The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons 9463728228, 9789463728225

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The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons

Heritage and Memory Studies This ground-breaking series examines the dynamics of heritage and memory from a transnational, interdisciplinary and integrated approach. Monographs or edited volumes critically interrogate the politics of heritage and dynamics of memory, as well as the theoretical implications of landscapes and mass violence, nationalism and ethnicity, heritage preservation and conservation, archaeology and (dark) tourism, diaspora and postcolonial memory, the power of aesthetics and the art of absence and forgetting, mourning and performative re-enactments in the present. Series Editors Ihab Saloul and Rob van der Laarse, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Advisory Board Patrizia Violi, University of Bologna, Italy Britt Baillie, Cambridge University, UK Michael Rothberg, University of Illinois, USA Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University, USA Frank van Vree, NIOD and University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons

Edited by Erica van Boven and Marieke Winkler

Amsterdam University Press

Editorial board: Eddo Evink, Frank Inklaar and Frauke Laarmann-Westdijk Copy editor: Adam Frick/Frick Language Group Cover illustration: Image from Looking for Lenin (2017) by Niels Ackermann and Sébastien Gobert Published by Fuel Publishing Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 822 5 e-isbn 978 90 4855 083 8 (e-pdf) doi 10.5117/9789463728225 nur 649 © The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2021 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Introduction

The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons Erica van Boven and Marieke Winkler

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I People The Iconization and Mythologization of Byron’s Lifeand Work in Nineteenth-Century Netherlands and Europe

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Lenin as Cultural Icon

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Brigitte Bardot: The Making, Recycling, and Afterlife of an Icon

63

Jan Oosterholt

Maria Brock

Ginette Vincendeau

II Places The Renaissance at a Glance

The Panoramic View of Florence Paul van den Akker

83

Iconic City Thrillers

111

City Branding

129

Encoding Geopolitics Through Cinema Rui Lopes

Historical Culture and the Making of ‘Hanzestad Zwolle’ Frank Inklaar

III Objects National Treasure Tea Bowls as Cultural Icons in Modern Japan Meghen Jones

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What to Lea(f) In, What to Lea(f) Out

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Exploring the Iconic in History Museums

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Hitler Goes Pop

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Author Biographies

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Index of Names

233

Pedagogical Opportunities of a Cultural Icon – Anne Frank’s Chestnut Tree Kirsten E. Kumpf Baele

Pieter de Bruijn

Reflections on Media Representation and Collective Memory Yvonne Delhey

List of Images Image 1 Image 2 Images 3 and 4 Image 5 Image 6 Image 7

Lord Byron. Engraving by Charles Turner, published by Anthony Molteno, after Richard Westall, published 15 July 1825 29 National Portrait Gallery, London The Modern Prometheus, or Downfall of Tyranny. Print by George Cruikshank, satire on Napo34 leon’s exile to Elba (1814) British Museum, London Soviet Propaganda Posters depicting Lenin 48 Public domain Brigitte Bardot during the Venice Film Festival Venice, Italy, 1958 64 Photo by Mario De Biasi Wikimedia Commons Florence seen from the Piazzale Michelangelo, 2009 84 Photograph by the author Domenico Ghirlandaio, Visitation, 1485-1490, fresco85 Capella Maggiore (Tornabuoni Chapel), Santa Maria Novella, Florence

Image 8 Image 9 Image 10 Image 11 Image 12 Image 13 Image 14 Image 15

Image 16

John Brampton Philpot, Panorama of Florence from San Miniato, ca 1857, albumen print, 16.5 × 42.3 cm86 Private collection John Ruskin and George Hobbes (attributed), Panorama of Florence from San Miniato, 1845, 86 daguerreotype, 16.9 × 21.3 cm Lancaster University, The Ruskin Library, Museum and Research Centre, the Whitehouse Collection Viollet-le-Duc, Panorama of Florence from San Miniato, 1836, pen, brown and black ink, traces 88 of pencil, 31.8 × 64.4 cm Musée d’Orsay, Paris Thomas Cole, View of Florence from San Miniato, 88 1837, oil on canvas, 99.1 × 160.3 cm Cleveland Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, View of Florence from the Boboli Gardens, 1835-1840, oil on canvas, 51 × 73.5 cm89 Louvre Museum Louis Gauffier, Portrait of Dr. Thomas Penrose, 91 1798, oil on canvas, 49.2 × 65.4 cm Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN, USA Louis Gauffier, The Family of André-François, Count Miot de Melito, 1795-1796, oil on canvas, 68.7 × 88 cm93 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Andrea Verrocchio (attributed), Madonna and four saints, detail with a model of the city of Florence in the left hand of San Zenobius, oil on panel, 173 × 165 cm (full painting) 96 San Martino a Strada in Chianti, Grassina (originally in the Church of SS. Annunziata, Florence) Anonymous, after Jacopo de’ Barbari, Birds-eye view of Venice, ca 1500, woodcut (6 blocks on 12 leaves of paper), 134 × 283 cm 97 Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

Image 17 Image 18

Image 19 Image 20 Image 21

Image 22 Image 23 Image 24

Francesco di Lorenzo Rosselli (?), Panoramic view of Florence, ca 1471-82, woodcut, 98 58.5 × 13.15 cm (in six leaves) Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin George Cook, Panorama to Florence from the San Miniato hill, after a design which William Turner made after a sketch by James Hakewill, engraving, in: James Hakewill. A Picturesque Tour of Italy, from Drawings Made in 1816-1817100 London: John Murray, 1820 (without numbering) George Eliot, Romola, Leipzig: Bernhard Tauch104 nitz Verlag, vol. 1, 1863: frontispiece Library copy of the Getty Research Institute [https://archive.org/details/romola01elio_0/page/n7] Singapore’s poster, packed with regional iconography, including the inflated title, which evokes 116 the colour and stripes of Chinese lamps Istanbul’s poster, with the protagonists enveloped by local architecture and an orientalist tagline. The title’s initial resembles a pattern from the Hagia Sophia, followed by letters 117 simulating the calligraphy of qalam pens. Tea bowl (Japan) named Unohanagaki (Fence of Deutzia Flowers), 16th-17th cent. Shino ware stoneware, 9.5 x 11.8 cm 152 Mitsui Memorial Museum. Important Cultural; Property Feb. 2, 1955; National Treasure June 27, 1959 Tea bowl (Korea) named Kizaemon, 16th cent. Stoneware, 8.9 x 15.4 cm 152 Kōhōan, Daitokuji. Important Cultural Property Jan. 23, 1933; National Treasure June 9, 1951 Tea bowl (China), 12th-13th cent. Jian ware stoneware with ‘oil spot’ (yuteki) tenmoku glaze. 7 x 12.3 cm 160 The Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka. Gift of Sumitomo Group (The Ataka Collection). Photograph: Muda Tomohiro. Important Cultural Property Jan. 19, 1931; National Treasure June 9, 1951

Image 25 Image 26 Image 27 Image 28 Image 29 Image 30 Image 31 Image 32 Image 33

Tea bowl (China), known as “Inaba Tenmoku,” 12th-13th cent. Jian ware stoneware with iridescent spotted (yōhen) tenmoku glaze. 6.8 x 12 cm Seikadō Bunko Art Museum, Tokyo. Important Cultural Property July 3, 1941; National Treasure June 9, 1951 Tea bowl (China), 12th-13th cent. Jian ware stoneware with iridescent spotted (yōhen) tenmoku glaze, 6.8 x 13.6 cm Fujita Art Museum, Osaka. Important Cultural Property March 31, 1953; National Treasure November 14, 1953 Tea bowl (China), 12th-13th cent. Jian ware stoneware with iridescent spotted (yōhen) tenmoku glaze, 6.6 x 12.1 cm Ryōkōin, Daitokuji, Kyoto. Important Cultural Property April 23, 1908; National Treasure June 9, 1951 Tea bowl (China), 12th-13th cent. Jizhou ware ware stoneware with tortoise shell (taihi) glaze, 6.7 x 11.8 cm Shōkokuji, Kyoto. Important Cultural Property Jan. 19, 1931; National Treasure March 31, 1953 Oketani Yasushi, Tea bowl (Japan), 2014, Stoneware with iridescent spotted (yōhen) tenmoku glaze. 6.6 x 12.9 cm Private collection Tsujimura Shirō, Tea bowl of the Ido type, 2003. Stoneware, 9.8 x 15.4 cm Photograph © 2021 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Hon’ami Kōetsu (1558-1637), Fuji-san, Raku fired earthenware, 8.5 x 11.5 cm Sunritz Hattori Museum of Arts. Important Cultural Property March 29, 1952; National Treasure Nov. 22, 1952 Engraving of The Brookes slaveship around 1788 Public domain Illustration by Cristoforo dall’Acqua for a 1818 Italian translation of Captain John Stedman: A negro hung by his ribs from a gallows, 1792 Public domain

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161 161 161

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Images 34 and 35 Walter Moers, Adolf, the Nazi Pig (1998) & Little Asshole and Old Curmudgeon (1993)214 Cover of James Carr and Archana Kumar, Image 36 Hipster Hitler (2013) 216 Image 37 Cover De Groene Amsterdammer, July 8, 1939 Cartoon by L.J. Jordaan 218 Page from Master Comics 47 (1944), ‘Capt. Marvel Image 38 220 meets Corp. Hitler Jr.’ The Digital Comic Museum

Introduction The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons Erica van Boven and Marieke Winkler The omnipresence of the icon Read any newspaper or online magazine, watch any video or television ad, and it is likely you will encounter the term ‘iconic’ being applied to a specific person, building, object or even fictional character. Cultural icons can take many forms, and they appear to be omnipresent in the public domain. As Alexander, Bartmanski and Giesen stress in Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life (2012), ‘The concept of [the] icon has endured across vast stretches of time and space. It represented the sacred for medieval churchgoers a millennium ago and remains central to the technical discourse of computer users today.’1 They continue, ‘The icon has proven to be a powerful and resilient cultural structure, and a container for sacred meanings, long after Friedrich Nietzsche announced the death of god’.2 Despite the central place iconic representations take in contemporary culture, consensus on what the term ‘icon’ means is abundantly lacking. Overflowing with meaning, the concept itself almost seems to become meaningless. As the art historian Martin Kemp already signalled in From Christ to Coke: How Image becomes Icon (2011), ‘the term iconic is now scattered around so liberally and applied to figures or things of passing and local celebrity that it has tended to become debased.’3 Recently, Hariman and Lucaites even spoke of the ‘hyperinflation’ of the concept, stressing

1 2 3

Alexander, Bartmanski and Giesen, p. 1. Alexander, Bartmanski and Giesen, p. 2. Kemp, p. 3.

Boven, Erica van, and Marieke Winkler (eds), The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463728225_intro

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that icons suggest ‘a stable fixture, a familiar setting, an enduring connection to something beyond endless churn and change’. 4 They add that the problem is a devaluation of the term itself, ‘leaving the public more adrift than before’.5 This volume sets out to limit the inflation of the term by offering, in this introduction, a comprehensive overview of the existing conceptualizations of the icon and by demonstrating, in the chapters that follow, how the concept can be fruitfully applied in research from diverse cultural disciplines, such as literary studies, media studies, art history, and cultural history. The book has been arranged according to the main perspectives of the contributions: iconic persons (I. People), iconic places (II. Places) and iconic objects (III. Objects). The contributions focus on the visual aspects of icons as well as on the cultural historical embedding of iconic representations – two aspects which are strongly intertwined and cannot easily be separated, if they can be separated at all. In the various contributions, questions are addressed about the construction of cultural icons. How are images turned into icons? What are the characteristics of iconic representations? What role do modern media and cultural institutions play in constructing icons? To what extent are cultural icons the product of an explicit promotional campaign, as opposed to the outcome of a diffuse cultural process? Several contributions also specifically discuss questions about the dynamics of cultural icons. How and why does the meaning and function of cultural icons change over time? How does the meaning of an icon depend on its viewing public and on the specific (inter)national context in which it circulates? What meanings of the icon are disregarded at certain times and places, by whom, and why? In this introduction, we further elaborate on the field of cultural icon studies as a form of cultural history, strongly embedded in visual and cultural studies. Here we argue this approach can benefit from insights from cultural memory studies, thus expanding the focus of the f ield by looking at the interaction with the socio-historical contexts icons embody, as well as the way they remember and (re)shape the meanings of these contexts. The goal of this introduction is not to offer a strict, a priori definition of the icon, but rather to set the markers that define the study of cultural icons and to clarify existing ambiguities surrounding the concept.

4 Hariman and Lucaites, p. 303. 5 Ibid.

Introduction

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The iconic turn in contemporary culture The major role icons take in contemporary culture has stimulated the study of cultural icons significantly.6 The increased interest for cultural icons in both the public and the scholarly domain is inherently linked to the growing role visuality plays in contemporary Western society. Cultural scholars were already pointing out the growing dominance of images in contemporary culture in the 1990s. The departing point for the essays collected in W.J.T. Mitchell’s influential Picture theory (1994), for example, was the observation that ‘we live in a culture dominated by pictures, visual simulations, stereotypes’.7 In addition, for Mieke Bal, ‘the stark visuality of present culture’, as she called it in The Practice of Cultural Analysis (1999), formed an important incentive for overcoming disciplinary hang-ups and addressing both textual and visual dimensions within her project of cultural analysis.8 Notably, in their volume Cultural Icons (2011), editors Keyan Tomaselli and David Scott refer to Bal when they state that ‘[i]n the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century world, language is tending to become supplemental to the visual image’.9 The ‘stark visuality’ of present culture that has prompted the rise of cultural icons is often linked to the increased mediatization of today’s society. In particular, the rise of new media such as photography, film and cinema, broadcast television, video and the internet, including virtual reality and games, have contributed to a shift within modern culture from text to image.10 While this broad cultural tendency towards visuality can be seen as a prerequisite for the icon to flourish11, other, specific socio-cultural tendencies have contributed further to its popularity and omnipresence. A first additional factor of importance is the far-reaching individualization of present-day society. As the commitment of both individuals and social groups to example figures is of all times and places, within a highly individualized society the need for (a personal relationship with) ‘exemplary forms of life’ and cultural models increases, as cultural historian Willem Frijhoff argues in Saints, idols, icons (1998): ‘More and more our perception 6 Binder, p. 102. 7 Mitchell, 1994, p 2. 8 Bal, p. 9. 9 Tomaselli and Scott, p. 11. 10 See Lister, especially Chapter 2, ‘New Media and Visual Culture’. 11 Hariman and Lucaites, p. 303: ‘The reason for deeming virtually anything and everything iconic probably is a response to the incredible expansion, acceleration, and decontextualization endemic of contemporary media experience. When nothing is anchored, one needs anchors.’

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of [social] processes, structures and conjunctures is organized around emblematic or exemplary historical figures’.12 The life stories of ‘holy’, ‘great’, or ‘famous’ figures help us in shaping our own life story; they offer support in a world in which the ideal of a successful and happy life is primarily framed as the responsibility of the individual, not the community.13 At this point, the need for icons (NB by Frijhoff primarily understood as exemplary figures) connects to the growing pre-occupation with celebrities. Just as the phenomenon of the icon gains renewed attention and relevance within an individualized and visually mediatized culture, even more so the appearance of the celebrity is understood as a telling symptom of a meritocratic society. Notwithstanding that earlier beginnings of celebrity culture have been identified14, overall the phenomenon is irrevocably interlinked with modern mass media and social media in particular. As Ellis Cashmore emphasizes in Celebrity Culture (2014): ‘The conditions [for celebrity culture to come into being] include the proliferation of media in the 1980s and the loss in confidence in established forms of leadership and authority that happened around the same time.’15 However, when trying to understand the obsession with cultural icons and related phenomena such as the celebrity, it is not only the individualization of present-day Western society (which is accompanied by the loss of confidence in established forms of authority, according to Cashmore) that proves to be a factor of importance that needs to be taken into account. A second additional factor lies in the profound entanglement of the economic and cultural domain. This intertwining is unmistakably clear in the case of the celebrity that is generally seen as ‘a product of consumer culture’.16 Yet, also in the case of cultural icons, the commercial or economic dimension is often not far away. As several contributions in this volume demonstrate, the construction and dynamics of cultural icons are not always only the product or effect of complex socio-historical interactions, they can also be the product of targeted branding or specific marketing strategies. 12 Frijhoff, p. 16 (trans. Van Boven and Winkler). 13 More critically, Frijhoff indicates that the need for icons underline the narcistic tendency in contemporary culture, see Frijhoff, p. 17. 14 Kemp, pp. 342-343: ‘There have been a number of attempts to define the beginning of celebrity culture. The rise of mass popular entertainment in Britain in the later eighteenth century, the advent of photography on a mass scale, the rise of film and then television, and the internet have all been seen as marking special beginnings.’ 15 Cashmore, p. 6. 16 Andrews and Jackson cited in Cashmore, p. 6.

Introduction

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The omnipresence of the cultural icon thus can be connected to what we can call an iconic turn in contemporary Western culture.17 In order to further understand the icon’s functioning within contemporary culture, we need not only to consider the visual dimension of the icon or its reception by certain groups, but also the way the phenomenon of the icon ties in with questions of individualization/collectivity and of culturalization/ commercialization.

Definitions of the icon As indicated above, it is difficult – if even at all desirable – to provide a single definition of the concept of the icon. ‘Icon’ has become a buzzword used by the media for almost everything. Furthermore, a definition of the icon and indication of its characteristics appears to be highly dependent on one’s starting point. Different perspectives generate different emphases. For example, in the case of Alexander et al., who in Iconic Power adopt a sociological standpoint, the concept can refer both to the traditional religious depiction of saints and to the little pictures by which we navigate through our computer. Frijhoff, as a cultural historian, proposes a distinction between ‘saint’, ‘idol’ and ‘icon’ and reserves all three terms to refer to exemplary figures/persons. In yet another way Tomaselli and Scott adopt a semiotic perspective and perceive the icon in the first place as a special sign that originates in the real but is transformed to a ‘simulacrum’.18 However diffuse the use of the term might be at first sight, when overlooking the field of cultural icon studies, it seems possible to distinguish three positions. For clarity: these three positions do not correspond with the design of this book in three parts. Throughout the entire book, in each part (People, Places, and Objects), elements of all three positions can be found. A narrow conception of the icon recalls its original meaning of ‘image’; the very word ‘icon’ stems from eikon, the Greek word for image and was used specif ically for religious images in Greek and Russian Orthodox 17 Besides the aforementioned W.J.T. Mitchell, it was the German art historian Gottfried Boehm who introduced the term ‘Iconic Turn’ (Ikonische Wende) to indicate the cultural shift from word to image, a shift that also represented a major change in the way cultural sciences acquire and structure their knowledge. 18 Tomaselli and Scott, p. 16: ‘The sign becomes a simulacrum that substitutes – mediatizes – the original person or object into something else that becomes progressively susceptible to commercial exploitation’.

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Christianity.19 Traditionally, art history was the discipline where to find this use of the concept of the icon. Though at present in art history, the term is also no longer restricted to depictions of religious figures, we do find the narrow conception of the icon still resound, for example in From Christ to Coke by Kemp, when he refers to the icon as ‘a visual icon’ and defines it as a special kind of image that has risen to extravagant levels of fame.20 Kemp wonders what it is that makes iconic images so ‘extraordinary’. In a way, for Kemp iconic images are surrounded with some secret, they seem actively to incite ‘the need for legends’.21 Not surprisingly, the main task of the scholar studying the icon from this perspective is to ask how iconic images have achieved this extraordinary status, and whether they have anything in common. Indeed, it seems possible to give some general characteristics of the cultural icon despite the aforementioned ubiquity of the icon concept. The main factors all cultural icons have in common are fame and widespread recognizability.22 An icon is always widely known and instantly recognized by a certain audience.23 This is certainly the case for the iconic persons discussed in the chapters by Jan Oosterholt (Lord Byron), Maria Brock (Lenin), Ginette Vincendeau (Brigitte Bardot), Kirsten Kumpf Baele (Anne Frank) and Yvonne Delhey (Hitler), as well as for the depictions of episodes addressed in the contributions by Paul van den Akker (the Renaissance) and Pieter de Bruijn (The ‘Blitz’). Where images are concerned, even apart from the issue of fame of their subject, not every image has the potential to reach an iconic status. Icons are strong and highly concentrated images. After all, only images which emanate an immediate strength can appeal to basic visual and conceptual senses in such a way that they become iconic. In addition, icons have to be easily repeatable and reproducible and that means they have to take a certain static shape. The image has to crystallize into what Kemp calls ‘a memorable still’.24 A certain degree of standardization is needed, a fixed shape, as many examples in this book reveal. Other characteristics can 19 See for example Binder, p. 101; Brink, p. 139; Mitchell, 1986, p. 31. 20 Kemp, pp. 2-3. 21 Kemp, p. 3. 22 Frijhoff, p. 52: ‘The icon – more than the saint, the idol and celebrity – is based on affirmation and recognizability. It refers in other words not to the particular and concrete qualities of a specific (historical) person or event but to a set of qualities that are collectively perceived and appointed to the iconic representation’ (trans. Van Boven and Winkler). 23 Hariman and Lucaites, p. 285: ‘Yet even the most widely recognized icons are not known by all and often are identified incorrectly (…). Nor do all viewers agree on the meaning or value of the iconic image’. 24 Kemp, p. 4.

Introduction

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be related to this such as simplicity and symmetry. These features favour the capacity of icons to keep some of their core qualities in the processes of change they go through. Kemp refers to this as transgression: a cultural icon transcends the limits of its initial context of origin, function, context, and meaning.25 In the course of time, it undergoes many transformations. It develops and changes in various historical periods, geographic and cultural contexts and media. It takes multiple forms; its representations can become schematic, and yet it is still recognizable in outline. This continuity is also a main quality of cultural icons. Although the above goes especially for visual icons, the idea of standardization and abstraction can be considered a component of an overall description of cultural icons. A second position that can be distinguished within the rich body of icon studies does not see the icon primarily as an ‘image’ but understands it as a special kind of ‘sign’. When approaching the icon in this way, the study of cultural icons takes inspiration from the tradition of semiotics, the theory of signs (visual, aural, or linguistic), and their interpretation, as developed initially by C.S. Peirce (1839-1914). To avoid confusion, it should be noted that the cultural icons we discuss in this volume are not necessarily ‘Peircean icons’. These concepts are not to be mixed up, but there are relations. According to Pierce a sign consists of three inter-related parts: the sign itself, the object it refers to and the effect (by Pierce referred to as the ‘interpretant’) that the sign/object relation has on its receiver.26 In his early work Pierce describes the icon as a specific sign that constitutes a distinct relation between sign and object, namely a relation of likenesses. The icon, in other words, is a sign that is interpreted as resembling its object. Following the work of F. de Saussure (1857-1913) this relation is explained in slightly different terms. The icon is a sign and thus, according to De Saussure, consists of two sides: a form (the image, the word, the object: what we see or hear) called the signifier and a meaning (the concept or thing it refers to) called the signified. What makes the icon a special kind of sign is the inherent resemblance between signifier and signified. Whether one adopts a Piercian or De Saussurian terminology, researchers that make use of semiotics define cultural icons generally as signs that ‘refer to the thing they represent’27 or that ‘resemble their objects’.28 This indeed applies to 25 26 27 28

Kemp, p. 3. Pierce, p. 478. Frijhoff, p. 52. Tomaselli and Scott, p. 18. See also Bijl, p. 28, footnote 22.

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all icons discussed in this book. For example, the iconic book chest Hugo Grotius escaped in from prison in 1621, subject of the chapter ‘Exploring the Iconic in History Museums’ by De Bruijn, refers to an actual book chest. At the same time and in the course of history, this object has been charged with multiple meanings, making the cultural icon in the end much more than a sign which resembles its object. This is where the contemporary study of icons, rooted in semiotics, follows up on Pierce. As Tomaselli and Scott point out in their study Cultural Icons: ‘Semiotics is not just about the “meaning of any image or corpus of images” but about the way images are constructed and work within systems; it is also about the way they are interpreted’.29 By emphasizing that the analysis of the icon not only requires the study of their form and their function but also involves investigating their interpretation, Tomaselli and Scott indirectly stress the importance of hermeneutics within the study of cultural icons. Cultural icons generally have a strong visual nature, yet a narrative is needed to reveal their signif icance, to interpret their levels of meaning and social functioning. Icons, in other words, contain a complex visual-textual relation. In this sense, it is telling that the task of the semiologist is framed as a decoding – or ‘reading’ – of the layered symbolic and affective meanings of the sign, in our case the icon30, including as well the meaning-making process (or semiosis) on the part of the receiver. The task of decoding is explicitly addressed in the chapters by Lopes and Delhey. The inherent connection between image and narrative and the emphasis on the act of ‘reading’ brings to light a signif icant difference between the semiotic approach and an approach that departs from the narrow conception of the icon sketched above. Instead of focusing on the question of icons’ communalities (what do iconic representations have in common?), semiotic inquiries are much more concerned with differentiations (how do signifier and signified differ? How are icons ‘read’ in different cultural contexts? What meanings does the sign convey, and what meanings are oppressed?).31 These questions indicate that icons are not just representations – they do not merely reflect certain values, virtues or ideals. As signs that need to be decoded, they also play an important role in shaping both individual and 29 Tomaselli and Scott, p. 19. 30 As Alexander and Bartmanski write in their introduction to Iconic Power: ‘Icons are aesthetic/ material representations, yes, but they are also signif iers of the ideationally and affectively intuited signified’. Alexander, Bartmanski and Giesen, p. 2. 31 Exemplary for this focus is the concept of ‘iconic difference’ coined by Gottfried Boehm to refer to the difference between the representation and its model in the real world.

Introduction

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collective values. Icons, in other words, can be ‘actants’, as Alexander and Bartmanski put it: ‘They inspire and invite us to interact with them’.32 It is this productive aspect of cultural icons that is further incorporated in the third position that proposes a broad definition of the concept of the icon. Though it can be studied as such, the cultural icon is always more than an image or visual representation. Cultural icons reached their iconic status because, during the processes of transformation they undergo, they gather meanings which go beyond their original reference, beyond what they actually represent. In new historical periods, in new social and cultural contexts, they are connected with new meanings, new associations, new connotations that sometimes have little to do with their actual meaning. The aforementioned book chest of Hugo Grotius, for example, came to represent a crucial episode in Dutch history. Other contributions show how an image, namely the panorama of Florence, came to represent a complex of convictions, such as the birth of modern man, and in addition came to stand for a whole ‘iconic’ period, namely the Renaissance (in the chapter by Van den Akker) or how the icon of Lenin got detached from the historical figure Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov and became the site of numerous projections and instrumentalizations: a symbol for communism, an image for Russia’s influence in the post-Soviet period or a reference to a lost utopia (in the chapter by Brock). As these examples, as well as both definitions of the icon discussed above, make clear – and we can’t stress this enough – the narrow conception of the icon is always intertwined with and touches upon a broader conception of the icon, a conception that emphasizes the process of iconization and circulation of the icon rather than that it concentrates on the iconic representation itself. In this regard, the third position we distinguish here can be perceived as the result of a shifting emphasis from the making and construction of the icon via the analysis of its multiple meanings, to the role of its audiences and its reception within these meaning-making processes, the latter, as we have seen, was an emphasis that was already present via the ‘interpretant’ in the semiotic approach. This shift in emphasis from studying the icon to investigating the iconic is for example visible in the volume Iconic Power, in which the title and subtitle, ‘materiality and meaning in social life’, already indicate the more social(historical) perspective on what an icon is and how it functions.

32 Alexander, Bartmanski and Giesen, p. 4.

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Functions of the icon As all three positions discussed above indicate, an important function of the icon lies in its symbolic meaning. The profound symbolic function of the icon becomes apparent in the workings of the traditional religious icon (which is believed to function as a mediator between earthly life and the heavens), just as much as in the workings of modern, secular icons. From a semiotic perspective, the icon is related to the symbol. As explained above, the cultural icon refers to something that existed or happened in reality, but at the same time it embodies far more than what it represents. Apparently, the process of iconization turns images, individuals and even objects (as Meghen Jones shows in her contribution on Japanese tea bowls) into something less tangible. The link with the context of the origin of the sign is loosened and sometimes even appears to fade. In this sense, the cultural icon moves towards the symbol, that is, a sign with an arbitrary relationship to its reference. That is the reason why icon and symbol are often mixed up: it is not always easy to disentangle the two. A flag, for example, can be considered as a national symbol or as a national icon. It is also the reason the study of cultural icons easily activates related concepts such as the ‘archetype’ and the ‘myth’. There is a similarity with the concept of the ‘archetype’ when icons represent deeply felt, idealized meanings, or when icons resound classical myths or mythical figures (as Oosterholt shows in his contribution on the adaptation of Lord Byron). Crucial here is the de-historicizing effect of the icon, an effect ascribed as well to the workings of contemporary ‘myths’ by Roland Barthes, as Delhey explicates in her contribution ‘Hitler goes Pop’. Just as with Barthes’ myths, a key feature of cultural icons is a pattern of accrued layers of meaning and a looser link with historical reality. In addition to the much-studied symbolic function of cultural icons, this volume focuses further on what we determine as another important, related function: the icon’s modelling capacity. The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons thus explicitly sets out to place the study of cultural icons within the present need for cultural models, as we think the ubiquity of the icon is not only striking but also telling.33 Iconic images, persons, or events, with their concentrated strength and concise meaning, have acquired an exemplary status and can therefore 33 This ‘passion’ for icons can also work the other way around: the power and presence of images have not only triggered their worshipping but also their destroying, see Latour, p. 16.

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function as a model in shaping our image of the past, the present, and the future. This exemplary status is not just one of the icon’s characteristics; it is in fact precisely what makes (the image of) a person, a place or an event a cultural icon, what defines its role in culture. Powerful iconic representations affect the senses, the emotions, and the imagination, and they therefore are becoming more and more a tool in modern culture. It is not uncommon that in these modern uses of iconic persons or cult objects the religious origin of the icon still shines through. This is visible in the worshipping of Lenin, as Brock shows, manifested in a personality cult including body embalming and pilgrimages. But the religious origin also shines through in the ‘fan culture’ that surrounds a mass media celebrity like Brigitte Bardot, as Vincendeau demonstrates, in her contribution of the typical ‘blonde’. These two examples also point towards the striking gender dimension of cultural icons. Whereas male icons embody power, leadership, heroism, or geniality, and thus are models of a whole range of masculine ideals and values, female icons are iconic for their beauty, sex appeal, sensuality (see Bardot), or typical female virtues, such as chastity and self-sacrif ice (think of a f igure like Mother Theresa).34 The gender dimension especially shows how cultural icons are not only modelling our view of the past and contribute to the shaping of collective memory. They also draw attention towards the reproduction of stereotypes and fixed cultural meanings that circulate within society. To study cultural icons is in one way also asking the question of how these fixations can be opened up. In other words, with this book, we want to demonstrate that analysing cultural icons will provide more insight in the preoccupations of contemporary society.

Conclusion By addressing both the construction and dynamics of cultural icons, this volume follows up on the vast body of research done within the field of visual and cultural studies. However, by shifting focus to the modelling function of cultural icons within the light of cultural memory studies, it also wishes to expand the dominant semiotic approach and to think along the lines of research that addresses the circulation, reception and appropriation of the icon. To proceed in this line of research requires that the phenomenon of the cultural icon is explicitly understood as a factor of importance – that 34 See Horrocks. See also Frijhoff, pp. 9-10.

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is, a productive factor, an ‘actant’ – within the wider process of shaping and constructing (collective) cultural memory. This expansion offers constructive analytical benefits. First, it permits us to distinguish between a narrow conception of the concept of the icon – namely, as a visual representation – and a broader conception of the icon that indirectly meets the current ubiquity of the term – namely, the icon as a complex of functions and meanings (also referred to earlier as the ‘iconic’). Second, the framing of the study of cultural icons within the light of cultural memory studies makes it possible to demonstrate the rich and wide scope of the study of cultural icons while limiting the aforementioned ‘deflation’ of the concept. This limiting lies in the given definitions that restrict the field of the icon/the iconic and in focusing on the function of the icon as a model. Moreover, the volume calls attention to new and understudied dimensions of the icon, such as the role of humor (Delhey) or the didactic functioning of icons (Kumpf Baele and De Bruijn), alongside what remains of vital importance: the study of those meanings of cultural icons that stay invisible or neglected. ‘[A]n icon’s lasting power lies precisely in the way it taps into invisible domains while condensing their complexity’, Lopes writes in the chapter ‘Iconic City Thrillers’; it is this apparent invisible complexity of icons that the scholar needs to address as well and where (s)he has to look for new meanings.

References Alexander, Jeffrey C., Dominik Bartmanski and Bernhard Giesen (ed.), Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Andrews, David L. and Jackson, Steven J. (eds.), Sport Stars: The Cultural Politics of Sporting Celebrity, London, Routledge, 2001. Bal, Mieke (ed.) with Bryan Gonzales, The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999. Bijl, Paul, Emerging Memory. Photographs of Colonial Atrocity in Dutch Cultural Remembrance, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2015. Binder, Werner, ‘The Emergence of Iconic Depth: Secular Icons in a Comparative Perspective’, in Alexander, J., Bartmanski, J., and B. Giesen (ed.), Iconic Power. Materiality and Meaning in Social Life, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 101-116. Boehm, Gottfried, Was ist ein Bild? München, Fink Wilhelm GmbH, 1994. Brink, Cornelia, ‘Secular Icons: Looking at Photographs from Nazi Concentration Camps’, History & Memory, Spring/Summer 2000, pp. 135-150.

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Cashmore, Ellis, Celebrity Culture, London/New York, Routledge, 2014. Frijhoff, Willem, Heiligen, idolen, iconen, Nijmegen, SUN, 1998. Hall, Stuart (ed.), Representation. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi, Sage Publishing/The Open University, 1997. Hariman, Robert and John Lucaites, ‘Icons, Appropriation and the Co-Production of Meaning’, in Kjeldsen (ed.), Rhetorical Audience Studies and Reception of Rhetoric, New York, Pelgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 285-308. Horrocks, Roger, Male Myths and Icons: Masculinity in Popular Culture, London, Palgrave MacMillan, 1995. Kemp, Martin, From Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009. Latour, Bruno, ‘What Is Iconoclash? Or Is There a World beyond the Image Wars?’, in Latour, B. and Peter Weibel (ed.), Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2002, pp. 13-37. Lister, Martin et al, New Media: A Critical Introduction, London/New York, Routledge, 2003. Mitchell, W.J.T., Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986. Mitchell, W.J.T., Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994. Pierce, Charles S., The Essential Peirce, Volume 2, eds. Peirce edition Project, Bloomington I.N., Indiana University Press, 1998. Tomaselli, Keyan and David Scott, Cultural Icons, London/New York, Left Coast Press, 2009.

About the authors Erica van Boven is emeritus Professor of Literature at the Open University (the Netherlands) and Associate Professor of Modern Dutch Literature at Groningen University. Her research focuses on Dutch literature and literary criticism of the interwar period, middlebrow culture, and gender studies. Until 2017, she was in charge of the research project Dutch Middlebrow Literature 1930-1940: Production, Distribution, Reception, funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Her recent publications (books and articles) concern bestsellers in the Netherlands (1900-2015), popular Dutch fiction of the twentieth century, gender debates in the interbellum, and the once famous Dutch author Arthur van Schendel (1874-1945).

