality of the terms ‘honesty’ and ‘fascination’. When he is far from the fighting he claims that ‘There was a fascination in all this. More than anything I wanted to be out there with them. Contact: that event for which so many of us lusted. And I knew that something in me was drawn to war. It might have been an unholy attraction, but it was there and it could not be denied’ (Caputo 1977: 68). And back in the US he remembers that when people asked ‘how [he] felt, going into combat for the first time’ (Caputo 1977: 76), he says that he avoided answering truthfully in order not to disturb the questioner, although he told himself that he was ‘happy’. One could object that this kind of acknowledgement (‘pleasurable and excruciating’ as in the quote above) is present in several texts of 20th-century war literature, for example, in Ernst Jünger and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. However, the fascination for combat and violence takes on a new stress here. The acknowledgement of this fascination was a constitutive aspect of war narration even in classical literature: the fascination was conveyed to the reader or the spectator through an ambiguous and possibly dangerous catharsis. But after the First World War the mythic dimension was partly dismissed, though it reappeared in some Hollywood classics and in propaganda movies in which romantic and noble heroes reappeared. On the other hand, in Vietnam narratives the narrator is always torn between the moral condemnation for his fascination (in which he sometimes tries, without succeeding, to separate the ‘moral’ from the ‘aesthetic’) and an almost prophetic impulse to consider witnessing the truth as an almost sacred objective. This kind of narrator claims that, although the American soldier is aware of being guilty of unforgivable misdeeds, he thinks he is, historically, the first combatant who dared to acknowledge his fascination with violence. Thus, the moral value of his account will be higher than those of the past and will make the American soldier a unique and matchless human being, the only kind of war hero still possible in the contemporary world. Acknowledging the pleasure of violence, both painful and self-celebratory, self-accusing and partly self-absolving, often goes with the spectacularization of war and has clear sexual overtones. Caputo narrates that when he saw his men act bravely ‘an ache as profound as the ache of orgasm passed through [him]’ (Caputo 1977: 254, my emphasis), and he says that it is because of this (orgasmic) sensa-

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tion that some officers were ready to sacrifice themselves, not for their homeland or for a just cause, but simply for the desire ‘to experience a single moment when a group of soldiers under your command and in the extreme stress of combat do exactly what you want them to do, as if they are extensions of yourself’ (ibidem, my emphasis). Elsewhere, Caputo is even clearer on this point when he writes: ‘This inner, emotional war produces a tension almost sexual in its intensity’ (Caputo 1977: 278, my emphasis). In the same perspective, one can interpret the still traditional definition of courage proposed by Caputo, very traditional if compared to the self-reflexive, almost self-deconstructive tone one can find in Tim O’Brien.⁸ It is not accidental that Caputo’s constant references to sexuality do not evoke any tenderness, but rather extreme sensations very close to violence, brutality, sadism, masochism, excess and perversion, escape from daily life, and presents predicaments in which the victim almost always takes feminine form.⁹

3. Vietnam Veterans’ Aphasia In the second half of the 1970s, also thanks to the publication of texts like A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo, Dispatches (1977) by Michael Herr and Going After Cacciato (1978) by Tim O’Brien, but especially due to the circulation of commercially successful movies like The Deerhunter (1978), Coming Home (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979), one could perceive a revaluation of personal accounts which could be interpreted as an expression of a spiritual and often religious regeneration. The British critic Philip Melling has tried to read Vietnam War fiction in the light of the American Puritan tradition. In his perspective, the oxymoronic arrogant naivety of the Americans in Vietnam goes back to the desire to retrieve the ancient ‘errand into the wilderness’ (the regenerative spiritual journey into the wild lands), and to their certainty in a civilizing mission (the Manifest Destiny) which would distinguish the US from other countries, making the US truly ‘exceptional’:

8 I have discussed Tim O’Brien’s self-reflexive tone in Rosso 2003 (especially in ch. 6 and 10). His complex thematization of the notion of courage (and much more) can already be detected in O’Brien 1973, and more clearly in O’Brien 1978 and 1990 (particularly in the short stories ‘On the Rainy River’ and ‘Speaking of Courage’). 9 On the notion of ‘male bonding’ and misogyny in Vietnam fiction, see Jeffords 1989 (passim) and Rosso 2003 (ch. 9 – 10).

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To the Puritan, testimony was an integral feature of the experience of errand and crucial determinant of the individual’s right to membership in the church. The idea of making a private stand on public a mission – of testifying to one’s own religious experience in front of the others – was regarded as a spiritual duty (Melling 1990: xiv).

In this perspective, the ‘will to testimony’ shown by Caputo and other American writers should be interpreted as the self-understanding of the first generation ever of ‘new witnesses’: ‘Those who have survived that experience and come to maturity because of it are the bearers of a special kind of knowledge that an older generation – and a civilian readership – do not possess’ (Melling 1990: 60). Melling’s thesis is fascinating but runs the risk of reading all American culture through its white and religious tradition. If it is true that the myth of authenticity of the witness – as opposed to the bureaucratic language of the military and political hierarchy – draws heavily on the rhetoric of the Founding Fathers, it is very reductive to see the amazing success of the Vietnam stories as depending only on a spiritual-religious regeneration. A better tool for understanding the Vietnam effort as a means of giving visibility to war and violence is the tentative concept of ‘possessive memory’. According to Peter Braunstein, the 1960s Generation (the Baby Boomers) – as opposed to Generation X – has surrounded the memory of its youth experience with ‘barbed wire’, in order to prevent others from sharing emotional or traumatic memories. Such a memory, which is intimately linked to the search for the ‘authentic self’, would be shared by young people with different beliefs and with different experiences such as the Flower Children, the students who joined the Student Movement, the Vietnam veterans and the pacifists, and so on, that is, by individuals who had gone through a profound identification change as a group. This is one possible way of reading the extreme search for authenticity the veterans used to talk about and which they mention in most of their writings: if we limit the right to speak only to the witness – some kind of a new Ajax – who hides himself behind the ineffable nature of trauma, we bar any possibility of communication and any meditation on our recent past.¹⁰ As I have tried to show elsewhere, there are some efforts – like those you can find in Tim O’Brien’s very imaginative works (but one could also mention Robert Olen Butler’s works, and in some respects even Stephen King’s Hearts in Atlantis) – to avoid these aphasic

10 The case of the Vietnam vets, or of any other vets for that matter, is complicated by the fact that they belong to a male group and that their withdrawal within that group (male bonding) involves problems of misogyny (for example, through the creation of a new jargon from which women and non-combatants are excluded).

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mechanisms, which are historically understandable but psychologically and politically dangerous, not to say sterile.¹¹ In conclusion, the narrative and thematic modes of most Vietnam War fiction are closer to the realistic-mimetic mode of which A Rumor of War is one of the most valuable examples, while Tim O’Brien is a very rare case of resistance against realism. We still have to answer the question of whether it is possible to reach the ethical aims of ‘the literature of witnesses’. Caputo answers this question on the usefulness of his witnessing by referring to the didactic stance of Puritan autobiography: ‘It might, perhaps, prevent the next generation from being crucified in the next war’, though he immediately adds: ‘But I don’t think so’ (Caputo 1977: xxi). Should we believe him or is this simply a rhetorical device? Maintaining from the very first pages that witnessing is useless paradoxically makes the role of the witness even more dramatic and urgent, and urges us to treat it seriously, as if we were privileged readers. However, the narration of history teaches us that the literal reading of his negation is correct. Making war visible, even in its most atrocious aspects, does not prevent the next generation, to use Caputo’s words, ‘from being crucified in the next war.’

Works Cited Beidler, Philip (1991) Re-Writing America: Vietnam Authors in Their Generation (Athens / London: The University of Georgia Press), 36 – 52. Butler, Robert Olen (1992) A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (New York: Henry Holt). Caputo, Philip (1977) A Rumor of War (New York: Ballantine). ––––– (2000a) ‘Goodnight, Saigon: Lecture at the United States Air Force Academy”, War, Literature & the Arts. An International Journal of the Humanities, 12.1 (Spring / Summer), 19 – 27. ––––– (2000b) ‘A Rumor of War: A Conversation with Philip Caputo’, War, Literature & the Arts. An International Journal of the Humanities, 12.1 (Spring / Summer), 4 – 17. Cawelti, John C. (1999) The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press). Dickson, Paul (1994) War Slang: Fighting Words and Phrases of Americans from the Civil War to the Gulf War (New York: Pocket Books). Gibson, James William (1994) Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America (New York: Hill & Wang). Heberle, Mark (2009) Thirty Years After: New Essays on Vietnam War Literature, Film and Art (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing).

11 On this, see again Rosso 2003, especially ch. 10 (191 – 216).

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Herr, Michael (1977) Dispatches (New York: Random). Jeffords, Susan (1989) The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). King, Stephen (1999) Hearts in Atlantis (New York: Scribner). Kovic, Ron (1976) Born on the Fourth of July (New York: Pocket Books). Melling, Philip (1990) Vietnam in American Literature (Boston, MA: Twayne). Myers, Thomas (1988) Walking Point: American Narratives of Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press), 89 – 104. Newman, John (1996) Vietnam Literature: An Annotated Bibliography of Imaginative Works about Americans Fighting in Vietnam (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press). O’Brien, Tim (1973) If I Die in a Combat Zone ((New York: Dell). ––––– (1978) Going after Cacciato (New York: Dell). ––––– (1990) The Things They Carried (Boston: Houghton Mifflin / Seymour Lawrence). Rosso, Stefano (2003) Musi gialli e berretti verdi. Narrazioni Usa sulla Guerra del Vietnam (Bergamo: Sestante-Bergamo University Press). Slotkin, Richard (1992) Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum). Spanos, William V. (2003) ‘A Rumor of War: 9 / 11 and the Forgetting of the Vietnam War’, boundary 2, 30.2, 29 – 65. Styron, William (1977) ‘A Farewell to Arms’, The New York Review of Books, June 23: 3 – 6.

Gerald Bär¹

The Subversive and the Sublime: Aspects of the British, German and Portuguese Critical Reception of ‘Anti-War’ Films in the Aftermath of May ’68 Ich bin 1968 hier nach Deutschland gekommen und was mich tief beeindruckt hat, jenseits meiner Bewegungs-Solidarität, war die Sensibilität dieser Studentenbewegung für die deutsche Geschichte. Die Sensibilität, das aufarbeiten zu wollen, was die deutsche Gesellschaft in den fünfziger und sechziger Jahren nicht fähig war, aufzuarbeiten. (Daniel Cohn-Bendit 1988)

With this essay, I want to present a short retrospective on the critical reception of several ‘anti-war’ films and films about student revolts (such as Alice’s Restaurant, A. Penn 1969; M*A*S*H, R. Altman 1970; The Strawberry Statement, S. Hagmann 1970; Zabriskie Point, M. Antonioni 1970; and Catch 22, M. Nichols 1970) in British, East- / West-German and Portuguese publications. This sequence of analysis seems to be justified, considering the various phases of the movies’ reception: as American films were neither dubbed, nor censured in Britain and Ireland, it was there, where they would first be shown and critically appreciated in Europe. Obviously, their reception in a divided post-war Germany was a much more complicated case. Furthermore, their dubbing caused a considerable delay to their public release. Although May ’68 had some repercussions in Portugal (student revolts, Lisbon / 1969), most of the films in question only entered the commercial cinema circuit after the revolution of 1974 – some never did. However, the delayed Portuguese critical reception of these productions will provide a useful comparison and complement. Focused on the wealth of information on the reception of ‘anti-war’ movies, this essay will not discuss each film as thoroughly as would be desirable. However, many studies have already provided adequate readings of the films considered in what follows.

1 I would like to thank Guy Stern (e-mail exchange / Oct.–Nov., 2009) and my colleague Landeg White for their helpful suggestions and contributions to this article. Furthermore, I am grateful for the support of the Referat 403 – Bundesbildstelle – Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung, namely for the permission to include photos by Klaus Lehnartz and Jens Gathmann. As it was impossible to trace the copyright holders of the remaining pictures, I am prepared to compensate possible claims according to the usual standards.

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The last part of my essay provides a short analysis of certain effects, which the visual representation of violence can produce and its implicit ethical / aesthetical dilemma. Reverting to Burke, Kant and Schiller, the relationship of the sublime and the subversive will be discussed. On the background of the debate about aestheticizing the events of 11 September 2001 (Hirst, Baudrillard, Stockhausen) and the actions of the RAF (Der Baader-Meinhof-Komplex, Edel 2008), the representation of scenes of violence and war in the selected films deserves special attention. I felt rather uncomfortable approaching the subject (which was one of the motives I wanted to explore it) for various reasons: my own fascination with certain scenes of violence (e.g. the explosion in slow motion at the end of Zabriskie Point), the clash of moral and aesthetic categories, the lack of statistics about the numbers of viewers of the films in question and a lack of information about the audience reaction at the time. Concerning these issues I am grateful for the support of three persons who actually experienced audience response when the films came out in the respective countries. While my colleague from Universidade Aberta, Landeg White, witnessed standing ovations for If in a British cinema in 1968, my wife in 1974 saw many viewers of M*A*S*H leaving a Lisbon afternoon show long before the end of the film. Guy Stern, one of the ‘Ritchie Boys’², had the opportunity to observe West German cinema goers after World War II. With great uneasiness, he recollects ‘the fact that the reception in Germany was occasionally perverse, as I was watching audiences in various German cities. Unfortunately, many Germans,

2 Guy Stern is Distinguished Professor of German at Wayne State University, Detroit, and interim director of the Holocaust Memorial Center Zekelman Family Campus in Farmington Hills. In Camp Ritchie, Maryland, the ‘Ritchie Boys’, who as teenagers had escaped the Nazis in Europe, were trained in intelligence and psychological warfare for special missions in World War II. After D-Day, they became a decisive force in the war. Nobody knew the enemy, his culture and his language better than the Ritchie Boys. They had no idea what it would be like to see their homeland again, they did not know what had happened to the families and friends they had left behind. On the front lines from the beaches of Normandy onwards, the Ritchie Boys interrogated German prisoners, defectors and civilians, collected information of tactical and strategic importance: about troop sizes and movements, about the psychological situation of the enemy, and the inner workings of the Nazi regime. They drafted leaflets and produced radio broadcasts. In trucks equipped with amplifiers and loudspeakers, they went to the front lines and under heavy fire tried to persuade their German opponents to surrender. They were among those who liberated the concentration camps. They worked for the Nuremberg Trials and determined the policy for the de-nazification of Germany (Cf.: http: // www.ritchieboys.com / EN / story.html / ; accessed on November 22, 2009; and Bauer / Göpfert 2005).

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especially of the older generation, were still beguiled by the battle scenes. I could not help intuiting that they felt “wir haben doch gesiegt” [we won, nonetheless].’ Later on, this experience influenced Stern’s cautiousness concerning the possible effects of a collective reception of these films or of the presentation of the Holocaust on TV: I, for example, failed completely in predicting the huge success of the American-made television series on the Holocaust.³ When asked by the German Cultural Attaché (who was blind) to judge the series for German consumption, I advised against it because I felt minor mistakes inherent in the script would give rise to denials of the Holocaust. But, Heinrich Baumhof, the Attaché, recommended the film (against my advice) and it was hugely successful in German-speaking countries: ‘Eine Nation ist betroffen.’ [A nation is stunned.]

In Guy Stern’s opinion, ‘anti-war’ films, when they became outright polemical, did not attract the general public. When the message was wrapped with humor, even black humor, they had a far greater effect. The great filmmakers of anti-war movies knew that. Robert Altman did it in M*A*S*H (which had some very grim hospital scenes) and the satire was already part of the book in Catch 22. Alice’s Restaurant abounds in subtle humorous attacks on war. The Quiet and the Unquiet Germans In his book The Unquiet Germans (1958), Charles W. Thayer, brother-in-law of ex-U.S. Ambassador to Russia Charles E. Bohlen and himself a career diplomat and freelance writer refers to the influence of American film and music (in Germany via American Forces Radio) on global youth culture.⁴ At the same time, in terms of contemporary composition, there seems to have been only a considerable demand for German beer drinking music in the U.S. record industry.

3 Holocaust is a television miniseries broadcast in four parts from April 16 to April 19 in 1978 on the NBC television network. It was directed by Marvin J. Chomsky; the teleplay was written by novelist-producer Gerald Green, who later adapted the script into a novel. In the US, it was extremely popular, earning a 49 % market share. It was also popular in Europe and had a major impact when it was broadcast in West Germany in January 1979. 4 ‘The “Half Strong” [die Halbstarken], they call them in Germany. In London, they’re “Teddies”. In Belgrade, they’re called “Friars”. I’ve run into them in Warsaw, Moscow and Prague as well. In Baku, on the edge of Asia, a Communist schoolmarm had told me the Stilyagi, as they’re known in the Soviet Union, are the product of American culture. “Your films and jazz and Hollywood styles are responsible”, she said belligerently. […] Willi Steiner, the draughtsman’s apprentice, blames youthful rowdyism on American films and American-style comics. That is what the Communist schoolmarm in Baku had told me. Though the explanation may be oversimplified, American tastes have had a marked influence in other respects on the young Germans.’ (Thayer 1958: 97, 101)

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Thayer’s conclusions concerning political culture in West Germany, based on ‘numerous opinion polls to which the younger Germans have been subjected in recent years’ present a complex scenario: According to the Emnid Institute, for instance, Hitler ranks third in their view, after Bismarck and Frederick the Great, in the hierarchy of heroes. One in four youngsters is opposed to the present system and at least one in three believes that Government should be placed in the hands of an authoritarian leader rather than in those of the individual voters. In this respect, the younger generation does not differ significantly from its elders, only a third of whom, according to the Institute for Demoskopie, now consider Germany responsible for the war and at least a quarter of whom still entertain a good opinion of Hitler. More than half of them believe that National Socialism was a good idea but badly executed (Thayer 1958: 79).

However, already before the events, generally resumed and generalized by the expression ‘May ’68’, many cinema-goers of both Germanys (FRG / GDR) were sensitive to a different cinematographic perspective on violence and war. Great parts of a young generation that had not taken part in the Second World War, though highly politically aware, had not only openly debated and accused their parents of responsibility for the Hitler regime, but also taken sides against the Vietnam War.

Demonstration against the war in Vietnam / West-Berlin 1968 (© Bundesregierung / Klaus Lehnartz)

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In West Germany, the death of Benno Ohnesorg during a student demonstration against the Shah of Iran in June 1967 had raised mistrust against a government that was backing North American policies and against its monopoly of using violence. He was shot by the policeman Karl-Heinz Kurras who, as has been discovered recently, had been a member of the SED and a Stasi-collaborator since 1955. For the GDR media, his death was proof of the Federal Republic’s potentially fascist character. Soon the press would focus on the struggle of West Berlin’s progressive workers and students against the ‘Notstandsdiktatur’. Nevertheless, some parts of the student movement were blamed for their decadent moralethic attitude (hippies). The influence of a new anti-authoritarian western youth culture and its political implications after the Prague Spring caused uneasiness. (Cf. Wolle 2001) In his analysis of the West German Student revolt, GDR-Historian Siegfried Prokop points out the differences between the Marxist-Leninist ideology and the contradictory eclectic revolutionary potential of the petty bourgeoisie [‘der kleinbürgerliche Revolutionarismus’].⁵ After the Korean War (1950 – 53), Allen Ginsberg had seen the best minds of his generation ‘destroyed by madness […] who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war’ (‘Howl’, Ginsberg 1956). However, in the late sixties American and English box-offices still rejoiced to productions such as The Dirty Dozen (Aldrich 1967), Where Eagles Dare (Hutton 1968), The Green Berets (1968 Kellogg / Wayne) or Battle of Britain (Hamilton 1969) – action films, glorifying war heroes. Even the Pictorial History of War Films, an attempt to establish a canon by Clyde Jeavons in 1974 without distinguishing between war- and ‘anti-war’ films, dedicates relatively little space to films such as Catch 22 or M*A*S*H. The author’s comment starts off emphasizing their cynicism: Latterly, cynicism has become a prime ingredient of the American war film. First used in any appreciable quantity by Stanley Kubrick in Dr Strangelove …, it has since become the dominating flavour in such films as Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1969), Mike Nichols’s Catch 22 (1970), and Robert Aldrich’s Too late the Hero (1970) (Jeavons 1974: 240 – 241).

5 ‘Consequently, the revolutionarism of the petty bourgeoisie is pseudo-revolutionary. It does not form part of the theory of the working-class, but is in hostile opposition to it.’ (My translation) [‘Der kleinbürgerliche Revolutionarismus ist also pseudorevolutionär. Er gehört nicht zur Theorie der Arbeiterklasse, sondern steht ihr feindlich gegenüber.’] (Prokop 1974: 121)

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This disapproving introduction is not a surprise. After the decline in anti-war or pacifist sentiment during the years before World War II not only had nationalism played a considerable part in the growing acceptance of war as a necessary evil. There was also a strong ideological motive to accept armed conflict, expressed in anti-fascist rhetoric and, in cultural terms, to save ‘western civilisation’ – a sentiment of just cause that continues to determine the perspective of the generation who won the war, despite the horror experienced. Even though traditional war films were also popular in West-Germany, Austria and Switzerland, a great majority of the population preferred the so called ‘Heimatfilme’ [Homeland films] after the Second World War. The films of this genre (e.g.: Schwarzwaldmädel, 1950; Der Förster vom Silberwald, 1954; Hoch droben auf dem Berg, 1957), usually shot in the Black Forest or in the Alps, were noted for their a-political attitude, rural settings, sentimental tone and simplistic morality. They centered on love, friendship, family and non-urban life – ‘don’t mention the war’, as John Cleese in the British sitcom Fawlty Towers used to say. In the 60s these ‘Heimatfilme’ became more exotic by including Karl May adaptations (Der Schatz im Silbersee, 1962; Winnetou I, II, III (1963 – 5); Winnetou und Shatterhand im Tal der Toten, 1968).

Although the famous Winnetou trilogy included several elements of the American Western genre, in many ways it still continued the tradition of the ‘Heimatfilm’. However, since the early 60s there were tendencies to abandon this cinema made by and for the generations that took part in the war. In the ‘Oberhausen Mani-

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festo’ (1962),⁶ a young group of directors proclaimed the young German film for an even younger and intellectual audience. The older generation’s legacy concerning ‘anti-war’ films certainly includes Die Brücke (1959) by the Swiss-Austrian director Bernhard Wicki. Even the GDR’s official yearbook of film, usually extremely critical about West German cinema, praised this production. It uses the expression ‘pazifistischer Antikriegsfilm’ [pacifist anti-war film], only lamenting Wicki’s merely ‘naturalistic approach’ (Jahrbuch des Films 1959, 1960: 79). But what those Germans who appreciated the melodramatic film about a doctor in Stalingrad (Der Arzt von Stalingrad, 1958) thought of the sarcastic comedy M*A*S*H (Robert Altman 1970 / West-German release: 27 / 05 / 1970) is hard to tell. There seem to be no reliable statistics about the number of spectators at the time⁷, although novels, such as Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’s Keiner weiß mehr (1968), may have captured the pre-’68 Zeitgeist rather well. A younger filmmaker’s contribution to this subject – Michael Verhoeven’s o.k. (1970) caused a scandal at the Berlinale film festival of the same year. His film, based on a Vietnam War episode of 1966, was shot in black and white to imitate contemporary war reports on TV and included long scenes depicting a woman’s rape. The perpetrators are American soldiers speaking with a Bavarian accent (Brechtian V-effect). Against the will of several members of the jury, George Stevens, its president, intended to exclude o.k. from the festival programme. The ensuing controversy led to a premature end of the Berlinale without the awarding of any prizes, threatening the event’s future. Released in July 1970, o.k. was certainly less successful at German box-offices than M*A*S*H and soon forgotten.

6 ‘The collapse of the conventional German film finally removes the economic basis for a mode of filmmaking whose attitude and practice we reject. With it the new film has a chance to come to life. German short films by young authors, directors, and producers have in recent years received a large number of prizes at international festivals and gained the recognition of international critics. These works and these successes show that the future of the German film lies in the hands of those who have proven that they speak a new film language. Just as in other countries, the short film has become in Germany a school and experimental basis for the feature film. We declare our intention to create the new German feature film. This new film needs new freedoms. Freedom from the conventions of the established industry. Freedom from the outside influence of commercial partners. Freedom from the control of special interest groups. We have concrete intellectual, formal, and economic conceptions about the production of the new German film. We are as a collective prepared to take economic risks. The old film is dead. We believe in the new one.’ (Oberhausen, February 28, 1962) 7 Neither the Verband der Filmverleiher, nor the Hauptverband Deutscher Filmtheater (HDF) could provide the statistics for the productions in question.

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However, the German ambivalence concerning collective guilt and their different sense of humour⁸ certainly determined the cinema-goer’s genre-expectations. In this particular case, it seems clear that the subject was no laughing matter for the German public in general (at least officially). Even now, films (incl. comedies) dealing with Hitler and the Second World War meet with an extremely sensitive reception.⁹ Nevertheless, watching an (American) movie about the wars in Korea or in Vietnam may have had a different impact. An explanation for this complex scenario determining the German reception is offered by Mitscherlich’s book The Inability to Mourn (Die Unfähigkeit zu Trauern, 1967). Its West German edition reached 66,000 copies in 1969 (1st American edition in 1975). Its analysis of the rejection of guilt (perpetrators see themselves as victims) applies to the German war generation: the replacement of mourning by identification with innocent victims happens frequently and is mostly a rejection of guilt, which is reforced by the claim to have only obeyed orders. Consequently, many are convinced to have been victims of evil powers: first of the ‘bad Jews’, then of the ‘bad Nazis’ and finally of the ‘bad Russians’ (cf. Mitscherlich 1969: 60). By the end of the sixties, ‘anti-war’ films and films about the student revolts, such as How I Won the War, If …, Alice’s Restaurant, M*A*S*H, The Strawberry Statement, Zabriskie Point, and Catch 22, obviously targeted the younger generation. These productions are often accompanied by an allusive soundtrack with songs, commenting on the action. In 1970, M*A*S*H came second in the American box-office charts, grossing 82 million dollars. Since Dr Strangelove, If, and How I Won the War, the so-called ‘anti-war’ films display a provocative, antimilitary and anti-bourgeois attitude, which in Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963) and Week-End (1967) had reached an early peak. Therefore, it is not surprising that already before the early seventies their effect was questioned, not only on a moral level, but also sociologically, politically and aesthetically. Both terminology and sub-genre had become debatable. Consciously or not, Jeavons (1974) avoids the expression ‘anti-war’ film. Years before in his article ‘Fuck for Peace’ (Film, Jan. 1968), the West German film critic Ernst Wendt had analysed elements of satirical comedy and the representation of war in European productions such

8 In his book Früher begann der Tag mit einer Schusswunde (1969), Wolf Wondratschek ironically describes contemporary German humour as a matter for specialists who have to talk us into cheerfulness on television: ‘Der Humor ist eine Angelegenheit von Spezialisten. Sie müssen uns im Fernsehen zur Heiterkeit überreden. Aber dann lachen wir Tränen, denn wir wollen ernstgenommen werden’. (Wondratschek 1969: 9) 9 Cf. the recent controversial debate about Dani Levy’s film Mein Führer – Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler (Germany, 2006 / 7).

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as Lester’s How I Won the War (1967) and Godard’s Les Carabiniers. The war-film genre and its heroes were ridiculed; the perception of war, transmitted by its visibility and permanent reproduction on the screen, had become suspicious. But Wendt goes even further: ‘War may just be clown’s play, even the “realistic”, so called anti-war films, indolently parodied by Lester, cannot be trusted […].’¹⁰ Already in Godard’s Pierrot, le Fou (1965)¹¹ and later in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point war is not visibly present anymore, but only audible through car radio broadcast and in mime.

1. Reception in Britain In the late 1960s, the British public was already well accustomed to pictures of ‘The Ugly War of Vietnam  – in Colour’, as the subtitle of an article about LIFE photo-journalist Larry Burrows in the British Journal of Photography Annual 1966 implies (Burrows 1966: 48 – 57). However, the reception of ‘anti-war’ films and of films about the student revolts was altogether not overwhelming in the British periodical Sight and Sound, although with the vision of hindsight the evaluation of some soon changed for the better. The expectations raised concerning the collective production of Loin du Vietnam (Resnais, Klein, Ivens, Varda, Lelouch, Godard, 1967) were not fulfilled (cf. Sight and Sound 36, 4, 1967: 166 and 37, 1, 1967 / 8: 9 – 10). In her review of How I Won the War (1967), the first question Penelope Houston felt like asking Richard Lester ‘was whether he hasn’t seen Les Carabiniers’: Godard chose to make a simple statement with almost baffling directness; Lester’s equally simple statement is complicated through technical indirection. Characteristically, Godard’s point was not that war is horrible (that we might take for granted) but that it is an ultimate in brutish stupidity. Lester pins the brutish stupidity, as it were, on to the adulatory combat movies, the anti-war films which get caught up in their own heroics. To do so, he goes back to square one: war is horrible. But the net effect of How I Won the War is that it’s not so much directly anti-war, as anti other war movies (Houston 1967: 202).