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Marieke Winkler is Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at the Cultural Studies department of the Open University (the Netherlands). Her current research focusses on the interactions between science and literature, and the (literary) construction of images of the future and past. Currently she is the coordinator of the research program ‘Imagining the Future City: Envisioning Climate Change and Technological Cityscapes through Contemporary Speculative Fiction’. In 2018, with prof. Erica van Boven and prof. Paul van den Akker she organized the international conference ‘The Icon as Cultural Model’.



The Iconization and Mythologization of Byron’s Life and Workin NineteenthCentury Netherlands and Europe Jan Oosterholt

Abstract Lord Byron is one of the most striking nineteenth-century examples of an icon in the modern sense of the word. Far into the nineteenth century Byron and the main characters from his poems remained models for the rebellious ‘romantic’ hero: a modern version of Milton’s fallen angel. Much has been written about Byron’s work, life and reputation. This enduring interest makes ‘Byron’ ideally suited for a demonstration of research into the historical development of an iconic person as a cultural model. The chapter analyses the Dutch reception of Byron and shows its entanglement with the discussion about the ‘un-Dutch’ character of Romanticism. Paradoxically, there was also an appropriation of Byron, resulting in a Christian ‘light’ version of the ‘Byronic hero’. Keywords: Lord Byron, icon as cultural model, mythologization, European and Dutch appropriation, modern Prometheus and Lucifer

Introduction On 22 April 1822, the Dutch poet Isaäc da Costa (1798-1860) wrote a letter to a friend in which he openly confessed his fascination with Lord Byron, whose Cain he had just read: Yesterday I read Cain and I was truly filled with horror. The text is beautiful, it’s terribly beautiful, resembling the poet’s physiognomy and the way he portrayed Lucifer. Now I dare to say that I know this man and his soul.

Boven, Erica van, and Marieke Winkler (eds), The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463728225_oost

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Today I bought his portrait, which I’m sending you for amusement, begging you to return it to me as soon as possible. You will notice the man of genius, the sensitive poet, the son of kings, the English Lord; but also, alas!, the melancholic doubter and libertine, spoilt by the spleen and philosophy of our days. His eyes, as beautiful as they may be, show the opposite of the divine resignation of the adorable saviour’s face, and the beastly powerful back of the head and neck all show the seducer and the author of Don Juan. Powerful in his striving for evil; and yet weak: this is how he apparently looks; and whilst wrestling with sombre violence against his nature’s limitations, he turns out to be a toy for the evil spirit, that turns his glorious talent into sin, thus proving the meaning of Providence: the greatest freedom consisting in the humblest subjugation to the Heavenly Father […] A resemblance with the Apollo is there, but it is well known that the Apollo when slightly changed gets an infernal expression; and it’s common knowledge that the Northern face is very much like the Greek […] Indefinite are the reflections resulting from comparing Lord Byron’s Cain with his own physiognomy […]1

Which portrait was sent by Da Costa, we do not know, but the association with Apollo indicates that it might have been an engraving based on one of the portraits by Richard Westall, the painter who transformed Byron’s profile more or less to ‘a replica of the Apollonian […] model’.2 Da Costa’s fascination would nowadays be seen as a manifestation of fan culture: he

1 Byvanck, p. 95-97. ‘Ik las den Cain gister avond door en waarlijk met ontzetting. Het stuk is schoon, het is verschrikkelijk schoon, gelijk de physionomie van den Dichter en gelijk hijzelf ons Lucifer afschildert. Ik durf nu zeggen dat ik den man en zijn ziel kenne. Heden kocht ik zijn portret en zende het u eens voor de aardigheid, met verzoek het spoedig weer te mogen hebben. Gij zult er in zien den man van genie, den gevoeligen dichter, den zoon der koningen, den Engelschen Lord; maar ook helaas! den somberen en door de spleen en de filosofie onzer dagen bedorven twijfelaar en wellusteling. Zijn oogen, die hoe schoon ook, juist het tegendeel van de hemelsche gelatenheid van ’t aanbiddelijke Heilandshoofd, te kennen geven, – zijn dierlijk-krachtige vormen van het achterhoofd en den hals, toonen den verleider en den autheur van don Juan. Machtig ten kwade; en echter zwak: zoo ziet hij er blijkbaar uit; en terwijl hij met een somber geweld tegen de beperktheid van zijn wezen worstelt, blijkt hijzelf een speeltuig van een boozen geest te zijn, die zijn heerlijken aanleg ten kwade ontwikkelt, tot een bewijs in de bestemming der Voorzienigheid dat de hoogste vrijheid in de nederigste onderwerping aan den Hemelschen Vader bestaat…. Een gelijkenis met den Apollo is er mede in, maar het is bekend dat de Apollo zelf met een ligte verandering een helsche uitdrukking krijgt; en overbekend dat de Noordsche kop aan den Griekschen zeer nabij komt…. Oneindig zijn de bespiegelingen die nog de vergelijking van Lord Byron’s Caïn en van zijn eigen physionomie oplevert….’. 2 Greer, p. 33.

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Image 1 Lord Byron. Engraving by Charles Turner, published by Anthony Molteno, after Richard Westall, published 15 July 1825

National Portrait Gallery, London

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specifically states that he wants to possess Byron’s portrait, almost as if it were a prayer card.3 Byron is one of the first poets around whom an industry of engravings was brought into being. The author himself seems to have been in control of the image which artists created of him, at first: in the case of the famous paintings of Westall and Phillips, Byron chose the posture in which he was portrayed. However, he seems to have had less control over the many engravings which, whether or not based on the portraits of Westall and Phillips, flooded the market in the 1810s and 1820s. For the poet’s inner circle, the Byron on these engravings was not easy to identify, but paradoxically this did not apply to the public at large. Byron became stylized into a ‘brand’ which could be recognized by a few recurring motifs: ‘a bare throat, a white collar, a curling forelock, a receding hairline, a characteristic pose’. 4 In his study on Byron’s Romantic Celebrity, Tom Mole concludes, ‘For a celebrity in the age before photography, gaining cultural ubiquity meant having your image adjusted, simplified and branded until visual recognition became immediate’.5 Nowadays, such a commercialization of a product is connected to developing an ‘iconic brand’. The visual image of Byron, distributed via new techniques for the time period, played an important part in the success story of Byron and his works. The aforementioned stylization of his portrait made Byron easily recognizable. In semiotics, one speaks of an ‘icon’ when sign, significance, and object coincide; traditionally, one tends to think in this respect of visual signs, because one seems more inclined to overlook the difference between sign and object when being confronted with images instead of words. The disappearance of this distinction is also an essential feature of religious icons. For example, when worshipping a portrait of the Virgin Mary, the believer identifies the image and the object. A condition for this religious practice therefore is that such an image of a saint does not change through the ages. Meanwhile, the term ‘icon’ is accepted in a secular context – often combined with the adjective ‘cultural’ – referring to persons or objects within a culture that have obtained an exemplary status. Desanctified, the icon has become less tied to the object on which it is based. In semiotic terms, apart from an iconic function, these cultural icons are also attributed with indexical (connotative) and symbolic (conventional) signif icance. Scott and Tomaselli speak of a process of ‘iconization’, in 3 4 5

Honings, pp. 21-25. Mole, p. 75. Mole, p. 94.

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which the iconic, indexical, and symbolic functions coincide in ‘narratives, ways of making sense, and sometimes into grand narratives’.6 Iconization implicates mythologizing, a process in which an icon obtains a universal quality, if only while the origins of the connotations are no longer traceable. Because of the exemplary function of an ‘icon’, Frijhoff links the term with ‘saint’ and ‘idol’. In his discussion of these originally religious concepts, Frijhoff is interested in what he calls ‘transmission of sacredness’,7 meaning a non-religious extension of the significance of these terms. According to Frijhoff, saints, idols, and icons are benchmarks in debates about social standards and values, as the icon embodies a purified, stylized exemplum. Frijhoff sees iconization as a historical process during which an icon develops into ‘an elaborated and outspoken historical model that owes its significance no longer solely to the sign, but also to the enshrinement in a historical reality’. 8 Such an icon can develop into a ‘narrative’ or ‘an archetypal scene’; for instance, in representing ‘unquenchable mourning for loved ones’, the ‘Pièta’ can continually emerge in slightly altered shapes because of its archetypal quality. Frijhoff analyses the transformations and the openness to multiple interpretations of these exempla, along with how diverse groups ‘appropriate exemplary phenomena’.9 In this article, I study the reception of Byron and his works as an example of an ‘iconization process’. I am mainly interested in how Byron became part of a specific iconic tradition. Following Frijhoff, I trace how an icon develops into a narrative or myth. How does this narrative inscribe itself in an existing myth that is appropriated by various groups and that is constantly transformed in the process? To this end, I analyse the specific ways in which two Dutch Calvinist poets appropriated Byron and his work. Prior to that, I sketch Byron’s reputation in England and in parts of the European continent.

The English versus the continental ‘Byron’ Da Costa’s aforementioned fascination with Byron’s portrait fits into a Byron cult which grasped England and the continent at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In Tom Mole’s vision, this type of celebrity culture 6 Tomaselli and Scott, p. 20. 7 Frijhoff, p. 37, ‘overdracht van sacraliteit’. 8 Frijhoff, p. 54, ‘De icoon wordt tot een meer uitgewerkt en duidelijker gehistoriseerd model, dat zijn waarde niet langer ontleent aan het teken alleen, maar aan de verankering in een historisch herkenbare werkelijkheid’. 9 Frijhoff, p. 20, ‘zich exemplarische levensvormen toe-eigenen’.

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is a nineteenth-century invention. One of the side effects of the scaling-up of the English print culture around 1800 was that readers no longer knew the writers personally. According to Mole, the resulting ‘apparatus of celebrity’ was a structure that Romantic culture developed to mitigate this sense of information overload and alienation. It responded to the surfeit of public personality by branding an individual’s identity in order to make it amenable to commercial promotion. It palliated the feeling of alienation between cultural producers and consumers by constructing a sense of intimacy.10

Consequently, the author’s identity had to be branded. In the case of Byron, the visual image of the poet was crucial: people recognized him through his curl, his impressive forehead, his opened collar. New technologies made it possible to give readers the impression they had unmediated contact with their beloved poet. Byron reinforced this feeling by what Mole describes as a ‘hermeneutic of intimacy’; in his poems, he seems to share his inner secrets with his readers, a strategy by which the estranging effect of a printed message is embezzled. All of the heroes of Byron’s epic poems seemed more or less to be his alter ego, through which the poet revealed himself more and more. Da Costa’s identification of Byron with his hero Cain is just one of many examples of this type of reader response. Mole delivers a plausible explanation as to why Byron was so popular in England. Yet one of the specific characteristics of the Byron cult was that it flourished not only in his homeland, but also in the rest of Europe, and thus also in countries in which the scaling-up and commercialization of the literary industry was less developed than in England. A possible explanation for Byron’s continental popularity is the combination of his cosmopolitanism and his inclination to travel abroad. As a youngster, he made the traditional grand tour through Europe. The experiences collected at this journey inspired him to write Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, perhaps his most famous poem. In 1816, after several moral scandals, Byron was forced to leave England for the continent. In Italy he got involved in the movement of the Carbonari, liberals striving for an Italian state. In 1823 he went as a military to Greece to participate in the Greeks’ battle for independence. Then in 1824, in Mesolongi, he died after a serious illness. His political engagement in Italy and Greece made him a hero in the eyes of European

10 Mole, p. 16.

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liberals, and the progressive circles on the continent were more inclined than his English compatriots to remain silent about his libertine ways. In Italy, but also in Poland and Russia – territories where a strong opposition against conservative rulers existed in the 1820s – Byron was cherished as a tireless fighter against the politics of the ‘Holy Alliance’.11 In France there was a similar sentiment with liberals calling Byron the ‘Bonaparte de la poésie’;12 like the former emperor, for whom Byron nurtured a lifelong fascination or even enthusiasm, the English poet fought indefatigably against the tyranny of the old feudal Europe. Yet in a country like Holland, where in the 1820s a liberal opposition hardly existed, Byron’s political reputation was of little consequence.13 Here he only was a revolutionary as a poet; as such he developed into the incarnation of the romantic ‘Zeitgeist’. In this period the English probably would have been astonished by this, partly because they were not interested in the continental battle between classics and romantics but also because Byron, in comparison with the Lake Poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge, was much more a defender of the classicist tradition. Yet in most of the European continent, apart from the German territory, classicism was much more persistent and therefore it was more clear how Byron distinguished himself from this tradition. One tended to associate ‘the sublime Lord’ with ‘gothic villains’ and ‘noble outlaws’, types of heroes who grew popular at the end of the eighteenth century.14 In France, and not long thereafter in other European countries, it was this ‘romantisme noir’ which inaugurated the end of the ‘doctrine classique’. Byron’s political and literary images resemble each other in as far as in both of them, the resentment against authorities, traditions, and conventions is foregrounded. Byron and his Byronic Heroes became associated with Lucifer and Prometheus, both rebels rising to divine authority. At the end of the eighteenth century – the heyday of pre-romanticism – they stood model for the so-called ‘Kraftgenie’ or ‘Original Genius’. To return briefly to Mole’s study about Byron, in his vision at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Byron grew into a ‘brand’ and ‘icon’. In marketing terms used today, such an ‘iconic brand’ is defined as an ‘encapsulated myth’.15 Following this suggestion, one could interpret Byron’s image as a transformation and epitome of the ancient 11 12 13 14 15

Cardwell, pp. 1, 307, 335-336. Hoffmeister, p. 58. For the Dutch reception of Byron, see Popma; D’haen; Mathijsen; Briggeman. See Thorslev. See Holt.

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Image 2 The Modern Prometheus, or Downfall of Tyranny. Print by George Cruikshank, satire on Napoleon’s exile to Elba (1814)

British Museum, London

icon of and tale about the insubordinate rebel not accepting the limitations of an earthly existence.16 In the image of Byron and his Byronic Heroes, previous transformations of this rebellious archetype came together; in their Byronic manifestation, they became ripe for the post-Napoleonic nineteenth century, and they developed into a very ‘successful’ cultural model. Ian Watt studied the afterlife of these kinds of myths in the modern age. In his Myths of Modern Individualism, a lot is said about Don Juan and Faust, literary heroes who, in their romantic transformation, strive for transcendence and are therefore bestowed with the status of a hero. Watt defines this kind of myth as a traditional story that is exceptionally widely known throughout the culture, that is credited with a historical or quasi-historical belief, and that embodies or symbolizes some of the most basic values of a society.17 16 For an analysis of the ‘rebel myth’ as ‘cultural icon’, see Parker. 17 Watt, p. XVI.

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The philosopher Hans Blumenberg enriched Watt’s description – the myth as the incarnation of societal values – with a psychological explanation. In Blumenberg’s vision, myths play a role in coping with the irrational and uncontrollable.18 According to this German scholar, myths are an antidote to ideologies tending to dogmatism: the myths are constantly ‘rewritten’ and as such deliver answers to new developments which dogmatic ideologies try to ignore. Blumenberg’s perspective is relevant for this essay, also because he sees the myth of Prometheus, the icon of the revolting rebel par excellence, as one of the most powerful in the modern age. He extensively addresses how Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Byron’s older contemporary and admirer, rewrote the myth. In his ‘Sturm-und-Drang’-period, Goethe sees the titan’s son as the well-known ‘preromantic’ hero resisting divine authority and creating life as a second creator. Later in his life Goethe describes Napoleon as a second Prometheus, an image that became customary, especially after the former French emperor was imprisoned at Saint Helena. He typified Napoleon as ‘demonic’: someone having no doubts and feeling superior to his fellow-creatures, moral codes and justice. It is remarkable that Goethe also accredits this demonic quality to Byron, the English poet being the incarnation of a genius independent of moral and aesthetic rules, a pride that resembles that of Napoleon. Goethe admires this demonic quality, but it also instils fear in him. In Byron’s heroes – especially Manfred and Cain – Goethe recognizes Promethean and also Faustian tendencies, and perhaps it was this last association which inspired him into modelling a figure in the second part of Faust after the English Lord, who then already was deceased. Demonic qualities were also attributed to Byron by the Dutch poet Isaäc da Costa, as mentioned at the beginning of this article. I focus more extensively on Da Costa’s attitude to Byron in the next paragraph.

Da Costa Like Goethe, Da Costa was also fascinated by the figure of Prometheus. In 1820, this youngster, then still Jewish, but not long thereafter converted to Orthodox Calvinism, translated Prometheus bound, a tragedy he ascribed to Aeschylus. Prometheus is chained to a Caucasian rock, because, against Zeus’ will, he stole fire to give it to mankind. He refuses to give in to the tyrant Zeus, who at the end of the play causes an earthquake whereby Prometheus is thrown into Hades. In the Greek tragedy, Prometheus is 18 Blumenberg, pp. 239-290.

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explicitly presented as a saviour of mankind: he not only donated fire, he also taught man how to civilize his surroundings with the help of mathematics, astronomy, agriculture, and more. His rebellion against the supreme deity Zeus is altruistic and therefore heroic. Da Costa’s translation is from a twentyfirst-century perspective very idiosyncratic, but the content of the plot is left intact. Remarkable perhaps considering Da Costa’s conversion, inspired by the Dutch poet Bilderdijk, to a contra-revolutionary ideology a few years later, in which any rebelliousness against divine and worldly authority was being mistrusted. During the pre-revolutionary eighteenth century, Prometheus was a teacher of mankind and a challenger of obscurantism, in short the incarnation of the enlightened belief in progress. In addition, in 1823, a few years after his translation of Prometheus bound, it was precisely this Enlightenment that was attacked by Da Costa in his notorious pamphlet Bezwaren tegen de geest der eeuw [Objections to the spirit of the age].19 We do not know whether the young Da Costa knew of Byron’s fascination with Prometheus. At the age of almost 60, Da Costa wrote a foreword to a new edition of his Prometheus in which he referred to his lifelong admiration for Aeschylus; in retrospect, he found himself in the company of many of his contemporaries, amongst them ‘Goethe, that titan of German poetry’20 and Lord Byron, ‘who wrote about the lasting impression Aeschylus’ Prometheus made on him and which influenced everything he wrote since he read the tragedy as a young boy during his years in Harrow’.21 In 1821, Da Costa was still optimistic about the English poet’s future: ‘Something good must become of him. He is too sublime to submit to the disbelief of the times. He is too much of a poet’.22 But in his response to Byron’s portrait a year later, he states that his hopes were destroyed when reading Byron’s Cain. In this mystery play, Byron transformed his biblical title hero into a second Faust who, like Goethe’s medieval philosopher, is dissatisfied with the limits of life in general and his knowledge of its secrets in particular. Cain too is seduced by the devil – in his case, none other than Lucifer – who leads him, again like Mephistopheles Faust, on a dazzling journey through the extra-terrestrial and underworld. Cain is certainly not Byron’s first Promethean rebel, but it was the first time the 19 Da Costa, 1996, pp. 47-121. 20 Da Costa, 1876, p. 727, ‘Goethe, dien dichterlijken Titan van Duitschland’. 21 Da Costa, 1876, p. 727, ‘die verklaarde dat de indruk van Eschylus Prometheus, die door hem op Harrow-college met zijne medestudenten driemaal in een enkel jaar gelezen was, op alles wat hy sedert zelf heeft geschreven een beslissende uitwerking geoefend heeft’. 22 Byvanck, p. 93, ‘Er moet nog eens iets goeds van hem worden. Hij staat te hoog voor het ongeloof dezer dagen. Hij is te veel dichter’.

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English poet placed this figure in a biblical and even theological context. Da Costa, only just converted to Calvinism, felt compelled to respond.23 He translated a small part from the play: the scenes in which Cain is seduced by Lucifer. Da Costa confronts these verses, according to him full of fallacies, narrow-minded arguments and fake philosophy, with long choruses in which Cain’s and Lucifer’s statements are falsified. Da Costa appropriated Byron’s play, transforming it into an ode to divine providence, to which a good Christian, unlike Byron and his heroes, should obey. In this article, I conf ine myself to one example of the way Da Costa appropriated Byron’s text. In this passage, Da Costa connected Lucifer’s belief in an autonomous mind – a strong conviction of Byron too – with the ‘Zeitgeist’. In Byron’s verses, Lucifer is the prosecutor of Jehovah, who is said to deny his subjects the right ‘[to] live forever, in the joy/ And power of Knowledge’. But Cain, so Lucifer tells him, can still achieve this ‘By being/ Yourselves, in your resistance. Nothing can/Quench the mind, if the mind will be itself/ And centre of surrounding things – ‘tis made/ To sway’.24 Da Costa started by extending these verses: […] If one allows free rein to the force of the dissatisfied mind, which prickles to rebellion, and, without noticing, develops more and more. A persistent will to be itself, moulds the mind into an axis around which the world tolls!25

Words and expressions like ‘rebellion’, ‘allowing free rein’, and ‘an axis around which the world tolls’ accentuate the spirit of revolt much more than Byron’s verses. Da Costa completes this free translation with a chorus in which Lucifer’s words are distorted: […] Yes! Take pride in self-esteem, Seducer of the Universe! The Satan’s of this world receive gladly the poison you offer them! Yes, by being your-self and not with Jehovah! Yes, being independent, and governing your own fate! Behold hell’s slogan: behold how it curses the Lord!26 23 See K., pp. 443-461. 24 Byron, pp. 889-890. 25 Da Costa, 1876, pp. 291-292. ‘Zoo ge aan de kracht/van d’onverzaden geest, die u ten opstand prikkelt,/en, zonder dat gy ’t weet, zich meer en meer ontwikkelt,/den vrijen teugel viert. Een onomstootbre wil/van door zich-zelf te zijn, vormt in den geest een spil,/waarom de wereld zwaait!’ 26 Da Costa, 1876, p. 292. ‘Ja! roem op eigen waarde,/Verleider van ’t Heelal! De Satans dezer aarde/ Ontfangen blij te moê ’t vergif dat gy hun biedt!/Ja! door zich-zelven te zijn, en door Jehova niet!/Ja! onafhanklijk zijn, en zelf zijn lot regeeren!/zie daar de leus der hel: zie daar den vloek des Heeren!’

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Again, phrases like ‘the Satans of this world’, ‘independent’, and ‘governing’ allude to political conflicts. At the end of the Da Costa’s adaptation, there is a cry from the heart of the chorus in capital: ‘INDEPENDENCE IS NOT TO BE! TO WISH FOR IT, AGONY!’27 In this maxim, the fate and tragedy of Cain, Lucifer and the Prometheus of the Enlightenment are being summarized. As almost every other reader of the works of Byron, Da Costa identified the author of Cain with the play’s fictional characters. In Byron, he sees ‘an image of that Lucifer, who sparkling with angelic qualities tumbled because of his weakness’.28 This is exemplified in his reaction to Byron’s portrait: as an icon, the ‘sublime Lord’ is to Da Costa a nineteenth-century manifestation of the rebel to divine authority and a transformation of Lucifer, Prometheus, and the like.

Van der Hoop’s translation of Lamartine’s ‘L’homme’ Unlike in many other European countries, the Dutch fascination with Byron is mainly found in the sphere of Calvinist orthodoxy. Next to Da Costa, the somewhat younger poet Adriaan van der Hoop, Jr (1802-1841) is also a representative of this movement.29 Van der Hoop translated ‘L’homme’ by Alphonse de Lamartine, a ‘cri de coeur’, addressed to Byron. Lamartine, as a youngster very religious and royalist, published this poem, consisting of 12 long stanzas, in his Méditations poétiques (1820), a collection of poetry that made him instantly famous in France and in the Netherlands.30 ‘L’homme’ is an appeal to Byron – typified as ‘chantre des enfers’ and ‘ange tombé’31 – to engage his genius in an ode to God. With this poem, Lamartine obtained the reputation of a Christian and moderate alternative to Byron: his descriptions 27 Da Costa, 1876, p. 294. ‘ONAFHANKLIJKHEID IS NIET ZIJN! DIE TE WENSCHEN, FOLTERPIJN!’ 28 Byvanck, p. 97, ‘een beeld van dien Lucifer die schitterende van Engelheid door zwakheid gevallen is’. 29 It is probably no coincidence that this fan of Da Costa and Byron too wrote a poem about Prometheus. In this poem, Prometheus is admittedly being a ‘robber of the flames out of the all-inspiring fire of creation’, a ‘violator of everything sacred’, but this violation only concerns Zeus, while the other gods try to console the titan’s son with heavenly songs. It is Prometheus’ tragedy that mankind, to whom he gave fire, disdains and even despises him. Van der Hoop compares this fate with that of the poet rising with his enthusiasm to ‘the realm of inf inite beauty’: the public listens to these sublime sounds and cherishes him, but the mood changes and the praise gives way to ‘envy’ that ‘gnaws him on his heart, with a constant pain, as a fierce vulture’. Like Prometheus, the true poet does not give in, and eventually he will harvest eternal fame. See Hoop, 1842, pp. 87-91. 30 See Kool. 31 De Lamartine, p. 11.

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of nature and his melancholy tune were in Byron’s fashion, but unlike his English model, Lamartine never gave up hope for the afterlife. In 1825, his fascination with Byron again inspired him, this time to write his Dernier chant du pèlerinage d’Harold, a ‘sequel’ of Childe Harold, in which Lamartine sends the hero to a convent. Lamartine’s early poetry was immensely popular in the Netherlands, and for years it was used as proof that sublime poetry could only result from a Christian inspiration. In the opening lines from ‘L’homme’, Lamartine alludes to the likeness between Byron and Prometheus by using the image of an eagle: Toi, dont le monde encore ignore le vrai nom, Esprit mystérieux, mortel, ange, ou démon, Qui que tu sois, Byron, bon ou fatal génie, J’aime de tes concerts la sauvage harmonie, Comme j’aime le bruit de la foudre et des vents Se mêlant dans l’orage à la voix des torrents! La nuit est ton séjour, l’horreur est ton domaine : L’aigle, roi des déserts, dédaigne ainsi la plaine; Il ne veut, comme toi, que des rocs escarpés Que l’hiver a blanchis, que la foudre a frappés; […] Lui, des sommets d’Athos franchit l’horrible crime, Suspend aux flancs des monts son aire sur l’abîme, Et là, seul, entouré de membres palpitants, De rochers d’un sang noir sans cesse dégoutants, Trouvant sa volupté dans les cris de sa proie, Bercé par la tempête, il s’endort dans sa joie. Et toi, Byron, semblable à ce brigand des airs, Les cris du désespoir sont tes plus doux concerts.32 32 De Lamartine, p. 4-5, 224-225. ‘O Gij, in wiens gemoed geen menschenkenner leest,/ ’t Zij Engel, meer dan mensch, of afgevallen geest!/ Waar, en tot welk een doel gij ’t aanzijn hebt ontfangen;/ ‘k Bemin het wild geruisch, o BYRON! van uw Zangen;/ Gelijk mijn sombre geest door ’t klaat’ren wordt geboeid/ Des bergstrooms, wen de Orkaan het eikenwoud doorloeit./ ’t Verschrik’lijke is uw kreits: de vale nacht uw woning!/ Zoo haat de forsche gier, der voog’len trotsche Koning,/ De vlakte, en zoekt als gij, der bergen steilen top,/ […] [Hij] Krijscht […] op Athos kruin, als fiere zoon der wolken,/ En sticht zijn roofkrocht aan den rand van ’s afgronds kolken./ Dáár, eenzaam en omringd met lillend aas en bloed,/ Laaft hij in ’t stormgewoel ’t op roof onvlamd gemoed/ Aan jammerkreten, die zijn stervende offers slaken./ En sluimert rustig in, wanneer de donders kraken./ […] Uw ziel, o BYRON! aan dien schrik der lucht gelijk,/ Is ’t aaklig tandgekners der wanhoop, keurmuzijk!’

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The comparison of Byron’s soul with an eagle is larded with imagery suiting the preromantic ‘gothic tradition’ in which the ‘Kraftgenie’ flourished. In nineteenth-century France and Holland, this style became typif ied as ‘romantic’, and it was associated with Byron’s work as such. Lamartine tried to Christianize Byron, and about ten years later his Dutch translator Van der Hoop followed in his footsteps. He even accentuated the religious tone of Lamartine’s poem by adding a motto derived from Da Costa: Thou art, and that what we are is unbeing, oh my God! Thou art! The world, and humanity, and its fate, Are the image, which Thou expresses, and again can withdraw! Thou art the Sun of being; we, thy fleeting rays.33

These are the first four lines of Da Costa’s long poem ‘Voorzienigheid’ (‘Providence’), in which the poet sings his firm faith in divine justice. It is exactly this trust in heavenly fate that Lamartine misses in life and work of Byron. In 1837, Van der Hoop made his most substantial contribution to the Dutch Byron mania by writing the verse tale De renegaat (‘The Renegade’), but this renegade too turned out to be ‘a desatanized Byronic hero’.34 The Dutch obsession with Byron then was already less intense, paradoxically in a period in which Dutch literature became more and more defined by liberal voices and less by Orthodox Calvinist criticism. As youngsters, liberal critics like Bakhuizen van den Brink and Potgieter had been charmed by Byron too, but by the end of the 1830s, they had developed a concept of literature in which the ‘sublime Lord’ and also Bilderdijk became negative models instead. This ‘subjective’ poet – Potgieter lent the predicate from Goethe – was guilty of ‘enlarged suffering’ or egocentrism, while society needed a more social poet engaged with the problems of the age. The Byronistic ‘Einzelgänger’ had to give way to the ‘gesellige Genie’.35

Conclusion In the eyes of Da Costa, Byron was a modern incarnation of the biblical Lucifer, the sublime hero who refused to accept his subordination to God: 33 De Lamartine, p. 224. ‘Gij ZIJT, en ’t geen wij zijn is ONZIJN, o mijn God!/ Gij ZIJT! De wereld, en het menschdom, en hun lot,/ Zijn ’t denkbeeld, dat Gij uit, en weêr terug kunt halen!/ Gij zijt de Zon des ZIJNS; wij, Uw vergankbre stralen.’ 34 Hoop, 1965, p. 10. ‘een gedesataniseerde Byronheld’. 35 Leuker, p. 183.

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the English poet’s biography became one with his visual image, the stories of his epic heroes and the myth of the rebel revolting against divine providence. His was a spirit of rebellion, which almost everywhere in Europe became synonymous with ‘Romanticism’, a denomination shared by the movement’s supporters and opponents alike. No one could ignore this ‘cultural model’; one could try to ‘tame’ the rebel, at best. Da Costa does this in his adaptation of Cain: Byron, the sublime genius, was admired by him, but this genius had to watch for conceit or even hubris. This accounted for Byron, but also for the perhaps even more iconic figure of Napoleon, who was commented upon in similar terms.36 Somewhat later, the Byron and Da Costa admirer Van der Hoop followed the same ‘taming strategy’ by translating the congenial French poet Lamartine. Lamartine probably owed his popularity in large parts of Europe to his reputation of a ‘moderate Byron’, but interestingly enough he never seems to have become an icon in the way Byron was.37 With Byron, iconization and mythologization went hand in hand. In the terms of Tomaselli and Scott: in the Byron cult icon, index, and symbol melted into a narrative that functioned as a frame of reference throughout Europe. Around 1840, the cultural model of the ‘Byronic hero’ and the modern Prometheus was brought more definitely into disrepute: the egocentric ‘Kraftgenie’ was – temporarily – replaced by the ‘gesellige Genie’ or the ‘social Genius’. Later in the nineteenth century, authors like Nietzsche started again to embrace Byron’s works and both the poet and his Byronic hero lived on in the perhaps even more ‘iconic’ ‘Übermensch’.

References Blumenberg, Hans, Arbeit am Mythos, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1981 (Zweite, durchgesehene Auflage). Briggeman, Jill, ‘“’T zij engel, of afgevallen geest”, De receptie van Lord Byron in Nederland, 1820-1850’, Skript 35, no. 3, 2014, pp. 148-160. Byron, Lord, ‘Cain’, in McGann, J.J. (ed.), The Major Works, Oxford/New York, Oxford University Press, 2008 (reissue), pp. 881-938.

36 Oosterholt, pp. 50-51. 37 Perhaps also because in the case of Lamartine, an industry of engravings was missing. According to Parker, it is because of this lack of images that Jesse James, another example of a revolting rebel, did become a myth, but unlike for instance Che Guevara, not an icon: ‘the myth of Jesse James contained all of the features of primary cultural iconicity lacking only a distinct image to fix the meaning of his myth in collective memory’. See Parker, p. 102.

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Byvanck, W.G.C., De jeugd van Isaäc da Costa (1798-1825), Tweede deel, Leiden, S.C. van Doesburgh, 1896. Cardwell, Richard A. (ed.), The Reception of Byron in Europe, London/New York, Thoemmes Continuum, 2004. Da Costa, Isaäc, Da Costa’s kompleete dichtwerken, edited J.P. Hasebroek, ­’s-Graven­hage, D.A. Thieme, 1876. Da Costa, Isaäc, ‘Bezwaren tegen den geest der eeuw’, in Dwaasheid, ijdelheid, verdoemenis!, edited by G.J. Johannes, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 1996, pp. 47-121. D’haen, Theo, ‘“A Splenetic Englishman”: The Dutch Byron’ in Richard A. Cardwell (ed.), The Reception of Byron in Europe, London/New York, Thoemmes Continuum, 2004, pp. 269-282. Frijhoff, Willem, Heiligen, idolen, iconen, Nijmegen, Uitgeverij SUN, 1998. Greer, Germaine, ‘Lord Byron’s Image’, in Christine Kenyon Jones (ed.), Byron: The Image of the Poet, Newark, University of Delaware Press, 2008, pp. 29-38. Hoffmeister, Gerhart, Byron und der europäische Byronismus, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983. Honings, Rick, Star Authors in the Age of Romanticism. Literary Celebrity in the Netherlands, Leiden, Leiden University Press, 2018. Hoop, Jr., A. van der, ‘Prometheus. Lierzang’, in Lente en herfst. Verspreide en nagelaten dichtloveren, Rotterdam, H. Nijgh, 1842, pp. 87-91. Hoop, Jr., A. van der, De renegaat, edited by W. Drop, Zwolle, Uitgeversmaatschappij W.E.J. Tjeenk Willink, 1965. K., ‘Byron – Da Costa naar aanleiding van de “Caïn”’, Stemmen des Tijds. Maandschrift voor Christendom en Cultuur 8, no. 2, 1918, pp. 443-461. Kool, J.H, Les premières méditations en Hollande de 1820 à 1880, Paris, L. Arnette, 1920. Lamartine, Alphonse de, ‘De mensch (Lord Byron toegezongen)’, trans. A. van der Hoop, Jr. in A. van der Hoop, Jr, Gedichten. Eerste deel. Leiden, A. Sythoff, 1859, pp. 224-233. Lamartine, ‘L’homme’, In Oeuvres poétiques completes, Guyard M. (ed.), 4-11, Paris, Gallimard, 1963. Leuker, Maria-Theresia, Künstler als Helden und Heilige. Nationale und konfessionele Mythologie im Werk J.A. Alberdingk Thijms (1820-1889) und seiner Zeitgenossen, Münster, Waxmann, 2001. Mathijsen, M., ‘Byron getemd in Nederland’, Verslagen en mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde 120, no. 2, 2010, pp. 53-72, 184. Mole, Tom, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

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Oosterholt, Jan, ‘“Geesel Hollands” of ‘Man onzer eeuw’? Napoleon als splijtzwam in het Nederlandse literaire veld omstreeks 1840’, Internationale neerlandistiek 49, no. 1, February 2011, pp. 44-56. Parker, Mike, Cultural Icons: A Case Study Analysis of their Formation and Reception Thesis, University of Central Lancashire, 2012. Popma, T., Byron en het Byronisme in de Nederlandsche letterkunde, Amsterdam, H.J. Paris, 1928. Schults, U., Het Byronianisme in Nederland, Utrecht, J.L. Beijers, 1929. Thorslev, Jr., Peter L., The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1962. Tomaselli, Keyan G. and David Scott (ed.), Cultural Icons, Walnut Creek, Left Coast Press, 2009. Watt, Ian, Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996.

About the author Jan Oosterholt is Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at the Cultural Studies department of the Open University (the Netherlands). He is specialized in nineteenth-century Dutch literature and published books and articles on literary poetics, imagology and adaptations. In 2012 he edited a special issue of Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde on the function of foreign literature in Flanders and the Netherlands. His current research focuses on literary transfers and Dutch theatrical texts in the nineteenth century.



Lenin as Cultural Icon Maria Brock Abstract Examining the numerous meanings and symbolic incarnations of Vladimir Ilich Lenin after his death in 1924, this chapter examines how icons may be used to articulate political positions, and how in processes of contesting and re-negotiating history, icons function in relation to collective remembrance. It will do so by examining artistic representations of Lenin in film and art, as well as how the fall and destruction of icons does not stop them from re-emerging as spectral, haunting presences. It is argued that in order to study the icon as a material site of both projection and collective fantasy, the complex functioning of the icon within a specific historical and political context needs to be considered, as well as the way its manifestation transcends the spatial and the psychical. Keywords: Vladimir Ilich Lenin, post-socialism, collective memory, memorials, materiality, decommunization, haunting, Ukraine

Introduction This chapter explores the numerous symbolic meanings and incarnations that Vladimir Ilich Lenin has assumed since his death in 1924. From posthumously becoming the object of a Soviet cult of personality, to being displayed in an embalmed state in the centre of Moscow for more than ninety years, the real historical figure of Lenin has become the site of numerous projections and instrumentalizations. Within the Soviet Union and Russia, ubiquitous symbolic use of Lenin iconography can be linked to Orthodox tradition, whereas the care and dedication with which his body has been preserved (or supplemented with other matter) evokes the treatment of the bodies of kings in European monarchic history.1 Since the collapse of the 1

See Yurchak.

Boven, Erica van, and Marieke Winkler (eds), The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463728225_brock

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Soviet Union, the continued function of keeping Lenin’s body as-if-immortal has been called into question, while Lenin the icon has become symbolic of the spectre of communism, as the iconic image continues to haunt the world both in the form of Lenin statues and busts which can be found in many parts of the globe, as well as in artistic interpretations and more commodified manifestations. This chapter looks at the real as well as artistically mediated fates of some of these Lenin statues as ways of investigating the interaction between icon and shifting cultural and societal landscapes. Furthermore, this chapter examines how an icon can be used to articulate political positions that speak to contemporary concerns rather than those of the individual he or she was in life, and how in processes of contesting and re-negotiating history, icons function in relation to collective remembrance. It will do so by examining more closely artistic representations of Lenin in film and art. Wolfgang Becker’s 2003 film Good Bye, Lenin! has a pivotal scene towards its end in which the film’s titular, yet up to this point hidden, protagonist finally materializes. We are in Berlin, where Christine Kerner, committed socialist and mother of Alex, has woken up some time earlier from a coma brought on by a heart attack she had sustained on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall. While she was unconscious, the world around her changed in ever more confusing ways, and in her still fragile state her son is advised to avoid confronting her with unpleasant or shocking news. He takes the doctor’s direction extremely literally by recreating the now defunct German Democratic Republic in the world of their apartment, procuring or making no longer produced East German goods, as well as shooting his own TV news programmes which show the GDR as still in existence, and thriving. In the pivotal iconic scene, we first see a giant statue of Lenin being airlifted past Christine Kerner, initially only visible in its shadowy outline. Surreally, and thus adding to the dreamlike atmosphere of the sequence, the head and torso of the Lenin statue are carried by a helicopter, which dips especially low over the cars and building as it approaches the mother. Lenin’s outstretched arm seems to be beckoning her, and she follows him with a confused gaze as he zooms past her only to disappear into the sunset. The dreamlike character of the scene and the haunting presence of Lenin emerge as specific to her condition, and to much of East Germany after the fall of Wall. Lenin has become an icon without a home, wandering and haunting the world, much like the spectre that communism was and perhaps still is. Indeed, a spectral, dreamlike apparition of Lenin, this time connected to water as well as air, also appears in an earlier, remarkable scene in Theodoros Angelopoulos’ Ulysses Gaze – a scene that is intentionally or

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more symbolically mirrored in Becker’s 2003 film. Here, ‘the scene features an Ozymandias-like vision of a ruined Lenin. Gliding forward at its stately, sleepwalking pace, the film watches fragments of a huge statue being loaded onto a barge. And as the likeness of Lenin’s disembodied head is moved through the sky by a crane, the camera looks on in wonder’.2 Finally, an albeit much smaller bust of Vladimir Ilich Lenin is the subject of Aylin Kuryel’s 2016 short documentary Welcome, Lenin (Hoşgeldin Lenin), once more making an appearance on water. While the chapter will return to the documentary later on, the way in which these Lenin statues are made to emerge from the debris of a sunken empire, carrying the patina of history and memory, is a good starting point, as they may prompt us to ask, like Srećko Horvat and Slavoj Žižek in their book on the future of Europe: ‘What is Lenin the name of?’3

What makes Lenin a cultural icon? The year 2017 made it once more a frequent possibility to encounter images and depictions of Lenin in multiple guises and across numerous locations even outside the former Eastern Bloc, as the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution occasioned exhibitions and discussions on the legacy of the Soviet ‘experiment’ specifically, and the past, present, and future of communism more generally. The iconic symbols of these public events tended to either be reproductions or -reworkings of famous AgitProp posters, an image of Vladimir Ilich Lenin, or a combination of the two. Such prominence accorded to him prompts an examination of Lenin’s enduring status as a cultural and political icon. The overarching concern of this volume is the processes and dynamics that transform an object or person into a cultural icon. More specific to the concerns of this chapter is a follow up question into the use and use-value of an icon. Utilizing the example of Vladimir Ilich Lenin, this chapter examines how icons may be used to articulate political positions, and how in processes of contesting and re-negotiating history, icons function in relation to collective remembrance. In order to do so, it first looks at the iconization process of Lenin after his death and that process’ interaction with elements of traditional Russian religious culture, as well as the political and symbolic function of preserving and displaying his body in 2 See Maslin. 3 Žižek and Horvat, p. 180.

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Images 3 and 4 Soviet Propaganda Posters depicting Lenin

Public domain

the Mausoleum on Red Square. It goes on to discuss how Lenin – similar to other political figures such as Nelson Mandela and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara – serves as ‘Master-Signifier’, becoming the locus of projections and political instrumentalization, as well as subject to commodification. In its final parts, the paper looks at iconoclastic processes, and how the fall and destruction of icons does not stop them from re-emerging as spectral, haunting presences. Finally, the paper sustains an examination into the potential benefits for scholars to think of Lenin as a cultural icon; I argue that studying icons as material sites of projection and collective fantasy demonstrates the complexity of their functioning within specific historical and political contexts in a way that transcends the spatial, the psychic, and the symbolic. Overall, Lenin seems as iconic as one can get. Such an overabundance of representations and re-workings of him exists that no single chapter or even collection of texts could do analytical justice to them. Lenin the icon was commodified to such a degree that one might devote a whole chapter listing different depictions of Lenin, from concrete to ever more schematic depictions. Indeed, this multiplicity is one of the fundamental features of the cultural icon, which is always ‘a complex fact, not just a singular image, even if iconic effect seems reducible to the sensuous compression that only

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simplicity of a single visual act can promise’. 4 Dominik Bartmanski argues that a study of iconicity primarily entails an unravelling of ‘the performative complexity of powerful symbols’, but that as a reward, the study of ‘iconicity affords a new knowledge and thus a new social criticism based on expanded understanding rather than specific political concerns.’5 This chapter is such an attempt to analyse the knowledge an analysis of Lenin the icon affords. In order to achieve this, one of the first aims of this text is to establish why exactly Lenin qualifies as an icon, and what facets make up his iconicity. Some differentiations need to be made early on between the different meanings Lenin has assumed. First, there is Lenin as he was present in the Soviet Union. Alexei Yurchak has written extensively about the symbolic function which Lenin assumed in the Soviet Union. Lenin was needed symbolically as the founding father of Leninism and the Soviet project as a whole, in order to legitimize the role and power of the Communist Party. Important to note is that Yurchak argues that Lenin’s immaterial function cannot be understood without a detailed study of the fate and (per)mutations of Lenin’s physical body.6 This differs from his role in contemporary Russia and also the former communist countries, which is once more distinct from the rest of the world, where perhaps the most significant distinction is between those who are sympathetic to leftist political projects and those who are not. Additionally, exploring the nature of iconicity also requires an enquiry into the appeal that Lenin may hold, and whether – from a more psychosocial perspective – there are collective fantasies that find in the historical figure an ideal locus of investment and projection. One should also state early on that the icon character in fact lies within Lenin, not Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov – the man that was to become Lenin. However, the choice of a nom-de-guerre, while to a large degree a practical consideration, hints at how the seeds of Lenin the myth were sown by the man himself, as much as he may have expressed resistance to the ‘cult of personality’ that was to emerge most prominently after his death, and which is now seen as an integral part of communist regimes past and present, be it Stalinism in the Soviet Union or Juche socialism in North Korea.7 Indeed, a Lenin statue permanently suspended in a state of being toppled was one of the finalists of a recent Canadian competition for a memorial to commemorate victims of communism. In the post-Soviet world and beyond, Lenin remains a 4 5 6 7

Bartmanski, p. 1. Bartmanski, p. 7. See Yurchak, as well as Bernstein and Yurchak. Lenin and Tucker, p. lx.

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powerfully charged symbol. As a later part of this chapter will illustrate, this charge becomes apparent when looking to the public’s relationship with the material remains of the socialist past as they are embodied in statues of Lenin, which dot the cityscapes of the former Eastern Bloc, from Berlin to Tashkent.

When man becomes icon As Anne Rigney commented in her reflection on cultural icons, ‘having a person solves a lot of problems.’8 A person is both concrete and mysterious, providing the perfect site for processes of identification, as well as enough opacity that is open to interpretation or manipulation, thus potentially representing multiple aspects and ideas. At the same time, in the case of Vladimir Ilich Lenin, one might be tempted to ask whether Lenin can still justifiably be referred to as a person, in that the process of iconification – turning the individual into myth, symbol or cliché – seems to have advanced further with him than it has with many other cultural icons. It is clear that Lenin’s death needed to take place in order for his iconic nature to emerge, which is particularly paradoxical, given that his body is still on display in his mausoleum on the Red Square, even as, biologically, less and less of him remains.9 Along with the mythology of Lenin that emerged after his death, the increased currency of the visual that fully took off in the twentieth century contributed to an accelerated dynamics of the icon.10 In fact, the frequency may now be too high for any icon to fully manifest or settle, so that Lenin the icon is always also a by-product of an age that was ripe for iconicity as a ‘cultural fact’, as well as becoming the condensed representation of one aspect or front of the Cold War – another age that demanded its icons. However, icons also harbour their own ‘temporalities that are imposed on humans by things, not just the other way around’.11 Thus, while an icon is always man-made, and while its quasi-religious aura may correspond to a human penchant for the mysterious and the sacred, once it has assumed a place in the world as such, it develops its own agency and effects. This chapter treats the placement of Lenin’s body in 8 Rigney, lecture delivered during the conference ‘The Icon as Cultural Model’ (Open University, 25-26 January 2018, Amsterdam). 9 Less than 23%, according to Yurchak. 10 See Rose. 11 Bartmanski, p. 26.

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the Mausoleum on Red Square in 1924 as a point of origin, making it stand out as an unusually clear demonstration of the intentionality of Lenin’s iconification. As a result of the analytical categories used to speak of Russia past and present, as well as the structure of political leadership in the country, there is a focus on strong leaders, with a distinct tendency to draw historical parallels ranging from the Tsar to Vladimir Putin, at times presupposing an ‘inherent need’ of the Russian people for a ‘paternal leader figure’.12 Of course, when Putin and Lenin are referred to in one sentence, phonic similarities in their names underline the perceived cultural resemblances between the two. However, this link is made by members of the Russian government themselves. In January 2018, President Putin declared publicly that the ‘communist ideology has much in common with Christianity.’ And while he is clearly choosing these words tactically in order to create a sense of continuity between the Soviet Union, its legacy, and the current regime in Russia, which publicly establishes close relations with the Orthodox Church, his following words still appear noteworthy: Lenin was put in the mausoleum – how does this differ from the relics of saints for Orthodox believers, or even Christians in general? They tell me ‘there is no such tradition in the Christian world.’ But how can that be true? Go to Mount Athos and see for yourselves, there are the relics of saints, and here, too, there are the relics of St Sergyi and St German. So in essence the authorities then did not come up with anything new, they merely adapted for their ideology that which humanity had invented a long time ago.13

Indeed, religious icons in the Russian Orthodox tradition were often placed in a specially designated corner of the room, the so-called ‘Krasnyi ugol’, the ‘Red’ or ‘Beautiful’ Corner.14 Soviet public institutions and offices would later feature a picture or bust of Lenin and usually of the General Secretary of the Communist Party. This appears to signal a natural transition, in which this designated place now holds a portrait of Vladimir Putin. One might therefore conclude that in the Russian context, Lenin the icon is merely a placeholder for a sacred religious essence. However, scholar Anya Bernstein argues that the religious reading of the way Lenin’s body has been handled and displayed 12 See Brock. 13 Cited in Novaya Gazeta, 14 January 2018 (trans. M. Brock). 14 Barker and Grant, p. 57.

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is imprecise: ‘Lenin’s body continues to occupy an area of cultural and political sacredness located outside of what is conventionally understood as “religious”, marking a distinction that is often obscured in readings of Soviet cultural politics.’15 According to the results of a survey conducted by the Levada-Center in November 2017 in Russia, 41% of respondents felt that Lenin should be buried properly, while an equal percentage of respondents were in favour of keeping him in the mausoleum. The remaining 18% were unsure of the right course of action.16 Thus, one might conclude that many citizens of the Russian Federation refuse straightforwardly religious or quasi-sacred relationships with the body of Lenin. Similarly, Alexei Yurchak’s approach to mapping out the symbolic terrain that Lenin used to occupy is to analyse the political role Lenin’s body has played in the political project of the Soviet Union, centring on the physical manifestation of Lenin and his (diminishing) bodily remains, which he juxtaposes and analyses alongside the more symbolic body. Unlike Jeremy Bentham’s ‘auto-icon’, consisting of his skeleton and a body and face made of wax and displayed in one of the central buildings of University College London, it was never Lenin’s wish for any of his bodily remains to be preserved or put on show, yet the ‘living sculpture’ of Lenin has been at the Red Square Mausoleum since 1924, in a process not unlike and yet completely different from that of kings who had wax effigies made after their death. Yurchak describes a dual process of ‘cultivating Lenin’s body – as a combination of body-effigy (visible only to the political regime) and body-corpse (displayed to the population)’, which required significant resources over the years, such as an especially created laboratory tasked with the embalming and upkeep of Lenin’s body.17 As he argues, sovereignty takes on a different quality here. Political power is mediated via ‘Leninism’, that is, through ‘the substitution of Lenin with ‘‘Leninism’’’, which required a ‘simultaneous canonization of the ideal and banishment of the man.’18 The aim was for Lenin the person to ‘disappear’ in full view in a political vanishing act: ‘Lenin’ as a politically sacred figure of the Soviet polity was also doubled internally – into ‘canonized Lenin’ (the sovereign, who was above Soviet language and law, could not be questioned by them, and whose voice articulated the foundational Truth of that polity) and ‘banished Lenin’ 15 16 17 18

Bernstein and Yurchak, p. 202. See Levada-Center, 12 May 2017. Yurchak, p. 146. Yurchak, p. 122.

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(homo sacer, who was excised from political discourse, was below language and law, and whose words, ideas, and facts of life were censored, distorted, and tabooed).19

Lenin the human had to become a quasi-fossil in order for Leninism the ideology to arise and become the founding philosophy of the Soviet Union, and which subsequently all leaders referenced, despite or because of its ever-changing content. Yurchak argues that in fact the Soviet Union only experienced a true symbolic upheaval when Gorbachev tried to ‘return’ to the true Lenin, in terms of the essence of his political vision, thereby trying to get away from using him ‘iconically’.20 Thus, to restore or rehabilitate any kind of original Leninism via the figure of Lenin was made impossible through the canonization or iconification of the man and political actor he had once been. Some may draw parallels to the fate of the spectre of communism in Russia, where it, too, is starting to resemble a mummy or undead body. According to journalist Oleg Kashin, ‘[a]ll that’s left of Russian communism today is a scarecrow. […] Nowadays it’s possible to call communism a religion, or an illness, or a natural phenomenon – it won’t disagree or agree with you, since it’s long dead’.21 However, this hollowness of the effigy of Lenin the icon has also proven useful, as the fate of another political icon has more recently demonstrated.

Lenin as a Master-Signifier In order to understand how the legacy of a cultural and political icon needs to mediate the contradiction between concreteness and emptiness, authors David Scott and Keyan Tomaselli examine the life and legacy of Nelson Mandela, whom the authors call ‘the Man with No Face’.22 While there are perhaps more differences than similarities between the two historical figures of Lenin and Mandela – in life and after – the weight of symbolic meanings they have taken on can teach us something about the cultural and historical dynamics of the icon more generally. They argue that Mandela’s legacy was in part formed as the result of a ‘structuring absence’. During 19 20 21 22

Bernstein and Yurchak, p. 189. See Bernstein and Yurchak. See Kashin. Scott and Tomaselli, p. 26.

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his 27 years in prison, Mandela the icon first took shape as a symbol of the anti-apartheid struggle. However, it emerges that much of the ‘icon-work’, as I would term it, took place towards the end of his imprisonment as the regime was weakening, and after his release, so that his potentially unpalatable communist and militant origins were all but forgotten: ‘This process is evident in the way the sign of Nelson Mandela was disarticulated from the material and bloody discourse of antiapartheid struggle in the 1980s and 1990s into a brand’.23 In the process of iconification, Nelson Mandela became a ‘simulacrum’, and thus exposed to forces of not only reinterpretation, but also ‘commercial exploitation. The image of Nelson Mandela is now regularly appropriated and branded to market South Africa and AIDS prevention’.24 These ‘invisible layers of semiotic function’, they argue, can have contradictory effects and meanings ‘but for the icon to endure, these contradictions must become subsumed into a dialectical dynamic that is capable of accommodating shift and reversals of meaning.’25 This insistence on encompassing and managing opposing forces echoes Douglas Holt’s (2004) argument that iconic brands represent cultural anxieties and contradictions, while implicitly demonstrating that in the 20th and 21st centuries, there is no iconification without commodification. However, returning to Mandela the icon, the process of managing contradiction and in consequence making his legacy more benign was also a necessary process for the conflict-ridden country and its legacy: colonialism; racism, brutality, and torture; and deeply entrenched social and economic inequalities. In a more explicitly discursive reading, Mandela the icon then becomes a ‘Master-Signifier’ capable of encompassing and suturing multiple meanings and serving as a figure of identification, fulfilling an essential albeit precarious role for post-apartheid South African society.26 When attempting to analyse the function of Lenin-as-icon, it becomes pertinent to ask whether and what the ‘Master-Signifier’ of Lenin is able to repair over 100 years after the October Revolution and more than 25 years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Is he, like Mandela, a heroic figure worthy of identification and therefore still somewhat personified? Or has he become de-personified entirely, with his presence in the mausoleum in Red Square curiously stripping him of humanity? After all, there is no ‘concrete’ Lenin to return to and an attempt to do so is politically destabilizing, as 23 24 25 26

Tomaselli, p. 13. Ibid., p.18. Ibid., p.19, 21. See Hook.

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Yurchak insists. Yet, independent of one’s conclusion, Lenin the icon can clearly still perform work on behalf of the public, once having been recruited in the service of Leninism, and now represents its legacy, or multiple versions thereof. Indeed, icons are ideally capable of managing complicated legacies, as ‘it contains multiple patterns of identification and invokes strong emotional responses, while its wide circulation includes both likely similarities and obvious differences in use’.27 In Martin Kemp’s work on icons, the example of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara offers another productive avenue for understanding the function of political icons.28 Looking to the most iconic photograph of Guevara, Kemp gives an account of how the reworking of this image and the multiple commercial reproductions that followed, and which include incongruous items such as bikini bottoms, vodka, and Cuban cigars, have stripped the icon of any content that Che may have originally sought to convey or represent himself. While this commodif ication largely took place after Guevara’s violent death, it is the fall of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe that more definitively lessened or erased the political charge inherent in Guevara’s original image. By now, he symbolizes revolution in the sense of a spirit of rebellion, which is perhaps why his depictions are so popular among students and young people, even when admirers of his image are of course not necessarily unaware of his historical role or disinterested in his political legacy. The title of Kemp’s book, From Christ to Coke, seems especially apt in this regard, as the twentieth century political and historical icon is a product of both religious and capitalist forces. In the Christian world, it was Jesus Christ – and in particular artistic reproductions of Christ – that created a blueprint for the depiction of martyrdom and charisma, which combines suffering and struggle with fantasies of masculinity, mastery, and capability. At the end of this process stand commodification and commercialization. Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi associates Lenin with harmful masculine fantasies of mastery: ‘I am convinced that the twentieth century would have been a better century had Lenin not existed. Lenin’s vision interprets a deep trend in the configuration of the psyche of modern masculinity. Male narcissism was confronted with the infinite power of capital and emerged from it frustrated, humiliated, and depressed’.29 It is worth keeping this gendered dimension in mind when trying to understand icons. Female icons are customarily famous for their sensual appeal, even when it is in combination with other 27 Hariman and Lucaites, p. 3. 28 See Kemp. 29 Berardi et al., p. 28.

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aspects, whereas male icons tend to represent forms of mastery or bravery, with physical beauty a negligible or absent attribute. The ‘distribution of iconicity’ in favour of men is of course a by-product of patriarchal culture, but the interrelation between ideas around masculinity or masculine appeal and who gets to become an icon is worthy of consideration in order to understand what it is that converts person into icon. It is masculinity that is chiefly associated with the power to effect lasting change, and with the daring and violence that is seen to be required to do so. It is the masculine that is active rather than passive, that transforms rather than accommodates, and it is the masculine that haunts dreams and histories – not as nurturer or seducer, but as fateful agent and fatherly despot.

The fall of an icon Robert Hariman and John Lucaites, reflecting on their own work on icons, claim that ‘more can be done to account for the texture of things’.30 If approached literally, this means examining the texture of Lenin as he is present in the world today. Immediately, we run into difficulties: do we look to the embalmed or mummified Lenin on Red Square, and the ongoing attempts to keep his physical texture unchanged, leading to less and less of Lenin the man remaining? Or do we examine the texture of the Lenin statues all over the post-Soviet (and not only) world, which all retain a similar basic set of features, and which forego a more detailed, individualized face? In the case of the latter, this simplified, un-textured surface increases reproducibility, but it is also an attempt to depersonalize Lenin – the more schematic Lenin becomes, the more he is able to represent and encompass.31 Now, several decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the afterlives of these same schematic depictions, featuring two- or three-dimensional Lenins, have become symbolic of the type and degree of reckoning with the past in which different Eastern Bloc governments and stakeholders are willing to engage. In the former Socialist Republic of Ukraine, no town was complete without its very own Lenin, to such a degree that it became the Soviet Republic with the highest concentration of Lenin statues, numbering around 5500 in 1990.32 In contrast, it is estimated there are no Lenin statues left standing in Ukraine. 30 Hariman and Lucaites, p. 21. 31 See Yevgen Nikiforov’s 2017 book for socialist mosaics in Ukraine, some of which similarly feature schematic depictions of Lenin. 32 See Teicher.

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And while the most publicized removals were perhaps those that took place during the Maidan protests and their aftermath in 2013 and 2014, such as the toppling of Kyiv’s famous ‘Bessarabska Lenin’, it is the period since 2015 that had the greatest impact on the fate of the remaining statues.33 In April 2015, four laws were passed in the Ukrainian parliament (or Verkhovna Rada) which sought to regulate the commemoration of Ukrainian history. They mandated the removal of communist monuments, as well as the renaming of settlements whose names are related to communism. It was estimated that by January 2017, 1,320 Lenin monuments had been dismantled during the de-communization effort. Ukrainian authorities also opted against the creation of a sculpture park, the likes of which are in existence in Hungary and Lithuania, instead seeking to achieve an almost complete ‘Leninist extinction’.34 This phenomenon has been termed ‘Leninopad’, or Leninfall. Leninfall is by no means the f irst case of a large-scale post-socialist iconoclasm. Slavoj Žižek and Srećko Horvat describe similar removals, both organized and spontaneous, in Poland and Croatia of the 1990s.35 However, according to Myroslava Hartmond, it is the temporal disconnect between the end of communism and the toppling of the statues that is noteworthy, so that the Ukrainian case is one of a delayed catharsis.36 In psychoanalysis, catharsis is the term for a dismantling and redirecting of an emotional charge, so that here, the literal dismantling of the Lenin sculptures becomes an expression of the pain and tragedy of the Soviet, as well as post-Soviet period. Lenin is identified with the Soviet regime and Russia’s influence in the post-Soviet period. In the book Looking for Lenin, which chronicles the fate of some of these statues through photographs and conversations with local residents, Lenin emerges as a generic tyrant, combining the crimes of Stalin and Hitler, so that the suffering under communism, especially during the Great Famine, as well as the devastations of World War II, are conflated into one large narrative of historical trauma and injustice.37 At the same time, Lenin also appears in some interviews as the symbol of a lost utopia, whose fall represents a form of sacrifice on the altar of history and a cathartic moment for the nation. Leninfall’s cathartic violence has also invited artistic reflection. In her installation entitled Let’s put Lenin’s head back together again!, Ukrainian 33 34 35 36 37

See Walker. See Jowitt. Žižek and Horvat, p. 178. See Hartmond. See Ackerman et al.

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artist Yevgenia Belorusets featured elements of recently demolished statues of Lenin found in Ukraine, as well as a conversation between the artist and literary scholar Elena Vogman.38 In their dialogue, the destruction of Lenin statues becomes a deeply tragic process, itself the expression of the larger tragedy of the afterlives of a Lenin who is seen as the iconic incarnation of a restless spirit, a ‘disturbed, archaic spectre [that] has been wandering through time and space in search of parts of its lost body, so that, having restored its strength, it can return land and freedom to the people.’ While each new attempt at national or popular liberation appears to result in tyrannical leader figures and renewed bursts of violence followed by denunciations of the tyrant, Belorusets nevertheless proposes a reparative move: Let’s put Lenin’s head back together again! Let’s put it back together, this dirty, smashed and sinister thing all caked in spit, Which became hateful, struck fear, and made you want to forget it. Which relinquished its meaning. But which, at the moment it was destroyed, so patently stood witness alongside us.

Lenin here becomes valuable not because of what he may represent, but because of his enduring presence in the life of the nation and its people. The legacy of Lenin the icon is so entangled with national history that to eradicate his legacy means enacting violence that has effects reaching beyond the mere destruction of stone idols.

What is Lenin the name of? Lenin-as-icon is the result of a conscious, collective effort towards achieving iconicity. He was needed as the eponymous component of the Soviet Union’s founding philosophy, but this creation also required a zombification of Lenin the man. Now, he remains as a symbol of communism as an oppressive political system, or, alternatively, of its condition before the (Stalinist) Fall. Posthumously, Lenin was instrumentalized, remaining unburied both in a literal and symbolic sense. Undead or spectral Lenin served as the starting point for this chapter. It has been said that Lenin haunts the Left as much as the Right, continuing on as a symbol of the ‘other Europe’, or, 38 See Belorusets.

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more internationally, the Second World. As Lenin is being recovered in one location, he is being discarded in another, but somehow, he keeps returning, though at times with a delay of years or decades. In Welcome, Lenin, this retrieval takes places in Akçakoca, a town on the Black Sea coast of Turkey located about 200 km East of Istanbul.39 A small bust of Lenin was found by local fishermen in 1991, having been thrown into the sea in the early 1990s or late 1980s, after having travelled to the shore from Romania or Ukraine. As a token of admiration for the craftsmanship of the bust’s original sculptors, much care was then given to a restoration of this battered Lenin, who lost part of this face in the journey across the sea. Although returning to Lenin his nose is treated as a way of returning him his dignity, it also strips him further of his Lenin-ness, so that, in the words of the fisherman who found the bust, ‘It does not look like Lenin. It looks like an ordinary man.’ Clearly, the two are mutually exclusive. In the discussions that follow with the town’s inhabitants, including its mayor, arguments about the bust’s fate range from it needing to be exhibited because Lenin once provided support to Mustafa Kemal, to arguing for it being placed in a museum to acknowledge Lenin’s important historical role, to insisting it should be placed in the open at a site where people can have barbecues around it. However, the end of the film shows Lenin being locked away into storage, no doubt awaiting his next retrieval, both literal and historic. There is of course no ‘returning’ to the real Lenin, as he was lost to us the moment he was transformed into an icon. However, with late capitalism’s enduring economic and ecological crisis, which prompted even Francis Fukuyama to somewhat call for a return of (a form of) socialism, Lenin’s emblematic function appears to be increasing in relevance once more. Until recently – when he was not seen as emblem of the oppression and persecutions that took place in the name of the Soviet regime – he was regarded chiefly as a fallen idol that could be commodified and consumed ironically, and whose fetish function always appeared to exist chiefly for others. After all, it is always simpler to find an emblem of and for the ‘other’. In the former Eastern Bloc, Lenin-as-icon is chiefly needed for a reckoning with the past, itself a precondition for the construction of a future. In the former First World, Lenin the icon is symbolic of the vanished Second World – a world at times reconstructed as one of myths, and simpler truths, but also as inhabited by phantoms and terror. Yet, ghosts haunt all of us survivors of the twentieth century. Lenin the spectral icon is retrieved from the confines of history, from history-as-stasis, to serve the functions that 39 See Kuryel.

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political and commemorative processes assign to him. In this sense, Lenin continues to have multiple afterlives, encompassing at times contradictory meanings. Finally, what makes Lenin the icon so unique is that he haunts space as much as he haunts time. A symbolic reckoning with this real and imagined legacy invites or even necessitates engagement with the physical remains of Leninism, so that, as this chapter has shown, meditation stands side by side with, or is at times superseded by, confrontation.

References Ackermann, Niels and Sébastien Gobert, Looking for Lenin, London, FUEL Design & Publishing, 2017. Barker, Adele M. and B. Grant, The Russia Reader: History, Culture, Politics (World readers), Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2010. Bartmanski, Dominik, ‘Modes of Seeing, or, Iconicity as Explanatory Notion: Cultural Research and Criticism After the Iconic Turn in Social Sciences’, Sociologica, no. 1, 2015. Belorusets, Y., ‘Let’s Put Lenin’s Head Back Together Again’, Exhibition October 2015-April 2016, http://belorusets.com/work/let-s-put-lenin-s-head-backtogether-again (accessed 3 November 2020). Berardi, Franco Bifo, Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thoburn, After the Future, Oakland, AK Press, 2011. Bernstein, Anya, and Alexei Yurchak, ‘Sacred Necropolitics: A Dialogue on Alexei Yurchak’s Essay, “The Canon and the Mushroom: Lenin, Sacredness, and Soviet Collapse”’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7, no. 2, September 2017, pp. 199-216. Brock, Maria, ‘The Hyperrealities of Putin and Trump: Why Worth Paying Attention to the Public Personas of Political Leaders’, Baltic Worlds, 9: 4, 2016, pp. 83-87. Good Bye, Lenin! dir. Becker, Wolfgang. 2003. DVD. Hariman, Robert and John Louis Lucaites, ‘Icons, Iconicity, and Cultural Critique’, Sociologica, no. 1, 2015. Hartmond, Myroslava, ‘Lenin After the Fall’ in Niels Ackermann and Sébastien Gobert, Looking for Lenin, London, FUEL Design & Publishing, 2017. Holt, Douglas B., How Brands Become Icons. The Principles of Cultural Branding, Harvard, Harvard Business Press, 2004. Hook, Derek, ‘Love, Artificiality and Mass Identification’, Psychodynamic Practice 20, no. 2, 3 April 2014, pp. 128-43. Jowitt, Ken, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993.

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Kashin, Oleg, ‘Примирение с Чучелом. Почему Слова Путина о Коммунизме Никого Не Шокиру ют’, https://republic.ru/posts/88929 (accessed 3 November 2020). Kemp, Martin, From Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012. Levada-Center, ‘Захоронение тела Ленина’, accessed 18 October 2019. www. levada.ru/2017/12/05/zahoronenie-tela-lenina/. Lenin, Vladimir I. and Tucker, Robert C., The Lenin Anthology, New York, Norton, 1975. Maslin, Janet. ‘Ulysses, Ozymandias And Lenin in the Balkans’, The New York Times, 17 January 1997, www.nytimes.com/1997/01/17/movies/ulysses-ozymandias-andlenin-in-the-balkans.html. Nikiforov, Yevgen, Decommunized: Ukrainian Soviet Mosaics, Berlin, DOM Publishers, 2017. Novaya Gazeta, ‘Путин Сравнил Тело Ленина с Мощами Святых’, Блог “Новой Газеты” (blog), 14 January 2018, https://novayagazeta.livejournal.com/7790810. html (accessed 3 November 2020). Rigney, Ann, ‘From Icons to the Iconic’, keynote delivered during the conference ‘The Icon as Cultural Model: Past, Present and Future’, Open University, 2526 January 2018, Amsterdam. Rose, Gillian, ‘Icons, Intensity and Idiocy: A Comment on the Symposium’, Sociologica, no. 1, 2015. Solaroli, Marco (ed.), ‘On Icons: Media, Visibility, Materiality, and Cultural Power’, Sociologica 1., 2015. DOI 10.2383/80392. Sturken, Marita, ‘The Continued Relevance of the Icon: A Comment on the Symposium’, Sociologica, no. 1, 2015. DOI 10.2383/80400. Teicher, Jordan G, ‘What Happened to Ukraine’s 5500 Lenin Statues?’ Lens Blog (blog), 17 July 2017. https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/what-happenedto-ukraines-5500-lenin-statues/ (accessed 3 November 2020). Tomaselli, Keyan G. and Scott, David (ed.), Cultural Icons, London/NY, Routledge 2009. Ulysses’ Gaze, dir. Angolopoulos, Theodoros, 1997, DVD. Walker, Shaun, ‘Ukraine Protesters Topple Lenin Statue in Kiev’, The Guardian, 8 December 2013, www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/08/ ukraine-opposition-viktor-yanukovych-european-integration. Welcome, Lenin, dir. Kuryel, Aylin, 2016, Online. Yurchak, Alexei, ‘Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty’, Representations 129, no. 1, February 2015, pp. 116-57. Žižek, Slavoj, and Srećko Horvat, What Does Europe Want? The Union and Its Discontents, Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture, New York, Columbia University Press, 2015.

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About the author Maria Brock holds an MSc in Social & Cultural Psychology (LSE) and a PhD in Psychosocial Studies (Birkbeck). She is a lecturer and Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at Malmö University. Her research evaluates the psychosocial dynamics of transitional and post-transitional societies in the former Eastern Bloc, and the former GDR and Russia in particular, focusing on issues of representation, nationhood, memory, and gender. Previous and upcoming publications have reflected on the role of language and affect in reactions to the case of Pussy Riot, the status of memory objects and ‘museums of the everyday’ in the proliferation of post-socialist nostalgia in East Germany, the critical potential of irony and satire, and cinema and the Real.