Apart from technical and stylistic flaws, ‘this absolutely serious comedy’ presents a balancing act on the tightrope of a hybrid genre, which even John Lennon’s

10 ‘Krieg kann nur ein Clowns-Spiel sein, auch den ‘realistischen’ sogenannten AntiKriegsfilmen, die Lester lässig parodiert, müssen wir nicht glauben […].’ (Wendt, 1968: 14) 11 Over the car radio, the two protagonists Ferdinand (Belmondo) and Marianne (Karina) hear the message ‘garrison massacred by the Viet Cong who lost 115 men’.

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appearance (Musketeer Gripweed) could not turn into a box office success.¹² The effect of Lester’s attempt to deconstruct ‘anti-war’ films that still treat war in a rational manner is questionable. For most spectators, the application of Brechtian estrangement techniques is bewildering rather than creating critical distance. After Godard had taken the ‘brutish stupidity’ from the war-scenario out to the streets and the everyday life of contemporary France in Week-End (1967)¹³, Lindsay Anderson made a film about violence in and against the British publicschool system, which coincided with the student revolts of 1968: If … (title derived from Kipling, cf. Robinson 1968: 30). Again, Godard was the measure for Gavin Millar’s negative review that also criticised Anderson’s ‘wholesale appropriation of scenes from Vigo’ (Zéro de Conduite 1933): Anderson reflects a fascination with that majestic blend of anarchy and surrealism. And at other times, in the violence of his solutions, he seems to be nearer to Godard. […] If … is a film concerned with revolution, but about anger. And if we can’t read the writing on the wall, perhaps it was because the hand shook a little (Millar 1968 / 9: 43).

According to Anderson, If … ‘was not created in any way with a conscious knowledge or analysis of student movements in France, Berlin, Tokyo, London, and Columbia University. None were heard of in that way when the script was being written.’ (Gelmis 1974: 156) Nevertheless, the film won the 1969 Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival.

12 ‘The tone is strident, tense, exclamatory; reasonable enough if Britain were in a deeply military mood. But in this country at this moment How I Won the War seems to me to be stubbing its toes by kicking ferociously at an open door. Is there an audience here, of an age and temper likely to be affected by the film, to be thrown by its anti-militaristic attitudes? Which is not to say that anti-war films need not be made, but that the bloody officers and dissident troops (“shoot your own bloody officer”) belong with the used stock of the Saturday night TV satirists. Beneath its abrasive technique, How I Won the War seems to me to be asking for a conventionally unconventional 1967 reaction: pop goes the army – or the army goes pop. And this, of course, is the sort of mental barrier which Les Carabiniers broke through’ (Houston 1967: 202). 13 ‘Using the shock tactics of guerrilla warfare, Godard has established the horror of the bourgeoisie. And one of the most remarkable achievements of Week-End (Connoisseur) is that far from lapsing into anticlimax, it rises from horror to horror. […] In this instant destruction of his creations, Godard goes beyond a mere application of Brechtian theory. […] It is not only the imaginary characters, or the fact that each scene turns instantly to metaphor, that makes WeekEnd Godard’s most poetic film to date, somewhere between Swift and Samuel Beckett. […] For Week-End is poetic in its structures as well as in its imagery, alternately violent and tender, humorous and cruel. A dialectic poem, a revolutionary film’ (Dawson 1968: 151 – 152).

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Arthur Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant (1969) consciously uses the voices of a youth (Arlo Guthrie), ‘repudiating the values of the older generation’, and his father (Woody Guthrie) who represents the ‘Old Left’ (Gelmis 1974: 268 – 9) An ‘anti-war’ (and somewhat ‘anti-ecological’) message based on A. Guthrie’s talking blues ‘Alice’s Restaurant Massacre’ (1967), is how to avoid the Vietnam draft by getting a criminal record for littering: I think that the point has been reached where the American people on the whole have made it known to their leaders that they don’t really want to be in this war. And now the only problem is how they get out of it without losing face (Guthrie 1969: 69).

Furthermore, musical statements against the war from Woodstock featured in many cinema productions. From Lester’s cynical use of ‘We’ll meet again …’, over ‘Suicide is painless’ (M*A*S*H) to ‘The End’ (Apocalypse Now), the English speaking audience were given food for thought. However, in many other countries (e.g. Germany) these songs were not subtitled and may not have produced the desired effect, for a great part of the viewers missed out on this important dimension of the films. The young students, who understood them, were sceptical, warned by Theodor W. Adorno’s verdict (televised in an interview / 1969)¹⁴ not to express

14 ‘Actually, I believe that attempts to bring political protest together with popular music – that is, entertainment music – are doomed for the following reason. The entire sphere of popular music, even there where it dresses itself up in modernist guise is to such a degree inseparable from “Warencharakter”, from amusement, from the cross-eyed transfixion with consumption, so that attempts to outfit it with a new function remain entirely superficial. When somebody sets himself up, and for whatever reason accompanies maudlin music by singing something about Vietnam being unbearable, then I find exactly this song unbearable. By making the horrendous somehow consumable, it ends up wringing something like consumption-qualities out of it!’ [Ich glaube allerdings, daß Versuche, politischen Protest mit der Popular Music, also der Unterhaltungsmusik zusammenzubringen, deshalb zum Scheitern verurteilt sind, weil die ganze Sphäre der Unterhaltungsmusik – auch wo sie irgendwie modernistisch sich aufputzt – so mit dem Warencharakter, mit dem Amüsement, mit dem Schielen nach dem Konsum verbunden ist, daß also Versuche, dem eine veränderte Funktion zu geben, ganz äußerlich bleiben. Wenn also dann Irgendjemand sich hinstellt und auf eine im Grunde doch schnulzenhafte Musik irgendwelche Dinge darüber singt, daß Vietnam nicht zu ertragen sei, dann finde ich, daß gerade dieser Song nicht zu ertragen ist. Weil er, indem er das Entsetzliche noch irgendwie konsumierbar macht, schließlich auch daraus noch etwas wie Konsumqualitäten herauspreßt!] (http: // www.video4viet.com / watchvideo.html?id=UdmAAU XasXE&title=Adorno+About+Beckett+And+The+Deformed+Subject / (accessed on August 08, 2009)

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anti-war sentiment in pop music, because it makes the atrocious somehow consumable. The best publicity for R. Altman’s M*A*S*H was provided by the US Army and Air Force, who banned it from their service theatres. This ‘hilarious, blasphemous black comedy’ also received a very favourable review in Britain, ‘as probably one of the most irreducibly funny films ever made’ (Dawson 1970: 161 – 162). People have long been debating whether M*A*S*H is really an anti-war movie, but there should be no doubt at all about the intentions of Mike Nichols’ bleak film of Catch 22 (Paramount)¹⁵. It is ironic that of the two films M*A*S*H seems more indebted to Joseph Heller’s novel; the screwball black comedy that is Heller’s trademark is central to the conception of M*A*S*H, but it plays a relatively minor part in the film of Catch 22 (Farber 1970: 218).

These introductory words to Steven Farber’s comment on Nichols’ follow up film to The Graduate (1967) are not very promising and indeed, the review comes to a rather devastating conclusion, emphasizing its nearly insignificant formal achievements: ‘Catch 22 is unquestionably a failure, too solemn and portentous for the modest rewards it offers’ (Farber 1970: 219). Similarly The Strawberry Statement (Hagmann 1970), based on James S. Kunen’s book about student revolts at Columbia, but filmed at Berkeley, faced a dismal reception, due to its script, its confused story line and its ‘bewildering lack of an overall vision’: The shots are ostentatious, breathtaking and often beautiful, with many unusual high and low angles, and much swirling movement and fancy focus-pulling. The mood which such modish filming creates is frequently at odds with the content, and in treating each set-up as raw material for a stunning image, Hagmann and his photographer have devalued the subject matter almost to the point of irrelevance (Campbell 1970: 160).

Even the appealing soundtrack could not help that, as Campbell remarks, Hagmann ‘fared worse than Antonioni in Zabriskie Point in capturing campus revolt’. Although the critic mentions a few positive aspects, Hollywood productions, such as The Strawberry Statement, never come even close to his idea of

15 The intensions may be clear, but not the terminology, as the director confesses in an interview: ‘G[elmis]: do you think of Catch-22 as an anti-war film? N[ichols]: I suppose. G: Does that word disturb you? Anti-war? Does it sound too pious? N: Nobody wants to make a pro-war film. And I don’t know what an anti-war film is. It’s like “Fuck Hate.” Nobody likes war. It’d be like making an anti-evil film. Or a pro-good film.’ (Gelmis 1974: 351 – 2) As Nichols admitted not having watched the box-office success The Green Berets, his claim that nobody wants to make a pro-war film seems too optimistic.

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‘radical cinema’.¹⁶ Despite this (or rather because of it), the movie was awarded the Jury Prize at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival. During ‘non-heroic’ Godard’s excursion to the US in 1968, Gene Youngblood, a journalist of the Los Angeles Free Press wrote that, for an increasing number of serious young people, the French director had become as important as Sartre, Hesse, and Dostoyevsky. Although Michelangelo Antonioni had not quite achieved this status even after Blow-Up (1966), his American film Zabriskie Point raised high expectations: Antonioni was appearing everywhere – on the UCLA campus, at demonstrations, at SDS meetings. […] Antonioni’s sympathy with the young radicals was very apparent. When I asked him what kind of a reception he had received from them, he replied: ‘They didn’t trust me at the beginning, and they were right. First of all, I walked in and said I was working for M-G-M, for the establishment.’ […] And for Antonioni Zabriskie Point looks as though it will also be a highpoint. For it deals with some of the most vital contemporary issues, it is visually exciting, and it continues his experimentation with the medium (Kinder 1968 / 9: 27 – 30).

However, in 1970 Julian Jebb felt the need to examine the many ‘charges which have been levelled’ against the film in Time and Newsweek: ‘intellectual poverty of the film, combined with an ignorance of America¹⁷ and a cynical exploitation of the youth market’. Also in England critics from The Times and the New Statesman had found Zabriskie Point ‘incredibly fatigued and silly beneath its pretty surface’; its ‘ideas remain self-contained capsules, repeated, decorated, but never deepened, enriched, given surprising resonances’ (Jebb 1970: 125 – 126). Evoking Antonioni’s statement that he ‘wasn’t trying to explain America – a film is not social analysis after all’, Jebb defends the movie, playing its poetical approach against the ‘simplicities of Easy Rider’ and the ‘irony and charm of Alice’s Restaurant’: ‘because each of them is a polemical film in one way or another; and Zabriskie Point is offensive precisely because it is not polemical and yet suspect because it is intelligent and beautiful. […] The more you search for a message, the more obstinately will the structure and the poetry of the film elude you’ (Jebb 1970: 126).

16 ‘The Strawberry Statement has been dismissed by some reviewers as pure exploitation of the swinging revolutionary scene. It is not that, since it is one of the first major films even to approach the Movement seriously, but in its indecisiveness, some lapses into commercial cliché, and in the very prettiness of its images it emphasises how far Hollywood still is from a genuine radical cinema’ (Campbell 1970: 160). 17 The accusation of ‘ignorance of America’ is still implicit in the title of Norman Kagan’s book Greenhorns: Foreign Filmmakers Interpret America (1982), in which the author discusses Godard’s Made in U.S.A. and Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point among other productions.

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On the other hand, Robin Wood, also comparing it with Alice’s Restaurant, criticises precisely Zabriskie Point’s ‘empty aesthetic beauty’: ‘The film itself is, in the last resort, not unlike Rod Taylor’s house: as beautiful, superfluous and dehumanised’ (Wood 1970 – 71: 23). Nevertheless, Films and Filming (Jan.  1971: 43 – 46) honoured Antonioni for best direction and Daria Halprin for most promising (female) newcomer (Zabriskie Point). According to this magazine ‘the men who show films in Britain’ considered M*A*S*H the best comedy and the best screen adaptation of the year 1970.

2. Reception in West-Germany In West Germany, many reviews were even more critical, possibly because the critics were influenced by the opinions of their foreign colleagues who had commented on the films before their dubbed versions were shown on German screens. Indeed, after a rather positive reception of If … (cf. Fernsehen + Film, Feb. and Sept. 1969) and an analytical, but frosty review of Week-End (cf. Filmkritik 2 / 69: 89 – 92), the West German Filmkritik lashed out against Alice’s Restaurant. Comparing the movie’s subject to its treatment in Arlo Guthrie’s ballad, Siegfried Schober accuses Penn of failure, of using clichés, simplifications, myths and flat characters for a rather bourgeois concept of ‘Hippies’ [‘Aussenseiter-Biedermeier’, ‘Hippie-Farce’]: the ‘half-hearted and confused’ film’s theatrical and sentimental approach dismisses everything that has to do with politics and war, law and order in a careless and frivolous ‘Comic and Cabaret manner’ (cf. Schober 1970a: 34). The reviewer of Fernsehen + Film (March 1970: 6 – 7) comes to similar conclusions, considering ‘Alice’s Restaurant the swan song of all ideals’ [Alice’s Restaurant wird zum Abgesang an alle Ideale]. Zabriskie Point, too, is reviewed rather warily and receives an ambiguous verdict: ‘Violence in the name of nature’ would correspond to the intellectual ingenuity of a film of protagonists, which Zabriskie Point has not turned out to be, or to the documentary (due to the distrust in images), which was prevented by the montage. This violence shows something of the spontaneous violence against the intellectual-naïve that only dreams of its realization (My translation).¹⁸

18 ‘“Gewalt im Namen der “Natur” […] entspräche der intellektuellen Naivität des Films aus Protagonisten, der Zabriskie Point nicht geworden ist, oder des Dokumentarfilms aus Vorbehalten gegen Bilder, den schließlich die Montage verhindert hat. In ihr äußert sich etwas