Brigitte Bardot: The Making, Recycling, and Afterlife of an Icon Ginette Vincendeau

Abstract This chapter highlights the dynamics of the modern media icon by analyzing how Brigitte Bardot was a star made by the image (photography and film) and by reconstructing how her celebrity survived through the image. It discusses the emergence, evolution and impact of Bardot as a cultural icon and her continued relevance long after she stopped making films in 1973. In doing so, the chapter demonstrates how Bardot can be perceived as an icon in several senses – literally as the model of photographers, filmmakers and painters, culturally as creator and bearer of fashion and lifestyle that were widely imitated, and symbolically as the articulation of a sexualized rebellion against the conservative, patriarchal France of the time. Keywords: mass-media icon, celebrity, Brigitte Bardot, representations of femininity, modernity

In the 1950s and 1960s, the film star Brigitte Bardot, known as ‘BB’ (her initials, pronounced in French, also mean ‘baby’), was the most famous French woman on the planet and the first French mass-media celebrity in post-war France. The cult and adulation but also the hysteria and hostility she generated were unprecedented, to the extent that new words such as Bardotmania, Bardophilia, Bardology, and Bardography were invented,1 anticipating Beatlemania by a decade. Today, the popularity of her films has faded, and many of them are forgotten, including in France, with a few 1 For an extended discussion of Bardot’s stardom, see Vincendeau 2013. The book contains an extended bibliography on Bardot, part of which is referenced here.

Boven, Erica van, and Marieke Winkler (eds), The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463728225_vince

64 Ginette Vincendeau Image 5  Brigitte Bardot during the Venice Film Festival. Venice, Italy, 1958

Photo by Mario De Biasi Wikimedia Commons

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exceptions such as Roger Vadim’s Et Dieu… créa la femme/And God Created Woman, the film that launched her global fame in 1956 and Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris/Contempt (1963), a reflection on her stardom and on cinema in general. Her iconic status, however, has endured. Bardot offers a fascinating case study for thinking about the icon as a ‘cultural model’. Her example is instructive in terms of how a modern icon is constructed and developed, how it evolves and how it survives, the impact it had on French culture in a particular era, and more generally on global representations of femininity. As a film star, Bardot belongs to the past (she stopped making films in 1973), but as an icon she is timeless. Bardot fits the category defined by film scholar Christine Geraghty as the ‘star-as-celebrity’,2 meaning a star whose private life is more important than her professional performance. She also corresponds to what sociologist Jeffrey Alexander calls the ‘celebrity-icon’, a figure structured by the interplay of surface and depth, whose seductive surface (essentially an aesthetic phenomenon) is articulated with depths of meaning – an ideological phenomenon. In this respect, for Alexander, celebrity-icons are ‘transitional objects for adults, mediating between internal and external reality, between the deepest emotional needs and contingent possibilities for their satisfactions’.3 In the case of Bardot, these meanings concern gender, sexuality, and modernity. As a fashion model, film star, and ‘scandalous’ celebrity, Bardot was made by the image, and her celebrity survives through the image – photos, films, objects, and writing. She herself contributed to this mediatization process, through interviews but also through her autobiography, published in two volumes in 1996 and 1999, 4 and a series of books and interventions that kept her in the public eye. Before examining Bardot as an icon in more detail, I here give a brief account of her life and career. Bardot was born in 1934 in a well-off Parisian bourgeois family. A sensational beauty with a lithe body, child-like face, and abundant long hair (bleached blond from 19565), she studied ballet and from 1949 was a fashion model, appearing in women’s magazines such as Elle and Marie-Claire. She was noticed by the filmmaker Marc Allégret, who auditioned her; later, she featured in several of his films. Meanwhile, she married Allégret’s assistant, the photographer and future filmmaker Roger Vadim in 1952, the year she began her film career. This initially consisted mostly of comedies, such 2 See Geraghty. 3 See Alexander. 4 Bardot, Initiales B.B. Mémoires; Bardot, Le Carré de Pluton. 5 For an analysis of the importance of Bardot’s blonde hair, see Vincendeau 2016.

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as Cette sacrée gamine/Mam’zelle Pigalle (Michel Boisrond, 1956), which showcased her unique combination of eroticism, youthful energy, and natural performance style, in part arising from her lack of theatrical training; she would later frequently be criticized for her ‘bad acting’. Altogether, Bardot developed a persona that projected a bold, impudent sexuality, a ground-breaking form of modernity in the context of conservative 1950s France. In 1956, Et Dieu… créa la femme crystallized the definitive version of this image and launched Bardot on to a different level of notoriety. The film created a ‘scandal’ due as much to the exposure of her naked body (the first time we see her, she is entirely naked, lying on a terrace in the sun) as to the rebellious character she plays in the film, insolent in the face of the older generation. The originality of her persona was to be both a sex goddess – the classic object of the male gaze – and an autonomous subject, confidently expressing her own desire. As the feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir famously put it in 1960, ‘in the game of love, she is as much the hunter as she is the prey’.6 But a key to Bardot’s success was also that the film and surrounding media discourse suggested a transparency created by an equivalence between her character, her performance, and her ‘real self’ (reinforced by the fact that she left her husband Vadim during the shoot to have an affair with her co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant). The film also launched Saint-Tropez, where it was shot, as a fashionable seaside resort, and the association between the place and the star would prove an important aspect of her iconicity. Et Dieu… créa la femme propelled Bardot as a major star in France when it came out in December 1956; from then on, all her films would be built around her, and the even more scandalous reception of the film nine months later in September 1957 in North America propagated her fame to the whole world. Bardot subsequently appeared in a series of star vehicles in different genres, comedies mostly, but also dramas such as En cas de malheur/Love is My Profession (Claude Autant-Lara, 1958) and La Vérité/The Truth (HenriGeorges Clouzot, 1960). In all the films, however, her star image always dominates the characters she plays. Bardot stopped her film career in 1973 because she disliked filmmaking, because her box-office draw was going down, and also because she understood that her transgressive image of female sexuality had a ‘sell-by-date’. She stopped just as the rise of soft porn films threatened to make her image of sexy nudity obsolete or at least banal, the year before the first Emmanuelle film (Just Jaeckin, 1974). 6 De Beauvoir, p. 30.

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Yet throughout the 1960s, as her box-office popularity declined, she continued to be obsessively followed and scrutinized as a celebrity. The media and the public continued to be fascinated with her love affairs and marriages, the birth of her child, her hair, her clothes, the places where she lived. After she gave up filmmaking, she remained in the public eye thanks to her writing, but also because of her much-publicized actions as an animal rights activist and her controversial political opinions. Bardot’s power as an icon outstripped both the significance of her films and her talent as a performer. To understand how she made the transition from national film star to international icon, we must first return to the context of her rise to fame in the 1950s and the mechanisms of the construction of her image.

Creating the icon: the proliferation of images Bardot was made by the image in a literal sense, as a model for photographers, filmmakers and painters, at a particularly propitious time. A new form of film stardom was on the rise, when instead of theatrical training and rising through the ranks, stars were increasingly plucked from modelling or beauty contests; in other words, they were selected for their beauty and photogénie rather than their acting talent. The post-war period saw a huge expansion in the media in France as in the rest of the Western world, especially the illustrated press – both answering and creating an expanded public appetite for images of and information about celebrities. In France, the main transmitters of these images were news magazines such as Paris Match, women’s magazines like Elle and Marie-Claire, and popular film publications such as Cinémonde. Within this context, the role of Bardot’s husband/impresario Roger Vadim was crucial in launching her career, a typical phenomenon within celebrity culture, as Chris Rojek argues.7 As an ambitious journalist and aspiring filmmaker, Vadim was well-connected in the French media world, and it is thanks to his influence that Bardot featured on the cover of Paris Match on 10 February 1951 and then 7 June 1952, an honour normally reserved for major stars, politicians or foreign royalty, even though at that point her first film had not even been released. Building on this, Vadim marshalled his contacts to have her photographed each year during the Cannes film festival in the early and mid-1950s, in a bikini on the beach, or with famous Hollywood actors, again in excess of her modest status as a starlet. The strategy worked, constructing, from scratch, her private life as 7

Rojek, pp. 129-137.

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an ‘event’. So, for instance, Elle featured her marriage to Vadim on the cover of its 29 December 1952 edition, while a fashion story inside the same issue pointedly showed her ‘at home’, in her bedroom, with her pet dog, wearing one of her grandmother’s petticoats, and so on. This slow accumulation of images both reinforced the association between Bardot and fashion and sowed the seeds of the future Bardotmania. As Bardot became a major film star with Et Dieu… créa la femme, the process continued apace and, at the height of her fame, she was allegedly the most photographed woman in the world, as claimed in the documentary Paparazzi (Jacques Rozier, 1963), discussed below.8 Her film career picked up too, and she made 23 films between 1956 and 1963, the height of Bardotmania (and 43 altogether from 1952 to 1973), which all received distribution and massive publicity on account of her. She posed for artists such as Kees van Dongen and later Andy Warhol, and these portraits in turn were widely disseminated though the media: her portrait by van Dongen, for example, painted in 1954, appeared on the cover of Life magazine on 28 March 1960. Completing the circle, Bardot’s films themselves increasingly commented on her iconicity and global recognition, more or less explicitly. In L’Affaire d’une nuit/It Happened at Night (Henri Verneuil, 1960) Pascale Petit, who plays the female lead, is reduced to pointing to her star presence, as Bardot (with her then husband Jacques Charrier) appears as a customer in a restaurant: ‘Look, it’s her!’ Vie privée, a film that falls into the rare genre of ‘autobiopic’, makes Bardot the actual subject of the whole film. In it, Bardot plays Jill, in a narrative that re-enacts the process of her rise to stardom, from ballet dancer and model to major celebrity hounded by the media. In the 1965 American comedy Dear Brigitte,9 directed by Henry Koster and starring James Stewart, an 8-year old boy from San Francisco falls in love with her and writes every night to ‘Miss Bridgette [sic] Bardot, France, Europe’, until she replies and he demands that his father takes him to visit her in Paris, which they do. Although this is never explained in the film, the boy must know of Bardot through reproductions of her image, as it is highly unlikely a child his age would have been taken to see her films in the US, given the sexual nature of her image. Moreover, the family is shown as old-fashioned in their cultural tastes (they live on a boat and entertain themselves by 8 While it is diff icult to verify the veracity of such a statement, the fact that it was often reiterated is indicative, and it is certainly plausible that Bardot was then one of the most frequently photographed women to appear in the media in the Western world. 9 This is technically her only Hollywood film, although the sequence in which she appears was shot in France, as she refused offers to go and work in the US.

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playing classical music) and the father, a poet and university professor, is stereotypically presented as a dreamy intellectual, detached from everyday reality. Nevertheless, when he discovers his son’s infatuation with Bardot, he pronounces her name several times with a wistful expression on his face and compliments his son for being a ‘blue-blooded’10 American male. In other words, she is by then a ‘household name’. In 1969, despite her declining box-off ice, Bardot became, literally, a national icon when she posed for the bust of Marianne, the emblem of the Republic that can be found in mayors’ offices throughout the country. Bardot was the first celebrity model to be used for Marianne,11 and the fact that the bust (sculpted by Aslan) shows Bardot’s breasts practically naked led some mayors to reject it. Nevertheless, a number of them adopted it, and it has remained a popular artefact. Later, Bardot’s face appeared – as Marianne – on a range of French postage stamps. Thus, film, photography, and art (we might also add song, as she launched a singing career in 1961) propelled Bardot’s iconic status beyond the world of film into both popular culture and the political imaginary of the nation. The process however was not entirely smooth and unproblematic. As a pioneer in mass-media celebrity, Bardot also experienced the contradictions and darker side of fame. In this, the role of the paparazzi was paramount. On the whole, the images discussed above originated from ‘off icial’ sources – recognized filmmakers, famous artists, photographers employed by reputable publications. But the world of stars and celebrities in the post-war period also saw the emergence of the paparazzi, photographers who took unplanned or ‘stolen’ pictures of stars and celebrities, aiming to catch them in moments of intimacy normally hidden from view. These pictures were then sold to the gossip press, also in the ascendant at the time. The name ‘paparazzi’ was supposedly coined by Federico Fellini in his film La Dolce vita in 1960 (in which they feature prominently, in particular chasing the blond star played by Anita Ekberg), but their existence predates the film. In the absence of a structured studio system to support stars as in Hollywood, paparazzi contributed to the build-up of star careers. Although they are always represented as an intrusive nuisance, violating people’s private lives, they were part and parcel of the European film industry. Unsurprisingly, Bardot rapidly provoked their interest, and in effect they followed in the footsteps of the more ‘legitimate’ photographers deployed by Vadim at the 10 This is a joke based on the fact that the boy is colour-blind. 11 The figure had previously been modelled on anonymous actresses; the practice of using well-known actresses or singers continued after Bardot, for instance with Catherine Deneuve.

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beginning of her career, but now their combined attention was stifling. For example, during her second marriage to Jacques Charrier in June 1959, the town hall (which by law has to remain open to the public during a marriage) was mobbed by the press. During the birth of their son in January 1960, journalists and photographers besieged her building to such an extent that Bardot had to give birth at home, the press mob adding to the trauma of the birth (as she experienced it). Equally desired and resented, paparazzi illustrate the ambivalence of the celebrity process. Accounts of Bardot’s life after 1956, including her own declarations and writing, are a litany of complaints about intrusive photographers, yet there is evidence that she made no attempt to hide from them. On the contrary, in some cases she made sure not only that they would be present, but also that she would be recognized. For instance, Bardot contrived to be seen with her new lover Sami Frey in the summer of 1960 while still married to her second husband, Jacques Charrier. Approaching her car on Boulevard Saint-Germain where she and Frey sat, Charrier immediately spotted her ‘tall coiffure à la Marie-Antoinette’, whereupon the two men had a fight, snapped by a conveniently placed photographer.12 As her friend, producer Christine Gouze-Rénal, remarked à propos of Bardot’s fear of being bothered in the street, ‘I often thought that if she did her hair differently […] people would notice her much less. But she insists on leaving her hair loose’.13 Here too, several of Bardot’s films reflect on this contradiction. Vie privée shows the star constantly pursued, often aggressively, by fans, members of the public, journalists, and photographers. At the same time, a sequence illustrates her rise to stardom with a montage of magazine covers and sensational gossip spreads with titles like ‘the image of sin’, ‘parents complain’ and ‘censored’, ‘immoral!’ In other words, the star seeks the reproduction of her image and the approval of fans but deplores their excessive presence as her life becomes constrained by it. This process is even more explicitly analysed in Jacques Rozier’s short film Paparazzi, commissioned by Jean-Luc Godard during the making of Le Mépris. While in Le Mépris, Godard’s authorial discourse turns the popular film star into a cinephile icon, the shoot in Capri was surrounded by paparazzi pursuing the star and her entourage off-screen. Yet according to the film’s voice-over, Bardot did her best to catch the attention of the photographers swarming around the crew, while ostensibly hiding from them. Beyond this insight, Rozier also astutely breaks down the process of turning the celebrity into 12 Lelièvre, pp. 128-129. 13 Rihoit, p. 277.

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an icon. The scenes about the paparazzi in a realistic mode document the business of image making. They speak about the people they photograph, their equipment, and the hazards and rewards of their job; one of them mentions they risk their lives in taking photos from dangerous spots. Shots of paparazzi with enormous telephoto lenses suggest their roles as hunters, yet images of magazine covers featuring Bardot reiterate the centrality of photos to her stardom. There are also close-ups of the star that showcase her beauty as a sublime spectacle. Towards the end of the film, two shots of Bardot turning her head towards the camera, smiling, her hair blowing in the wind, are slowed down and replayed many times. In the repetition of these tiny moments, with ethereal singing on the soundtrack, the star is frozen in time and literally becomes an icon. The intense mediatization process discussed above was the basis for the transformation of Bardot from starlet to icon. But the relentless proliferation of her image, which after all was a phenomenon experienced by other stars, would not have been sufficient to anchor her persona with such force in the culture of the time. In addition to the surface qualities of her image, her deeper meaning to her fans and the public at large were anchored in the culture of the time in more profound ways.

Imitating the icon: the symbol of a generation In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Bardot articulated the sexualized rebellion of the young generation against the conservative, patriarchal, and misogynist culture of the time. Her sex goddess identity, based on her strongly eroticized image, harked back to traditional gender roles, and yet she was also a figure of modernity and change. For Andy Warhol, who took her as the subject for one of his silkscreen series in 1974, she was ‘one of the first women to be really modern’.14 Bardot was part of what the American scholar Susan Weiner identifies as female enfants terribles,15 a group which includes the novelist Françoise Sagan (who published her very successful first novel, Bonjour tristesse, at 19) and the singer Juliette Gréco, among others. These are young women from privileged backgrounds who had the necessary cultural and aesthetic 14 Andy Warhol, quoted in the Gagosian Gallery exhibition press release, London, 28 November 2011 (the gallery exposed seven of the eight silkscreens made by the artist in 1974, following a commission by Bardot’s third husband Gunther Sachs). 15 See Weiner.

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capital to successfully channel their rebellion against the older generation through their art, though the process was not without ambiguity. While their youthful femininity enabled them to deploy seduction as a weapon, it also acted as a restraint by positioning them as objects of desire. For Bardot, this contradiction was particularly acute since as a film star she had to exploit her looks in a way that was not necessary for a novelist like Sagan. Such contradictions can be found too in the physical type represented by Bardot and the ‘iconic’ cultural creations inspired by her (such as the Barbie doll), the child-woman – a figure at once sexually provocative and unthreatening. Bardot also frequently received the label of ‘sex kitten’.16 The child-woman emerged as a recurring figure in the 1950s; for instance, Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita was published in 1955, and when Simone de Beauvoir wrote about Bardot, she entitled her piece ‘Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita syndrome’.17 Nevertheless, beyond the contradictions of the child-woman, the mixture of adulation and hostility Bardot generated, both on and off screen, reveals that she embodied precisely the complex ideological transformations of the country at a key moment in its history, torn between tradition and modernity. Beyond the sexual aura she deployed as a child-woman, Bardot was perceived, from And God Created Woman onwards, as representative of her age group, of the young generation arising after the trauma of the Second World War – revealingly, critics often referred to her as ‘the female James Dean’. On screen, her rebelliousness played out differently according to the genre of the films. In comedies such as Cette sacrée gamine (1956) and Une Parisienne (1957), her transgressions are the source of (comic) mayhem but considered charming – they are ultimately incorporated in the happy ending of the films in which she systematically gets her way, usually the man she wants. In Et Dieu… créa la femme, a light-hearted melodrama with comic elements, her character Juliette is the archetypal child-woman in relation to the ageing playboy Carradine (Curt Jürgens) who desires her, yet she turns him down. She shocks the older women and clearly has the sympathy of the young generation; she has friends her age, men and women, and she is loved by the young Michel (Jean-Louis Trintignant) whom she marries. Her sexual and youthful energy override her potential ‘threat’, in part because the film was directed by a young filmmaker, Vadim, and designed to showcase her (and his) modernity. Although at the end Michel slaps Juliette because of 16 It is often said that the British photographer Cornel Lucas coined the phrase for Bardot in 1955, though there is no conclusive evidence that the term was not used before. 17 See De Beauvoir.

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her brazen behaviour (drinking and dancing wildly), and she returns home with him hand-in-hand, apparently contrite, her provocative star persona cancels out any notion of submissiveness. Bardot appeared in fewer dramas, but as these were made by prestigious directors, they had a more lasting cultural impact. These films capitalize on her as a visual icon just as much as the light-hearted comedies, but they offer a much more negative version of her persona. In En cas de malheur and La Vérité, her youth and modernity are presented as attractive to male characters but dangerous, to them and to herself. In En cas de malheur, she wrecks the marriage and career of a senior lawyer (Jean Gabin), while provoking the jealous rage of her younger boyfriend. In La Vérité, her character Dominique Marceau is accused of the murder of her boyfriend Gilbert (Sami Frey); as the court case proceeds, it becomes clear that what is on trial is not so much Dominique’s actions as her hedonistic lifestyle in pursuit of a good time and sexual freedom. This is compared by the accusation lawyer to the ‘scandalous’ lifestyle of characters in Simone de Beauvoir’s novel Les Mandarins, and by extension Beauvoir herself. In parallel, it is obvious that Bardot is also targeted by the film. Dominique was modelled both on a real-life case,18 and on the star’s lifestyle, mirrored in several details in the plot, and well-known to the public through the media by the time the film came out in the Autumn of 1960 (over the summer, her off-screen affair with Sami Frey had also been splashed all over the gossip press). In both films, Bardot’s character dies violently at the end: she is murdered by her young boyfriend in En cas de malheur, and she commits suicide in jail in La Vérité. Similarly, she dies at the end of Vie privée and Le Mépris, departing in this way from her actual life story: contrary to contemporary sex goddesses, such as Diana Dors and Marilyn Monroe, Bardot did not die tragically young but lived to a ripe old age (at the time of writing, she is 85). Her death in these two films is also directly linked to her celebrity: in Vie privée she is blinded by a flashbulb and falls to her death from a tall building; in Le Mépris, she leaves her husband to follow a Hollywood film producer (Jack Palance), and they die in a car crash. All four films simultaneously celebrate her iconic power and punish her for it. The contradictory meanings attached to the icon Bardot in French culture in the 1950s and 1960s can be understood in two ways. One is that she crystallized the generational conflicts of a society that was in the grips of 18 Pauline Dubuisson; see Jaenada’s remarkable analysis of the Dubuisson case. For further analysis of La Vérité, see Vincendeau, ‘La Vérité: women on trial’, online film essay, The Criterion Collection, www.criterion.com/current/posts/6195-la-v-rit-women-on-trial.

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a wide-ranging process of modernization in a period of economic boom,19 yet was shackled by the forces of moral and cultural conservatism. The other sense is more specifically sexual. Bardot represented the desire for female emancipation more than emancipation itself at a time when such a thing was legally impossible. Although they had been finally granted the vote in 1946, women in post-war France were still legally subject to the power of their fathers and husbands, as pointed out by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, which created a scandal when published in 1949. Women’s actual sexual freedom was severely constrained in the absence of legal contraception or abortion. The model she offered, that of a carefree young woman pursuing her sexual desire in a hedonistic environment, was enormously attractive to young women, yet unattainable except for the most privileged – thus explaining the intensity of her appeal and the violent hostility she generated. There was however one aspect of Bardot that could be more easily copied, and that was her looks and clothes. Indeed, one of the most remarkable aspects of Bardotmania was the extent to which she was imitated by women. Her hairstyle, her dresses, her make-up, all were endlessly scrutinized and reproduced. Her buying a dress in a shop ensured the fortune of the shop and the designer, as happened to Louis Féraud after Bardot bought a white dress in his shop in Cannes, and the designer subsequently sold ‘500 of them in a matter of days’.20 While imitation by fans was not unusual for a major film star, Bardot brought this process to an unprecedented height, with multiple impacts: economic (expanding the fashion market), aesthetic and cultural (defining a new silhouette for women), and psychological (influence on fans). The writer and artist Jean Cocteau summed up this process when he said, ‘The fashion industry may in vain spend fortunes, but this witch, this sphinx only needs buy a pair of trousers and a man’s sweater at Madame Vachon in Saint-Tropez, for all the young women of the Côte d’Azur to adopt this outfit, and for this outfit to become fashion.’21 Bardot’s fashion sense came in part from her upbringing. Her mother was an elegant woman with contacts in the Parisian fashion world, and she was instrumental in launching her daughter’s first career as a model. Initially sporting a youthful version of the bourgeois fashion in vogue in the 19 The so-called ‘Trente Glorieuses’, ‘thirty glorious years’ of economic expansion, from the Liberation of France in 1945 to the oil crisis in the 1970s. 20 Louis Féraud obituary, 28 December 1989: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/581320. stm (accessed 3 November 2020). 21 Cocteau, p. 69.

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early 1950s, Bardot soon defined her own style against that of her mother’s generation, towards a ‘young’ identity. She rejected haute couture as ‘for grannies’22 and supported the work of a new generation of prêt-à-porter designers, whose creations displayed a more informal and relaxed style. She favoured bikinis, jeans, ‘Capri’ pants, striped sweaters, simple dresses in natural and cheap fabrics, and minimal jewellery, while at the same time her clothes were designed to maximize the erotic impact of her body, revealing her breasts, slim waist, and long legs.23 She cut a new figure as a star in this sense too, as she eschewed the fur coats, silk or satin dresses, and diamonds traditionally associated with stars at the time. This can be seen in the short documentary on the Côte d’Azur entitled Du côté de la côte, directed by Agnès Varda in 1958. Here we glimpse Bardot in Saint-Tropez, walking out of a building in jeans and T-shirt, her long hair blowing in the wind. Soon after, Varda inserts a shot of Sophia Loren at the Cannes festival, in an evening dress and a diamond tiara. The important point about Bardot’s looks and clothes is that they could be easily and cheaply reproduced. One of her most famous outfits was a pink and white gingham wedding dress designed by Jacques Esterel for her second wedding to Jacques Charrier in 1959, a pattern of which was soon available in Elle, reproduced in its 10 August issue of the same year. The gingham fabric (called Vichy in French), normally used for children’s clothes or tablecloths, was a bold choice as wedding dress material, but the wild success of the dress both revived the Vichy fabric industry and launched pink and white gingham as Bardot’s ‘signature’ fabric, an association still alive today. Bardot created a highly recognizable silhouette, with her mane of long blond hair, low-cut tops, tight waist and billowing or tight skirts and trousers, whose reproducibility and impact on women is recorded in several films. In Dear Brigitte, when the young boy and his father arrive in Paris, they take a taxi to Bardot’s residence. Suddenly, the boy points to a young woman in Capri pants and long blond hair walking on the pavement: ‘Look, it’s her!’ To which the taxi driver replies, ‘No, Monsieur, that is not our BB. In France, many girls try to look like BB’. In Vie privée at one point Bardot is driven through Paris; as her car stops at a traffic light, a group of men recognize her and heckle aggressively. We then see a cinema showing one of her films, La Garce de Syracuse (‘The Bitch from Syracuse’, an imaginary film) with a giant cut-out picture of her in a low-cut red dress, followed by a montage of shots of young women walking in the street, their hairstyle and clothes 22 Steele, p. 279. 23 For more details about Bardot and fashion, see Vincendeau 2005.

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very explicitly in the Bardot style. This establishes two things. On the one hand, we see how the connection between the ‘real’ Bardot and her fans is made via the icon, here concretely displayed at the front of the cinema. On the other hand, we also see the gendered nature of her reception; the men verbalize their desire aggressively24 while the young women appropriate her image literally on their bodies. Bardot thus epitomizes the process whereby, according to Alexander, imitation of celebrities through fashion is a process of absorption, of ‘becoming’ the star.25

The recycling and survival of the icon Today, over four decades after she gave up making films, Bardot is still in the news. Her memoirs of 1996 and 1999, as well as the half-dozen other books she has written since to air her views in an ‘unfiltered’ way, have frequently caused a stir, if not a scandal. Her main topic, the defence of animal rights, has a long history. Always known as an animal lover, in the 1970s Bardot moved on to a militant phase with her campaign against the culling of baby seals in Canada, and she has continued her actions vigorously ever since. Her latest book at the time of writing, Brigitte Bardot, Tears of Battle, is subtitled ‘An Animal Rights Memoir’,26 and it features a photo of the young Bardot with a monkey on the cover. In 1986, she established the Fondation Brigitte Bardot, devoted to a range of activities related to animal welfare (for instance against the use of real fur in fashion).27 However, this activism at times slides into racist pronouncements, in particular when it comes to Muslim and Jewish traditions of slaughtering animals, to which she is violently opposed. The hostility she provokes in this respect is reinforced by the fact that her fourth husband, Bernard d’Ormale (whom she married in 1992), is a known sympathizer for the far-right party the Rassemblement National (formerly Front National). This politically-inflected image of Bardot keeps her media presence alive, but it affects – often negatively – the way her ageing is perceived. As a former actress and veteran celebrity, she retains a fan base and is regularly celebrated; her birthdays are an item in the national news, and there 24 At another point in the film, an older woman violently attacks her verbally in a lift, a scene based on a real-life episode; however, this is an isolated case and Bardot typically elicited female fandom. 25 Alexander, p. 325. 26 Bardot, with Anne-Cécile Huprelle. 27 See www.fondationbrigittebardot.fr/

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continues to be a steady stream of books about her, from biographies and coffee-table books to academic work. At the same time, there is palpable hostility, especially on the internet, directed at the ageing Bardot, and pictures of her today are relentlessly contrasted, in a derogatory way, with her splendid youthful image. The mocking of the aged Bardot is easily recognizable as banal misogyny and ageism, whereby older women are mercilessly mocked. In this respect as in others, Bardot is confrontational and uncompromising. She explicitly refuses to have recourse to plastic surgery, contravening today’s expectations regarding stars and celebrities, especially women. Yet at the same time she retains a seductive image, wearing pretty clothes, make-up, and doing up her long – grey – hair, sometimes with flowers in it. On the one hand, she won’t give up the memory of her youthful attractiveness, and on the other she refuses artificial means to maintain it. But the mocking or hostility also speak to the degradation of the surface beauty of the icon being felt as intolerable. To assuage the loss, one avenue is open, that of recycling and merchandising the ‘old’ image of the young Bardot. In addition to a plethora of still photographs and postcards of the young star, the image of the young Bardot proliferates on T-shirts, purses, canvas bags, tote bags, and so on. A reproduction of the bust of Marianne can easily be obtained from the Louvre museum shop. In 2010, the luxury brand Lancel launched a Brigitte Bardot bag which does not carry her actual image, but refers to her in other ways. The star insisted that the bag not be made of leather; her initials are attached to it as a metallic charm, and the lining is in pink and white gingham fabric, as is a small make-up purse accompanying the bag. The important publicity campaign for the bag was based around a picture of a radiant young Bardot smiling while its motto, ‘Et Lancel… créa le B.Bardot’ (And Lancel… created the B.Bardot’) clearly alluded to her film Et Dieu… créa la femme. The Lancel launch took place shortly after a major Bardot exhibition at Boulogne-Billancourt, near Paris, in late 2009,28 which went on to Saint-Tropez in 2010 and Los Angeles in 2012, with as a subtitle, ‘B.B., the carefree years’, echoed in Lancel’s publicity tag for the Bardot bag of ‘légèreté’ (lightness). While the airbrushing out of the older woman is typical of our ageist society, and the recycling of the image obeys a commercial logic, the appeal to the Bardot of 60 years ago clearly also shows her continued relevance, deploying the seductive surface of the young icon to address her deeper anchorage in French culture. The formerly 28 The exhibition ran from 29 September 2009 to 31 January 2010 at the Espace Landowki, Boulogne-Billancourt, near Paris, curated by Henry-Jean Servat.

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iconoclastic young woman battling against the patriarchal conventions of her time has become not only the ‘Woman of the 1960s’ but ‘BB forever’.29

References Alexander, Jeffrey, ‘The Celebrity-Icon’, Cultural Sociology 4, no. 3, 2010, pp. 323-336. Bardot, Brigitte, Initiales B.B. Mémoires, Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1996. Bardot, Brigitte, Le Carré de Pluton, Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1999. Bardot, Brigitte, with Anne-Cécile Huprelle. Tears of Battle, An Animal Rights Memoir, New York, Arcade Publishing, 2019. Beauvoir, Simone de, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome, London, André Deutsch and Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1960. Beauvoir, Simone de, The Second Sex, London, Vintage, 2009. Cocteau, Jean, ‘Le cas Brigitte Bardot’, in Mes Monstres sacrés, Paris, Editions Encre, 1979. Geraghty, Christine ‘Re-examining Stardom: Questions of Texts, Bodies and Performance’, in Reinventing Film Studies, edited by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, London, Arnold, 2000, pp. 183-201. Jaenada, Philippe, La Petite femelle, Paris, Julliard, 2015. Lelièvre, Marie-Dominique, Brigitte Bardot, Plein la vue, Paris, Flammarion, 2012. Rihoit, Catherine, Brigitte Bardot, Un mythe français, Paris, Olivier Orban, 1986. Rojek, Chris, Celebrity, London, Reaktion Books, 2001. Steele, Valerie, Paris Fashion, A Cultural History, New York, Oxford, Berg, 1998. Vincendeau, Ginette, ‘Hot Couture: Brigitte Bardot’s Fashion Revolution’, in Fashioning Film Stars, Dress, Culture, Identity, edited by Rachel Moseley, London, BFI, 2005, pp. 134-146. Vincendeau, Ginette, Brigitte Bardot, London, BFI/Palgrave, 2013. Vincendeau, Ginette, ‘And Bardot … Became a Blonde: Hair, Stardom and Modernity in Post-war France’, Celebrity Studies 7, no. 1, 2016, pp. 98-112. Weiner, Susan. Enfants Terribles, Youth and Femininity in the Mass Media in France, 1945-1968, Baltimore MD and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

About the author Ginette Vincendeau holds the chair of Film Studies at King’s College London. Her research focuses on French cinema, especially popular genres 29 Bruckner, pp. 78-79.

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(thriller, film noir, comedy) and film celebrities. She has published widely on stardom in European and Hollywood film, with a special focus on the cinematic icon Brigitte Bardot. Ginette Vincendeau is a regular contributor to the international film magazine Sight & Sound, editor of The Encyclopedia of European Cinema (1995) and biographer of director Jean-Pierre Melville. Recent book publications entail Paris in the cinema: Beyond the Flâneur (2018) co-edited with Alastair Phillips that offers a new approach to the representation of Paris on screen.



The Renaissance at a Glance The Panoramic View of Florence Paul van den Akker Abstract Since its inauguration in 1869, hardly anyone who travels to Florence will miss a visit to the Piazzale Michelangelo to enjoy the panoramic view of the city. But there is more than meets the eye. In this chapter it is argued that around 1800 the panorama of Florence started to grow into an iconic view, in line with the formative role that historians began to assign to the f ifteenth-century Republic of Florence in Europe’s early cultural development; an idea that culminated in Burckhardt’s characterization of Florence as the cradle of modern man. Bearing this idea in mind, this chapter investigates how the panorama, at a glace, captures the Tuscan city in its almost unaltered early Renaissance state and how it slowly grew into a popular image that conjures up Florence’s historical achievements in a nutshell. Keywords: Florence, Piazzale Michelangelo, William Roscoe, Louis Gauffier, Lord Byron, Stendhal, Jacob Burckhardt

Around 1865, the Italian urban designer Giuseppe Poggi (1811-1901) began constructing the southern ring way around Florence. The so-called viale dei Colli runs on the former old city walls that Poggi was commissioned to demolish to meet the needs of the then-expanding modern city. Winding through the southern hills, the scenic road is brought to a climax in the Piazzale Michelangelo, the wide terrace with a monument in the middle, containing bronze copies of the famous marble sculptures which Michelangelo had made during his Florentine period. From there a beautiful panoramic view unfolds. One can see at a glance the Tuscan city along the Arno river practically in its Renaissance state as the Medici family had left it a long

Boven, Erica van, and Marieke Winkler (eds), The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463728225_akker

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Image 6  Florence seen from the Piazzale Michelangelo, 2009

Photograph by the author

time ago. Actually, even now the later nineteenth-century urban sprawl seems almost invisible, or appears no more than a blur around the historic inner city at the most. Since its inauguration in 1869, hardly anyone who travels to Florence will miss a visit to the Piazzale to enjoy the splendid view on the city. In this chapter, the panoramic view of Florence is studied as an iconic site, that is, a privileged point of reference within the collective remembrance of a specific historical period, in this case the Renaissance. By investigating the way the city was depicted by different artists, it is argued that the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century interpretation of Renaissance Florence played a key role in raising the panoramic view of the city to an iconic status.

The panoramic view of Florence The appeal of panoramic urban views goes far back – at least over 500 years, as a charming detail shows in the background of Domenico Ghirlandaio’s fresco of the Visitation. It is one of the scenes dedicated to the life of St. John the Baptist which he painted around 1486-90 in the Turnabuoni

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Image 7  Domenico Ghirlandaio, Visitation, 1485-1490, fresco

Capella Maggiore (Tornabuoni Chapel), Santa Maria Novella, Florence

chapel in the Florentine church of Santa Maria Novella. In the middle of the Visitation are three subsidiary figures in contemporary clothes, seen from behind, calmly leaning over a wall on the top of a hill. Even now they trigger our curiosity to join them and inspect the view below which apparently has drawn their attention. There is the suggestion of a city to admire; a fictitious one indeed, yet appropriately reminiscent of Florence, with the middle and right tower resembling that of Palazzo Vecchio and the Santa Maria Novella.1 In contrast to Ghirlandaio’s small rampart, where only three figures enjoy the view of the townscape, the modern Piazzale Michelangelo is normally very crowdy during the day. We modern tourists are well aware that we are 1

Cadogan, pp. 236-243.

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Image 8 John Brampton Philpot, Panorama of Florence from San Miniato, ca 1857, albumen print, 16.5 × 42.3 cm

Private collection

Image 9 John Ruskin and George Hobbes (attributed), Panorama of Florence from San Miniato, 1845, daguerreotype, 16.9 × 21.3 cm

Lancaster University, The Ruskin Library, Museum and Research Centre, the Whitehouse Collection

far from unique in our admiration for the vista, and that we are definitely not the first to capture it with a camera. Since the invention of this apparatus, the panoramic view has been photographed innumerable times. The earliest pictures by the pioneers John Brampton Philpot (1812-1878) and Alphonse Bernoud (1820-1889) even go back to the late fifties and early sixties of the nineteenth century, not considering the older daguerreotypes by a.o. John

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Ruskin (1819-1900) and his companion John (‘George’) Hobbes.2 Considering these early dates of the photographs taken from nearly the same spot at San Miniato or the Bobboli gardens, Poggi incorporated an already favourite site into his design of the viale dei Colli, and, what’s more, enlarged its popularity by transforming it into a monumental public square.3 But already before the camera’s arrival, the site had attracted the attention of artists and travellers. Among them Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879), who in October 1836 drew a sketch of the site, and the painter Thomas Cole (18011848). Born in England and emigrated to America in 1818, the latter had set out on a Grand Tour of Europe in 1829. During his stay in Italy in 1831-1832, Cole also visited Florence and went to the San Miniato. From there he made a careful drawing of the panorama, on which he recorded the exact date and time of his presence, that is 15 June 1831, half an hour before sunset. In 1837, five years after his return to New York, he transformed the sketch into a great painting. 4 It was in the same period that a smaller version of the panoramic view from the southern hills, softer in tone, was painted by the French artist Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796-1875) during his second stay in Italy around 1835-40.5 Most likely Cole’s and Corot’s works are only two of a larger production of panoramic paintings of Florence from this spot around the second quarter of the nineteenth century. At least, it is suggested by the regular appearance of rather unknown versions on the art market. Recently, two were auctioned with a size close to Cole’s painting: in 2017, one by the English painter William James Müller (1812-1845), who visited Florence at the end of November 1834 during his Grand Tour from Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland to Italy; and in 2018, another one by the Dutch artist Abraham Teerlink (1776-1857). Unfortunately, both are undated, but it is clear that Müller must have painted his between 1834 and 1845. As for Teerlink, who already went to Rome in 1809 and never left Italy again, his painting is suggested to be from 1856.6 2 Brampton Philpot made several photographs from the San Miniato, see Tamassia; Fanelli 2019. For Alphonse Bernoud, see Fanelli and Mazza, Alphonse Bernoud. See also Fanelli 2013 on Florence and photography. For Ruskin and Hobbes, see Quintavalle, pp. 13-50, 71-77, and 83. For another daguerreotype, by Alexander Ellis (1814-1890), dated June 1841, see Smith, pp. 7-32, and two others by Ferdinando Artaria (1781-1843), see Hannavy, p. 83; Quintavalle, pp. 87-136; Fanelli, ‘Artaria’. 3 On the north bank Poggi conducted a network of avenues on the place of the old city walls. See Fanelli 1980, esp. Chapter 11; Poettinger and Roggi. 4 A heliogravure of Viollet-le-Duc’s drawing was posthumously published in E.E. Viollet-le-Duc 1884, planche C. For Cole, see Barringer, pp. 45-46. 5 Pomarède, pp. 128-129. 6 Müller’s painting was auctioned at Sotheby’s London, 6 July 2017, lot 189. Müller stayed in Florence from 27 November 1834 until the end of the month, see Solly. The panorama painting

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Image 10 Viollet-le-Duc, Panorama of Florence from San Miniato, 1836, pen, brown and black ink, traces of pencil, 31.8 × 64.4 cm

Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Image 11 Thomas Cole, View of Florence from San Miniato, 1837, oil on canvas, 99.1 × 160.3 cm

Cleveland Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

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Image 12 Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, View of Florence from the Boboli Gardens, 1835-1840, oil on canvas, 51 × 73.5 cm

Louvre Museum

According to Tim Harbinger, Cole when he visited Florence had been ‘especially captivated by the scenery, and particularly by the famous view of the city’.7 Nowadays it is famous indeed, and it is even likely that the view must already have gained some of its reputation at the time Cole and other early nineteenth-century painters climbed up the southern hills across the Arno. When one consults Luigi Salerno’s I pittori di vedute in Italia of 1991 and the exhibition catalogue Firenze e la sua imagine, cinque secoli di vedutismo of 1994, and browses through the internet, it becomes clear that in general Florence had been a beloved subject to cityscape painters from the fifteenth century on. But it can also be concluded that the specific view of Florence from the southern hills was a rather late invention.8 Even in the is mentioned in Solly’s list of works as a ‘Large Picture of Florence’, see Solly, p.332. Abraham Teerlink’s painting was auctioned at Wannenes Art Auctions in Genova, Dipinti antichi e del XIX secolo, p. 302, lot.nr. 899. In the entry it is suggested that the panoramic view corresponds to the painting ‘Firenze, veduta da San Miniato’ dated 1856, which was one of Teerlink’s works presented on the exhibitions of the ‘Società Amatori e Cultori di Roma’. In late 2019 Kunsthandel P. de Boer in Amsterdam sold the painting at the PAN Amsterdam. 7 Barringer, p. 45. 8 See Salerno. The fresco with the Siege of Florence in 1530, painted by Giorgio Vasari in 1558 in the Palazzo Vecchio, is exceptional in its bird’s-eye view of the city and its surroundings taken from the south. According to Chiarini there was a change of focus at the end of the eighteenth century from documenting the city to representing its environments. He especially refers to the work of the painter Jakob Phillip Hackert, which he considers to have been the source of Corot and eventually the French impressionists; see Chiarini and Marabottini, p. 6.

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works of Thomas Patch (1725-1782), whose panoramic pictures of Florence were very popular among eighteenth-century Grand Tourists, no such city portrait can be found. Thus, somewhere between the time of Patch and Cole the panoramic view must have started to draw the attention of painters and art lovers. I think it was in the last decade of the eighteenth century, during the turmoil of the French Revolution and its aftermath, that it made its entrance as a subject for painting. And there was more to it than just a change of taste. At first the view, though slightly more to the west at the Bobboli Gardens, seems to have been introduced in the guise of a meaningful background in portraits painted by Louis Gauffier (1762-1801). In 1779 this French artist had settled in Rome, where he numbered many a grand tourist among his clientele. However, being a royalist the French Revolution made Gauffier flee to Florence, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany at the time. In 1795 the then reigning duke, Ferdinando III (1769-1824), decided to declare neutrality in the war against the French First Republic. He was able to gain independence for Tuscany when his contemporary Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), then still general, invaded the Italian peninsula and occupied its Northern parts. This was partly due to Ferdinand’s not unsympathetic attitude towards the Republic, which was rather in line with the enlightened absolutist form of government, which his father, Pietro Leopoldo (1747-1792), had gradually developed in Tuscany. It was in this short period of Florence’s neutrality that Gauffier in 1798 painted, among others, the portrait of the poet Thomas Penrose (1769-1851), then secretary to the English envoy to the duke of Tuscany.9 Penrose is recorded as if interrupted during his gentleman’s pastime of sketching the view, seated on a terrace somewhere in the Boboli Gardens. By the time Napoleon did occupy Tuscany and the Grand Duchy was dissolved, in 1799, Gauffier must have felt safe enough to stay in the capital as a specialist in portrait painting. Obviously the view of Florence was appreciated by some French officers of Napoleon’s army, who were stationed there, as it became a favorite background to the portraits which they commissioned Gauffier to paint.10

9 Poppi, pp. 539-564, esp. 540, tav. 777; Salerno, p. 420, tav. 71; Marabottini, 177-179, cat. no. 111. A study in pencil for the portrait of Penrose is in the National Museum of Ancient Art in Lisbon. 10 See e.g. Gauffier’s portrait of an officer, thought to be General Jean-Claude Moreau (1755-1828), auctioned at Christie’s New York 13-04-2016, lot 26. In the same catalogue mention is made of a composite painting with eleven reduced sketches of portraits, corresponding to full-scale commissions by individuals who were in Italy, some of them also with a view on Florence in the background. It is in the Musée Fabre in Montpellier http://museefabre.montpellier3m.fr/

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Image 13 Louis Gauffier, Portrait of Dr. Thomas Penrose, 1798, oil on canvas, 49.2 × 65.4 cm

Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN, USA

In another guise, the panorama image appears in Gauffier’s portrait of 1795-1796 of the family of André-François, count Miot de Melito (1762-1841), RESSOURCES/RECHERCHE_D_OEUVRES (accessed 3 November 2020). For a biography of Gauffier, see Zanella.

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who at that time was Minister Plenipotentiary for the French Republic to the Grand Duke of Tuscany in Florence.11 Gauffier captured Miot as the servant of the Republic in the hall of his Florentine residence, surrounded by his wife, two children, and his brother. The hall is decorated with two large sculptures and a great panorama picture; it is hard to tell whether the latter suggests a coloured drawing, or a tempera-painting functioning as a kind of wall-hanging.12 According to the gallery owner Patrick Matthiesen, who sold the picture in 2010 to The National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the sculptures serve as symbols of Miot’s credentials: the bust on the table of the Roman Republic’s founder, Brutus, as a Republican symbol, and the statue of Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and the arts, who had become the emblem of the new French Republic as underlined by the inscription on its plinth (‘Republique Française’). Obviously, the panorama painting was a symbolic reference to Miot’s professional link to Florence as a French diplomat.13 Count Miot may have possessed one of the many copies of the bust, but Matthiesen holds the Minerva to be the product of Gauffier’s imagination. And he believes the same goes for the panorama, which, moreover, ‘is not a view of contemporary Florence; instead it is the Tuscan capital during the time of her own glorious republic.’ Until now it is indeed unknown whether a panorama as in Miot’s portrait really existed, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did. Gauffier may have made it himself to serve as a model for the background in his portraits. In that case it would have been a first in the genre of Florentine panoramas. If not, then at least the credit goes to the fictive panorama in the count’s family portrait. Matthiesen was right in his observation that Gauffier’s panorama in his portrait of the count’s family presents Florence in its Renaissance state, 11 In his memoirs Miot de Mélito states that on 6 February 1795 he was appointed as ‘ministre plénipotentiaire près le grand-duc de Toscane’. Miot de Mélito, p. 56. [French Edition] 12 Matthiesen, p. 33-43. In 2010 the painting was bought from The Matthiesen Gallery by the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. 13 In 1795, after Napoleon Bonaparte’s entry into the political arena, ‘realizing that his state was in peril, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand III, son of the Austrian Emperor, finally officially recognized the Republic and Tuscany was declared neutral. … It was in the context of these events that André-François Miot … was appointed to the strategic post of Foreign Affairs Commissioner, a title, which under the Directoire was equivalent in rank to that of Foreign Minister.’ Matthiesen, p. 37. The portrait of Miot continued a tradition to be found e.g. in the family portrait of Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany (1765 to 1790), of 1773 by the Austrian artist Wenceslaus Werlin (?-1780). At the right is a vista of Florence, being the Grand Duchy’s capital, as symbol of Ferdinand’s territory. The portrait is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, www.khm.at/objektdb/detail/2420/ (accessed 3 November 2020).

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Image 14 Louis Gauffier, The Family of André-François, Count Miot de Melito, 17951796, oil on canvas, 68.7 × 88 cm

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

although it doesn’t rule it out as an image of the contemporary city. As a matter of fact, from this viewpoint Florence’s appearance had hardly changed over the centuries. Yet I doubt whether Matthiesen’s negative interpretation of the cityscape as a token of transience, ‘a comment on the obsolescence of the Italian state’, is correct. Why should Gauffier and Miot, by focusing on the Dome and the Palazzo Vecchio, ‘two powerful symbols, respectively of church and state’ have wanted to give ‘a f inal comment that here, like everywhere, the blind power of nature governs all’, as Matthiesen believes?14 In his memoirs of 1858, based on his diaries and posthumously published by his son-in-law, Miot shows to have been familiar with the view that in the fifteenth century the Republic of Florence had played an important role in politics, arts and sciences. In for example one of his reports to the Committee of Public Safety in France, he refers to (here quoted in the 1881 English translation of his memoirs) ‘the famous era of the Florentine Republic’ and he praises the Grand Duke’s father, 14 Matthiesen, p. 43.

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Pietro Leopoldo, who in contrast to the Medici Grand Dukes before him had given Florence ‘a more important part to play’ among the States of Italy. In him, Miot could not ‘but recognize an enlightened ruler’.15 It was with regret, however, that he observed how the Florentine society of his time proved not to be interested in Pietro Leopoldo’s enlightened policy. And Miot deplores how thus, Florence had lost the antique energy which had distinguished that noble city in the stormy times of the Republic. Her peaceable inhabitants, deprived of all their rights, were no longer the distrustful citizens, whom love of freedom and of independence had so often roused to the most courageous measures and the most generous sacrifices. They were no longer so many illustrious Maecenas who offered magnanimous hospitality to science and letters.16

Perhaps this passage prompted Matthiesen to negatively interpret the panorama in the count’s family portrait. It is true, Miot deplored that in his time the ‘prevailing aspect of all classes [in Florence] was that of indolence’, but I don’t think that he or Gauffier wanted the panorama to express this mood.17 It is rather the opposite: the ostentatious place of the picture on the wall is to be interpreted as a tribute to Renaissance Florence in the time of the Republic with its critical citizens and fruitful patronage. And probably the same goes for the vista on the background of Gauffier’s other portraits of French officers. Given the characterization of the Florentine Republicans in his memoirs, it comes as no surprise that Miot, in his capacity of ambassador and minister of the new French Republic, was inclined to look at fifteenth-century Florence as a worthy pioneer of his government. To us this profile of the Florentines of the day as citizens with ‘love of freedom and of independence’, capable of ‘courageous measures’ and generous towards the arts and sciences, may sound as a literary cliché, or icon if you wish. After all, for a long time this characterization has grown into an inherent part of the story of the Early Renaissance in Italy. Even if in serious scholarly studies it is considered no longer tenable, the cliché is often still heard. But keep in mind that in Miot’s time these ideas were recent. After looking at the fifteenth century itself, I will elaborate further on this point. 15 Miot de Melito, p. 38. 16 Miot de Melito, p. 77. 17 Miot de Melito, p. 77.

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From a prosperous present to a glorious past The practice of portraying the city has a long history. Besides some visual renderings in the form of imaginary scale models held by a city’s patron saint, such as the one of Florence which an anonymous painter around 1472 put in the left hand of Saint Zenobius, there is the genre of the pictorial map, or bird’s-eye view map, in which the city is presented in a view from above at an oblique angle. A famous response to the early modern growing demand for geographically accurate pictorial overviews, is the woodcut rendering of the city of Venice which Anton Kolb, a German merchant, in 1500 had commissioned Jacopo de’ Barbari (c. 1470-1516?) to design.18 Apparently Kolb, for a long time living in Venice, wanted to visually honour the city as an economic and military naval power. Barbari characterized Venice as a commercial centre of the world by inserting the images of Mercury and Neptune, besides those of the eight classical wind gods. Mercury and Neptune harmoniously change glances, as the god of commerce from the sky above to the ruling god of the sea in the water below. The visual honour also applies to the city’s beauty, which perhaps is best to be described as a functional correlation between a unique geographical situation, urban structure, and variety of buildings. It was this organic unity which qualified Venice as a strong naval power and trading centre, and which Barbari made visible at a glance by using the bird’s-eye view. There are also fifteenth-century written testimonies of appreciation for a city’s aesthetics in combination with its functional and administrative characteristics. At the beginning of the century, the Florentine humanist and chancellor Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370-1444), for example, wrote in his eulogy on Florence that ‘ornaments and tasteful things pervade the city from all sides’. He referred in particular to the beauty of the buildings. ‘What architecture, what sort of decorations!’ Bruni exclaimed. ‘For as the blood pervades the whole body, in the same way the whole town is pervaded by beauties and things pleasing to the senses.’ One of them in particular, the Palazzo Vecchio, he thought to exceed all other buildings, revealing its function of town hall at first sight. In his eyes the buildings outside the city create a sense of harmony, covering ‘all the mountains, hills and plains’ like snow ‘as described by Homer’, and thus ‘they rather look to have fallen from heaven than being man made’.19 18 Van der Sman, pp. 40-41. 19 Bruni’s Laudatio Florentinae Urbis dates from 1403-1404. I here partly adapted the English translation – Bruni, In Praise of Florence, 82-84 – on the basis of Scheepers’ Dutch translation, that conforms more to the Latin original.

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Image 15 Andrea Verrocchio (attributed), Madonna and four saints, detail with a model of the city of Florence in the left hand of San Zenobius, oil on panel, 173 × 165 cm (full painting)

San Martino a Strada in Chianti, Grassina (originally in the Church of SS. Annunziata, Florence)

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Image 16 Anonymous, after Jacopo de’ Barbari, Birds-eye view of Venice, ca 1500, woodcut (6 blocks on 12 leaves of paper), 134 × 283 cm

Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

Bruni’s enthusiasm for the urban and architectural beauty bears witness of civic pride. To him the Florentine architecture expressed the unique flowering of his city: a high level of civilization which he also recognized in Florence’s military feats, habits and customs, the republican government, and the use of language. Certainly, his eulogy stands in a classical literary tradition, written as it is in the early fifteenth century, which is shortly before the actual introduction of what is now called Renaissance architecture.20 Yet Bruni set the tone, and his panegyric had its impact on the future. Or he expressed a present civic pride which gradually seems to have stimulated artists, architects and patrons to spend their talents and money to add new beauties to the city. Perhaps it also motivated the making of Francesco Rosselli’s great woodcut of Florence, which is one of the earliest realistic cityscapes.21 Five and a half centuries later, Bruni’s eulogy was to become a key document for Hans Baron (1900-1988) in studying the origins of the Renaissance.22 According to this German-American historian the text contained the first signs of ‘our’ modern mentality. Following the example set by antiquity, the Florentine humanists of the early fifteenth century allegedly promoted a democratic republic of citizens, full of self-esteem and social responsibility. 20 Scheepers, pp. 15-76. See also Wikipedia, ‘List of literary descriptions of cities (before 1550)’. 21 See Nuti. A comparable panoramic view to Florence by Rosselli, ca 1489-95, is discussed by Tartuferi. 22 See Baron. See also De Koomen, pp. 263-280 and 281-306.

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Image 17 Francesco di Lorenzo Rosselli (?), Panoramic view of Florence, ca 1471-82, woodcut, 58.5 × 13.15 cm (in six leaves)

Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

With this interpretation Baron in 1955 revived the once highly popular, but then already waning image created a century earlier by Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) of the Renaissance as the cradle of modern man. And thus Baron gave back to Florence her position as a ‘unique city – by far the most important workshop of the Italian, and of the modern European spirit’, as Burckhardt had clearly and concisely put it in Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy) of 1860.23 Burckhardt has become the best-known advocate of this iconic interpretation of Florence. And probably his name will always be connected to the idea of the Renaissance as the period in which man came to see himself as the centre of the universe, and Florence as the place where he began to criticize seemingly indisputable religious, political or, for example, scientific axioms. Regardless, the passage from the memoirs of Miot de Melito quoted above shows that Florence was already assigned a vital formative role in the early development of European culture long before Burckhardt’s publication. But, as I said earlier, in Miot’s time it was still a rather recent idea. It was only since the turn of the eighteenth century that the Republic period of Florence had come to be appreciated as a milestone in the history of European culture. Before that time, the city ruled by members of the House of Medici, in particular Lorenzo il Magnifico, could hardly count on the 23 Burckhardt, 1860, p. 88: ‘… bei weitem die wichtigste Werkstätte der italienischen, ja des modernen europäischen Geistes überhaupt.’ The English translation used here is based on Burckhardt, 1928, p. 86.

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attention of historians, except in the context of local history.24 The focus had been on glorifying Rome’s role during the sixteenth century, the period that later came to be labelled as the High Renaissance, in its revival of the classical past in the field of the arts and sciences. This perspective had kept foreign visitors from paying serious attention to the ‘medieval’ city of Florence. Eager to reach Rome, Goethe (1749-1832), for example, was only marginally interested in Florence when he was travelling through Italy: ‘I hurried out of the city as quickly as I entered it’, he reported on his arrival on October 23 1786.25 So it is highly unlikely, that Goethe would have wanted a painter like Gauffier to make a portrait of him against a panoramic view of Florence. Miot’s taste and that of the other French sitters rather conform to what the French writer Marie-Henri Beyle would articulate just a couple of years later. Better known as Stendhal (1783-1842), Beyle became their comrade in 1800 when he joined the Italian army of Napoleon. On his return to Italy in 1817, three years after the Emperor Napoleon’s final defeat, he visited Florence again. Coming from the Apennine Mountains, Stendhal was struck by the sight of the city laying in the valley. As he wrote in his Rome, Naples et Florence (1817), it was with a beating heart as if in love, that he realized this to be the place ‘of Dante, Michelangelo, Leonardo! I thought by myself: behold the noble city, the queen of the middle ages! It is within these walls that civilization has started over again.’26 Like Stendhal, many artists and tourists took the opportunity to travel through Europe again after the French domination. Among them were the English architect and artist James Hakewill (1778-1843) and his wife, the painter and writer Maria Catherine Hakewill-Brown (17??-1842). During their journey in 1816-1817, in the same years as Stendhal’s, Hakewill had taken up the plan to publish an illustrated tourist guide of Italy. After having been asked to collaborate, the painter William Turner (1775-1851) made his own Italian trip two years later, during which he filled 23 sketchbooks with on-the-spot records of cities and sights, today all preserved in the Tate Gallery in London. One of them contains a loose sheet by Hakewill’s hand with recommendations of sights and works of art in Florence, which Turner actually followed on his homeward journey from Rome.27 24 Haskell, pp. 201-216. 25 Goethe, 1970, p. 149; Goethe, 1976, pp. 116-117. 26 De Stendhal, pp. 99-100. It was not until the French historian Jules Michelet that it became standard to label the fifteenth century as part of the Renaissance, an idea which Burckhardt further popularized; Haskell, esp. pp. 273-274. 27 See Powell. For the sketchbooks in the collection of Tate London, see Moorby May 2011a, and for the so-called Route to Rome sketchbook of 1819, including notes by Hakewill, see Moorby

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Image 18 George Cook, Panorama to Florence from the San Miniato hill, after a design which William Turner made after a sketch by James Hakewill, engraving, in: James Hakewill. A Picturesque Tour of Italy, from Drawings Made in 1816-1817

London: John Murray, 1820 (without numbering)

Hakewill’s and Turner’s coproduction, entitled A Picturesque Tour of Italy, From Drawings made in 1816-1817, was published in 1820 with engravings after the designs of both artists. Two are of different panoramas of Florence. One is taken from Fiesole in the North, presenting, as Hakewill remarked, ‘one of the richest and most varied assemblage of picturesque objects that can be found in Italy.’28 But it is the other view, from the opposite side of San Miniato, that was Hakewill’s favourite one. ‘From this point is given the best general view of the city of Florence’, he opens his description, and then concisely zooms in on the ancient buildings and their treasures. That for Hakewill it was more than a view of just a beautiful contemporary city becomes clear at the end. There he quotes from the lengthy narrative poem Child Harold’s Pilgrimage, which Lord Byron (1788-1824) had only recently published. Byron who, we are told, ‘has admirably touched upon the leading March 2010. For the sheet with Hakewill’s recommendations, see Moorby May 2011b. 28 Hakewill, no numbering. At the bottom left the engravings bear the name of Turner as the draughtsman who worked after a sketch by Hakewill. For the sketches by Hakewill, see Cubberley and Herrmann.

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features which strike the imagination on looking upon the city of Florence’. The quotation, especially the last three lines, can also be read as a caption of the engraving: But Arno wins us to the fair white walls, Where the Etrurian Athens claims and keeps A softer feeling for her fairy halls. Girt by her sheath of hills, she reaps Her corn, and wine, and oil, and Plenty leaps To laughing life with her redundant horn. Along the banks where smiling Arno sweeps Was modern Luxury of Commerce born, And buried Learning rose, redeemed to a new morn.29

Byron’s poem and Stendhal’s description of his arrival in Florence were both written around 1817. Their image of the city as the cradle of a cultural rebirth is what in 1860 was to become the key concept of Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. Whereas Stendhal had still characterized the fifteenth century as part of the Middle Ages (he praised Florence as ‘the queen of the middle ages’), Burckhardt was to call it the ‘Renaissance’, a term first introduced in 1855 by the French historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874) in a book on sixteenth-century French culture. Or more precisely, Burckhardt would label the fifteenth century as ‘Early Renaissance’, with Florence as the leading city which he distinguished from the Roman sixteenth-century High Renaissance. Nevertheless, he built on the same vision which Stendhal and Byron had propounded. Moreover, it was not even their invention either. For its creator we must go back in time a little bit further, to William Roscoe (1753-1831), the English historian and art collector who never visited Italy. In 1796 Roscoe published The Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Called the Magnificent.30 It was immediately a great success, being widely read not only in the English version, but also in the French, German and Italian translations directly following the original publication.31 The novelty of Roscoe’s book was exactly that it promoted fifteenth-century Florence as the place where European civilization was reborn. ‘The close of the fifteenth, and the 29 Hakewill, no numbering. For the poem itself, see Byron, 47, Canto IV, XLVIII. 30 Fletcher, pp. 1-20, esp. p. 2-3. 31 Clough, pp. 97-118. For the editions and translations, see pp. 98-99. According to Clough the title page of the first edition of Roscoe’s biography of 1796 is ‘misleadingly dated “1795”’.

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beginning of the sixteenth century’, the opening runs, ‘comprehend one of those periods of history entitled to our minutest study and inquiry. Almost all the great events from which Europe derives its present advantages, are to be traced up to those times.’ Roscoe mentions the invention of the art of printing, the schism from the church of Rome, and ‘the degree of perfection attained in the fine arts and the final introduction of true principles of criticism and taste’.32 Thus in Florence the dark Middle Ages would have come to an end, and that ‘under the auspices of the House of Medici, and particularly through the ardor and example of Lorenzo, the empire of science and true taste was again restored.’33 Byron and Stendhal, Hakewill and Turner, and many early nineteenthcentury writers and artists were indebted to Roscoe for their view on Florence as the place of restoration of this empire of civilization, sometimes in a direct way, as in the case of Stendhal. Whether he had already read Roscoe’s book on his return to Italy in 1817 is unknown, but in 1828 he had. In his entry of 28th of October of that year, published in Promenades dans Rome (1829), he criticized Roscoe for his image of Lorenzo de’ Medici as being too soft. But his critique didn’t imply the rejection of the author’s idea about the importance of the late fifteenth-century Florentine culture.34 Considering the early popularity of Roscoe’s book, it is possible that also André-François Miot, Thomas Penrose, and the other foreigners in the Tuscan city had a concept of Florence like Roscoe’s in mind, when they proudly posed for their portraits against the backdrop of the Florentine panorama, realizing that over the centuries Lorenzo’s Florence had hardly changed its appearance. At least the ideas about Florence in its glorious Republican years which Miot expressed in his memoirs, correspond to Roscoe’s. In other words, I think it is no coincidence that this new vision on the cultural achievements of Florence ran parallel to the introduction of panoramic paintings from the southern hills, which was a new point of view, showcasing the city in its famous, unaltered Republic state. Roscoe’s book continued to fascinate in the nineteenth century. It was one of the sources of inspiration for George Eliot (1819-1880) in writing her 32 Roscoe, p.i. 33 Roscoe., p. iii. Clough refers to a contemporary, anonymous characterization of Roscoe’s biography as the work of a gentleman ‘investigating and describing the rise and progress of every polite art in Italy at the revival of learning with acuteness, depth and precision.’ Clough, p. 98. Bullen, pp. 38-58, also discusses the differences between Roscoe’s and another ‘myth-making text’: J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi’s sixteen-volume Histoire des républiques italiennes au moyen âge, published between 1807 and 1818. 34 Stendhal, p. 191.

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historical novel Romola, published in 1863, notwithstanding her differences of opinion with Roscoe on the political and religious values of this period in the Florentine or European history.35 The story of Romola is set in Florence at the close of the fifteenth century, that is at the time of Savonarola when the Medici were driven away from the city. The intriguing prologue reads like an opening scene of a movie starting at daybreak on the San Miniato hill. As in the painted panoramic views of Florence, past and present merge together, where the reader is invited to look down on a world-famous city, which has hardly changed its outline since the days of Columbus, seeming to stand as an almost unviolated symbol, amidst the flux of human things, to remind us that we still resemble the men of the past more than we differ from them … And doubtless, if the spirit of a Florentine citizen [of the last decades of the fifteenth century] could return from the shades, and pause where our thought is pausing, he would believe that there must still be fellowship and understanding for him among the inheritors of his birthplace.36

It comes as no surprise that in copies of Romola’s 1863 edition for the European continent outside England, postcards (albumen prints?) are bound in as a frontispiece, showing the San Miniato spot with Giuseppe Poggi’s viale dei Colli, the broad avenue in the direction of Piazzale Michelangelo in the foreground, surrounded by still very young trees.37 It was an appropriate addition to the book indeed. Whether he had read Romola or not, in constructing his terrace Poggi had actually taken the final step towards optimizing the view of what Eliot had described as ‘an almost unviolated symbol’. 35 Bullen, pp. 208-238. According to Bullen in comparison to among others Roscoe’s view, that of Eliot ‘is significantly different from that of previous writers. Broadly speaking, it is more scientific, and more positivist than those histories that had grown out of the turmoil of local religious or political conditions.’ Bullen, p. 210. 36 Eliot, pp. 1-10, esp. pp. 1-2. 37 See e.g. the library copies of the Getty Research Institute, https://archive.org/details/ romola01elio_0/page/n7, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, https://archive.org/ details/romola01eliotg (both accessed 3 November 2020). In both, the photograph is bound in on the frontispiece of volume 1. 2. Romola was published by the publishing house of Berhard Tauchnitz in Leipzig, who distributed English literature on the European continent: Jojoal, ‘George Eliot’. The viale dei Colli runs from the Porta Romana along the viale Machiavelli to the piazzale Galileo Galilei, continues along the viale Galileo Galilei to the Piazzale Michelangelo and continues along the viale Michelangelo. The photograph in the Illinois copy is most probably by Giacomo Brogi, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brogi,_Giacomo_(1822-1881)__3011_-_Firenze_-_Panorama_dal_Viale_de%27_Colli_ca._1870.jpg (accessed 3 November 2020).

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Image 19 George Eliot, Romola, Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz Verlag, vol. 1, 1863: frontispiece

Library copy of the Getty Research Institute [https://archive.org/details/romola01elio_0/page/n7]

Conclusion The panorama has come a long way to grow into that unviolated symbol. Its history is a complex of aesthetic, historical, and political ideas – and even commercial ones, considering that nowadays photographs of the view serve as a showpiece for travel agencies and tour operators to seduce travellers to come to Florence. These travellers in turn come not only to admire paintings and sculptures from a key moment in the history of art, but also the city as a work of art in itself, which stands for a place that has allegedly played a key role in European cultural history. As one of the many booking websites has it, standing on Piazzale Michelangelo ‘you are looking at the city that gave birth to incredible artists, amazing scientists and an enthralling history of discovery and power that has filled novels and movie theatres’.38 Burckhardt once stated that it had been his intention to portray the Renaissance ‘in so far as she was the mother and the source 38 www.visitf lorence.com/f lorence-monuments/piazzale-michelangelo.html (accessed 3 November 2020).

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of modern man.’39 In this he stood in a scholarly and literary tradition of studying and portraying fifteenth-century Italian culture which Roscoe had started. For Burckhardt, Florence was the city where it had all begun, and although we have seen that Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien was the ‘breeding ground’ so to speak rather than the birthplace of this vision, it was his image of the Renaissance that has become iconic. The story of Florence’s key role is still told, even when Burckhardt is no longer referred to. At the moment of writing this article for example the Wikipedia text on the internet informs the reader that Florence ‘is considered by many academics the birthplace of the Renaissance’. Repetition is a feature of such iconic ideas. And the same goes for pictures, as the panorama view of Florence proves. One of the photographs around the Wikipedia text is that of ‘a sunset view of the city’ from the Piazzale Michelangelo. In case of the vision of the Renaissance and Florence, the literary and the visual icons developed in concert with each other. Both show how these icons, as Alexander and Bartmanski have stated, ‘are also signifiers of the ideationally and affectively intuited signified.’40 What the history of the Florentine panorama also shows is that Mitchell may be right that nowadays ‘we live in a culture dominated by pictures’, but that this may not lead to the conclusion that in the past people didn’t mediate knowledge through visual means and the use of icons. 41 The panorama also exemplifies the principle of ‘symbolization’, which Brink, as referred to by Binder, has called a common feature of icons, religious as well as secular ones. Symbolization understood as ‘the condensation of meaning in one image’: in the case of the panorama it is the surveyable view of the unaltered Renaissance city. 42 This must have been the decisive factor for the view from the south to become elected as the favourite one among the various alternatives. It would be worthwhile to look at icons in the way Alex Mesoudi in his Cultural Evolution (2011) has studied the phenomenon of ‘cultural achievements’ and compare them with successful innovations as described by the sociologist Everett Rogers. In a certain sense, the three conditions which Mesoudi and Rogers proposed to be characteristic of such innovations also apply to the panorama. First, it had a relative advantageousness over the alternatives: it allowed among others to clearly discern the main ingredients of the almost unaltered Renaissance 39 40 41 42

Quoted in Welch, p. 9. Alexander, Bartmanski and Giesen, p. 2. Mitchell, p. 2. Binder, p. 106.

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city with its distinctive walls, most important civic and religious buildings, and bridges over the Arno river. Second, there is compatibility regarding the quality of the visual information between this panorama and the other ones from different angles. One can identify, for example, the urban structure of the familiar elements, though more strongly highlighted. And last but not least, there is simplicity in this bird’s-eye view. It allows the entire city to be seen at a glance in its former, as well as in its present state. 43 These conditions allowed the view to grow into an iconical view of Florence, as a work of art in itself, destined to summarize the myth of the European Renaissance spirit, serving as its birth certificate.