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Much worse fared The Strawberry Statement, considered a necessary, although perverted follow-up to Easy Rider in terms of rhetoric of imagery and soundtrack. According to Schober, the disappointment with the Hippie and dropout movement that could not provide any alternatives is compensated by the College Revolutionaries who deceive the passive audience with a suggestive and commercially successful play about struggle and power, values and objectives. The action is ‘involving in an imaginary and emotional way, where politics is nothing, but an event’ [auf eine imaginäre und emotionale Weise, wo Politik nichts als Ereignis ist …] (Schober 1970b: 602). Fernsehen + Film (Jan. 1971: 22) scorns the movie as ‘the by far most stupid, ridiculous and reactionary film that America has made about its rebelling kids’ [der bei weitem dümmste, lächerlichste und reaktionärste Film, den Amerika über seine revoltierenden Kids gemacht hat]. In comment on comedies about revolt and war (Fernsehen + Film, Sept. 1970), Klaus Eder had already mentioned The Strawberry Statement before analyzing M*A*S*H by Altman, who as the critic suggests, may have vented his anger about the Cartwrights in this film (cf. Altman’s Bonanza episodes). A production, ‘technically not very good’ and ‘made by a man, who must hate everything military’, M*A*S*H is perceived as a partly ‘macabre Grotesque’, notable for its devastating and sarcastic criticism of soldiers and puritan moral concepts. However, its slapstick elements and its parodied war-scenario (apparently set in Korea), far from reality and from Vietnam, are criticized (Eder 1970: 9 – 10). After its appearance on West German screens in 1971, Catch 22 is compared to Heller’s best-selling novel and to M*A*S*H. Dismissed for being trapped in the imagery of war machinery and for its confusing plot, it was regarded as ‘another “anti-war film” with wit  – that is, a witty war-film with an un-witty “anti” in front’.¹⁹ Besides pointing out the reviewed films’ technical flaws, unfaithful adaptation and doubtful aesthetics, most West German critics lament their directors’

von der spontanen Gewalt gegen die intellektuell-naive, die von ihr nur träumt’ (Feurich 1970: 595). 19 ‘… aber so gut ist der Film nicht, der trabt im Zugzwang der Kriegsmaschinerie-Bilder; und auf einen klaren, einfachen Irrsinn kommen drei unklare Einfälle. […] Das Dazuinszenierte ergibt insgesamt wieder einen „Anti-Kriegsfilm“ mit Witz – also einen witzigen Kriegsfilm mit einem witzlosen Anti davor. […] Wieder ist der Krieg, über mancherlei komische Wendungen, ein Fall geworden. In der Nähe von MASH. Ein bisschen der Dramaturgie des Buches folgend, ein bisschen creativ wie man es von Werbefritzen oder Layoutern verlangt.’ (Filmkritik 3 / 1971: 160)

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lack of political attitude and engagement, their selling out to commercial principles and the transmission of wrong political messages. In his 1971 article ‘Ein Anti-Kriegsfilm ist noch kein Anti-Kriegsfilm’ [An antiwar film is still not an anti-war film], Michael Radke claims that it is easier to charge images with anti-war messages, than sounds (marches, guns, yelling of orders). In his excurse about the use of music in the war film genre he observes the ironic use of songs in Catch 22. Contrary to Balázs’s early vision of the universally comprehensible film language, an image has different meanings and connotations in different cultures and contexts. Commenting them in (on) various semantic systems (levels), even to the point of redundancy, seems inevitable, if a certain (political) message is to be preserved and transmitted. However, Radke points to the impossibility of making ‘anti-war’ films, because they implicitly legitimise any film about war, using war as the background for a model of peace which is hardly ever explained. Thus, war is not associated with evil in the conscience of the viewer, but remains as a fact. In films such as Dr Strangelove, How I Won the War and Catch 22, Radke criticizes the lack of reflection about the genre. Their directors do not realize that the effect of images against war is neutralized, for, as he puts it: ‘There are no images against war, because the purpose of images is to transfer the strange into the known, to diminish the horror, instead of increasing it. Metaphors always aim to establish an order, create myths which represent, and rites which stabilize this order’. ²⁰

20 ‘The makers and producers of such films reflect too little about the genre they are about to deal with. Otherwise they should have realized that pictures opposing the war keep anihilating themselves in their effect. There are no pictures against war, because all that pictures aim at is to turn the strange into the familiar, to relieve horror, instead of increasing it. Metaphors always want to establish order, create myths, which represent this order, rites that stabilize it.’ (My translation) [‘[D]ie Hersteller und Produzenten solcher Filme verwenden zu wenig Reflexion auf das Genre, mit dem sie umgehen wollen; sonst nämlich müsste ihnen aufgegangen sein, dass sich Bilder gegen den Krieg in ihrer Wirkung stets selbst aufheben. Es gibt keine Bilder gegen den Krieg, denn Bilder sind darauf aus, Fremdes in Vertrautes umzuwandeln, Entsetzen abzubauen, statt zu potenzieren. Metaphern wollen immer Ordnung stiften, Mythen schaffen, die diese Ordnung repräsentieren, Riten, die sie stabilisieren.’] (Radke 1971: 16)

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3. Aestheticized Violence in Other Genres / Structural Violence Recourse to parodic and comic elements as a means to show the absurdity of war coincided with a new strand of violence in cinematographic entertainment. Had several directors of ‘anti-war’ films used a documentary style and violent scenes to show the reality and horrors of war, the Italo-Western (Once upon a Time in the West topped the West German box-office charts in 1969 with 13,000,000 viewers), Westerns such as Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), and horror films such as Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) presented extreme violence even in slowmotion to shock their audience. In these box-office successes, ‘the old formula violence with its moral and social functions was abandoned. Filmic violence now took on more intense, increasingly voyeuristic but also more aestheticized and dramaturgical quality’.²¹ This development had to do with the replacement of the Hays Code, adopted by major studios from 1930 to 1968, for the MPAA film rating system, which included x-rated movies (no admittance under 17). Its repercussions were also felt in the more severe censorship measures taken in countries, such as Portugal and Spain. According to Arno Heller the habitualized watching of film violence may not only reduce the normal inhibition towards violent aggression, but also ‘lead to a higher degree of immunization, insensitivity and emotional indifference in the response to medial and real violence in general’ (Heller 1998: 164). His suggestion that the spectacular escalation of movie violence took place roughly from the early seventies onward and that this may be a response to the disruption of the counter culture of the sixties²² remains questionable.

21 Heller 1998: 158. Low-budget gore-shock films from the likes of Herschell Gordon Lewis also appeared. Examples included 1963‘s Blood Feast (a devil-cult story) and 1964’s Two Thousand Maniacs, which featured splattering blood and bodily dismemberment. 22 Heller 1998: 165: ‘[T]he fact that the spectacular escalation of movie violence took place roughly from the early seventies onward indicates that it may be a response to the disruption of the counter culture of the sixties. In the wake of the Vietnam debacle, the Watergate scandal, and the beginning of economic regression, a general feeling of disillusionment became ubiquitous. It seems as if the breakdown of the political ideals of the sixties, the social dreams, alternative life styles and sexual revolution had left a kind of existential vacuum which filled itself with a nihilistic and apocalyptic mood, most strikingly in the popular culture of the time. The repressed anger against the new conservativism and Yuppy-callousness of the Reagan period obviously needed an emotional outlet – and one was found in the imagined violence of popular culture.’

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However, on 4 May 1970, American society, already well aware of the war outside US boundaries through daily TV coverage about Indochina, was stunned and divided by the war-like scenario at Kent State University, Ohio. National Guards had shot into a crowd of demonstrating students, injuring nine and killing Allison Krause, William Schroeder, Jeffrey Miller and Sandra Scheuer²³, which provoked a nationwide student strike and violent protests in front of the U.S. Embassy in West Germany. Two years earlier, on 11 April 1968, Rudi Dutschke, the most prominent spokesperson of the German student movement, had been shot in the head by a young unskilled worker who was influenced by the mass media’s relentless campaign against Dutschke. This incident had also caused riots and provided, as Aust’s book and Edel’s homonymous film Der Baader-Meinhof-Komplex (2008) suggest, a motive for terrorist violence.²⁴ Unfortunately, Edel’s production fails to clarify why the successful journalist Ulrike Meinhof abandoned the way of political (counter-)information, debate and provocation, resorting to open criminal violence.²⁵ Her article ‘Vom Protest zum Widerstand’ [From Protest to Resistance] published in the GDR-sponsored journal konkret (5 / 1968) seems like a premonition of many terrorist acts committed by the RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion / Red Army Faction) that would follow and shake the democratic fundaments of the young West-German Republic.²⁶ In the ensuing climate of polarization great parts of the

23 Sandra Scheuer’s father Martin had immigrated to the United States in 1935 to escape Nazi persecution. Although Neil Young’s song ‘Ohio’, written immediately after the ‘Kent State Massacre’, became an anthem to many people, it was banned from playlists in some parts of the country, because of its ‘anti-war’ (= unpatriotic) and ‘anti-Nixon’ sentiments. 24 In the 896 pages of Aust’s book, the author refers briefly to the impact of Kerouac’s On the Road in Western Europe (pp. 60 – 61), but never mentions Herbert Marcuse’s and Adorno’s influence on the ongoing debate within the various leftwing groups. Other films about this subject: Fassbinder, Schlöndorff, Kluge, etc., Deutschland im Herbst (1978), Heinrich Breloer, Todesspiel (1997). 25 In 1970, Meinhof still produced the film Bambule, for which she had also provided the script, urging female revolt and class warfare. By the time it was scheduled to be shown on TV, she, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin had become wanted terrorists (bank robbery, bombings) and its broadcast was delayed until 1997. 26 Protest is when I say I can’t stand this and that. Resistance is when I make sure that the things I can’t stand won’t happen any longer. […] Similar things, although not in the same words, could be heard from a Black of the Black-Power-Movement during the Vietnam Conference in February in Berlin. […] For the first time the borderline between verbal protest and physical resistance has been crossed not only symbolically, but factually and massively at the protests against the attempt on Rudi Dutschke’s life. Now, after it has been demonstrated that there are other means than just demonstrations, Springer-Hearings, protest events, other means than those that failed, because they could not prevent the attempt on Rudi Dutschke,

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generation that grew up in post-war Germany questioned the moral integrity and legitimacy of their political elites and decision makers who had been responsible for the rise of the Nazi regime and had again passed controversial emergency laws (Notstandsgesetze) in May 1968 as the 17th constitutional amendment to the Grundgesetz (cf.: Enabling Act / Ermächtigungsgesetz, 23 March, 1933).

The war in Indochina, the West-German emergency laws and the Enabling Act in the same context: Demonstrating against the emergency laws in Bonn, 1968 (© Bundesregierung / Jens Gathmann)

now that the chains of customs and decency have been thrown off, the debate about violence and counter-violence can and must be started all over again. [Protest ist, wenn ich sage, das und das paßt mir nicht. Widerstand ist, wenn ich dafür sorge, daß das, was mir nicht paßt, nicht länger geschieht. […] So ähnlich – nicht wörtlich – konnte man es von einem Schwarzen der Black-Power-Bewegung auf der Vietnamkonferenz im Februar in Berlin hören. […] Die Grenze zwischen verbalem Protest und physischem Widerstand ist bei den Protesten gegen den Anschlag auf Rudi Dutschke […] erstmalig massenhaft, […] tatsächlich, nicht nur symbolisch – überschritten worden. […] Nun, nachdem gezeigt worden ist, daß andere Mittel als nur Demonstrationen, Springer-Hearings, Protestveranstaltungen zur Verfügung stehen, andere als die, die versagt haben, weil sie den Anschlag auf Rudi Dutschke nicht verhindern konnten, nun, da die Fesseln von Sitte & Anstand gesprengt worden sind, kann und muß neu und von vorne über Gewalt und Gegengewalt diskutiert werden.] (Meinhof 1968: 5)

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Heinrich Böll’s book Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum oder: Wie Gewalt entstehen und wohin sie führen kann (1974 / Filmversion by Schlöndorff / Trotta, 1975) continued the ongoing debate about structural, institutionalized and monopolized violence, alerting to the effects of the tabloid headline (‘Schlagzeile’).

4. Reception in East Germany After World War II, American, British, French and Russian occupying forces considered the medium of film an important tool for the rehabilitation and reeducation of the defeated Germans. As the Soviets controlled more than 70 % of Germany’s formerly impressive film production, they had the best means to propagate their political and aesthetical visions during the Cold War and to position the GDR critique. As early as the 1950s, East German critics had considered on screen violence as a typical ingredient of Hollywood productions. Its imitation in West German movies was usually interpreted as a visible sign of brutality and decadence inherent to the capitalist system. Small wonder American films were hardly shown in the German Democratic Republic. During the 1950s only Salt of the Earth (Herbert J. Biberman 1954) and Marty (Delpert Mann 1955) were officially presented to East German cinema-goers. After the implementation of nationwide television, many ‘emigrated’ every evening, watching West German programmes and dubbed American films. In official critical reviews West German productions were often accused of militarist, fascist and anti-soviet tendencies (Jahrbuch des Films 1958: 82, 94), besides the blame for being Americanized. The Yearbook of Film of 1958 summed it up: ‘What the Western is to the American, the Heimatfilm is to the producers of the Federal Republic’ [Was dem Amerikaner sein Western, das ist dem bundesdeutschen Produzenten sein Heimatfilm, sein ‘Unterhaltungsfilm’] (Jahrbuch des Films 1958: 83]. In 1961, along with the Federal Republic’s censorship system (FBW / FSK), the so-called ‘Neo-Sadism’ adopted from Hollywood was condemned.²⁷ During

27 ‘Neo-Sadism Hitchcock’s dead bodies may still be the best, but “hardcore gangsterfilms” and horror movies, that until lately seemed to have been a Hollywood domain, are now also occupying a large space in West-German film production. Gun-men, stranglers, slashers spread fear and horror, the number of dead bodies increase – the spectator gets accustomed to murder’ (My translation). [Neo-Sadismus Zwar sollen Hitchcocks Leichen immer noch die

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the 11th plenary session of the SED’s central committee in December 1965 even several DEFA-films (e.g. F. Vogel’s Denk bloß nicht, ich heule, 1965, K. Maetzig’s Das Kaninchen bin ich, 1965 and F. Beyer’s Spur der Steine, 1966)²⁸, theatre-plays and beat-music were prohibited. Nevertheless, two American productions of 1970 received a surprising appreciation: Soldier Blue (Ralph Nelson 1970) and The Strawberry Statement (Stuart Hagmann 1970). Even the violence in Ralph Nelson’s Western was greeted as ‘naturalistic’ and a quotation of the director’s own words, borrowed from an article in Frankfurter Rundschau, served as a justification: ‘If the film shocked you, it was my intention. I tried to show the true face of war’. The article compared the slaughtering of Indians in Soldier Blue with the massacres of civilians in Vietnam (Prisma 3, 1971: 202 – 3). Although The Strawberry Statement had won the Jury Prize at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival, it was only shown in West Germany in 1976 (Kunen’s book was translated and published by the leftist März Verlag in 1969: Erdbeer-Manifest). In East Germany, the film was a huge success when it came to the cinema already three years earlier (2 March 1973). As it was appreciated rather for its social criticism, than for any cinematographic values, the leaflet Film Für Sie Blutige Erdbeeren 28 / 73 focuses exclusively on the US American socio-political context (racial discrimination, assassination of the Kennedys and M.L. King, scandal and riots at Columbia University). Quoting Arthur Schlesinger, Film Für Sie blames the ruthless domination of the monopolized industries in the era of late capitalism for the manipulation and abuse of students and for the corruption of its own social and moral principles. However, the movement’s only merit is seen in its exposing this situation, whereas its ‘individual concepts’ lead to erroneous, escapist and utopian forms of ‘anarchism, especially in the beginning of

besten sein, aber “harte Krimis“ und Horror-Filme, die bislang eine Domäne Hollywoods zu sein schienen, nehmen jetzt auch in der westdeutschen Filmproduktion breiten Raum ein. Gun-men, Würger, Bauchaufschlitzer verbreiten Angst und Schrecken, die Leichen häufen sich – dem Zuschauer wird das Morden vertraut gemacht. Die vielgepriesene Freiheit, hier erweist sie sich als die Freiheit in der Wahl der Tötungsart.] (Jahrbuch des Films 1961, 1963; comment influenced by Marxist-Leninist theory (Wiederspiegelungstheorie) on illustrated pages between pp. 80 and 81). 28 ‘Our GDR is a clean state. In this state there are unremovable standards of ethics and moral, of decency and good manners. […] In some of the films produced by DEFA during the recent months, Das Kaninchen bin ich’ und‚ Denk bloß nicht, ich heule’ […], are showing tendencies and conceptions alien and harmful for socialism’ [Unsere DDR ist ein sauberer Staat. In ihr gibt es unverrückbare Maßstäbe der Ethik und Moral, für Anstand und gute Sitte. […] In einigen während der letzten Monate bei der DEFA produzierten Filmen, Das Kaninchen bin ich’ und‚ Denk bloß nicht, ich heule’ […], zeigen sich dem Sozialismus fremde, schädliche Tendenzen und Auffassungen.] (Honecker 1990)

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the seventies’, (‘Beatniks’, ‘Hippies’, ‘demonstrations for “sexual freedom”’ and ‘mind-expanding drug’ abuse, new mysticism, etc.), playing into the hands of ‘reactionary forces’. The introduction to the film concludes that ‘also among the American youth, creative Marxism will have to prevail instead of the wrong theories of anarchism.’²⁹

GDR – The Strawberry Statement (Stuart Hagmann, 1970) – FRG

29 Especially in the beginning of the 70s the individualistic concepts, which were guidance for many, took on the shape of anarchism. From Beatnicks to Hippies, from demonstrators for sexual freedom to spiritualizing drugs, from the resurrection of several kinds of mysticism to the followers of flower power who show their outrage by withdrawing from society. However, these confused and escapist, naïve and utopian ideas and corresponding actions only serve reactionary forces. That is why creative Marxism has to prevail also among the American youths, replacing the wrong theory of anarchism, if they do not want to waste their energy and to have made their sacrifice in vain (My translation). [‘Die individualistischen Vorstellungen, von denen sich viele leiten liessen, nahmen jedoch oft, besonders Anfang der siebziger Jahre, die Gestalt des Anarchismus an. Das geht von den „Beatniks“ bis zu den „Hippies“, von den Demonstrationen für „sexualle Freiheit“ bis zu den „Geist erhebenden Rauschgiften“, von der Wiederbelebung verschiedener Spielarten des Mystizismus bis zu den „Blumenkindern“, die ihre Empörung durch Rückzug aus der Gesellschaft kundtun. Aber diese wirren und wirklichkeitsflüchtigen, naiven und utopischen Vorstellungen und entsprechendes Handeln dienen nur den reaktionären Kräften. Deshalb muss auch unter der amerikanischen Jugend anstelle der falschen Theorie des Anarchismus der schöpferische Marxismus die Oberhand gewinnen, wenn sie ihre Kraft nicht vergeuden, ihre Opfer nicht umsonst bringen will.] (Film Für Sie Blutige Erdbeeren 28 / 73; cf. also Review in Treffpunkt Kino 3 / 73 ‘Blutige Erdbeeren‘, pp. 16 – 17).

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Only in 1978 would the ‘healing narrative’ Coming Home (Hal Ashby) and Apocalypse Now (F. F. Coppola) receive similar recognition in the German Democratic Republic, but the latter film’s violence and its deficient political position still drew criticism.³⁰ For large sections of the leftist West-German academic audience and film critics, these ‘anti-war’ productions were not politically concrete or radical (polemical) enough. Influenced by Adorno, who had returned from exile in 1949, many considered Hollywood films as part of a culture industry that uses the medium’s enlightening potential as mass deception. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the movie leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film. Furthermore, its commodified and fetishized character of goods and the process of aesthetic sublimation would eventually reaffirm the system, despite its critical attitude (Cf. Horkheimer / Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der Aufklärung 1944) which circulated in pirate prints among West German students during the 1960s, until it was reprinted in 1969 by S. Fischer Verlag GmbH). On the other side of the wall, official GDR reviewers welcomed only those productions that fitted in with their Marxist aesthetics of reflecting society (Wiederspiegelungstheorie)³¹ and confirmed their ideological framework. In their reviews of ‘anti-war’ films hardly any of the German critics, east or west, refer to the pre-war pacifist tradition (e.g. E.M. Remarque, author of the ‘anti-war’ novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1928 / film version 1930) or Carl von Ossietzky, 1935 Nobel Peace Prize laureate).

30 ‘“Apocalypse Now” is an apocalyptic film, but the audience in capitalistic countries is used to the representation of death and violence. The film does not raise the questions about the responsibility for the deaths of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese in Vietnam. “Freedom” of film art in the “freest country of the world” has its limits.’ (My translation) [“Apocalypse Now” ist ein apokalyptischer Film, aber das Publikum in den kapitalistischen Ländern ist an die Darstellung von Tod und Gewalt gewöhnt. Die Frage nach der Verantwortung für den Tod Tausender Amerikaner in Vietnam und Hunderttausender Vietnamesen stellt der Film nicht. Die “Freiheit” der Filmkunst im “freiesten Land der Welt” hat ihre Grenzen.] (Prisma 11, 132) 31 However, even Arno Heller admits: ‘The staggering wave of violence in the 1960s and [sic] 70s with their exploding crime rates suggests that violence in film may be the inevitable reflection of violence in the streets and of a deeply troubled society in general’ (Heller 1998: 165).

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5. Reception in Portugal After the implementation of a censorship commission for theatre and cinema in May 1945, cinema in Portugal had a double-edged educational function, as Luís de Pina’s article ‘Educação pelo Cinema e para o Cinema’ [Education through Cinema and for Cinema, 1963] illustrates. Even for the Goethe Institute in Lisbon, it was impossible to avoid suppression, when its director decided to present political issues, such as May ’68, ‘anti-war’ films and literature by authors like Bertolt Brecht and Peter Weiss (Cf. Meyer-Clason 1979: 46, 47, 77, 78, 163 – 165, 172 – 181, 210 – 211, 354 – 355). Although May ’68 had some repercussions in the Estado Novo (cf. the student protests ‘contestação’ in 1969 / ‘os contestas’ of Coimbra), the debate about violence and war on the screen had to be confined to a restricted public space. Nevertheless, the ‘cadernos d. quixote’ series published subversive booklets, such as A Revolta de Maio em França (1968) including essays by Sartre, Cohn-Bendit and Lefebvre and others about the conflict in Vietnam. Even the bulletin of the Lisbon ABC Cine-Club issued texts about cinema and protest (Mata and Lobo 1969: 18 – 19), asking for a critical and ‘active spectator’ (Luciano 1969: 10 – 12). In the article ‘Cinema e Violência’ (based on programme 394 and 396 of Clube de Cinema de Coimbra), published in January 1969 by the leftist Coimbra based magazine Vértice, the subject is approached from a philosophical point of view (Nietzsche [sic], Sorel). Contemporary political issues (‘revolução permanente’) are mentioned, but immediately dismissed as a ‘certain “leftism” from Cohen [sic] Bendit to Régis Debray’.³² It is no surprise that the film publicly debated in this context was Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar of 1954. Whereas the contemporary productions only entered the commercial cinema circuit after the Revolution of 1974: M*A*S*H in September 1974, If … in November 1974, Catch 22 in May 1975, Zabriskie Point in April 1978 and The Strawberry Statement in March 1984. Some

32 ‘As in all regions of human life there is nothing more dangerous in terms of violence than the lack of true realism: either we perceive in violence the world’s only driving force as Nietzsche and Sorel did in their ways, or we perceive violence as a negative factor – a sort of diabolic element –, as those who claim to be Christians and Pacifists may prefer’ (My translation). [[C]omo em todas as regiões da vida humana, nada há mais perigoso, em matéria de violência, do que a falta de um verdadeiro realismo: ou vermos na violência a única roda do mundo, como quiseram, a seu modo, Nitzsche [sic] e Sorel, ou vermos na violência um factor negativo – uma espécie de elemento diabólico –, como desejam os pretensos cristãos e pacifistas] (Vértice 304, 1969: 61).

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films, such as How I Won the War or Alice’s Restaurant never made it to the Portuguese silver screens, but were eventually shown on television.³³ However, their success in cinemas and film festivals abroad was noticed and commented on, often relying on French articles, as in the case of Zabriskie Point. In April 1970, the review Celuloide (148) reported reactions to the film’s premier in New York, quoting from Philippe Labro, a correspondent of a French newspaper. Placing Antonioni’s work, ‘at the same time sublime and pessimistic’, in a tradition of recent films about América (cf. Kagan 1982), the quotation gives a rather positive impression of the film. It includes ‘all the new subjects of a cinema that has come of age and is avertly contemporary: a bit of drugs, a certain humour, a lot of violence, very much sex. And besides these ingredients there are the absurdity and the beauty of the times we are living in, incomprehension and a contrast between the aspirations of an outraged young generation and of a depressing capitalism.³⁴ These views are adopted by the anonymous Portuguese reviewer, who praises the film’s photography, direction and editing. In July 1970, Vértice (318) published a lengthy retrospective of Antonioni’s work quoting the director’s comments about his most recent film Zabriskie Point in which he considers revolution an interesting experiment.³⁵ His ‘more visible moral and political commitment’ in this movie was apparently too obvious to be shown in Portuguese cinemas. The same journal condemned M*A*S*H in its October issue (Vértice 321) as fulfilling the artistic criteria of bankers, speculators and sellers of fashion. This point of view is transmitted through a translated text of Nadine Sail, director of the Moroccan periodical Cinema 3.

33 Portuguese premiers: Week—End, Sept. 1974, Festival de Cinema da Figueira da Foz; M*A*S*H: Londres, 17 / 09 / 1974, Filmes Castello Lopes; If (Se): Apolo 70, 08 / 11 / 1974, Lusomundo; Catch 22 (Artigo 22): Apolo 70, 16 / 05 / 1975, Sonoro; Zabriskie Point (Deserto de Almas): Satélite, 28 / 04 / 1978, Filmes Castello Lopes; The Strawberry Statement (Morangos Amargos): Hollywood 1, 23 / 03 / 1984, Filmes Castello Lopes. 34 ‘Antonioni dá-nos com esta pintura, ao mesmo tempo sublime e pessimista da América, uma obra que completa os mais recentes filmes “Yankees” dos últimos anos. Está tudo ali, quer dizer os novos temas dum cinema que se tornou adulto e francamente contemporâneo: um pouco de droga um certo humor, muita violência, muitíssimo sexo. E a par de tais ingredientes estão patentes o absurdo e a beleza da época que vivemos, a incompreensão e o contraste entre as aspirações duma juventude revoltada e dum capitalismo deprimente.’ (Celulóide 148, Abril, 1970: 15 – 16). 35 ‘De “Zabriskie Point” (1969), o seu recente filme rodado nos E.U.A. ainda desconhecido entre nós, mas já anunciado, disse Antonioni: «o filme estará ligado a acontecimentos correntes. Trabalho melhor com um assunto em estado de contínua mudança, e o mundo inteiro está a experimentar uma revolução: movimentos extraordinários de grande vitalidade estão a emergir na América e noutros países».’ (Vértice 318, Julho, 1970: 510)

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Also in October of the same year, Evaristo de Vasconcelos, columnist for film reviews in the monthly Brotéria, published a rather daring article: ‘Filmes que ca não vimos’ [Films we did not watch here]. Ironically he asks: ‘Why not be curious about what happens outside this Garden of Europe (Portugal) and is maybe never shown here, because our lifestyle does not admit it, that is, the mildness of our manners?’³⁶ Lamenting in a footnote the impossibility to discuss films, such as Costa Gravas’ Z or M*A*S*H, Vasconcelos proceeds to review Tarkowski’s Andrei Roublev (1966) and Wadleigh’s Woodstock (1970). Not only were early films about rebellious youth, such as Nicholas Ray’s classic Rebel without a Cause (1955), banned, but also ‘anti-war’ comedies, for example: Blake Edwards’ What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? (1966) and Richard Attenborough’s Oh! What a Lovely War (1969). According to a censorship statement (S.N.I. / Comissão de Censura), the latter film was a ‘cruel libel against the war’. Its ‘pacifism and defeatism’ would be ‘terribly depressing’ for the families of soldiers in Africa, who should not be confronted with ‘the frequent affirmation that there is no ideal whatsoever that justifies the sacrifice’ (Cf. António 1978: 99 – 100 and 248). M*A*S*H, which as António remembers, was not even allowed to be mentioned in public newspapers (Cf. António 1978: 47). Obviously, Zabriskie Point was considered equally ‘inconvenient’ at the time.³⁷ On 10 April 1970, the censor in charge, Pedroso de Almeida, justified his verdict: ‘the youth’s revolt in the first parts and the destruction of civilization in the last are the determining motives. Not to mention the pornographic scenes in part 8 which could be easily eliminated’ (António 1978: 255). Nevertheless, on 27 April 1970, the distributor Filmes Castello Lopes asked for a re-examination of ‘Destino Zabriskie’ on the grounds of its world-wide success and its famous director. Due to its lack of appeal to a vast audience, the film was going to be exhibited only in a restricted space for intellectuals interested in the American problem of decadence (Cf. António 1978: 256). Yet, the Portuguese had to wait another eight years until they were allowed to watch the movie, then released under a different title. When it came out in 1978, ‘Deserto de Almas’ was

36 ‘… porque não curiosar o que se passa para além deste Jardim da Europa e talvez nunca venha aqui a passar-se por não o admitir o nosso – estilo – de – vida que, o mesmo é dizer, a – suavidade – dos – nossos – costumes?’ (Vasconcelos 1970: 349) 37 Censors’ comment: ‘The film’s subject – the youth revolt in a North America that has reached an industrial level, unable to respond to their anxieties – makes us consider it inconvenient at this moment.’ (My translation) [O tema do filme – a revolta da juventude numa América do Norte que atingiu um nível industrial que não responde aos seus anseios – leva-nos a considerá-lo inconveniente no momento actual.] (António 1978: 103).