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Goethe, J.W., Italian Journey [1786-1788], trans. W.H. Auden and E. Mayer, London, Penguin Books, 1970, (first published 1962). Hakewill, James, A Picturesque Tour of Italy from Drawings Made in 1816-1817, London, John Murray, 1820. Haskell, Francis, History and its Images. Art and the Interpretation of the Past, New Haven/London, Yale University Press, 1993. Jojoal, ‘George Eliot in Tauchnitz Editions – Part 1’, posted 5 May 2016, https:// paperbackrevolution.wordpress.com/2016/05/05/george-eliot-in-tauchnitzeditions-part-1/ (accessed 3 November 2020). Marabottini, A., ‘Louis Gauffier, Ritratto del dott. Penrose, 1798’, in M. Chiarini and A. Marabottini (eds.), Firenze e la sua immagine, cat. no. 111, Venice, Marsilio Editore, 1994, pp. 177-179. Matthiesen, P., Révolution, République, Empire, Restauration, Catalogue Matthiesen Fine Art Ltd., London, Matthiesen Fine Art Ltd., 2010. The catalogue is online, http://matthiesengallery.com/online-publications/revolution-republiqueempire-restauration/mobile/index.html#p=1 (accessed 3 November 2020). Mesoudi, A., Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 2011. Mitchell, W.J.T., Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986. Minneapolis Institute of Art. ‘Louis Gauffier. Portrait of Dr. Thomas Penrose, 1798’, https://collections.artsmia.org/art/10433/portrait-of-dr-thomas-penrose-louisgauffier (accessed 3 November 2020). Miot de Melito, A. François, Mémoires sur le consulat, l’empire et le roi Joseph/ Mémoires du comte Miot de Mélito, 3 vols, Paris, 1858. Miot de Mélito, A. François, Memoires of Count Miot de Melito, Minister, Ambassador, Councillor of State and Member of the Institute of France, Between the Years 1788 and 1815, edited by W.A. Fleischmann, trans. F.S. Hoey and J. Lillie, 2 vols, London, 1881. Moorby, Nicola. ‘First Italian Tour 1819-1820’, May 2011, in D.B. Brownb. (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours., Tate Research Publication, December 2012, www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/firstitalian-tour-r1132344 (accessed 15 November 2019). Moorby, Nicola, ‘Route to Rome sketchbook 1819’, sketchbook, March 2010. in D.B. Brownb. (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/researchpublications/jmw-turner/route-to-rome-sketchbook-r1138674#entry-main (accessed 3 November 2020).

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Tartuferi, A., ‘Francesco di Lorenzo Rosselli. Veduta di Firenze’, in M. Chiarini and A. Marabottini (eds.), Firenze e la sua immagine, cat. no. 8, Venice, Marsilio Editore, 1994, p. 69. Tinterow, Gary, Michael Pantazzi, and Vincent Pomarède (eds.), Corot, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Grand Palais/Canada, National Gallery of Canada/New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996. Van der Sman, Gert Jan, De eeuw van Titiaan. Venetiaanse prenten uit de Renaissance/Le siècle de Titien: gravures venitiennes de la Renaissance, exhibition catalogue, Maastricht, Bonnefantenmuseum/Brugge, Groeningemuseum and Het Arentshuis, Zwolle, Waanders, 2002. Viollet-le-Duc, E.E., Compositions et dessins de Viollet-le-Duc, Paris, Librairie Centrale d’Architecture, 1884. Welch, Evelyn S., Art and Society in Italy 1350-1500, Oxford/New York, Oxford University Press, 1997. Wikipedia, ‘List of Literary Descriptions of Cities (before 1550)’, last edited 5 December 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_literary_descriptions_of_cities_(before_1550) (accessed 3 November 2020). Zanella, A., ‘Gauffier, Louis (Poitiers, 1762-Livorno 1801)’, in E. Castelnuovo (ed.), La pittura in Italia: l’Ottocento, vol. 2, Milan, Electa, 1991, pp. 845-846.

About the author Paul van den Akker is Professor of Art History at the Open University (the Netherlands). His research focuses on two areas: the history of West European drawing in relation with art theory, and the history of the historiography of art and culture in Western Europe. In 2010, he published Looking for Lines: Theories on the Essence of Art and the Problem of Mannerism, on the eighteenth-century origins and the subsequent development of the modern idea of making a distinction between abstract design and figurative content, interpreted as a distinction between essential and non-essential qualities of a work of art. His publications on drawing and art theory concentrate on the history of changing drawing skills – their underlying cognitive as well sensorimotor qualities – in relation to changing artistic goals.



Iconic City Thrillers Encoding Geopolitics Through Cinema Rui Lopes Abstract Following Casablanca, throughout the 1940s and 1950s Hollywood produced a wave of thrillers that sought to capitalise on the reputation of foreign cities through exciting tales of romance and intrigue. Converting cities into marketable icons, those thrillers codified the outside world at a time when the United States was expanding its geopolitical reach. This chapter discusses how this process of cinematic iconization both elevated specific cities to myth and limited their meanings by dissociating them from political processes that did not fit the narratives of filmmakers or of the external agents pressuring them in the context of World War II and the early Cold War. It proposes a critical, attentive reading that can make the films’ omissions revealing in themselves. Keywords: American Global Power, Cold War, Film, International Intrigue, Lisbon, Second World War

Introduction When Warner Brothers prepared reviews and publicity pieces for their thriller The Conspirators (1944) for exhibitors to slip into local newspapers, they stressed the centrality of the city where the film’s action took place. As a result, papers across the US published variations of the following paragraph: ‘The Portuguese capital of Lisbon, transformed into a cauldron of romance and intrigue by a world at war, where spies and counter-spies, Nazis and anti-Nazis, soldiers of fortune and cringing refugees from the abattoir that was occupied Europe, rub elbows, is the stage for this

Boven, Erica van, and Marieke Winkler (eds), The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463728225_lopes

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absorbing mystery-romance.’1 With these lines, the studio inscribed the film in the emerging wave of US-produced romantic thrillers revolving around a sharply defined setting (usually a city, sometimes a larger region) placed at the crossroads of world affairs.2 Unlike The Conspirators, their titles often conveyed the setting-centric motif: Casablanca (1942), Tangier (1946), Calcutta (1947), Singapore (1947), Hong Kong (1952), Macao (1952), Lisbon (1956), Istanbul (1957). While many films summon – and expand on– their setting’s reputation, between the early 1940s and the mid-1950s there was a distinct trend of what we shall call Iconic City thrillers, characterized by the way they bombarded audiences with reminders of each city’s transcendental signif icance through tropes related to f ilm noir, such as chiaroscuro visuals, intricate plots, hardboiled dialogue, and existential malaise.3 Iconicity is a fruitful lens through which to examine the processes at play in thrillers such as these. My use of the term ‘iconic’ to label how they approached their urban settings draws on its polysemic meaning. It refers both to the classic definition of ‘icon’ as a visual representation that is the object of devotion (with thrillers inviting audiences to visualize cities as quasi-mythical places) and to its modern use to describe a cultural artefact that is durable, reproducible, and recognizable to a large group (with films building on the cities’ connotations while inspiring further productions that perpetuated those connotations). The label also refers to the notion of ‘icon’ as a small sign that codifies something larger into a simplified, stylized symbol, just as these movies reduced their settings to a relatively limited number of elements. Jeffrey C. Alexander and Dominic Bartmanski productively brought these concepts together in their introduction to the idea of ‘iconic power’. Defining iconicity as the interaction between a material 1 For example, ‘The Conspirators At Rialto’, Beatrice Daily Sun, 19 November 1944; ‘Thrilling Story’, Shamokin News-Dispatch, 28 November 1944; ‘The Conspirators Coming to Calhoun’, Anniston Star, 17 December 1944; ‘Powerful Drama At the America’, Casper Star-Tribune, 2 February 1945. The line can be traced to Warner’s Conspirators press book, accessible at the British Film Institute, Reuben Library. 2 The subgenre also spread to television, from city-of-the-week adventure shows like Dangerous Assignment (1951-2) and Passport to Danger (1954-8) to entire series focused on a specific location, like Hong Kong (1960-1) and the Singapore-based first season of China Smith (1952). 3 These works were ultimately a subset of the espionage and crime genres, albeit spliced with the DNA of melodramas and pulp serials. The emphasis on exotic romance situates them in the realm of what is typically considered ‘escapist’ fiction, Hollywood’s artificiality a striking contrast with city-focused European neorealist f ilms like Rome, Open City (1945). After Casablanca, however, the f ilm that best encapsulates this subgenre is actually a British production: the Vienna-set The Third Man (1949).

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surface and a discursive depth signifying elusive thoughts and feelings, these authors stressed that the latter’s conversion into the realm of perceptual, sensory experience necessarily implies a kind of reduction. Through this compression, ‘a certain symbolic subtlety’ is sacrificed in the name of an important pragmatic gain, namely the icons’ ‘portability’, assuring their citational quality and semiotic durability. 4 Based on the understanding of icons as an articulation between aesthetic forms and encoded meanings, this chapter’s first part analyses how Hollywood sought to grant specific cities an iconic status, exploring how that strategy was consolidated across multiple productions. The second part, acknowledging that an icon’s lasting power lies precisely in the way it taps into invisible domains while condensing the complexity of those domains, discusses how these thrillers codified contemporary political strands and, thus, participated in those strands by obscuring important features of their settings. The chapter concludes that the attempt to turn cities into marketable icons ultimately staged the impetuses and tensions of the growing North American presence in the world.

Screening iconic cities Besides reflecting Hollywood’s general infatuation with orientalist narratives inherited from European explorers, writers, artists, and filmmakers,5 the Iconic City thrillers of the 1940s-50s evolved from a few notable productions in the previous decade. With their sensuous expressionism derived from exoticizing remote locales, Josef von Sternberg’s works were obvious precursors to the Iconic City thriller,6 as are Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers, which often incorporate the famous features of their settings.7 Additionally, John Cromwell’s Algiers (1938) proved most influential. An almost shot-byshot remake of the French crime drama Pépé le Moko (1937), Algiers was a box-office hit about a police operation to lure a thief out of the Algerian capital’s casbah. The film bears what became many of the hallmarks of Iconic City thrillers, including an acknowledgement of the city’s allure in the title (in contrast to the French original, which focused on the lead 4 Bartmanski and Alexander, p. 2. 5 Shohat and Stam, pp. 100-14. 6 Morocco (1930), Shanghai Express (1932), The Shanghai Gesture (1941). 7 The Royal Albert Hall in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), a Swiss chocolate factory in Secret Agent (1936), Dutch windmills in Foreign Correspondent (1940), the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur (1942).

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character), a narration contextualizing the locale over a panoramic view of the coastline,8 a premise that hinges on the setting (unable to operate safely within the casbah, the police seeks to draw their target out), a montage capturing snapshots of the city’s key features, which are also addressed in a conversation stressing its larger-than-life quality,9 and use of said features for both atmosphere (scenic shots and background) and plot-related set pieces (the labyrinthine streets affect the outcome of chases). While the San Francisco-set detective film The Maltese Falcon (1941) may seem farther away from the Iconic City genre, it too popularized many of the genre’s motifs through its tale of greed, mystery, and betrayal in the pursuit of a McGuffin that brings the tough protagonist in contact with cosmopolitan criminals. In 1942, the seminal Iconic City thriller Casablanca repurposes ingredients from these movies for an allegory about the recent US entry into World War II, telling the story of an American expatriate who, although a professed isolationist, helps his ex-lover and her Resistance hero husband escape from Nazi persecution.10 At Warner, producers and screenwriters defended the decision to adapt the play Everybody Comes to Rick’s by tailoring it along the lines of Algiers.11 Besides the title change to Casablanca (another Maghrebin city under French colonial rule), the influence is clear from the establishing shot of a mosque (which pans over an amalgam of terraces into a lively street market)12 to various scenes drenched in low-key lighting, soft focus, thick cigarette smoke, multi-ethnic crowds, and ambient music. Yet Casablanca presents its setting as a key geopolitical intersection: a place where European refugees struggle to obtain visas to Lisbon (and from there to America), where a corrupt captain – personifying French authority – shifts from collaborating with Vichy to joining the Resistance, where the romantic climax becomes a blow against Nazism. From The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca inherited not only the proto-film noir sensibility, but also the screen personas of leading man Humphrey Bogart, shifty middleman Peter Lorre, and cheerful racketeer Sydney Greenstreet, imbuing their interactions with a renewed sense of urgency – the McGuffin(s) become letters of transit, while Bogart’s final sacrifice is an antifascist gesture. Casablanca’s success inspired multiple imitations. This film looms so large over subsequent Iconic City thrillers that the whole movement can largely 8 Algiers, 01:35-02:20. 9 Algiers, 03:27-5:22. 10 For Casablanca’s propagandistic subtext, see McLaughlin and Parry, pp. 1-5. 11 Lebo, pp. 39,77. 12 Casablanca, 02:00-21.

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be seen as a succession of attempts to recapture (or at least evoke) Casablanca’s appeal. Ensuing thrillers borrowed Casablanca’s visuals, themes, plot points, and characterization. Typecasting was a common strategy, with actors given roles in similar films, further conjuring afterimages of the original – the presence of Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet became a shorthand for foreign intrigue, as the duo reunited in Turkey (Background to Danger, 1943), in a French freighter (Passage to Marseille, 1944, alongside Bogart), and in Lisbon (The Conspirators), and they travelled from Istanbul to Sofia, Geneva, and Paris (The Mask of Dimitrios, 1944).13 Studios searched for a Casablanca-like locale, focusing on cities where a local flavour could again be mixed with transnational phenomena: refugee crises, espionage, contraband, and occupation. The effort to create a resonant setting was already evident before each film’s release. Even when centred on the cast’s star power, posters showcased glimpses of the city’s architecture and other iconic elements. A Singapore poster surrounds the leading couple with a skyline, Chinese letters, sampans, and a rickshaw.14 Calcutta places Alan Ladd among pillars, mountains, jungle trees, dancing women, and a guardian lion statue.15 At the marketing stage, however, the priority was not the cities’ specificities so much as the notion that the movies take place in an exciting, exotic location. Through epic descriptions worthy of legends and myths, taglines played up the sense of danger (Hong Kong is the ‘Port of a Thousand Dangers’, Lisbon is the ‘City of Intrigue, Murder and Excitement!’),16 often resorting to orientalist tropes, including references to cardinal points (in Calcutta, ‘Ladd meets Murder in the Mysterious Orient’; Istanbul is set ‘where the passions of the East meet the sins of the West’).17 The trailers participated in the build-up, with bold letters labelling Casablanca ‘the world’s most dangerous city’, 13 Greenstreet had appeared in Panama (alongside Bogart) in Across the Pacific (1942) and later appeared in Malaya (1949). Lorre appeared in the German capital (Hotel Berlin, 1945), Algiers (Casbah, 1948), and South Africa and Angola (Rope of Sand, 1949). Bogart starred in thrillers set in the Martinique (To Have and Have Not, 1944), Tokyo (Tokyo Joe, 1949), and Damascus (Sirocco, 1951) before re-teaming with Lorre in Beat the Devil (1953), a parody of foreign intrigue films. Other Casablanca stars in international settings include Paul Henreid in Conspirators and Rope of Sand and Claude Rains in Passage to Marseille, Rope of Sand, Lisbon, and in the Rio de Janeiro of Notorious (1946). 14 www.imdb.com/title/tt0039829/mediaviewer/rm4277139712, (accessed 8 November 2019). 15 www.imdb.com/title/tt0039235/mediaviewer/rm109718784, (accessed 8 November 2019). 16 www.imdb.com/title/tt0043654/mediaviewer/rm3111076352; www.imdb.com/title/tt0049446/ mediaviewer/rm1693059072, (accessed 8 November 2019). 17 www.imdb.com/title/tt0039235/mediaviewer/rm109718784; www.imdb.com/title/tt0050552/ mediaviewer/rm4065470464, (accessed 8 November 2019).

116 Rui Lopes Image 20  Singapore’s poster, packed with regional iconography, including the inflated title, which evokes the colour and stripes of Chinese lamps

Singapore the ‘City without a Conscience’, and Tangier the ‘International Capital of Intrigue’.18 If these promotional strategies mostly stuck to broad hyperbole, the movies themselves sought to f irmly establish their setting’s identities, placing them in context from the very beginning. The design of Tangier’s title evokes regional culture and religion by borrowing elements from the Arabic alphabet (the letter ‘e’ and the tails of the ‘a’ and ‘g’) and Muslim iconography (the crescents adorning the ‘i’ and ‘r’) and appearing in front of arabesques.19 Macao’s font simulated East Asian calligraphy’s compound strokes (for example, the ‘m’ looks written in three strokes) and seemed made out of bamboo sticks, suggesting the local flora.20 Opening soundtracks fulfil a similar function. The orchestral arrangement playing over Tokyo Joe’s (1949) credits suddenly shifts into a mimicry of traditional Japanese music while the title is onscreen.21 In Lisbon, the effect is achieved through lyrics: when 18 19 20 21

Trailers for Casablanca (00:50-3), Singapore (00:30-6), Flight to Tangier (00:02-5). Tangier, 00:09-16. Macao, 00:22-8. Tokyo Joe, 01:15-29.

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Image 21  I stanbul’s poster, with the protagonists enveloped by local architecture and an orientalist tagline. The title’s initial resembles a pattern from the Hagia Sophia, followed by letters simulating the calligraphy of qalam pens.

the title appears (in letters imitating Portuguese late Gothic style, over a drawing of the Belém Tower), a chorus sings the love song ‘Lisbon Antigua (In Old Lisbon)’, continuing throughout the credits and over extreme long shots of Portugal’s capital.22 On top of these evocative elements, thrillers situated the proceedings in more explicit – and authoritative – terms by co-opting devices from science and journalism, thereby resorting to semi-documentary techniques. During or immediately after the credits, globes and maps place the cities geographically.23 Areal footage gives viewers’ an initial, panoramic impression, steeped in authenticity.24 In some cases, a patriarchal voice-over briefly outlines – and validates – the location’s relevance. According to Affair in Trinidad’s (1952) extra-diegetic narrator: ‘Between North and South America lay the islands of the Caribbean, colourful and exotic. Once remote and little known, history is forcing them out of obscurity 22 Lisbon, 00:00-02:10. 23 Casablanca, 00:07-2:00; Tangier, 01:07-25. 24 Tokyo Joe, 00:12-1:30; Istanbul, 00:15-1:42.

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into the current of world events.’25 In The Shanghai Story (1954), a similar voice-of-God informs the audience that, in this ‘city of shame behind the bamboo curtain’, hotels have been ‘converted into internment camps for the last miserable group of the foreign population – Americans and Europeans who have sought in vain an exit permit’.26 That these words are spoken rather than written (in contrast to Algiers’ opening scrawl) gives the sequences the texture of a newsreel. Again, the tone was set by Casablanca – its narrator, Lou Marcelle, went on to introduce, among other locations, Ankara (‘Turkey’s capital is flooded with spies, agents, provocateurs… One street alone, the Street of Diplomats, is known as the Street of 1001 Plots’),27 and Damascus (‘For untold centuries, the political centre and metropolis of the Arab world’.).28 In an additional intertextual layer, Marcelle’s delivery sounds modelled after the documentary series The March of Time (1935-1951).29 As generic crowds gave way to recognizable actors playing f ictional characters in specific situations, a double movement took place. Discourse moved from presentation (explicit description) to representation (the casts’ enactment of the setting’s traits), immersing audiences inside the locales they had seen from afar. Conversely, the films abandoned the pretence of ‘representation’ (in the sense of reflecting a pre-existing reality) and proceeded to ‘present’ something new (a clearly fabricated story in fabricated sets), expanding the city’s mythology. The more nebulous the transition, the more powerful the iconization process at play. Indeed, as argued by Jeff Hopkins, the ability to blur the distinctions between fact and fiction, reproduction and simulation, the real and the imaginary, all through an illusion of depth, volume, and motion, situates the spectator in a ‘cinematic place’ where ‘the pleasure, the power, and the ideology of film are first manifest’.30 The transitions are therefore eased through juxtaposition: narrations, which begin over footage shot on location, then continue over images from backlots and soundstages.31 In Hong Kong, the apparently distant voice-over that describes the city as ‘a haven for political refugees, outmoded Manchurian warlords, and homeless Chinese peasants from the mainland’, having become ‘a listening post for commie China, a 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Affair in Trinidad, 00:10-29. The Shanghai Story, 01:18-40. Background to Danger, 00:55-02:07. Action in Arabia (1944), 01:06-55. https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/collection/the-march-of-time (accessed 8 November 2019). Hopkins, p. 49. Casablanca, 01:32-2:17; Macao, 01:23-2:19.

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rumour-mill, a propaganda machine’, is revealed to be the protagonist’s inner monologue.32 Along with these techniques, dialogue exchanges similarly set up the stakes. In Flight to Tangier (1953), a police officer explains the city’s law enforcement structure to a murder suspect.33 Scattered lines sum up each city as characters comment that ‘the scum of Europe has gravitated to Casablanca’,34 that ‘in Macao, everything is a gamble’,35 or that ‘breaking into Tokyo is tougher than breaking out of Alcatraz’.36 The most ingenious thrillers contain early scenes that effectively dramatize the city’s key features. Both Casablanca and The Conspirators show cafes where snippets of conversations by anonymous refugees express their desperation to continue their journey.37 Tokyo Joe conveys how tightly controlled US-occupied Japan had become at the time, by following ex-serviceman Joe Barrett as he goes through a series of bureaucratic procedures – administered by military personnel who keep track of Barrett’s steps – before obtaining a visitor’s permit.38 The first act of A Foreign Affair (1948) – with a more cynical view of occupation, mixing satire with romantic thriller elements – alternates between a congressional committee investigating US troops’ morale in Ally-occupied Berlin (its members discussing policy options for Germany before being briefed by a colonel driving them around the city) and an army captain exploiting the locals’ misery (including a recreation of Brandenburg Gate’s black market).39 If these introductory scenes defined the places, however, it was the films’ subsequent unfolding that cemented their iconic status by intertwining ‘thrilling’ aspects with each locale. A recurrent way of doing this was to make the plot hinge on the setting, so that thrillers became about the cities, not just set there. Updating Algiers’ premise, Macao revolves around the American authorities’ attempt to lure a gangster out of the corrupt, extradition-free colony, since they could only arrest him in international waters. The Shanghai Story also urges viewers to root for mobility, as it focuses on Westerners interned by the new Chinese regime who tried to 32 Hong Kong, 01:06-2:26. 33 Flight to Tangier, 13:42-15:07. 34 Casablanca, 04:21-7. 35 Macao, 13:51-2. 36 Tokyo Joe, 03:25-9. 37 Casablanca, 07:20-08:09; Conspirators, 08:36-55. 38 Tokyo Joe, 1:30-5:42. The inequal power relation with the local population was then illustrated as Barrett threw a cigarette onto the street and five Japanese fought over it. – 06:04-18. 39 A Foreign Affair, 01:23-26:30.

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escape and pass information to the outside. Affair in Trinidad’s main threat concerns the creation of a missile launch site in the Caribbean, which would put every ‘vital area’ in the US within striking distance of its enemies (as the villain explains with the use of a map).40 The audiences’ ability to follow and remember these stories, therefore, implies engagement with the settings’ geopolitical identity. Objects become icons when they gain symbolic power – a power viewers experience not only by understanding the object cognitively or evaluating it morally, but also by feeling its sensual, aesthetic force. 41 Iconic City thrillers projected the latter by systematically highlighting iconic motifs throughout the movie. Characters wandered through streets like flâneurs and visited marketplaces in extensive travelogue-like sequences filmed with ethnographic fascination. 42 Songs are not just part of the soundtrack, but also visually enacted through diegetic performances that drew on local musical and/or dancing traditions. 43 Some films go considerably further in the way they integrate the setting’s iconography. Important chases and confrontations are shaped by Tangier’s crowded roads, Trieste’s Roman ruins, and Hong Kong’s sampans.44 The Conspirators’ dénouement is not just set at the famous Estoril casino – it involves a double agent passing information through the numbers he picked at the roulette table. 45 Affair in Trinidad increases its climactic tension through the drumming from a local dance number taking place near the action.46 Lisbon crafts its romantic mood out of touristic attractions: torn between two women, the hero woos one of them in an Alfama fado house and by the Sintra palaces, and the other one in the Jerónimos Monastery and in the São Jorge Castle. By anchoring key set pieces on each locale’s iconic elements, the thrillers vividly link two aspects. More than the impact of a specific film, iconicity involves intertextual repetition across multiple works, which expanded the durability and reproducibility of the aforementioned cities’ roles in popular culture. Tangier’s 40 Affair in Trinidad, 1:18:40-19:40. 41 Bartmanski, p. 1. 42 Tokyo Joe, 05:42-6:58; Hong Kong, 42:20-43:52. 43 Tangier, 12:37-20:26; Calcutta, 12:36-14:17. The performances’ screen time increased according to actresses’ reputation for similar acts, as in the case of Foreign Affair’s Marlene Dietrich and Affair in Trinidad’s Rita Hayworth. They nevertheless drew attention to the settings: the former through the recreation of cabarets and lyrics about Berlin’s black market and devastation (30:53-35:10, 1:19:45-21:03, 1:45:53-49:14), the latter through the Latin beat and dancing style (03:30-6:54). 44 Flight to Tangier, 20:20-22:51; Diplomatic Courier, 48:15-49:30; Hong Kong, 1:23:03-29:35. 45 Conspirators, 1:25:50-34:10. 46 Affair in Trinidad, 1:15:04-16:09.

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titular city is also the setting of The Woman from Tangier (1948), Flight to Tangier, Tangier Incident (1953), and even most of Malaga (1954), title notwithstanding. Likewise, images of Lisbon’s downtown area, luxurious casinos, fado houses, wine, and beaches have reappeared in thriller after thriller.47 Additionally, brief allusions keep connotations alive while placing iconic cities on a continuum. Both Casablanca and Tangier end with characters flying to Lisbon. In Diplomatic Courier (1952), a character introduces Trieste as a juncture for various international agents by explaining that this city was to the Cold War what Lisbon and Istanbul had been to World War II.48 The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) begins with an American family in the final stop of a trip from Paris to Marrakesh, via Lisbon, Rome, and Casablanca.49 In the Singapore-set World for Ransom (1954), the hero’s record includes crimes in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Macao (while the villain demands a deposit at a Tangier bank).50 Flight to Hong Kong’s (1956) story of a global crime ring is mostly set in Macao, yet it also features scenes in Tangier, Lisbon, and Hong Kong. Even parodies of this subgenre – such as A Night in Casablanca (1946) and the Tangier-set My Favorite Spy (1951) – appeal to shared assumptions about the cities’ iconic status.

Beyond the screen More than a set of internal mechanisms, Iconic City thrillers should be viewed as part of large processes taking place offscreen. Like with their approach to storytelling, the films’ approach to settings did not so much forge new visions as draw on existing material and blow it to new proportions. The press and literature had already popularized Lisbon’s image as a hotbed of refugees and spies before The Conspirators and Storm over Lisbon (1944) dramatized it onscreen.51 Winston Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech and the establishment of the Free Territory of Trieste (1947-1954) – under military occupation and divided along Cold War lines – exacerbated that city’s longstanding reputation as a precarious,

47 Conspirators, 16:25-25:57, 39:04-43:17; Storm Over Lisbon, 01:03-19, 02:25-6:42, 47:35-49:54, 55:34-1:01:20; Jewels of Brandenburg (1947), 05:22-33, 59:00-1:00:30; A Bullet for Joey (1955), 05:03-8:52; Lisbon, 10:41-53, 12:22-36, 23:40-26:18, 26:27-28:24. 48 Diplomatic Courier, 31:07-29. 49 The Man Who Knew Too Much, 06:34-41. 50 World for Ransom, 45:22-43, 48:23-37. 51 See Bayles; Brennan; Prokosch.

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multicultural frontier, subsequently depicted in Diplomatic Courier.52 Known for harbouring eccentric millionaires and criminals, the Tangier International Zone (1924-1956) was the focus of substantial coverage alongside the various thrillers set in it.53 The aura of picturesque decay and wickedness of Macao’s titular city stretched back centuries.54 Yet Hollywood’s timing also closely followed current events.55 Set in a stilllargely-destroyed, not-yet-fully-denazified Berlin, A Foreign Affair came out a year after the draft of the European Recovery Program. The public’s interest in the Chinese Revolution and the Korean War ushered productions set in southeast Asia,56 including Hong Kong, whose protagonists flee from China into the British colony.57 Besides the voyeuristic thrill of inhabiting places discussed on the news, the genre also worked as a simulacrum of tourism, especially the later entries, which – in order to provide experiences unmatched by television, Hollywood’s feared competitor – tended to be shot in bright colours and on location. Without leaving the theatre, audiences could watch remote locales up-close and vicariously participate in the rituals of travelling: most Iconic City thrillers featured airplane flights, customs controls, hotel check-ins, restaurant meals, and night club acts, their f ilm cameras touring the streets while spotlighting monuments and landscapes. In a self-ref lexive sequence, Istanbul begins with an American tourist couple on an airplane looking at the Turkish city from above while the wife reads a guide book to her husband (and, thus, to the audience).58 The studios’ formula-based production and audience-seeking strategies were not the sole factors shaping the films. Since the early 1930s, Hollywood had institutionalized a form of self-regulated censorship, enforced by 52 For the ways in which Trieste’s identity was grafted into the collective imagination, including cinema’s role, see Pizzi, pp. 75-95. 53 For Tangier’s role in American imagination, see Edwards, pp. 121-123. 54 See Pittis and Henders. 55 Casablanca itself benefitted from its topicality – having initially timed its release to coincide with the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, Warner rushed to get the movie in theatres after the Allies’ surprise landing at Casablanca in November, which put the city on the news. See Edwards, pp. 43-44. 56 ‘H’wood Scurries To Capitalize On Korean Shooting’, Variety, 5 July 1950. 57 Despite its unrelated plot, Macao was also rushed into production to capitalize on the Korean crisis. See ‘RKO Speeds “Macao” As Topical, Timely Fare’, Variety, 17 July 1950. 58 Istanbul, 1:48-2:16. Hitchcock also played with the touristic angle in the Riviera-set To Catch a Thief (1955), whose credits appeared over the window of a travel agency displaying pictures of French beaches. – 00:18-1:47.

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the Production Code Administration (PCA), according to which ‘the citizenry of all nations shall be represented fairly’.59 Depictions of foreign places therefore had to be negotiated according to the PCA’s evolving understanding of fairness. Moreover, from June 1942 until September 1945, the Office of War Information (OWI) promoted the government’s narratives about the ongoing war in various media, including cinema. Although not always successful, this department gained increasing control over the filmmaking process, especially once the Office of Censorship agreed to refuse export licenses to productions not approved by the OWI.60 Between 1948 and 1954, the combination of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s accusations of widespread Soviet inf iltration, the House Un-American Activities Committee’s hearings into communist influence in the film industry, the American Legion’s activism, and the blacklist denying employment to entertainment professionals suspected of leftist leanings – not to mention covert influence by the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, State Department, and US Intelligence Agency – combined to pressure studios into proving their anti-communist credentials through productions with a distinctly Cold War-driven message.61 Whether responding to outside demands or reflecting filmmakers’ own ideological bias, Iconic City thrillers enacted the paradigm outlined by Henry Luce’s 1941 Life magazine editorial ‘The American Century’. Rejecting isolationism, Luce’s influential essay advocated intervention in World War II by postulating a national duty to not merely defend American territory but also promote US values worldwide. Luce appealed for the government and citizens to embrace the opportunity to achieve global supremacy by recreating the international environment, a process that should take shape through, among other things, imagination: ‘As America enters dynamically upon the world scene, we need most of all to seek and to bring forth a vision of America as a world power which is authentically American’.62 In these years, as the US spread its global reach on an unprecedented scale, thrillers explored the edges of that reach by filling the screen with foreign cities defined by their transnationality and demimondes. In those iconized cities, US notions of freedom, legality, and/or civilization seemed under dispute, which could either take a quainter form (making them interesting places to visit) or that of an existential threat, explaining why some of them 59 60 61 62

Doherty, p. 354. Koppes and Black, pp. 113-141. Eldridge, pp. 149-96; Doherty, pp. 15-27; Shaw, pp. 4, 42-8. Luce, p. 65.

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(Berlin, Tangier, Tokyo, Trieste) were under American administration, in collaboration with other Western powers.63 Mobilising the means and tropes of cinema, thrillers thus mapped out geopolitical hotspots and touristic destinations for the US public. The heroes were mostly North American males – outsiders who learned the laws of the land, thereby projecting a sense of adaptability and dominance.64 If supporting players like the Austro-Hungarian-born Peter Lorre (with his unplaceable accent) and the British Sydney Greenstreet (with his imperial posture) emanated an American notion of ‘foreignness’, leading men Humphrey Bogart, Alan Ladd, and Ronald Reagan became the quintessential embodiment of the self-image of US interventionism – their characters, seemingly reluctant to get involved in other countries’ politics, were ultimately compelled to do so by an idealistic aversion to injustice. The cast invariably included a love interest and a representative of local authority, spotlighting the places’ romantic potential and identifying allies or competitors for regional power. This gaze was then projected around the world through Hollywood’s own dominant position in foreign markets. To decode Iconic City thrillers, one must assess not just elements that recurrently appear but also those that are marginalized. Casablanca is a notable example for the way it linked its setting to resistance against the German occupation of France while sidelining resistance against the French occupation of Morocco, reflecting the priorities of World War II propaganda as well as Hollywood’s typical complicity with colonialism. The few Moroccan characters who are in the film (like the doorman Abdul) are barely acknowledged, with the camera’s point-of-view manipulation reinscribing their inconsequentiality by never privileging their perspective – instead, as argued by Brian T. Edwards, Casablanca promotes an identification with the American hero and, like him (and like US policy), relegates the native colonized population to the background, encouraging audiences to do the same.65 In the post-war years, benign depictions of empire increasingly overlapped with anti-colonialist attitudes,66 yet Iconic City thrillers’ engagement with aspects other than those that directly affected North Americans (be they romantic vistas or threats to safety) remained limited. Macao’s iconization 63 An extreme example, Diplomatic Courier conveyed its links to Washington’s foreign policy in a particularly straightforward fashion, its opening resembling an instructional film about the Department of State’s communication department. – Diplomatic Courier, 01:06-57. 64 On filmic projections of the masculinist desire to master a new land, see Shohat, pp. 19-66. 65 Edwards, p.70. For a frame-by-frame analysis, see Ray, pp. 50-53. 66 See Cowans.