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hailed by the reviewer of Isto é Cinema as ‘brilliantly done with an intelligent use of music […] A magnificent film of an amazing actuality’.³⁸ In his study O Imperialismo e o Fascismo no Cinema (1977), Eduardo Geada points out that only in the mid 1960s did Portuguese film critics emerge worthy of this name, who were willing to fight for an ‘aesthetically consequential and socially committed cinema’.³⁹ When the change had come, José Jorge Ramalho (Celulóide 202 / 3, Nov. 1974) praised the six year old If … as a work full of power, due to the actuality of its subject and for its reminiscences of Jean Vigo’s Zéro de Conduite and of Brecht’s epic theatre.⁴⁰ According to Ramalho, Anderson’s criticism includes the education of elites based on a ‘classicist heritage’. In ideological terms, his interpretation goes far beyond the contemporary reviews in Britain or Germany, by claiming that the film is criticizing bourgeois capitalist society and its economic infrastructure for not acknowledging the principle of dialectic transformation.⁴¹ However, with the end of censorship after the revolution, neither If …, nor M*A*S*H made it onto the list of the most seen films exhibited in Portugal during 1974⁴² that was headed by Eisenstein’s long suppressed Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Godard’s Week-End.

38 ‘Brilhantemente executada, com música inteligentemente utilizada […] Um filme magnífico, duma actualidade assombrosa.’ (P.M. 1978: 23) 39 Cf. Geada 1977: 98. On page 210 he describes several ways of censorship applied during the Estado Novo (voluntarily and involuntarily) by distributors, ranging from anticipating and not ordering films that might not pass official censorship, to omitting or not translating correctly the dialogues, etc. Between 1964 and 1967, 145 films (11 %) were banned and 693 (53 %) were cut; from 1971 to 1973 123 films (15 %) were banned and 352 (44 %) were cut. 40 ‘If relembra “Zero em Comportamento” de Jean Vigo e o estilo da dramaturgia épica brechtiana, sendo uma obra plena de força pela actualidade do tema’ (Ramalho 1974: 30). 41 ‘Anderson raises the issue of the crisis of obsolete institutions that nevertheless remain part of an ideological super-structure of a metaphysical order, being perpetually sustained by the formation of human resources with a classicist heritage. Capitalist bourgeois society is therefore being criticized for not realizing the principle of dialectic change, contaminated, as it is, by prejudice deriving from its basis, or more precisely, from the economic infrastructure of its present state.’ (My translation) [Anderson põe em causa a crise das instituições, ultrapassadas mas mantenedoras de uma superestrutura ideológica de ordem metafísica, ou seja invariante, alimentada pela formação de quadros humanos sucessivos portadores de uma herança classicista. A sociedade burguesa capitalista é, deste modo, criticada por não reconhecer o princípio da mutação dialéctica, viciada como se encontra de preconceitos originados na base, ou mais propriamente, na infraestrutura económica do seu stato quo.] (Ramalho 1974: 30). 42 Cineclube 3, April 1975: 9 – 11.

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Compared to the situation in Portugal, the critics of ‘anti-war’ films in Brazil seemed to have been even worse, as the dictatorship (1964 – 1985) went through its most oppressive phase between 1968 and 1973. By December 1968, the Institutional Act #5 (AI-5) was established, which abolished political and civil rights, instituted censorship of the media and the arts, and used torture as a regular practice of state interrogation and intimidation. Unlike Portugal, Spain was not involved in a colonial war and seemed to have experienced less pressure in terms of censorship concerning the films in question. Although the compulsory dubbing of foreign movies had been introduced in 1941 and made manipulation during the Franco Regime easier, their reviews became less restrained in the sixties. The internationally successful new Spanish Cinema (Buñuel, Saura, etc.) also expanded the limits of permissible representation in Spanish films. In the monthly nuestro cine of June 1970 not only was Woodstock reviewed and Godard interviewed, it also provided space for M*A*S*H. However, its flaws concerning the political message totally eclipsed the genre-debate. The reviewer simply emphasized that the film’s irreverent, sarcastic criticism never transcended the personal level of the characters – no condemnation of US activities in Vietnam, and even less disapproval of the war or the army (nuestro cine 98, 1970: 48 – 49). Zabriskie Point also got reviewed, and indeed, not favourably: ‘superficial’, ‘provincial’, ‘sentimental’ are some of the attributes – the song remains the same (nuestro cine 103 – 104, 1970: 42 – 43). Obviously, ‘anti-war’ films not only depend on the artistic. Their reception is influenced and conditioned by several contexts. Apart from historical, socio- and geo-political factors, there are also the political attitudes and educational backgrounds of each viewer that have to be taken into account.

6. The Subversive and the Sublime At the time when Zabriskie Point was finally shown in Portuguese cinemas, in 1978, another film was being widely debated because of its soundtrack and its ‘anti-war’ pretensions: Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. To what extent can the sublime be subversive? Are pictures of war, violence and destruction that capture and fascinate the viewer appropriate means to making him / her emotionally turn against war, or develop a critical position in a Brechtian sense? Can incessant scenes of violence at the end of a film (police violence / Strawberry Statement; violence against things / Zabriskie Point) drive the message home? Can an ironical musical comment on military helicopter action

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(Suicide is painless in M*A*S*H; Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries in Apocalypse Now) reveal its cynicism or rather enhance the viewer’s revelling in the pictorial beauty of destruction, rendered in slow motion (Pink Floyd’s Careful with that axe, Eugene in Zabriskie Point)? Obviously, the use of these elements was meant to un-glorify heroes, to unjustify ‘good’ causes and ultimately to deconstruct the war-film genre as a whole. Already in the early 60s had Lévi-Strauss questioned the ‘historic fact’ in his La Pensée Sauvage (1962: 340), referring to the individual perception that dissolves every episode of a revolution or of a war into a multitude of brain reactions. But replacing narratives⁴³, intended to provide sense for the people who experienced war, with narratives of its absurdity (cf. Catch 22, M*A*S*H) is a risky business. It will be rejected by many people (including veterans) whose peace of mind and successful life-stories depend on the belief in a just war. Furthermore, the aesthetic means applied in the effort of deconstruction may be misinterpreted in different cultural regions. The polemic controversy about the images of the collapsing Twin Towers included in fictional and non-fictional narratives of the catastrophe seems related to this problem, which reaches beyond the aesthetic dimension. Certainly, Hirst (‘visually stunning artwork’), Stockhausen (‘das größte Kunstwerk, das es je gegeben hat’ / the greatest piece of art ever) and Baudrillard (‘absolute event’) placed them in this context.⁴⁴ The misleading beauty of the images has already been criticised in Antonioni’s and Coppola’s case; the underlying categories of the sublime, which the 9 / 11 debate referred to depended largely on Burke’s, Kant’s and Schiller’s notions.⁴⁵

43 Herman (2009: 71 – 88, 85). Cf. also: ‘we organize our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative – stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing and not doing, and so on’ (Bruner 1991: 1 – 21, 4). 44 Cf. Damien Hirst, Interview, BBC News Online, 11 September 2002, Stockhausen’s comment was published in Die Zeit, 16 Sept. 2001, ‘Attacks Called Great Art’, New York Times, September 19, 2001, Jean Baudrillard, quoted in Mark Goldblatt, ‘French Toast: America Wanted September 11’, National Review Online, Dec. 3, 2001: 8. Baudrillard soon renounced the attacks: ‘I have glorified nothing, accused nobody, justified nothing. One should not confuse the messenger with his message. … I have endeavoured to analyze the process through which the unbounded expansion of globalization creates the conditions for its own destruction.’ (See Baudrillard, “This is the Fourth World War”, an interview with Der Spiegel, no. 3, 2002; refer to the translation in International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 1.1 (January 2004); http: // www. ubishops.ca / baudrillardstudies / spiegel.htm.) (accessed on August 23, 2009) 45 Cf.: Emmanouil Aretoulakis, ‘Aesthetic Appreciation, ‘Ethics, and 9 / 11’; http: // www.contempaesthetics.org / newvolume / pages / article.php?articleID=510 (accessed on August 23,2009)

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Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was published in the year of the Lisbon earthquake (1755) and comparable to the impact (in moral, ethical and aesthetical terms) caused by the 9 / 11 disaster. Burke defined the sublime as whatever excites ideas of pain and danger in the mind. It produces the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling. When danger or pains press too close, they are simply terrible and therefore incapable of giving delight. However, at certain distances, it may be observed that such things are delightful. In his Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), Immanuel Kant claims that the beautiful is ‘an object of delight apart from any interest’, thus connecting beauty with objectivity, universality of taste and freedom from morality (as moralism). Accordingly, visual attraction, springing directly from human emotion and imagination, has little to do with reason and morality. In his essay ‘On the Sublime’ (‘Über das Erhabene’, 1801), Friedrich Schiller defines the sublime as a mixed feeling which proves the existence of two opposite natures in the human being. These are interested in the conception of the same in completely opposite ways. The relative greatness perceived in the exterior world being the mirror, wherein man perceives the absolute greatness within himself: Not only the unattainable for the conceptual power, the sublime of quantity, but also the incomprehensible for the understanding, the confusion, can serve as a representation of the supersensuous. […] Who does not rather linger in the spirited disorder of a natural landscape, than in the spiritless regularity of a French garden? Who does not rather admire the wonderful fight between fertility and destruction on Sicily’s fields, does not rather feast his eye on Scotland’s wild cataracts and misty mountains, Ossian’s great nature, than admire in tight-laced Holland the sour victory of patience over the most obstinate elements?⁴⁶

Are these definitions of the sublime still valid in our age? What effect can scenes of horror shown in ‘anti-war’ films possibly achieve, if, according to Schiller, man approaches these frightful phantoms of his imaginative power fearless and with thrilling pleasure? Can they be considered ‘useful films’?⁴⁷ The aspect of mourning, so important in Homer’s epics and still present in Ossian’s ‘joy of grief’ has largely been eclipsed by a fascination for terror that

46 ‘On The Sublime’ by Friedrich Schiller. Translated by F. Wertz, Jr.; http: // www. schillerinstitute.org / transl / trans_on_sublime.html (accessed on August 23, 2009) 47 Alexander Kluge, a friend of Adorno and one of the subscribers of the Oberhausen Manifesto, explores the relationship between imagination, dreams, wishes and film. In terms of the mass media, he considers a film useful when it helps to organize human experience in a way that it serves people’s particular interest in their own experience, but not in the sense of a ‘dream-machine’ (cf. Eder and Kluge 1980: 49).

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leaves hardly any space for compassion and catharsis (in Lessing’s sense). This absence of the ability to mourn becomes apparent in Neil Young’s film Déjà Vu (2008) about CSNY’s ‘Freedom of Speech Tour’ in 2006 (an allusion to their homonymous album, released in 1970). It examines the relationship between Vietnam-era anti-war sentiment and today’s post-9 / 11 environment. In the film, a Vietnam veteran sums it up: ‘It’s déjà vu all over again’ (cf.: Young 2008). During the debates about aestheticizing not only the events of 11 September 2001, but also the violent actions of, what many consider a sidekick of the 68-movement, the Rote Armee Fraktion / RAF (Der Baader-Meinhof-Komplex, Edel 2008), in which categories of ethics and aesthetics collide, the lack of respect for the victims and their families has become a major issue. As Schiller pointed out in his essay ‘On the sublime’ man’s relationship to violence is intrinsically interwoven with (moral) culture: To annihilate violence as a concept, however, is called nothing other than to voluntarily subject oneself to the same. The culture, which makes him apt thereto, is called the moral.

Works Cited Adorno, T. W. and Horkheimer M. (1999) Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso). António, Lauro (1978) Cinema e Censura em Portugal 1926 – 1974. Colecção cinema / arcádia (Lisbon: Editora Arcádia S.A.R.L.). Aretoulakis, Emmanouil, ‘Aesthetic Appreciation, Ethics, and 9 / 11’: http: // www. contempaesthetics.org / newvolume / pages / article.php?articleID=510 (retrieved August 23, 2009). Aust, Stefan [1985] (2008) Der Baader Meinhof Komplex, 3rd revised edition (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe). Balázs, Béla (1924) Der Sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films (Wien / Leipzig: DeutschÖsterreichischer Verlag). Bauer, Christian and Rebekka Göpfert (2005) Die Ritchie Boys: Deutsche Emigranten beim US-Geheimdienst (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe). Bruner, Jerome (1991) ‘The Narrative Construction of Reality’, Critical Enquiry 18.1, 1 – 21. Brotéria. Cultura e Informação (7 / 1969 – 10 / 1970). Dir. Manuel Antunes, (Lisbon: Livraria Apostolado da Imprensa). Burrows, Larry (1966) ‘One Ride with Yankee Papa 13’ and ‘The Ugly War of Vietnam – in colour’, in The British Journal of Photography Annual 1966, ed. A.J. Dalladay, 44 – 58 (London: H. Greenwood & Co. Ltd.). Campbell, Russell (1970) ‘The Strawberry Statement’, Sight and Sound 39, 3, Summer, 160. Celuloide. Revista Portuguesa de Cultura Cinematográfica (148, April 1970 – 202 / 3, Nov. 1974), Dir. Fernando Duarte (Rio Maior: Gráfica Editora). Cineclube (3 / Abril 1975) (Oporto: Edição do Cineclube do Porto). Dawson, Jan (1968) ‘Week-End’, Sight and Sound 37, 3, Summer, 151 – 152.

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––––– (1970) ‘M*A*S*H’, Sight and Sound 39, 3, Summer, 161 – 162. Eder, Klaus (1970) ‘America, sinnlich America, gewalttätig’, in Fernsehen + Film (September), 9 – 10. ––––– and Alexander Kluge (1980) Ulmer Dramaturgien. Reibungsverluste, Arbeitshefte Film Hanser 2 / 3 (Munich, Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag). Farber, Steven (1970) ‘Catch 22’, Sight and Sound 39, 4, Autumn, 218 – 219. Fernsehen + Film (Feb. 1969 – Mai, 1971), ed. M. Brocker, E. Netenjakob, H. Rischbieter (Velber: Friedrich Verlag). Feurich, Jörg Peter (1970) ‘Zabriskie Point’, Filmkritik 11 / 70, 595. Film (Jan. 1968 – Sept. 1969), ed. Werner Kliess (Velber: Friedrich Verlag). Film Für Sie Blutige Erdbeeren (28 / 1973) Verantwortlich für den Inhalt: Erika Köhler (Berlin: VEB Progress Film-Vertrieb). Filmkritik (5 / 1967 – 3 / 1971), Dir. Enno Patalas / Filmkritiker Kooperative (Frankfurt / M.: Verlag Filmkritik). Films and Filming (vol. 17 / 4, Jan. 1971), ed. Robin Bean (London: Hansom Books). Geada, Eduardo (1977) O Imperialismo e o Fascismo no Cinema (Lisbon: Moraes Editores). Gelmis, Joseph (1974) The Film Director as Superstar (Harmondsworth [etc.]: Penguin / Pelican Book). Guthrie, Arlo (1969) Interview, Sight and Sound 38, 2, Spring, 69. Heller, Arno (1998) ‘Fantasies of Violence and their Functions in Contemporary American Film’, in Visible Violence: Sichtbare und verschleierte Gewalt im Film; Beiträge zum Symposium „Film and Modernity. Violence, Sacrifice and Religion“, Graz, 1997, ed. G. Larcher, F. Grabner, C. Wessely (Münster: LIT Verlag). Herman, David (2009) ‘Narrative Ways of Worldmaking’, in Sandra Heinen and Roy Sommer (eds.), Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research. (Narratologia vol. 20) (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2009). Honecker, Erich (1990) ‘Ein sauberer Staat mit unverrückbaren Maßstäben’, in 20. Internationales Forum des Jungen Films 1990 (Informationsblatt Nr. 15, Berlin). Houston, Penelope (1967) ‘How I won the War’, Sight and Sound 36, 4, Autumn, 202. Jahrbuch des Films 1958 – 62 (1959 – 1964), ed. Baumert, Heinz, Berlinghaus, Hermann, etc. (Berlin: Henschelverlag). Jeavons, Clyde (1974) Pictorial History of War Films (Feltham: The Hamlyn Publishing Group Ltd.). Jebb, Julian (1970) ‘Intimations of Reality: Getting the Zabriskie Point’, Sight and Sound 39, 3, Summer, 124 – 126. Kagan, Norman (1982) Greenhorns: Foreign Filmmakers Interpret America (Ann Arbor, MI: The Pierian Press). Kinder, Marsha (1968 / 9) ‘Zabriskie Point’, Sight and Sound 38, 1, Winter, 26 – 30. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1962) La Pensée Sauvage (Paris: Librairie Plon). Luciano, J. (1969) ‘O Espectador Activo’, Boletim ABC Cine-Clube de Lisboa I, 10 – 12 (Lisbon: Editora Lux, Lda). Mata, A. and H. Lobo (1969) ‘Cinema e Contestação’, Boletim ABC Cine-Clube de Lisboa II, 18 – 19 (Lisbon: Editora Lux, Lda). Meinhof, Ulrike (1968) konkret (5 / May, 1968), ed. Hermann L. Gremliza (Hamburg: KVV KONKRET GmbH & Co. KG). Meyer-Clason, Curt (1979) Portugiesische Tagebücher (1969 – 1976) (Königstein / Ts.: Athenäum Verlag GmbH).

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Millar, Gavin (1968 / 9) ‘If …’, Sight and Sound 38, 1, Winter, 42 – 43. Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarete [1967] (1969) Die Unfähigkeit zu Trauern. Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (Munich: R. Piper & Co. Verlag). Movie (18, Winter 1970 – 71), ed. Ian Cameron (London: Movie Magazine Limited). nuestro cine (98 / jun. – 103 – 104 / Nov. – Dec. 1970), Dir. Santiago de las Heras Andrés (Madrid: Escelicer, S.A.). Pina, Luís de Andrade de (1963) ‘Educação pelo Cinema e para o Cinema’, RUMO, Dir. Mário Pacheco (Lisbon: Bertrand, Lda.), Ano VII, 81 (Nov.), 304 – 311. P.M. ‘Deserto de Almas’ (1978), Isto é Cinema 16 / May 1978, 23. Prisma. Kino- und Fernseh-Almanach, (1 / 1969 – 18 / 1987) ed. Horst Knietzsch (Berlin: Henschelverlag). Prokop, Siegfried (1974) Studenten im Aufbruch. Zur studentischen Opposition in der BRD (Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben). Radke, Michael (1971) ‘Ein Anti-Kriegsfilm ist noch kein Anti-Kriegsfilm’, in Fernsehen + Film (5 May), 16. Ramalho, J.J. (1974) Review, Celulóide 202 / 3, Nov., 30. Robinson, David (1968) ‘Anderson shooting If’, Sight and Sound 37, 3, Summer, 130 – 131. Sartre, J.-P., D. Cohn-Bendit, H. Lefebvre et al. (1968) A Revolta de Maio em França (cad. d. quixote 11) (Lisbon: Publicações Dom Quixote). Schober, Siegfried (1970a) ‘Arthur Penn: “Alice’s Restaurant”’, Filmkritik 1, 32 – 34. ––––– (1970b) ‘Blutige Erdbeeren (The Strawberry Statement)’, Filmkritik 11, 602. Sight and Sound (vol. 35 / 1 1965 / 6 – vol. 39 / 4 1970), ed. Penelope Houston (London: The British Film Institute). Thayer, Charles (1958) The Unquiet Germans (London: Michael Joseph). Treffpunkt Kino (3 / 1973) ‘Blutige Erdbeeren’, 16 – 17. Vasconcelos, Evaristo de (1970) ‘Filmes que ca não vimos’, Brotéria, 10, 349. Vértice. Revista de Cultura e Arte (304 / Jan. 1969, 318 / Jul. 1970, 321 / Out. 1970), Dir. Raul Gomes (Coimbra: Atlântida). Wendt, Ernst (1968) ‘Fuck for Peace’, Film, Jan., 12 – 15. Wolle, Stefan (2001) Die versäumte Revolte: Die DDR und das Jahr 1968 / http: // www.bpb.de / publikationen / 9JZQKI,8,0, Die_vers%E4umte_Revolte:_Die_DDR_und_das_Jahr_1968. html (accessed on April 28, 2009) Wondratschek, Wolf (1969) Früher begann der Tag mit einer Schusswunde (München: Carl Hanser Verlag). Wood, Robin (1970 / 1) ‘Zabriskie Point’, Movie 18, Winter, 21 – 23.

Other References Cinema Aldrich, Robert (1967) The Dirty Dozen. Altman, Robert (1970) M*A*S*H. Anderson, Lindsay (1968) If … Antonioni, Michelangelo (1970) Zabriskie Point.

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Ashby, Hal (1978) Coming Home. Attenborough, Richard (1969), Oh! What a lovely War. Coppola, Francis Ford (1978) Apocalypse Now. Edel, Uli (2008) Der Baader-Meinhof-Komplex. Godard, Jean-Luc (1963), Les Carabiniers. ––––– (1965) Pierrot, le Fou. ––––– (1967) Week-End. Hagmann, Stuart (1970) The Strawberry Statement. Hamilton, Guy (1969) Battle of Britain. Hopper, Dennis (1969) Easy Rider. Hutton, Brian G. (1968) Where Eagles Dare. Kellog, Ray and John Wayne (1968) The Green Berets. Kubrick, Stanley (1964) Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Lester, Richard (1967) How I Won the War. Nelson, Ralph (1970), Soldier Blue. Nichols, Mike (1970) Catch 22. Penn, Arthur (1969), Alice’s Restaurant. Radványi, Géza von (1958) Der Arzt von Stalingrad. Reinl, Harald (1963 – 65), Winnetou I – III. Schlöndorff, Volker and Margarethe v. Trotta (1875) Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum. Tressler, Georg (1956) Die Halbstarken. Verhoeven, Michael (1970) o.k. Vigo, Jean (1933) Zéro de Conduite. Wicki, Bernhard (1959) Die Brücke. Young, Neil (2008) Déjà vu.

Editors Isabel Capeloa Gil is Professor of Cultural Theory at the Catholic University of Portugal and Senior Researcher at the Centre for Communication and Culture. In 2009 she was appointed Honorary Fellow at Institute of Germanic and Romance Languages of the University of London. Her main research areas include intermedia and gender studies as well as cultural war studies. From 2005 to 2012 she was the Dean of the School of Human Sciences at UCP. Adriana Martins is Professor of Theories of Representation, Portuguese Cinema and Globalization and Culture at the School of Human Sciences, of the Catholic University of Portugal. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the same institution, where she is also a Senior Member of the University’s Research Centre for Communication and Culture. Her main research interests are Comparative Literature, Film Studies, Cultural Studies, Intercomprehension and Intercultural Communication.

Authors Lara Duarte is Assistant Professor of American Culture, Translation and English at the Catholic University of Portugal (Lisbon) and has a PhD in American Poetry (University of Lisbon), and an M.A. in English Studies (University of Lisbon). Anne Martina Emonts is a German Culture lecturer at the University of Madeira, Portugal. She holds an M.A in Portuguese Contemporary History from the same university. In 2001, she won the National Award for Feminist Studies of Portugal. She completed her PhD in German Studies at the University of Madeira in 2006. Her main research areas are Cultural Studies of the early 20th Century with a focus on Gender Studies, Cross-Cultural Studies and German Modernisms. Júlia Garraio is researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (Comparative Cultural Studies Group) at the University of Coimbra. She holds a PhD in German Literature from the University of Coimbra with a thesis focused on Günter Eich’s poetology. Her current research interests include German literature, cultural studies, the representation of sexual violence, racism, sexuality and violence in 20th century Germany, and identity and memory in Reunified Germany. Paolo Jedlowski is Professor of Sociology at the University of Naples ’L’Orientale‘ and the University of Cosenza. He also holds regular seminars at the University of

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Lugano, Switzerland. His main research fields are history of sociology and sociology of culture. Pirjo Lyytikäinen is Professor of Finnish in the Department of Finnish, FinnoUgric, and Scandinavian Studies at Helsinki University and is director of the graduate program in Finnish literary studies. Since receiving her PhD, she has been a member of faculty at the University of Helsinki and between 1994 and 1998 was a senior research fellow at the Finnish Academy. She served as editor-in-chief of The Yearbook of Literary Research and is a contributing editor to the forthcoming Comparative History of Nordic Literary Cultures being prepared under the aegis of the ICLA Coordinating Committee. Vera Nünning studied English literature, history, and education in Cologne and graduated with a dissertation on Virginia Woolf’s aesthetics. Her postdoctoral thesis deals with Catherine Macaulay and the political culture of English radicalism. Since 2002, she has held the chair for English Literature at the RuprechtKarls-Universität Heidelberg. She has published widely on British and American history, as well as on English literature and culture from the 18th to the 20th centuries. Margarida Calafate Ribeiro is a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, Portugal and a member of the Comparative Cultural Studies Research Group. She holds the Eduardo Lourenço Chair from the Camões Institute at the University of Bologna, Italy, and was Visiting Research Associate at King’s College, University of London, from 2004 to 2009. Her current research interests include post-colonial studies, Portuguese and Lusophone literature, history of the Portuguese empire, in particular the African empire and the colonial wars. António Sousa Ribeiro is Full Professor for German Studies at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Coimbra. He is the co-coordinator of the working group on Comparative Cultural Studies and the director of Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais. He has published extensively on several topics in Austrian and German Studies (with special emphasis on Karl Kraus and Viennese modernity), Comparative Literature, Literary Theory, Cultural Studies, and the Sociology of Culture. His current research interests include Austrian and German Studies, Comparative Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Translation Studies, Studies on Modernism, and studies on violence, culture and identities.

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Caroline Rothauge wrote an M.A. thesis about the analysis of cinematographic representations of the Spanish Civil War as related to memory cultures in Spain. Since 2008, she has been a scholarship holder of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), at the Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen (Germany). Roberto Vecchi is Associate Professor of Brazilian and Portuguese Literature at the Faculty of Foreign Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Bologna, and also professor and director of the PhD Programmes on Iberistic Studies at universities in Bologna, Milan and Bergamo. He is an associated researcher at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra and an invited researcher of the Brazilian CNPq. Since 2007, he has held the Eduardo Lourenço Chair at the University of Bologna/Camões Institute with Margarida Calafate Ribeiro. His current research interests include Brazilian and Portuguese Studies, particularly the areas concerning to history, literature, trauma, memory and violence criticism. Patricia Vieira is an Assistant Professor in Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on Contemporary Brazilian, Portuguese and Lusophone African Literature and Film, Literature and Philosophy, Literary Theory and Lusophone Postcolonialism. Some of her recent publications include articles on Portuguese film, postcolonial studies in Portugal and in Lusophone Africa, Brazilian poetry, Portuguese feminist writing and Portuguese national identity. Shahd Wadi holds an M.A. in Feminist Studies from the University of Coimbra. She is also an Arabic teacher at the same university while also working as a translator. She has a B.A in Languages (Italian and English) from the Jordan University in Amman. She has participated in the coordination of several training courses at the United Nations University – International Leadership Institute in Amman.