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of its setting as a seedy pit of organized crime – preceded onscreen by the French drama Macao, l’enfer du jeu (1942) – is echoed in Forbidden (1953), Flight to Hong Kong, Hong Kong Confidential (1958), and The Scavengers (1959). This process, however, was shaped by the PCA, which worried about representing the native and settler population in a negative light. Its censors ordered the removal from Macao of elements of ‘white supremacy’, including a Portuguese captain claiming he had ‘never seen a white man dumb enough to want to save a coolie from drowning’, a policeman seconding that feeling, and that same officer ‘brutally stepping on the hands’ of a Chinese character.67 Due to these cuts, while the historic portrayal of Macao in US cinema associated this colony with corruption and inefficient law enforcement, it underplayed the racist dimension of Portuguese rule. Similarly absent is the fact that Portugal’s regime at time was a dictatorship founded by António de Oliveira Salazar back in the heyday of European fascism. This dimension has been disregarded since the earliest Iconic City thrillers, which, despite their explicit antifascist message, strategically focused on Portugal’s neutral status in World War II – and, towards the end, even bent its flexibility in the Allies’ favour. Aiming to secure the regime’s goodwill and avoid upsetting its ‘delicate’ international balance, the OWI ushered rewrites of Storm over Lisbon, whose producers then agreed to present local authorities in a flattering way.68 The ensuing iconic version of Lisbon, therefore, is melancholic and steeped in intrigue, but with no sign of its rulers’ authoritarian ideology or practices. While the Portuguese capital became a stage where foreign agents fell in love and fought for the destiny of international affairs, the domestic opposition and the authorities’ violent repression had no place in the popular image conjured by Hollywood. It would be misleading, however, to regard the cities’ screen identities as closed icons with immovable contours. Aside from the fact that location shooting can open cracks in a setting’s homogenous image by catching disruptive glimpses of social inequality or cultural plurality, the mere act of recontextualization – whether by a cultural scholar or by any other spectator displaced from the primary audience – can radically recode a film’s meaning. The impact of the US-centric viewpoint and the invisibility 67 Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library, MPAA, PCA records, Macao, Letter from Joseph Breen, 11 July 1950. 68 US National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD, Records of the OWI, Record Group 208, NC148567-4742245, Box 3526, Storm Over Lisbon, Letter from William S. Cunningham, 31 March 1944.

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of the films’ omissions ultimately depend on each viewer’s background, although even non-American audiences – including those from the films’ marginalized domains – can also approach these thrillers through an actantial reading method, momentarily embracing their story worlds and identifying with the seductive positions at the forefront of the narrative rather than deconstructing them based on personal experiences.69 While one may still adopt the latter approach, Iconic City thrillers seem particularly suited for contemporary reinterpretation. An informed look at the way Portugal’s secret police supports the Allies in Storm over Lisbon, for example, reverses the intended perspective, seeing in the film an illustration of the Allies’ own support for the Portuguese dictatorship, which continued beyond the war. In turn, when Lisbon’s American protagonists – smuggler Robert Evans and distraught wife Sylvia Merrill (whose husband is kidnapped by Soviets) – meet in a fado house as part of their saga of international exchanges across the ‘iron curtain’, it is tempting to look beyond them and imagine that their waiter, the customer putting on a monocle at a nearby table, or the couple talking behind them have their own stories of intrigue, conspiracy, and violence under the Salazar regime.70 In fact, since the film was shot in Lisbon, using locals as extras, it is safe to assume that the very people onscreen (and not just their fictional counterparts) lived lives of authentic secrecy and danger. In other words, the same depictions of these settings that made them iconic now lend themselves to fruitful iconoclastic recoding.

Conclusion Building on Casablanca’s template, Hollywood’s producers sought to capitalize on the reputation of foreign cities through violent tales of love and deception that ultimately worked as parables, codifying the outside world at a time when the US was expanding its geopolitical reach. Although Iconic City thrillers initially stressed their settings’ links to real-world events, overblown promotion, cinematography, and melodrama elevated their features to myth. Yet cinema did not merely help make places iconic – it also defined what was iconic about them and what was not. It simultaneously drew attention to locations and dissociated them from political processes that did not fit the narratives of filmmakers or of the external agents pressuring them in 69 For a classic study on this type of dissonance, see Shively, pp. 725-734. 70 Lisbon, 23:40-26:18.

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the context of World War II and the early Cold War. The iconic version of these cities, then, both exaggerated and limited their significance. A critical, attentive observation, however, can find the films’ omissions revealing in themselves and even project new meanings upon them, discovering in the depths beyond their sensationalized surface a symbol not just of specific cities, but of an increasingly Americanized world order.

References ‘H’wood Scurries to Capitalize on Korean Shooting’, Variety, 5 July 1950. ‘Powerful Drama at the America’, Casper Star-Tribune, 2 February 1945. ‘RKO Speeds ‘Macao’ as Topical, Timely Fare’, Variety, 17 July 1950. ‘The ‘Conspirators’ at Rialto’, Beatrice Daily Sun, 19 November 1944. ‘The Conspirators Coming to Calhoun’, Anniston Star, 17 December 1944. ‘Thrilling Story’, Shamokin News-Dispatch, 28 November 1944. Bartmanski, Dominic and Jeffrey C. Alexander, ‘Materiality and Meaning in Social Life: Toward an Iconic Turn in Cultural Sociology’, in J.C. Alexander, D. Bartmanski and B. Giesen (eds.), Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 1-12. Bayles, William D., ‘Lisbon: Europe’s Bottleneck’, Life, 28 April 1941. Brennan, Frederick Hazlitt, Memo to a Firing Squad, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1943. Cowans, Jon, Empire Films and the Crisis of Colonialism, 1946-1959, Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 2015. Doherty, Thomas, ‘Hollywood Agit-Prop: The Anti-Communist Cycle, 1948-1954’, Journal of Film and Video 40, no. 4, 1988, pp. 15-27. Doherty, Thomas, Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen & the Production Code Administration, New York, Columbia University Press, 2007. Edwards, Brian T, Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express, Durham, Duke University Press, 2005. Eldridge, David, ‘“Dear Owen”: The CIA, Luigi Luraschi and Hollywood, 1953’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 20, no. 2, 2000, pp. 149-96. Hopkins, Jeff, ‘Mapping of Cinematic Places: Icons, Ideology, and the Power of (Mis)representation’, in Aiken, Stuart C. and Leo E. Zonn (eds.), Place, Power, Situation, and Spectacle: A Geography of Film, Maryland, Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 1994, pp. 47-65. Koppes, Clayton R., and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies, London, I.B. Tauris, 1987. Lebo, Harlan, Casablanca: Behind the Scenes, Los Angeles, Simon and Schuster, 1992. Luce, Henry, ‘The American Century’, Life, February 17, 1941, p. 65.

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McLaughlin, Robert L., and Sally E. Parry, We’ll Always Have the Movies: American Cinema During World War II, Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 2006. Pittis, Donald, and Susan J. Hender (eds.), Macao: Mysterious Decay and Romance: An Anthology, New York, Oxford University Press, 1997. Pizzi, Katia, ‘Cold War Trieste on Screen: Memory, Identity and Mystique of a City in the Shadow of the Iron Curtain’, in Pizzi, Katia and Mariatta Hietala (eds.), Cold War Cities: History, Culture and Memory, Oxford, Peter Lang, 2016, pp.75-95. Prokosch, Frederic, The Conspirators, New York, Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1943. Ray, Robert, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Film: 1930-1980, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1985. Shaw, Tony, Hollywood’s Cold War, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Shively, JoEllen, ‘Cowboys and Indians: Perceptions of Western Films among American Indians and Anglos’, in American Sociological Review 57, no. 6, 1992, pp. 725-734. Shohat, Ella, ‘Gender and Culture of Empire: Toward a Feminist Ethnography of the Cinema’, in Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar (eds.), Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1997, pp. 19-66. Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, London, Routledge, 1994.

About the author Rui Lopes is a researcher at the Instituto de História Contemporânea (NOVA-FCSH), in Lisbon, and a member of the editorial board of Práticas da História: Journal on Theory, Historiography and Uses of the Past. He has a PhD in International History from the London School of Economics and Political Science and is the author of the book West Germany and the Portuguese Dictatorship, 1968-1974: Between Cold War and Colonialism (Palgrave Macmillan 2014), as well as of multiple articles related to cold war culture and Portugal’s international history. His current research projects focus on the transnational dimensions of European spy fiction and on the audiovisual depictions of the Portuguese dictatorship and empire.



City Branding Historical Culture and the Making of ‘Hanzestad Zwolle’ Frank Inklaar Abstract This chapter focusses on the topic of iconicity in city branding. By analyzing the way in which the Dutch city of Zwolle is ‘made’ into a successful brand – an iconic Hanseatic town –, general characteristics of the cultural icon, in particular the pre-eminent visual nature of the icon and the supposed universality of the icon, are put into question. Clearly, when it comes to iconic cities, few will think of a middle-large Dutch town like Zwolle. That the branding of Zwolle as an iconic Hanseatic city is deployed with such apparent ease is telling for the hyperinflation the concept of the icon has undergone in present culture. Still, as is demonstrated, a closer analysis of such an ‘un-iconic’ icon can tell much about the construction of icons in present day commercialized culture. More broadly, this analysis sheds light on the ways in which history is revived and remodelled in contemporary culture. Keywords: city branding, historical culture, construction of icons, virtual presence, mediated experience

Introduction In 2017 and 2018, the Dutch city of Zwolle introduced itself on national radio via a frequently broadcasted commercial as an old, but lively and highly attractive place to visit: Welcome to the city of Zwolle, a vibrant Hanseatic town, where life is celebrated in our historic city centre. A city populated by creative students, inventive entrepreneurs and opiniated free-thinkers. Here we believe that

Boven, Erica van, and Marieke Winkler (eds), The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463728225_inkl

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life becomes better being together. Within the confines of the old city walls there is a wide range of cultural and culinary discoveries on offer. Countless festivals, the culinary top of the Netherlands, striking exhibitions, the most beautiful bookshop of the country, all this can be discovered within the setting of the medieval scenery of the old Hanseatic town.1

Zwolle presents itself as a Hanseatic town, and the historical period of the Hanseatic League apparently plays an important role in the self-image of the city and its iconization. Not only in this commercial but in most of its communications, the city council uses the expression ‘Hanzestad Zwolle’, or ‘dynamic Hanzestad Zwolle’.2 Here, the coupling of the old and the lively becomes particularly visible when the adjective ‘dynamic’ is added to the expression ‘Hanzestad3 Zwolle’. However, the presentation of Zwolle as an iconic Hanseatic town is only of very recent date, and it seems to play a specific role in constructing Zwolle as a recognizable ‘brand’. In this article, I further analyse the case of Zwolle to explore the concept of the icon in city branding. Clearly, when it comes to iconic cities, few will think of a middle-large Dutch town like Zwolle. That the branding of Zwolle as an iconic Hanseatic city is deployed with such apparent ease is telling for the hyperinflation the concept of the icon has undergone in present culture. Still, as I demonstrate, a closer analysis of such an ‘un-iconic’ icon can tell us much about the construction of icons in present day commercialized culture. More broadly, such analysis sheds light on the ways in which history is revived and remodelled in contemporary culture. Since the end of the twentieth century, the way history is ‘used’ in contemporary culture has gained new and particular interest within the historical sciences. Within this field of study, the concept of ‘historical culture’ plays an important role. It draws specific attention to how the general public (not necessarily consisting of professional historians) integrates and processes history into everyday life. 4 Hence, some argue that, within the study of historical culture, the concept of the cultural icon can function as a meaningful tool to analyse the construction of cultural products that constitute historical culture. Traditionally, scholars studying icons, iconicity or iconization, either explicitly or inexplicitly, use the semiotic Piercian notion of an icon. From 1 In 2018, a visual counterpart of the text appeared on national television. 2 See www.visitzwolle.com. 3 In this article, I use the Dutch notation ‘Hanze’, except for expressions like ‘Die Hanse der Neuzeit’, the ‘New Hanse’, or the International Hanse Days’. 4 See Füssman; Kammen; Lowenthal, Samuel and Ribbens.

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this perspective the icon is conceptualized as a sign which refers to the thing it represents.5 It is not just any sign, but a condensed and standardized image of reality. The icon plays with reality; it is not the same, but it still refers to an (at least virtual) identifiable reality. In order for a sign to become an icon, it is important that the public widely recognizes references to a historical reality within the sign – be it a person, a piece of art or a photograph of a historic event. In this sense, icons not only have a visual and a textual dimension but also a sense of universality, as Martin Kemp stresses in his reference study From Christ to Coke: although ‘the term iconic is now scattered around so liberally and applied to figures or things of passing and local celebrity it has tended to become debased’ his examples are, he emphasizes, ‘as secure and universal in their iconic status as any cultural product can ever claim to be.’ In this view, universality almost seems to be an inherent quality of cultural icons. They have achieved ‘exceptional levels of widespread recognizability […] for very large numbers of people across time and cultures.’6 Because of the aforementioned characteristics, the concept of the icon raises several questions when applied here. Particularly relevant regarding our case study are both the question of the visual nature of the icon and that of the supposed universality of the icon. To start with the latter, universality needlessly seems to limit the applicability of the concept of a cultural icon. Cultural icons work within different contexts; some are only recognized within a specific subculture, some within other sociological configurations like nations, regions, etc. Some icons will develop into global icons, while others will remain meaningful within their own subculture or region. Regarding the Iconic City, it is useful to distinguish, as Leslie Sklair does for architecture, between a meaning of iconic that refers to ‘the stereotypical copy’ and ‘something unique as in unique selling point’.7 Nevertheless, both types of icon are relevant within their own context and icons – even the stereotypical ones – are neither universal nor eternally valid; they come and go, they are created and will be forgotten.8 Regarding the point of visuality, while Kemp, as an art historian, talks primarily about the ‘visual icon’9, and most of his examples are visual icons, it 5 See Frijhoff, p.52-55; Tomaselli and Scott, p. 18: ‘signs that resemble their objects whether their object is a thing in the real world, an idea, or another sign.’ 6 Kemp, p. 3. 7 Sklair, p. 136. 8 Frijhoff, p. 52-55. 9 Kemp, p. 3.

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can be argued that not all icons are visual. For example, the last icon discussed in from Chris to Coke, the formula E = mc², can be perceived as an image when approaching the formula in written or printed form as a ubiquitous virtual presence, like Kemp does.10 But this example also addresses the point made by other scholars such as the cultural historian Willem Frijhoff among others, namely that visuality is not a sine qua non; a cultural icon can have non-visual manifestations. Or, as Jeffrey Alexander postulates in Iconic Power (2011), iconicity is traceable to materially mediated experience.11 Related is the point addressed by Douglas Holt in How Brands Become Icons (2004) that ‘icons come to represent a particular story – an identity myth – that their consumers use to address identity desires and anxieties’.12 If we consider icons to be ‘materially mediated experience’, the conceptualization opens up space for an approach to icons as entities that are not strict visual images, but do have a virtual presence. As the case study in this chapter demonstrates, neither universality nor visuality is a necessary element of an icon. An icon can have many virtual shapes, and there are no confines determined beforehand; in theory, any sign will do. However, the presence of a story functioning as identity myth seems indispensable. In this article, I draw attention to the adaptation of a historical period as a necessary part of the construction and successful branding of a cultural icon. It must be stressed that, by doing so, I do not discard the importance of the visual nature of cultural icons – on the contrary, the visual element is of prime importance. Especially in our intensely mediated society in which visual images are predominant, it makes it possible for icons to be reproduced easily and spread widely. In addition, however, in this contribution I want to think through what can be called the ‘virtual presence’ of icons, arguing that in the process of making historical culture, illustrated in the case study below, it is the virtuality of the icon that plays an important role in its construction.

Zwolle: a case study Zwolle is a city with over 120,000 inhabitants in the river IJssel valley. It is the capital of the province of Overijssel and a regional economic centre. The city offers is a major transport hub and the gateway to the north-eastern part of the Netherlands. Zwolle has a long history. It obtained its city 10 Ibid, p. 7. 11 Alexander, paraphrased in Bartmanski, p. 5. 12 Holt, p. 19.

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rights in 1230. Zwolle’s ‘golden age’ (as in most cities in the IJssel valley) was between 1380 and 1480. The city was thriving economically and many impressive buildings were constructed, including several large churches, a new city hall, the city walls and gates, and some large townhouses. Culture and education blossomed under the wings of the religious reform movement ‘Moderne Devotie’. Zwolle was one of the main centres of this movement. In the city, several convents were founded, and some of the most important monasteries linked to the ‘Moderne Devotie’ were in the surroundings of Zwolle. Thomas a Kempis, the author of arguably the most important text of the ‘Moderne Devotie’, De imitatione Christi, lived most of his life in one of these monasteries. The ‘Moderne Devotie’ not only influenced religious life in the city, it was also very important for its educational activities. Many students came to Zwolle because of its Latin School, which for some time was one of the most advanced and well known in the Low Countries. Some of these students, as well as their teachers, were involved in copying beautiful illuminated manuscripts, many of which were produced in Zwolle. Geographically, Zwolle was between two other important cities in the IJssel valley – Deventer and Kampen – both major trade centres. The relationship with these neighbours was rather complex. The cities were in constant competition with each other, but whenever necessary, they were able to cooperate as well – for example, against a common enemy. To put it mildly, Zwolle often took a pragmatic stand against the other IJssel cities or, to put it more harshly, Zwolle often took an opportunistic stand against them. The same goes for the relationship between Zwolle and the Hanseatic League – the dominant league of trading cities in Northwest Europe – and Northern Germany in particular. Strategically situated between the major trading blocks of the time, with Holland and Flanders to the west and the Hanseatic League to the east, Zwolle (like the other IJssel cities) acted pragmatically or opportunistically. The city government constantly weighed up its interests, and this sometimes led to an orientation towards the west, sometimes towards the east. As a result, the city was an intermittent member of the Hanseatic League. For this reason, it is correct to describe Zwolle as a Hanseatic city, but this does not mean that Zwolle (like most of the Dutch Hanseatic cities) was a very loyal one. Nevertheless, the Hanseatic League was important for Zwolle, and a large part of Zwolle’s prosperity was based on Hanseatic trade. Furthermore, the Hanseatic network played a pivotal role in a cultural sense as well. For example, the ideas of the ‘Moderne Devotie’ travelled along trade routes, many students in Zwolle came from

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the German hinterland, organ music spread through the Hanseatic area, and a specific kind of architecture appeared in most Hanseatic cities. Nowadays, there is little evidence of Zwolle’s Hanseatic past. There are still several medieval buildings in the city centre, but only one building has the characteristic features of Hanseatic architecture. There are no direct references to its Hanseatic past in the form of trade offices (as in the German city of Lübeck), Hanseatic cog ships (as in the neighbouring town of Kampen) or a harbour with a wooden crane (as in Gdansk in Poland). Even so, Zwolle has been promoting itself as ‘Hanzestad Zwolle’ for a few decades, or more recently as ‘dynamic Hanzestad Zwolle’. How did this come about?

Stage 0: There is no ‘Zwolle Hanzestad’; the celebration of Zwolle 700 For a long time, the Hanseatic past of Zwolle played hardly any role in the identity of the city. In 1930, for instance, the city celebrated its 700th anniversary, or, more precisely, Zwolle celebrated that it had obtained its city rights 700 years earlier. In the festivities, which focused on the main events of Zwolle’s history, the Hanseatic period was not even mentioned. The initiative to celebrate the 700th anniversary lay with the local tourist board. It seized this opportunity to present Zwolle as an interesting city to visit. The idea gained support from other local organizations, and eventually the municipality became involved. The reason for the celebration was unambiguous: Zwolle will celebrate. Many had their doubts and maybe still have their doubts. Such a huge festival and for so long, what’s the purpose? What’s the purpose? It shows that Zwolle isn’t a dead city, but a vibrant and entertaining one; that Zwolle knows how to take risks, and dares to live!13

The image of Zwolle as a rather boring city, which took no initiative whatsoever, had to be changed. And it did change, though only for a short time. The city centre and all the main buildings were beautifully decorated and 13 From the Official programme of the festivities held to commemorate the 700th anniversary of Zwolle as a city, 2-6 September 1930, p. 7. ‘Zoo zal Zwolle haar feest vieren. Velen hebben het hoofd geschud en misschien schudden enkelen het nog. Zoo een groot feest van dagen lang, waartoe dient het? Waartoe het dient? Het bewijst, dat Zwolle geheel niet is een doode stad, doch een stad vol leven en vertier; dat Zwolle weet te durven, en durft te leven!’.

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illuminated at night-time. Shop owners organized a competition to show their decorated shopfronts. There was a variety of entertainment: concerts, parades, sporting events, and parties in several neighbourhoods. There were also special events such as demonstrations of bike-riding skills and swimming in the city moat. Special waterplanes flew over the city centre and 70 cars took senior citizens on a tour. In the garden of a major gardenrestaurant, a model was erected of the new bridge which was to be built over the river IJssel. Visitors could cross this bridge to an ‘old Dutch market square’ with a fair. Or they could visit in one of the main squares ‘Old Swolle’, a mock seventeenth century plywood village with traditional Dutch facades, which accommodated restaurants and cafes. And, of course, each evening the programme ended with a huge firework display. The main feature of Zwolle 700, however, was an open-air play, Swolle Stad 1320. The play showed a dramatized version of the actual ceremony of granting city rights to the city of Zwolle. This theatrical spectacle with noblemen, clerics, soldiers, farmers, and burghers in their fourteenth century outf its was performed twice at an estate near the city. Extra buses and trams were provided to transport the huge crowds who wanted to attend the play. On the Friday afternoon before the play, all the participants participated in a historical parade through the city centre. In the main square, a copy of the city rights was ceremonially offered to the residents. As modern re-enactments, the play and historical parade were as historically correct as possible. There was only one minor alteration: the actual ceremony never took place in Zwolle, but in the neighbouring city of Deventer. The week-long Zwolle 700 celebration was a huge success. The aim of attracting people from outside Zwolle to visit the city was achieved. Special night-trains were provided. Financially speaking, the festival proved successful as well. A year later, a budget of 12,000 guilders was partly spent on a permanent memorial of the celebration, a stone relief next to the one still existing city gate, depicting the actual transfer of the city rights. Zwolle had shown itself to be a vibrant and dynamic city, worth a visit. It turned out to be just for one week. For several decades, Zwolle returned to its former image of a dull, mediocre city. For my argument, it is important to look into the city’s self-image during this week of festivities in 1930. What was communicated to the visitors? The self-image was first and foremost a historical one; the highlights of Zwolle 700 – the play and the parade – were historical. The focus was on what the city had achieved in former days, on the great history of the city, not on its present achievements. This was partly due to the theme of

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the celebration. But there was also a lack of pride in the current state of affairs in the city. In the municipal museum, the city presented itself in a historical exhibition. Everything in Zwolle’s history that the city could be proud of was displayed. Coins hinted at former prosperity; engravings and paintings showed the former glory of the city and the famous people who had lived there, such as Thomas a Kempis and the family of famous painters, the Ter Borch family. The ‘Moderne Devotie’ was evident in the form of splendid illuminated manuscripts. Surprisingly, in this exhibition of historical pride, there was no reference to the Hanseatic period whatsoever. Apparently, the Hanseatic period didn’t play any role in the city’s self-image. In 1930, ‘Hanze’ wasn’t part of the city’s identity, and it wasn’t mentioned once. ‘Hanzestad Zwolle’ didn’t exist, let alone ‘dynamic Hanzestad Zwolle’.

Stage 1: Rediscovering and applying the Hanseatic past; the celebration of Zwolle 750 Fifty years later, the Hanseatic period was rediscovered as an important period in the city’s history, and since then ‘Hanze’ has become a main part of Zwolle’s city branding. In 1980, Zwolle celebrated its 750th anniversary as a city. In contrast to the celebrations 50 years earlier, this time the city administration took the initiative. In 1977, an organizing committee, Stichting Zwolle 75014, was created. During its first meeting, the representatives of the city administration were clear about what the purpose of the celebration should be. Plenty of entertainment could be organized for the population of Zwolle, but the city itself needed to achieve lasting results from the festivities. In any case, the festivities had to attract visitors and provide ‘Zwolle promotion’. With these objectives in mind, the committee set to work. After several brainstorm sessions, a list of festivities and activities was produced. The expansion of a municipal park was intended to be the lasting result of the celebration of Zwolle 750. But this would not attract many visitors, nor would it contribute to any promotion of Zwolle. The listed festivities were nice enough, but they lacked an appealing common denominator. The committee therefore weighed up some possibilities for theming the festivities. Some suggestions were considered and rejected, and eventually ‘Hanze’ was chosen. 14 Historisch centrum Overijssel, archive Stichting Zwolle 750, toegangsnummer 1052. The citations in the text are from inventory numbers 1 and 55.

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The idea is to add to the first theme [Hanze, FI] the revival of the Dagvaert, which was held for the last time in around 1700. The intention of this revival is to create a meaningful event and not just a dressing-up party. The number of cities (270 in Northern Germany alone) guarantees a meaningful choice, taking into consideration the fact that for example London, Bergen, Stettin and Nowgorod are ancient Hanze cities.15

In contrast to the celebration of Zwolle 700, the theming of Zwolle 750 had no direct link to the city rights of 1230. ‘Hanze’ as a theme offered opportunities to show not only a series of historical re-enactments, but also activities connected to the present and the future. Zwolle could present itself as a city with a rich history, but also as a dynamic city, full of entrepreneurial initiatives and with an international orientation, just as it (supposedly) had been in the historical Hanseactic period. From the start, the intention was to combine the popular historical re-enactments, which would attract tourists, with meaningful events relating to the present and future. The historical part of this combination was achieved in a very smart way. Zwolle proposed the founding of a New Hanseatic League (‘Die Hanse der Neuzeit’16), a modern version of the old league of trading cities. The purpose of the New Hanseatic League was economic and political cooperation, and of course the stimulation of tourism. Zwolle invited former Hanseatic cities to attend a new ‘dagvaart’, as the annual meeting of Hanseatic cities in the German city of Lübeck was once called. All the participants were to choose their own special means of transport to come to Zwolle: This can be in a historical way, for example, with ox-carts, or on a cog ship (Bremen), but also in a more present-day or futuristic manner (…). On the day of arrival (…) a Hanseatic parade will be held with all participating groups and vehicles. Afterwards the dagvaart will take place.17 15 Ibid. ‘De gedachte is aan het eerste thema [de Hanze FI] vast te knopen het herleven van de laatste Dagvaert, die rond 1700 gehouden is. Het ligt in de bedoeling dat herleven een zinvol karakter te geven en niet alleen te laten uitmonden in een verkleedpartij. Het aantal steden (alleen in Noord Duitsland 270) staat er borg voor dat er een zinvolle keus zal kunnen worden gedaan, ook al in het licht van het feit, dat bijvoorbeeld Londen, Bergen, Stettin en Nowgorod van ouds Hanzesteden zijn’. 16 Nowadays the official name for the ‘New Hanse’ is ‘Städtebund Die Hanse’. 17 ‘Dat mag historisch zijn bijv. per ossekar of met een koggeschip (Bremen), maar ook eigentijds of futuristisch zijn (…). De dag na aankomst (…) wordt het Hanze-def ilé van deelnemende groepen en voertuigen gehouden. Daarna vindt de dagvaart plaats.’

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The idea was received well, and more than 60 cities attended the ‘dagvaart’ and the founding of the New Hanseatic League. The Hanseatic parade, with representatives of the participating cities dressed up in historical clothing, was a big success. Another event, a Hanseatic market, was popular with visitors as well. Here the members of the newly founded Hanseatic League showed their local products and specialities and visitors were able to find tourist information while enjoying local snacks and drinks. One reason why the organizing committee, Stichting Zwolle 750, picked ‘Hanze’ as the general theme for the festivities was the requirement of the city administration that the celebration should also lead to a lasting result. According to the committee, the resurrection of the Hanseatic League provided just this: Furthermore, Zwolle creates something lasting; the revival of a tradition focused on relaxed relationships in Europe. This good city will be connected to this tradition for many years to come.18

It is clear what the lasting result required by the city administration would be. Zwolle would always be known as the founder city of the New Hanseatic League. In the first instance, this was linked to a political idea; the New Hanseatic League as a modern version of an old European form of cooperation, which would contribute to more relaxed relationships in Europe. This idea was prominent when, for example, the organizing committee was looking for a keynote speaker for the opening of the ‘dagvaart’. The f irst candidate was the former Belgian Prime Minister Leo Tindemans, a European in every respect. The mayor of Zwolle wrote in his invitation: With this rich tradition, we want to look to the present and the future. The Hanseatic theme can be a source of inspiration for us in the sometimes difficult promotion of European cooperation. This theme could contribute to the development of a contemporary European feeling (…) I already wrote that the idea of the dagvaart has received a lot of positive reactions, which has surpassed our expectations. It is already clear that our initiative will be continued in the years after 1980 by other Hanseatic cities; Dortmund and Lübeck have already signed up. 18 ‘Bovendien creëert Zwolle hiermee iets blijvends, namelijk de herleving van een traditie gericht op ontspannen verhoudingen in Europa. Een traditie waaraan de naam van deze goede stad in de lengte van jaren verbonden zal blijven.’

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This happening in Zwolle could therefore become the start of a new European tradition.19

Unfortunately, Leo Tindemans couldn’t address the ‘dagvaart’, but the message conveyed is clear. The lasting significance Zwolle was striving for was to be found in the politics of European cooperation. That is why the absence of the Hanseatic cities in Eastern Europe was regretted very much. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, this omission was filled almost immediately, especially by Hanseatic cities in the Baltic states. From the start, there were also economic and cultural motives for the resurrection of the Hanseatic League. Tourism and economic cooperation played a major part in the activities in Zwolle in 1980. The ‘dagvaart’ with the accompanying historical parade and the Hanseatic market catered to tourism. A special five-day Hanseatic fair was organized as a showcase for the economic achievements of the participating cities. Nowadays, it seems that these motives have surpassed the political motive of European cooperation. The most important activity of the New Hanseatic League is a multi-day event called the International Hanseatic Days. Since 1980, it has been held in one of the member cities of the New Hanseatic League each year. It is predominantly a touristic event, with traditional activities like the ‘dagvaart’ and the Hanseatic market, but also with new musical and cultural ones. The continuity of an international meeting each year proves the success of the entire New Hanseatic League. This is also evident in the enormous growth; the number of members has grown from over 60 in 1980 to 192 in 2018. Most cities with a Hanseatic past have joined the New Hanseatic League, which spreads across sixteen countries from England to Russia. And although tourism seems to dominate the activities of the New Hanseatic League, there are still signs that other motives remain important. Recent conventions (Herford 2013, Bergen 2016) held during the Hanseatic Days have led to agreements on economic cooperation. In Kampen 2017, there was a conference on water management in which member cities could share common problems and their possible solutions. If author Benjamin Barber is correct, the future of 19 ‘Vanuit deze rijke historie willen wij echter kijken naar het heden en de toekomst. Het Hanze-thema kan ons inspireren bij de soms moeizame opbouw van de Europese samenwerking. Dit thema kan bijdragen tot de ontwikkeling van een Europees eigentijds denken. (…) Ik schreef reeds dat het idee van de Hanze-dagvaart zeer is ingeslagen. De reacties hebben onze verwachtingen overtroffen. Het staat nu al vast dat ons initiatief in de jaren na 1980 zal worden overgenomen en voortgezet door andere Hanze-steden; Dortmund en Lübeck hebben zich daarvoor al aangemeld. Het Zwolse gebeuren kan derhalve het begin worden van een nieuwe Europese traditie.’

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solving major world problems will be found in cooperation between cities instead of countries.20 Maybe the New Hanseatic League will develop into a forerunner of this kind of cooperation. At least, Barber presents the historical Hanseatic League as an example of effective city cooperation.

Stage 2: Appropriation: a new identity? Let’s return to the main argument of this article: the creation of the iconic image of ‘Hanzestad Zwolle’. It should be clear by now that ‘Zwolle 750’ and the initiative to found the New Hanseatic League have been very important in this process. Compared to the celebration of Zwolle 700, Zwolle’s handling of its Hanseatic heritage changed dramatically from an almost forgotten part of the city’s history to a prominent part of the city’s identity. After all, Zwolle has been honoured internationally each year as the founder city of the New Hanseatic League, thus reconfirming each year the importance of its Hanseatic past. But, although the Hanseatic period was rediscovered as an important period in the city’s history, in 1980 there was no full-grown cultural icon like ‘Hanzestad Zwolle’. But since 1980, the general public seems to have appropriated the term ‘Hanze’ as a way of expressing a local identity. The word ‘Hanze’ has been used a lot in the city, especially as a prefix. For example, the new main location for offices and schools next to the train station is now known as Hanzeland, the main train connection to Amsterdam is called the Hanzelijn and the bridge over the river IJssel is called the Hanzeboog. These were off icial names invented by municipal civil servants. However, ‘Hanze’ apparently struck a chord with the ordinary Zwollenaar as well. There are now numerous enterprises that use Hanze as a prefix: Hanzekoeriers (a delivery service), Hanze Advocaten (a law firm), Hanze Apotheek (a pharmacy), Hanze Hotel, Jachthaven de Hanze (a marina), Hanzebouw (a building company), Hanzeparket (a parquet floor company), Hanze Hifi, Hanze Security, etc.; as well as sports clubs (Hanzerenners (cycling), FC Hanze (football), BC Hanze 83 (badminton), Bridgeclub de Hanze, etc. Indeed, ‘Hanze’ has become more than just a period or activity in Zwolle’s past; it has assumed iconic proportions. The term ‘Hanze’ apparently evokes positive associations in this part of the Netherlands. With regard to the enterprises, this could partly be explained 20 See Barber.

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by the dynamic and international dimensions of the Hanseatic League. Still, this cannot explain other signs of a positive attitude towards ‘Hanze’. A probable explanation is that the popularity of ‘Hanze’ has something to do with a growing sense of local and regional identity. ‘Hanze’ then serves as a nostalgic, rather vague, but still well-known, positive, and uncontested historic anchor for a regional identity. The dominant Dutch identity was mainly formed in the western coastal region of the Netherlands, Holland. The Dutch Golden Age represented first and foremost the economic and cultural prosperity of Holland. Dutch historiography was (and still is) dominated by Holland-centric history. In other parts of the Netherlands, there is a growing need for a different, more diverse story. ‘Hanze’ offers such an alternative regional identity. It has positive connotations, and it is a period of cultural and economic prosperity – an alternative ‘golden age’. It is not controversial in the same way as the Dutch Golden Age, with its negative features such as colonialism and slavery. The ‘Hanze’ gives this region (broadly-speaking, the IJssel valley) a past people can be proud of. And most important of all, ‘Hanze’ has nothing to do with Holland. This could explain the popularity of the Hanseatic period and its development into an iconic status.