Index 25th April 12, 30 adoptive testimony 16, 17 adoptive witness 17 aesthesis of blindness 25 aestheticized violence 193 aesthetics 1, 27, 31, 74, 83, 191, 199, 207 aesthetization 95 Africa 11, 18, 19, 20, 32, 34, 39, 101, 104, 107, 202 agents of oblivion 33 aggression 34, 36, 73, 96, 193 agony 53, 55, 56 American Civil War 5, 127 amnesia 3, 57, 139, 143 ancestral substitution‘ 144 apartheid 26, 38 aphasia 173 audiovisual media 3, 43, 45, 46, 52 audiovisual production 43 – 47, 51, 52, 54, 56 audiovisual reconstruction 43, 44, 46, 53, 55, 56 Auschwitz 21, 105, 106 authentication 46, 48, 49, 134 authority 44, 52, 88, 144, 159 autobiography 70, 74, 85, 117, 127, 175 Babelsberg 101, 103, 104 barbarian 24 – 31, 110, 111, 158 Battle of Adwa 34 Battle of Britain‘ 63, 72 – 77, 83 – 86, 181, 210 battlefield 4, 5, 64, 69, 89, 90, 92, 114, 120, 130, 140, 147, 151 – 153 battleground 1, 3, 4, 61 biography 73, 88, 132, 138 blindness 4, 25, 27 – 31, 94, 146 body 5, 14, 28, 29, 73, 78, 87, 90, 103, 106, 108, 115, 116, 118, 119, 121, 122, 129, 131, 133, 150 Britons 64 brothel 101, 103, 108, 111 brotherhood 152 canon 63, 88, 181 canonisation 46, 50, 51, 56

Carnation Revolution 29 censorship 3, 21, 45, 193, 196, 200, 202 – 204 childbearing 120 children of the Colonial War 4, 11, 15, 21 cine-entrevista 47 civilian(s) 40, 42, 43, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 63, 64, 71, 72, 75, 78, 80, 109, 145, 153, 160, 161, 163, 164, 174, 178, 197 civilisation 34, 38, 39, 182 civilized 30, 157 cleansing(s) 30, 42 Cold War 103, 196 collective imaginary 3 collective memory 12, 13, 37, 41, 45, 69, 70, 166 colonial past 4, 32, 33, 38 colonialism 4, 24 – 30, 32 – 35, 39, 122 combatant(s) 4, 12, 17, 18, 20, 71, 75, 172, 174 commemoration(s) 11, 30, 41, 42, 45 communicative memory 42 – 45, 52, 55, 56 comradeship 132, 152, 153 concentration camp(s) 11, 55, 102, 105, 107, 159, 160, 162 – 165, 178 confession(s) 19, 116 conflict(s) 1 – 8, 11, 12, 24, 42, 45, 48, 49, 53, 63, 72, 74, 83, 92, 114 – 116, 120, 121, 137, 142, 155, 157, 159, 168, 171, 182, 200 consensus 11, 20, 41 credibility 46, 47, 52 crime(s) 27, 34, 35, 37, 79, 106, 107, 111, 112, 199 critical reception 7, 64, 177 cultural product(s) 45 culture of honor 116, 118, 119 D-day 160, 164, 178 debris 135, 136 decolonisation 12, 33 deportation 106 deportee(s) 55 dictatorship(s) 11, 12, 17, 40, 41, 42, 45, 48, 204 discrimination(s) 38, 197 distress 102, 132

216

Index

distribution of the sensible 24, 25, 27 – 30 documentary genre 46, 47 domination 5, 87, 91, 93, 94, 104, 110, 197 duty of memory 13 effet de réel 71 emplotment 1, 3 empowerment 5 Englishness 76 enmity 3 Eritrea 32, 34, 38 erotica 96 ethics of representation 20 ethics of war 146 Ethiopia 32 – 34, 36, 37 ethnicity 3 ethos 91, 140, 143, 154 exceptionalism 157, 158 exhumation(s) 43 exile(s) 40, 46 – 48, 50, 51, 53 – 56, 88, 90, 93, 199 extermination 106 fascism 33, 57, 99, 100, 112, 113, 159, 160 fascist 32, 34, 37, 160, 181, 196 feature film(s) 47, 53, 54, 183 female body 5, 108 fertility 115, 120, 121, 206 fertilization 120 fictitious format(s) 47 Finnish Civil War 141 Finnishness 142 First World War 64, 65, 68, 72, 83, 84, 86, 88, 168, 171, 172 forced labourer(s) 41 forgery 139 forgetfulness 3 forgetting 139, 176 fratricidal conflict 4, 6 French/Prussian War 1870/71 90 frontier(s) 25, 122, 176 gas chamber(s) 78, 107 Gaza 114, 120 gender 3, 5, 31, 71, 99, 110 – 112, 122, 147, 152, 155, 156, 176 generation(s) 2 – 4, 8, 12, 13, 15 – 17, 19 – 22,

42, 45, 64, 70 – 72, 81, 87, 88, 90, 117, 142, 143, 168, 171, 174, 175, 179, 180 – 184, 187, 195, 201 generation of the grandchildren‘ 4, 42 genre convention(s) 46, 70, 74, 83, 84 Gestapo 102, 111 Golden Twenties‘ 69 Good War‘ 157, 167 graphic novel 35 grave(s) 38, 41, 43 Hamas 119, 121 hatred 104, 147, 155, 161 heritage 27, 30, 119, 154, 203 hero 7, 35, 71, 72, 75 – 78, 84, 85, 107, 116, 118, 136, 143, 145, 148 – 150, 155, 172, 180, 181, 185, 205 heroine 36 heroism(s) 56, 84, 131, 145, 154, 170 heterology 28, 30 high modernism 64, 68 Holocaust 11, 16, 78, 95, 99, 105 – 107, 178, 179 homeland 5, 34, 118, 173, 178, 182 homosexuality 99 horror(s) 1, 2, 6, 63, 66, 76, 78, 79, 94, 97, 146, 151, 155, 182, 186, 192, 193, 196, 197, 206 identity 6, 17, 53, 85, 87, 97, 111, 112, 119, 122, 128, 134, 137, 141, 149 image(s) 1, 6, 18, 35, 38, 43, 45, 46, 53, 54, 64, 72, 74 – 78, 83, 84, 89, 95, 96, 99, 103, 105, 106, 109, 111, 114, 115, 121, 128, 129, 130, 135, 140, 146, 149, 151, 152, 155, 158, 159, 161, 170, 188, 189, 190, 192, 205 imagination 11, 96, 133, 139, 199, 206 imagined community 6 immigrant(s) 33 immorality 99 incest 99 independence 30, 133, 141, 151 infancy 49 injustice 4, 37, 38, 68, 82 insight(s) 29, 44, 63, 70, 83, 84, 129 insurgency 56 interviewee(s) 48 Intifada 119 – 122

Index

invisible 1, 6, 11, 12, 19, 24 – 28, 30, 64, 65, 73, 74, 76, 78, 88, 94, 107, 158 Islam(ic) 110, 119, 121 Israeli-Palestinian Conflict 5, 114 Italo-Abyssinian War 37 Leclerc‘s Division 54, 55 legitimization 5, 49 Ley de Memoria Histórica 43 liberty 54 – 56, 119 literature 2, 6 – 8, 11 – 13, 18, 34, 36, 45, 63, 68 – 71, 73, 74, 80, 82 – 84, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 93, 97, 99, 107, 115, 140 – 142, 144, 146, 154, 168, 172, 175, 176, 200 literature-witness 13 loser(s) 40, 41, 56 lost generation‘ 64, 70, 71 martyrdom 140 masculinity 72, 75, 116, 147, 148, 152, 153, 155, 156 mass grave(s) 41, 43 massacre(s), massacred 38, 105, 185, 187, 194, 197 master narrative(s) 44, 48 May‘ 68 7, 177, 180, 200 medial construct(s) 2 mediated embedding 56 mediation 1 – 3, 46, 50 memorialistic discourse 45 memory 2 – 4, 7, 8, 11 – 13, 16 – 21, 32, 33, 35 – 39, 41 – 49, 51 – 58, 67, 69, 70, 79, 80, 83, 85, 90, 95, 112, 116, 139, 141, 143, 166, 174, 205 memory transfer(s) 2, 8, 16 memory work 45 metaphor(s) 53, 73, 92 – 94, 96, 106, 111, 115, 146, 149, 161, 186, 192 migrant(s) 33 minor literature 36 mode(s) 1, 3, 5, 24, 45, 70, 78, 79, 107, 109, 168, 175, 183 modernism 1, 64, 68, 168 modernity 1, 2, 7, 8, 208 monologue(s) 48, 107 montage films 47, 48 Mozambique 12, 24, 26, 29 – 31

217

Napoleonic Wars 142, 143 narrative(s) 1 – 9, 11, 13, 15 – 17, 19 – 22, 24 – 26, 28 – 30, 32, 35, 36, 43 – 48, 52, 54 – 56, 72, 74, 76 – 80, 84 – 86, 96, 101, 106 – 109, 115 – 117, 161, 168, 169, 171, 172, 175, 176, 199, 205, 207, 208 nation(s) 3, 5, 6, 30, 88, 99, 111, 116, 118, 119, 121, 125, 133, 139, 140, 142, 143, 145, 146, 148, 151 – 155, 157, 158, 160, 176, 179 nation building 3, 6, 139 national identity 6, 111, 112, 119 National Socialism 99, 103, 165, 180 nationalism 6, 122, 140 – 142, 148, 151 – 155, 182 native(s) 25, 26, 31, 34, 38, 122, 143, 153 Nazi Germany 101, 103, 106, 112, 141 Nazism 5, 99, 100, 103, 104, 106 – 108, 111, 160, 166 novel(s) 5, 6, 20, 24 – 26, 28, 32 – 37, 44, 63, 65, 67 – 69, 71 – 73, 75 – 86, 90, 91, 95, 99, 100 – 104, 106 – 112,154, 157, 158 – 164, 166 – 169, 179, 183, 188, 191, 199 oblivion 3, 4, 11, 12, 33, 40 occupation(s) 33, 75, 104, 106, 111, 115 – 119, 121, 147 oppression 30, 88, 122, 123, 140 orgy 105 overseas colonies 32 pact of silence 4, 40, 47 pacto del silencio 40, 42 painting(s) 48, 53, 63, 115 Palestine 115, 120, 121 Palestinian(s) 5, 114 – 123 Partido Popular 42 Partido Socialista Obrero Español 42 pathos 99, 137, 140, 141, 143, 155 patriotism 142 – 144, 146, 147, 149 – 151 peace 3, 7, 24, 71, 75, 87, 93, 103, 141, 151, 157, 184, 192, 199, 205, 209 Pearl Harbor 160 perpetrator(s) 4, 100, 107, 160, 183, 184 perversion(s) 5, 35, 104, 173 perversity 99 photo archive 18 photography 2, 8, 22, 63, 82, 185, 201, 207

218

Index

pictorial memory 53 politics of history 45, 46 politics of memory and oblivion 3 porn, pornography 5, 96, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104 – 106, 108, 111 – 113 post-colonialism 18, 21 post-memory 2 – 4, 11, 16 – 21 postmodernism 1, 168 power(s) 6, 24, 27 – 29, 32, 33, 42, 79, 85, 88, 92, 93, 99, 103, 106, 108, 111, 116, 117, 128, 136, 139, 148, 156, 172, 184, 191, 194, 195, 198, 203, 206 pregnant 81, 108, 114 prison camp(s) 41 propaganda 38, 57, 58, 64, 89, 107, 109, 141, 157, 158, 167, 172 racism 24, 27, 165 racist ideology 107 rape(s), raped 5, 32, 94, 96, 99, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116 – 118, 183 Realpolitik 104, 145 reconciliación 41 reconciliation 41, 136 recuperación de la memoria histórica 42 Red Army 109, 194 reeducation 104, 111, 196 refugee(s) 40 remediation 2 remembrance(s) 3, 4, 12, 41, 43, 44, 52, 56, 72 representation(s) 1 – 4, 6, 8, 11, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 32, 35, 43 – 47, 63, 72, 76, 78, 82, 84, 91, 96, 99, 100, 107, 139, 140, 144, 146, 157, 158, 160, 161, 167, 168, 178, 184, 199, 204, 206 Republican(s) 4, 33, 40, 41, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 53 – 56, 156 resignation 121 resistance 1, 32, 37, 38, 41, 116 – 119, 121 – 123, 159, 175, 194 roman noir 101 sacrifice(s) 136, 145, 148, 151, 154, 198, 202, 208 sadomasochism 99 Salazarist dictatorship 12

scar(s) 18, 75, 116 secession 130, 133, 137 selective memory 139 sexual abuse 99 sexual violence 5, 108, 110, 111 sexuality 5, 99, 100, 104, 108, 112, 113, 117, 173 shame 37, 118 shell-shock(ed) 66, 67 Shoah 16, 17, 22 sight(s) 25, 29, 34, 65, 75, 119, 128, 129, 131, 132, 137, 164, 185, 207 – 209 silence(s) 4, 13, 17, 26, 29, 40, 45, 47, 54, 58, 112 social construct 3 Soviet Union 107, 141, 179 Spanish Civil War 3, 4, 11, 40, 42, 48, 49, 52 – 57 Spanish Republican exile 4, 40, 46, 47, 50, 54 – 56 spectacularization of war 170, 172 Stalag fiction 99 stereotype(s) 24, 29, 35, 71, 72, 95, 108 – 111, 160 structural violence 193 subgenre(s) 63, 68, 69, 70, 82 sublime 7, 67, 149, 150, 177, 178, 201, 204 – 207 sublimity 149 subversive 7, 177, 178, 200, 204 suffering(s) 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 28, 33, 65, 69, 71, 72, 76, 80 – 82, 84, 85, 91, 102, 106, 131 – 133, 136, 146 – 148 taboo(s) 41, 42, 47, 52 target(s) 35, 71, 87, 99, 100, 106, 114, 145, 147, 184 testimony 12, 13, 16 – 19, 21, 174 the blindness of the soul‘ 94 the duty of memory‘ 13 Third Reich 5, 99, 100, 103, 104, 106, 107, 111 threat 24, 25, 111, 114, 120, 158 topoi 46, 54 torture 11, 26, 28, 29, 116, 117, 119, 165, 204 traitor(s) 88, 140, 143, 145, 153 transgeneration(al) 4, 17 transición 41, 42, 47, 48, 54

Index

trauma(s) 1 – 3, 8, 11, 16 – 18, 20, 21, 39, 57, 95, 174 trope(s) 4, 5, 25 twentieth century 5, 11, 63, 106, 112, 176 veil(s), veil(ed) 26, 114, 119, 120, 123 victimization 56, 110 Vietnam Generation 168, 171 Vietnam War 2, 6, 8, 11, 168 – 171, 173, 175, 176, 180 violence 1 – 3, 5 – 8, 28 – 30, 41, 73, 76, 85, 87 – 100, 104, 107, 108, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116, 122, 163, 165, 168, 171 – 175, 178, 180, 181, 186, 190, 193, 194 – 197, 199 virginity 116, 118 visibility 3 – 5, 24 – 28, 30, 63, 72, 76, 83 – 85, 87, 174, 185 visible 3, 5, 6, 11, 19, 24 – 28, 30, 31, 68, 80, 82, 85, 88, 92, 94, 158 – 161, 166, 168, 175, 196, 201, 208 visionary 128 war books controversy‘ 69, 71, 84

219

war epic(s) 141 War in Africa 18, 19 War in the Overseas Provinces 18 War Literature Boom‘ 63, 68 war on terror 1 war poets 64 warfare 1, 72, 74, 149, 153, 154, 178, 186, 194 wartime 3, 8, 69, 81, 101, 108 – 112, 145 weapon(s) 5, 74, 96, 114, 116 – 119, 121, 141, 148 witness(es) 6, 7, 12, 13, 16 – 18, 29, 41 – 43, 46 – 51, 53 – 56, 72, 82, 168, 171, 174, 175 womb(s) 78, 114, 115, 117, 120, 121, 129 World War II 2, 4, 5, 8, 32, 33, 54, 84, 88, 91, 93, 94, 100, 153, 154, 158, 166, 178, 182, 196 wound(s), wounded 5, 6, 37, 69, 74, 76, 84, 127, 130 – 133, 137, 148, 162, 165 WW II 100, 104, 107, 110, 112 yperite 37 Yugoslavia 11, 112