Stage 3: Commodification and city branding; ‘Hanzestad Zwolle’ The last decade of the twentieth century saw another important step towards the cultural icon ‘Zwolle Hanzestad’. ‘Hanze’ became a focal point for Zwolle’s marketing and city branding activities and for some neighbouring cities. These activities more or less reinforced the iconic status of the Hanseactic period. The main actor in this field has been (and still is) an organization called Hanzesteden Marketing. In order to promote tourism, seven (nowadays nine) cities in the IJssel region cooperated within this organization, which is established in Zwolle. ‘Hanze’ is the main theme used to attract tourists. ‘Hanze’ is attractive, because it is well known in a positive way. Most people in the Netherlands and also in neighbouring countries are at least familiar with the name. In the Netherlands, it is obligatory for children to learn about the Hanseatic period in their history courses at school. It has nostalgic, romantic, and historical connotations, a combination which usually sells well. And ‘Hanze’ offers something distinctive that other Dutch cities cannot provide. After all, there are only a few ‘Hanze’ cities. Hanzesteden Marketing uses a broad definition of anything ‘Hanze’. There has to be a medieval city centre, access to waterways which links the city to other ‘Hanze’ cities (according to Hanzesteden Marketing, trade in the

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Hanseatic period was carried out with boats, which is actually only part of the story, but it is important to cater to nautical tourists), and, of course, a claim to membership of the historical Hanseatic League. This definition is very broad one, but that is deliberate. The participating cities must have room for the individual colouring of their Hanseatic identity. After all, tourists must be tempted to visit all the Hanseatic cities, not just a few. For this reason, one city has a nautical profile, another a culinary profile, and a third a cultural one. It is important that the ‘Hanze’ identity be supported by the city’s inhabitants. A prime example of this is the city of Doesburg, which holds an annual event called ‘Hanzefeesten’. Many inhabitants participate by dressing up in medieval costumes. However, within the organization of Hanzesteden Marketing, it is not obligatory to have such an event. There are other ways to propagate the Hanseatic identity. Nonetheless, cities have to do something with ‘Hanze’ one way or the other. It’s not enough to put up signs at the entrance to the city to indicate that a visitor is now entering a Hanseatic city; the residents of the city themselves must reinforce the concept with specific content. Be it in education, or for use by entrepreneurs in their international contacts. Residents of a Hanseatic city must be proud of their identity as a Hanseatic city resident. Hanzesteden Marketing has developed a whole range of resources to induce tourists to visit the Dutch Hanseatic cities. There are various printed leaflets, including a special one for nautical tourism (Hanzesteden aan boord!) for the seven Hanze cities at (or near) the river IJssel. There are also leaflets for long-distance hikers and cyclists (Van Hanzestad naar Hanzestad), and a special route between the cities in the IJssel valley has been developed for long-distance hikers (Hanzestedenpad) and cyclists. Slightly less ambitious cyclists can make a tour from Kampen to Zwolle and vice versa (Hanzerondje Kampen-Zwolle). There are walking tours through the city centres of the participating cities and there is a leaflet for each one. All this information can be found online as well. Apps have been developed and, of course, the nine cooperating Hanseatic cities have their own websites.21 More information on the cities and their historical background can be found here. There is a calendar of events and information about overnight accommodation, shopping, museums, restaurants, activities, and arrangements that tourists may need. One may wonder how much ‘Hanze’ the Hanseatic cities actually have to offer. Indeed, the Hanseatic cities do have a medieval city centre with medieval buildings like churches, walls, and gates. But are they specifically 21 See http://www.hanzesteden.info/ or www.visithanzesteden.nl/.

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Hanseatic? Yes, they have buildings constructed in the Hanseatic period, but only very few display the characteristic Hanseatic architecture. There is hardly any connection with the historical Hanseatic League as a league of merchant cities. Kampen at least has its cog ship (kogge, the most famous ship of the period), but elsewhere there are hardly any material artefacts such as trade off ices, warehouses or cranes. In short, ‘Hanze’ refers to a period, to the ‘golden age’ of the region with a thriving economy and cultural and educational highlights, and not specifically to the ‘Hanze’ as a league of merchant cities. This lack of visual artefacts, which in theory should hamper the effectiveness of the ‘Hanze’ icon, actually seems to be no problem at all. For tourist purposes, any old material artefact from the Middle Ages, without any connection to the Hanseatic League, will do as well. For example, the tour through the city centre of Zwolle only includes one building with a vague architectural reference to the architecture of the Hanseatic cities in Northern Germany. But this is not a problem; the tour passes buildings built in the same period, and the tour can therefore be sold as a ‘Hanze’ walking tour. The creators of the tour are even more open-minded: interesting buildings of a later period, such as De Fundatie museum, or the shop where the local sweets are produced (het Zwolse Balletjeshuis) are included too. With so few material artefacts of the ‘Hanze’ as a league of merchant cities to offer, Hanzesteden Marketing is constantly searching for new opportunities to link the present to the historical Hanseatic League. One of these opportunities involves narratives about local merchants who travelled across the Hanseatic region to buy and sell their goods. The archives have little to offer in this respect, but some exceptions could make it possible to tell authentic stories. Audio points, or apps could be used to share the experience of travelling in the Hanseatic region with modern tourists. However, visuality is still largely missing. New technology is being considered. For example, augmented reality could show merchant vessels on the river IJssel, or to show remnants of buildings now hidden. In this way, visual elements could enhance the ‘Hanze’ icon. These new technological developments could be the key to creating a more complete ‘Hanze’ experience. For the last few years, Hanzesteden Marketing has been consciously targeting new markets, especially in Belgium and Germany. This ‘internationalization’ fits exactly into some new developments. The Dutch tourism board (NBTC) has developed new alternative touristic routes and narratives, to redirect streams of tourists from the cities in the western part of the country that are almost too popular (particularly Amsterdam) to other parts of the Netherlands. One of these routes is called the ‘Hanzestedenroute’,

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which passes through the cooperating Hanseatic cities in the IJssel region. Recently, the ‘Hanzestedenroute’ acquired a European dimension as well. It was chosen by the Council of Europe as one of its 33 official cultural routes. ‘Hanze’ as an attraction for historical tourism seems to be catching on. As the homepage of the website of the cooperating Dutch Hanseatic cities states, Hanzesteden (or Hanseatic towns, or Hansestädte, according to the chosen language): Hip and Happening.22 Meanwhile, Hanzesteden Marketing has been winning award after award for its activities.23 Hanzesteden Marketing uses the phrase ‘Hanzestad’ to attract tourists. A rather vague reference to a historical period with positive associations will do. A medieval city centre, access to waterways which links the city to other Hanseatic cities and a claim to membership of the historical Hanseatic League is sufficient for tourists who are looking for a nostalgic ‘feel good’ atmosphere. For Hanzesteden Marketing, it is unnecessary to link the term ‘Hanzestad’ to one specific city. On the contrary, cooperating cities will all have far more opportunities to sell their products to tourists when they use the term ‘Hanzestad’. Within this context, the participating cities have no reason to claim the term ‘Hanzestad’ for themselves; they see the benefits of cooperation. But there is a difference in the way Zwolle uses the iconic ‘Zwolle Hanzestad’.

Stage 4: Completion; ‘The story of Zwolle’ Recently, the iconic status of the Hanseatic period for the city of Zwolle reached a new level. ‘Hanze’ has become one of the three focal topics24 of what is called ‘the story of Zwolle’. ‘The story of Zwolle’, a creation of the LAGroup, arguably one of the most influential consultancy f irms in the f ield of culture and leisure in the Netherlands, has become the basis of city policies in city branding, tourism, and culture. In ‘the story of Zwolle’, the Hanseatic period explicitly stands for the international orientation of the city, its central economic and cultural position within 22 See www.visithanzesteden.nl/. 23 For example, the NBTC’s Network City Marketing Award in February 2018. 24 The other two are ‘De Moderne Devotie’ and ‘Cradle of Democracy’. Interestingly enough, the earlier mentioned historian Willem Frijhoff, in his book Heiligen, idolen, iconen, discusses Thomas a Kempis, one of the leaders of ‘De Moderne Devotie’ who lived most of his life in a monastery near Zwolle and another famous inhabitant of Zwolle, Johan Derk van der Capellen tot den Pol, leader of the ‘Patriotten’, an important Dutch democratic reform movement in the eighteenth century, as examples of Dutch icons.

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the region and its dynamic atmosphere for entrepreneurs. As mentioned earlier, the adjective ‘dynamic’ has been incorporated in the phrase ‘dynamic Hanzestad Zwolle’ in the most recent television ads. These are not only references to a glorious past, but also characteristics of the city and its inhabitants which the city wishes to communicate to the outside world in the present and future. It is another layer of meaning put into the cultural icon ‘Hanzestad Zwolle’. Zwolle has a Hanseatic past, is founder of the New Hanseatic League, it appeals to tourists as a nostalgic medieval town with access to waterways, and it is also a dynamic, internationally orientated, thriving city with a central economic and cultural position in the region. All these layers of meaning combine within the cultural icon ‘Zwolle Hanzestad’ and are used in part or fully, according to the context. This is how far we have come with ‘Hanze’ as an icon of Zwolle. The Hanseatic period has more or less been canonized in the city branding. Zwolle is presenting itself more and more as the icon of the Hanseatic League in the Low Countries, at the expense of other Hanseatic cities. In 2018, a new promotional film was produced which showed the city’s almost imperialistic ideas in terms of tourism. Anything worth visiting for tourists within a radius of 50 km from Zwolle was presented as an attraction near Hanzestad Zwolle. The message to foreign tourists was clear: they should use the city as a base for visiting other interesting sites. Zwolle is probably right in assuming that foreign visitors won’t stay more than a day in the city, just because of what the city itself offers, but probably will stay for a couple of days if they can visit interesting sites in the vicinity. And, for the average foreign tourist, 50 km is not much of a distance. Hanzestad Zwolle is consciously presenting itself as the focal point of the region, which, as expected, is not being received very positively by the neighbouring cities and tourist sites. Zwolle also claims to be a regional economic and cultural centre, with its dynamic and internationally oriented atmosphere. Zwolle is claiming ‘Hanze’ as an icon more and more exclusively in the phrase ‘Hanzestad Zwolle’. Historically, the city has no such claim (Zwolle was never a very important Hanseatic city). The city has hardly any material artefacts related to the Hanseatic League, and in the city’s archives there are exactly three documents which link Zwolle to the Hanseatic League. Zwolle’s only claim to fame is that it founded the modern Hanseatic League, die Hanse der Neuzeit. But this is exactly how an icon works: it refers to an (in this case historic) identifiable reality, but it is not necessarily historically correct; it always serves a present-day purpose.

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Conclusion The example of ‘Hanzestad Zwolle’ shows the diverse stages in constructing a city into a cultural icon. The analysis demonstrated how the concept of the cultural icon can be applied as a useful tool in the study of historical culture. As an analytical tool, it establishes a meaningful relationship between a present-day text/sign – in this case ‘Hanzestad Zwolle’ – and its historical reference – the historical period of the Hanseatic League – and the way this historical reference functions in constituting an ‘identity myth’, to use Douglas Holt’s conception of the way brands become icons. The example plainly shows that a cultural icon does not necessarily have to be visual. ‘Hanzestad Zwolle’ is a narrative without pictures. The analysis also demonstrates that a cultural icon need not be universal. ‘Hanzestad Zwolle’ functions locally, regionally and sometimes internationally as an icon. In addition, the example shows there was no question of a preconceived plan. In this sense, the functioning of the icon exceeds the boundaries of intentional branding. The ‘Hanzestad Zwolle’ icon was composed of several elements, arising from various contexts, that have come together over several decades: it involves the combination of a commemoration festival, new international cooperation, tourist marketing, city branding, and finally a sense of identity. Needless to say, that this process has not been completed, constructing an icon is a ‘work in progress’ and as such a continuously rich topic of study for historians and other cultural scholars interested in the ways the general public integrates and processes history into everyday life.

References [anonymous], ‘Cultuurnota Zwolle 2016-2020’, April 2016, www.zwolle.nl/sites/ default/files/cultuurnota-zwolle-2016-2020.pdf. Barber, Benjamin R., If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities, New Haven, London, 2013. Bartmanski, Dominik, ‘Modes of Seeing, or, Iconicity as Explanatory Notion: Cultural Research and Criticism after the Iconic Turn in Social Sciences’, Sociologica 1, April 2015. Frijhoff, Willem, Heiligen, idolen, iconen, Nijmegen, SUN, 1998. Füssmann, K. et al. (eds.), Historische Faszination. Geschichtskultur heute, Köln, Böhlau Verlag, 1994. Holt, Douglas B. How Brands Become Icons, Harvard, Harvard University Press, 2004.

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Inklaar, Frank, ‘De Hanze nu. Van historische periode tot marketinginstrument’, Overijsselse Historische Bijdragen, 2017, 132, pp.93-107. Inklaar, Frank, ‘Hanzestad Zwolle. Het ontstaan van een nieuw imago’, Zwols Historisch Tijdschrift 34, 2017, 2, pp. 82-91. Kammen, M., Mystic Chords of Memory. The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture, New York, Knopf, 1993. Kemp, Martin, Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012. Lowenthal, D., Possessed by the Past. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, New York, Free Press, 1996. Officieele gids der feestelijkheden ter gelegenheid van de herdenking van het 700-jarig bestaan van Zwolle als stad van 2 tot 6 september 1930, Foreword by Mr. J.A. Willinge Gratama, Zwolle, Gemeente Zwolle, 1930. Ribbens, Kees, Een eigentijds verleden. Alledaagse historische cultuur in Nederland 1945-2000, Hilversum, 2002. Samuel, R., Theatres of Memory. Volume 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture, London/New York, Verso, 1994. Sklair, Leslie, ‘Iconic Architecture and the Culture-ideology of Consumerism’, Theory Culture Society, 2010, pp. 135-159. Tomaselli, K.G., and D. Scott (ed.), Cultural Icons, London/New York, Left Coast Press, 2009.

Websites New Hanse, www.hanse.org/ (accessed 3 November 2020) City of Zwolle, www.visitzwolle.com/ (accessed 3 November 2020) Hanzesteden Marketing, www.visithanzesteden.nl/ or http://www.hanzesteden. info/ (accessed 3 November 2020) NBTC, https://nbtc.nl/ (accessed 3 November 2020)

Archives Historisch centrum Overijssel, Zwolle, Stichting Zwolle 750, access number 1052, inventory numbers 1 and 55.

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About the author Frank Inklaar is Assistant Professor in Cultural History at the Open University (the Netherlands). His research focuses on cultural transfer, Americanization, Disneyization and historical culture. Inklaar studied Modern History at the University of Amsterdam and obtained his PhD at the same university in 1997 on the subject of Dutch study visits to the US and their follow-up in the Netherlands as part of the Technical Assistance program of the Marshall Aid. Since then he has published mainly on the mechanism of Americanization in various post World War II contexts. The last few years his focus has shifted somewhat to studying the ways in which history is revived and remodelled in contemporary culture. Tourism, city branding and cultural events are the main fields of study within this context and Disneyization is one of the key concepts in this realm of research.



National Treasure Tea Bowls as Cultural Icons in Modern Japan Meghen Jones

Abstract Tea bowls hold profound significance in Japan today as loci of tea ceremony aesthetics and ideology. While tea bowls have come to be understood as embodiments of particular Japanese national aesthetics and value systems, their status as the most significant objects within tea rituals is a modern phenomenon. This essay explores the cultural iconicity of the eight tea bowls that were designated Japanese National Treasures in the 1950s and that continue to draw much attention. Each signifies something beyond the ordinary and encapsulates a particular aspect of Japanese national identity. As a group, they manifest idealized aesthetics of the Japanese tea ceremony, reinforce power structures, and inspire contemporary potters to reproduce them. Keywords: national icons, national aesthetics, chawan, material culture, symbolic power, ceramics

Introduction In the spring of 2017, crowds clamored to the Tokyo National Museum of Art’s exhibition Chanoyu – The Arts of Tea Ceremony, The Essence of Japan.1 Viewers beheld prized paintings and precious utensils associated with a cultural practice that rose to prominence in Japan in the sixteenth century, 1 Support for this research was provided by a Japan Foundation Fellowship at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies and a Travel Grant from the University of Michigan’s Center for Japanese Studies and Library. I wish to thank Louise Allison Cort, Andrew Maske, and Morgan Pitelka for feedback on a draft of this essay. Japanese names are in the customary order of surname followed by given name. All Japanese to English translations are by the author unless noted.

Boven, Erica van, and Marieke Winkler (eds), The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463728225_jones

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Image 22 Tea bowl (Japan) named Unohanagaki (Fence of Deutzia Flowers), 16th-17th cent. Shino ware stoneware, 9.5 x 11.8 cm

Mitsui Memorial Museum. Important Cultural; Property Feb. 2, 1955; National Treasure June 27, 1959

Image 23 Tea bowl (Korea) named Kizaemon, 16th cent. Stoneware, 8.9 x 15.4 cm

Kōhōan, Daitokuji. Important Cultural Property Jan. 23, 1933; National Treasure June 9, 1951

the ritualistic drinking of tea (chanoyu, literally ‘hot water for tea’). As 37 years had passed since Japan’s largest, oldest, and most prominent museum had staged an exhibition of tea-related arts, for some visitors it was the first time in their lives to encounter an exhibition of such an exceptional scale and scope. Sponsorship came from two of the nation’s main media outlets, the NHK and the Mainichi newspaper, and several of its largest companies, including Toyota Motor Corporation and Mitsui & Co. Four of the most influential Japanese schools of tea – Omotesenke, Urasenke, Mushakōjisenke, and Yabunouchi – were also involved. Of particular attraction were objects with the highest possible distinction, a title that conveys iconic status: National Treasure (kokuhō). Among these were two tea bowls, one made in Japan named Unohanagaki (image 22) and the other from Korea, Kizaemon (image 23.). How did these two unassuming, asymmetrical, cracked bowls come to be regarded as emblematic of the ‘essence of Japan’?

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Initially imported from China, whipped green tea (matcha) and its consumption were present in Japan by the thirteenth century. Throughout the Muromachi period (1336-1573), Zen Buddhist monks, aristocrats, and military warlords codified how tea was consumed. Its utensils played important roles in the aesthetics of tea. By the sixteenth century, chanoyu had developed as a secular, ritualistic practice among the highest echelon of military elites and cultural influencers, including wealthy merchants. During that century, tea drinkers promoted many of the aesthetic traits now associated with chanoyu – simplicity, humbleness, irregularity, stark beauty (wabi), and an emphasis on hospitality – and these traits became esteemed as hallmarks of Japanese cultural identity.2 Today, chanoyu, like Japanese fencing, flower arranging, and calligraphy, attracts students from across the world as a method of selfcultivation as well as a means to preserve cultural heritage.3 Participation in chanoyu is social, involving at minimum a host and guest, and requires knowledge of how to select, use, and engage in discourse about utensils, as well as the performance of precise, prescribed movements of the body. The idiom of the tea bowl (chawan) receives particular attention today as a distinctly Japanese locus of the aesthetics, ideology, and valuation of chanoyu. In his recent book Chawan to Nihonjin (The Tea Bowl and the Japanese), East Asian ceramics historian Kira Fumio writes that Japanese people share a particular affinity for ceramics, within which tea bowls have a ‘special status’. 4 Ceramics critic and museum director Kaneko Kenji claims that ‘different than with plates, bowls, or vases … any Japanese person with any relation to ceramics feels a sense of excitement when standing before a tea bowl.’5 While, from the late sixteenth century onward, the most revered object within chanoyu was the tea caddy, by the second quarter of the twentieth century, connoisseurs shifted attention to the tea bowl. As ceramics historian Fujioka Ryōichi wrote in 1973, ‘Among all the utensils of the tea ceremony, the tea bowl (chawan) plays the most active role … no other utensil for the tea ceremony is made in so many varieties or in equal quantities.’6 The shape, texture, and surface of a tea bowl manifest the host’s vision for a particular gathering, often coordinating the choice of the bowl to the season, a special event, and the guest. According to chanoyu scholar and antiquities dealer Oda Eiichi: 2 3 4 5 6

Haga, p. 195-230. Kristin Surak refers to the practice of tea in Japan as one of ‘nation-work.’ Surak, p. 3. Kira, p. 2. Kaneko, p. 6. Fujioka, p. 15.

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For those who enjoy chanoyu, the sound of the word ‘chawan’ is mesmerizing. The highlight of the two-person tea ceremony is the moment when the guest sips a bowl of tea served by the host. The tea bowl held in the hands at this moment is a place of heart contact between the host and the guest.7

Thus, like many contemporary cultural icons, tea bowls in use encourage social bonding.8 Access to knowledge of tea bowls, however, is sometimes seen as only available to the Japanese. For example, in a 2012 roundtable discussion recorded in the Japanese ceramics journal Tōsetsu, the ceramics historian and curator Inui Yoshiaki said, ‘Westerners praise tea bowls, but really none truly understand them… Tea bowls all look the same to Westerners, since Japanese aesthetics are so different.’9 The perception that tea bowls require special knowledge to appreciate undoubtedly has helped shape their historical and contemporary valuation within international art markets. At a 2016 Christie’s auction, an ‘oil spot’ (yuteki) tenmoku (brown or black glazed) tea bowl made in Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279) China realized a staggering price of USD 11,701,000.10 Since the most direct equivalent to the word ‘icon’ in Japanese is takaramono – meaning treasure or prized possession – it is useful to explore National Treasures in terms of iconicity. Like religious icons across the world, tea bowls are reverently handled in the course of consuming tea. It is tempting to compare tea bowls to religious icons, since Zen monks helped popularize tea drinking as an aid to wakefulness in meditation sessions. If we accept tea bowls as having a quasi-religious value in Japanese culture today, then we might identify an ‘iconic experience’ among users, involving visual and haptic forces.11 But tea bowls should not be confused with images and sculptures personifying religious leaders. Broadly speaking, tea bowls can also be understood as icons in terms of semiology and hermeneutics, due to their various signs and meanings.12 More specifically, and what is at the heart of this analysis, is that National Treasure tea bowls conform to what David Scott and Keyan G. Tomaselli def ine as key aspects of a cultural icon, in that they have gone through a process of ‘accreting layers 7 Oda, p. 2. 8 Solaroli, p. 2. 9 Inui et al., p. 33. 10 ‘Lot 707, The Kuroda Family Yuteki Tenmoku,’ www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/the-kurodafamily-yuteki-tenmokua-highly-important-6019217-details.aspx. 11 Solaroli, p. 4. 12 Scott and Tomaselli, p. 9.

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of meaning or connotation … representing continuity[,] … attaining an exemplary status … [, and] attracting intense mediatization.’13 Marco Solaroli similarly defines a cultural icon as serving to ‘condense, embody, preserve, and unveil a cultural deposit of forms, meanings, and emotions that can help make sense of historical or current experiences, thus shaping subjectivity and identity.’14 This essay explores the cultural iconicity of the tea bowls that were designated Japanese National Treasures in the 1950s and that continue to draw much attention. Each signifies something beyond the ordinary and encapsulates a particular aspect of Japanese national identity. As a group, they manifest idealized aesthetics of the Japanese tea ceremony, reinforce power structures, and inspire contemporary potters to reproduce them.

Designating icons: from Meibutsu to National Treasures According to today’s Agency for Cultural Properties in Japan, objects that embody ‘exceptionally high cultural values from the global perspective are designated as National Treasures to ensure protection.’15 From 1951 to 1959, Japanese government officials named eight tea bowls National Treasures – five made in twelfth- to thirteenth-century China, one made in sixteenth-century Korea, and two made in sixteenth- to seventeenthcentury Japan. All conform to the basic requirement that a tea bowl is without handles, roughly the size of two cupped hands, and meant to serve as a vessel for whipping powdered matcha with hot water to form a frothy, hot, green beverage. Tea bowls are meant to contain a portion of matcha such that much of the inside wall is visible (tea is not filled to the brim of the vessel). The National Treasure tea bowls from China, belonging to the genre karamono (Chinese things), represent the earliest types of coveted tea bowls imported to Japan – symmetrical forms with refined, shiny, iron-rich brown and black glazes often reminiscent of tortoise shell or hare’s fur. Kizaemon, the lone kōrai chawan (Korean tea bowl) National Treasure, as well as the two Japanese bowls (wamono, “Japanese things”) embody the sixteenth-century and later phase of chanoyu centred on wabi aesthetics of the imperfect and unpretentious. 13 Ibid, p. 21. 14 Solaroli, p. 24. 15 Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan, ‘Tangible Cultural Properties,’ http://www. bunka.go.jp/english/policy/cultural_properties/introduction/crafts/ (accessed 1 October 2020).

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Amidst the total of 874 National Treasures, these eight bowls comprise the majority of the fourteen ceramics with this status.16 All National Treasure paintings, sculpture, craft, calligraphy, archaeological items, and written documents are pre-modern and thus closely linked to the historical concept meibutsu (literally, ‘object with a name’). Whereas other icons of material culture may gain their status due to details of manufacturing, physical qualities, or authorship, the tea bowls’ status as cultural icons is predicated on their histories as meibutsu. Chanoyu scholar and antiquities dealer Oda Eiichi defines meibutsu as having the quality of ‘something beyond’ (nanika yori dokoro), a rather all-encompassing descriptor suggesting the flexibility with which objects could be designated National Treasures, too.17 The processes leading to these eight tea bowls becoming modern National Treasures and cultural icons began about 500 years ago. During the early phases of Japanese tea culture by the late Muromachi (1392-1572) and Momoyama (1573-1615) periods, tea masters often recorded in diaries notes about tea gatherings (chakaiki). Their conversations about favored objects with elite pedigrees recorded in these diaries became the basis for objects becoming known as meibutsu then and through the Edo period (1615-1868). Central to an object’s status were its owner and that person’s cultural advisors (dōbōsha). As the military elite held the most social as well as political power during these periods, they owned many of the tea bowls and other utensils designated meibutsu, a subject I will return to in the descriptions of the bowls below. In the Meiji era (1868-1912), the government began to legally designate as Important Cultural Properties many objects formerly known as meibutsu. As Kono Toshiyuki has pointed out, Japan’s designations of objects of national patrimony historically occurred at times of crisis. In the late nineteenth century, the rush towards Westernization and modernization resulted in the destruction of many significant temples and shrines, and then in 1929, the poor economy threatened the dispersal and export of longstanding significant private collections owned by former samurai families and other members of the elite.18 Since 1929, government control of designated objects of preservation has involved overseeing changes in ownership and exhibitions of objects, and preventing them from export. Owners are also eligible to 16 Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan, ‘Number of Designated Cultural Properties,’ http://www.bunka.go.jp/english/policy/cultural_properties/introduction/number/ (accessed 1 October 2020). 17 Oda, p. 136. 18 Kono, p. 479.

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receive government funds towards repair and conservation. From the Meiji era to today, while the goal of preservation has fueled much of these efforts, the stimulation of contemporary production has also been important.19 Julie Oakes describes the late nineteenth century imperial government’s designations of objects of preservation as having two characteristics of consumption that can also be applied to today’s policies. She labels these aspects ‘figurative consumption,’ in which viewers behold the preserved objects in museums, and ‘literal consumption,’ in which craftspeople use them as models for objects to be sold.20 Both forms of consumption are intrinsic to an object’s becoming a cultural icon as well, in terms of the proliferation of awareness and appreciation. The period immediately after the end of World War II saw changes to preservation policies resulting from the involvement of Allied Occupation officials. Their contributions were important in establishing the notion that National Treasures must have global significance, and their involvement altered the ways in which these objects were seen to embody Japaneseness. On 12 November 1945, as part of its policies protecting ‘arts, monuments, and cultural and religious sites and installations,’ the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) mandated that the Imperial Japanese government produce two lists – one of objects damaged ‘by military operations’ and one of objects deemed ‘National Treasures.’21 The mandate for these lists prompted the establishment of the Civil Information and Education Section (CIE) and studies involving American specialists. Within the CIE, the Arts and Monuments division officials worked with existing Japanese government agencies to coordinate preservation efforts. In 1949, the main hall of the seventh-century Buddhist temple complex Hōryūji – the oldest extant wooden structures in the world – partially burned, and several of its mural paintings were destroyed. This fire is often credited with the August 1950 creation of the Agency for Cultural Affairs and the passing that same year of the Law for the Protection of Cultural Assets. According to this law, all past National Treasures were demoted to the title Important Cultural Property and up for re-election as National Treasures according to strict criteria decided by representatives of the Ministry of Education and the Committee for the Protection of Cultural Assets.22 In December 1950, the Cultural Property Preservation Commission sent a report on cultural 19 20 21 22

Guth, p. 318. Purtle and Thomsen (eds.), p. 220. Woodard, p. 294. Koyama, p. 19.

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properties to UNESCO headquarters in Paris, whose representatives advised that Japan’s National Treasures be moved to a ‘neutral nation,’ but Japanese representatives opted to instead ‘speed up’ preparations to keep these objects in Japan.23 On 9 June 1951, the five members of the Committee for the Protection of Cultural Assets granted National Treasure status to a group of objects including four of the eight current National Treasure tea bowls. The committee members comprised powerful arbiters of Japanese culture who later continued to serve in high posts within government or arts administration: career arts administrator, ukiyo-e collector, and Director of the Tokyo National Museum from 1948-1950, Takahashi Seiichirō; the former Third Marquis of the Kumamoto Hosokawa clan and member of the Diet, Hosokawa Moritatsu; historian of Italian art, Yashiro Yukio; President of the Bank of Japan, Ichimada Hisato; and Secretary of Education, Arimitsu Jirō.24 The four tea bowls they selected were among a group of 181 designated treasures that year (26 paintings, 24 sculptures, 53 books, 39 craft objects, 2 archeological objects, and 37 buildings).25 At the time of the 1951 meeting, the committee was also in the midst of planning for 100 Japanese art objects to travel to San Francisco’s De Young Museum to be displayed at an exhibition in conjunction with the signing of the US-Japan peace treaty. Committee member Ichimada, who would later serve as Minister of Finance, was among the officials who would represent Japan at this critical political event.26 Thus, the committee deliberating that summer of 1951 was keenly aware of the importance of National Treasures in terms of preservation as well as national cultural identity. Four more National Treasure tea bowls were designated in 1952, 1953, and 1959. Why are eight of the fourteen National Treasure ceramics tea bowls? In part, the ‘aura’ attributed to this idiom by contemporary observers, as noted above, is a modern phenomenon involving economic factors. The comparatively high status of tea bowls can be traced to tea practitioner Takahashi Yoshio’s nine-volume Taishō meikikan (Taisho era catalogue of famous vessels), published from 1921 to 1928. In it, Takahashi referred to tea 23 Nippon Times, 13 June 1951. 24 ‘Bunkazai hogoīn kakugi de kimaru [Decision at the Cultural Property Protections Committee Meeting],’ Report #01230, July 1950, Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, http://www.tobunken.go.jp/materials/nenshi/2202.html (accessed 20 October 2020). 25 ‘Daiichiji kokuhō shitei happyo suru [First announcement of National Treaures selection],’ June, 1951, Report #01343, Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, http://www. tobunken.go.jp/materials/nenshi/2315.html (accessed 1 October 2020). 26 ‘Nat’l Treasures for S.F. Museum,’ July 27, 1951. Nippon Times.

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bowls and tea caddies as equally being ‘exemplars of chanoyu vessels’ (chaki no gihyō).27 As Oka Yoshiko has discussed, the Taishō meikikan conveyed a new status on tea bowls, which until that time had ranked below that of tea caddies, as it illustrated 436 tea caddies and 439 tea bowls. Takahashi’s book responded to the demands of a growing market for the sale of tea utensils during a period of increasing interest in tea and collecting among Japan’s leaders of the business world.28 As noted above, in comparison to other National Treasures, these tea bowls are notable in that the majority were not made in Japan, and this attribute can be understood according to their identities as cultural icons reinforcing collective memory and identity. While it was popular for tea masters of the Edo period (1615-1868) and after to incorporate into their practice novel bowls made in Vietnam, Thailand, and even works commissioned from Delft, Holland, none of those rose to the highest rankings.29 These eight East Asian tea bowls – five from China, one from Korea, and two from Japan – represented historical forms of taste and, significantly, power structures in which Chinese precedents were historically honored and, in a more contemporary setting, preserved and controlled, in varying degrees.

Five Southern Song black-glazed tea bowls The five Chinese tenmoku (black-glazed and distinctively shaped) National Treasure tea bowls (images 24-28) can be understood as cultural icons for several reasons beyond their Japanese government designations. Generally, Chinese ceramics historically had achieved a higher level of perceived technical and aesthetic virtuosity compared to domestic Japanese ceramics, and the medieval development of Japanese ceramics is to a large extent one of copying or referencing Chinese ceramic precedents.30 These bowls are ‘beyond the ordinary’ as cultural icons due to their rarity and provenances, described below, as well as their exceptional glazes. They also establish a long temporal thread between modern tea practice in Japan and the earliest tea consumption in China, dating likely to the Warring States period (c. 27 Oka, p. 94. 28 See Guth. 29 The catalog of tea implements Enshūkurachō lists examples of tea bowls designated as shimamono, literally ‘island objects,’ referring to objects made in places other than China or Korea, such as Thailand or Vietnam. Oda, Chawan no hanashi, p. 70-71. 30 See Kawahara.

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Image 24 Tea bowl (China), 12th-13th

Image 25 Tea bowl (China), known as

cent. Jian ware stoneware

“Inaba Tenmoku,” 12th-13th

with ‘oil spot’ (yuteki)

cent. Jian ware stoneware

tenmoku glaze. 7 x 12.3 cm

with iridescent spotted (yōhen) tenmoku glaze. 6.8 x 12 cm

The Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka. Gift of Sumitomo Group (The Ataka Collection). Photograph: Muda Tomohiro. Important Cultural Property Jan. 19, 1931; National Treasure June 9, 1951

Image 26 Tea bowl (China), 12th-13th

Seikadō Bunko Art Museum, Tokyo. Important Cultural Property July 3, 1941; National Treasure June 9, 1951

Image 27 Tea bowl (China), 12th-13th cent.

cent. Jian ware stoneware

Jian ware stoneware with

with iridescent spotted

iridescent spotted (yōhen)

(yōhen) tenmoku glaze,

tenmoku glaze, 6.6 x 12.1 cm

6.8 x 13.6 cm

Fujita Art Museum, Osaka. Important Cultural Property March 31, 1953; National Treasure November 14, 1953

Ryōkōin, Daitokuji, Kyoto. Important Cultural Property April 23, 1908; National Treasure June 9, 1951

National Treasure Tea Bowls as Cultur al Icons in Modern Japan

Image 28 Tea bowl (China), 12th-13th

161

Image 29 Oketani Yasushi, Tea bowl

cent. Jizhou ware ware

(Japan), 2014, Stoneware

stoneware with tortoise shell

with iridescent spotted

(taihi) glaze, 6.7 x 11.8 cm

(yōhen) tenmoku glaze. 6.6 x 12.9 cm

Shōkoku-ji, Kyoto. Important Cultural Property Jan. 19, 1931; National Treasure March 31, 1953

Private collection

Image 30 Tsujimura Shirō, Tea bowl

Image 31 Hon’ami Kōetsu (1558-1637),

of the Ido type, 2003.

Fuji-san, Raku fired

Stoneware, 9.8 x 15.4 cm

earthenware, 8.5 x 11.5 cm

Photograph © 2021 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Sunritz Hattori Museum of Arts. Important Cultural Property March 29, 1952; National Treasure Nov. 22, 1952

475-221 BCE).31 In these five objects coalesce the refined aesthetics of the Southern Song dynasty, often regarded as the golden age of tea, for at that time Chinese tea connoisseurship (pincha) reached an all-time high, and the structures for tea etiquette – serving and consuming – were codified by Chan (Zen) monks. The tea (Ch: mocha, Jse: matcha) they were meant to contain was powdered from the dried whole leaves, with hot water added to it, then whipped to a frothy consistency. Tenmoku black and brown-glazed 31 Benn, p. 6-7.

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stoneware bowls in Southern Song China were seen as uniquely well-suited for tea drinking by virtue of both their shape and their colour. The Fujian government official Cai Xiang (1012-1067) wrote in his Chalu (Record of tea), a treatise on tea written by imperial command between 1049 and 1053, ‘Tea is white, so black tea bowls are best,’ referring to Jian wares with thick walls that retain heat well.32 The bowls were used by Chan monks in the Fujian region, and Japanese Zen monks who travelled there for training brought examples back to Japan. The bowls became known as tenmoku, referring to Tienmu, a mountain in the vicinity of several Chan monasteries, and today ‘tenmoku’ in pottery studios around the world conveys the meaning of a brown to black, often dappled, high-fired ceramic glaze. These five bowls embody the pinnacle aesthetics of tenmoku tea bowls – thin-walled, elegant forms with richly mottled, sometimes iridescent, brown and black glaze. At the time of their importation, Japanese potters lacked the technical know-how to achieve anything similar. Their makers used iron-rich clay to form sloped walls rising atop a footed base and covered the vessels with a thick black glaze. A high amount of iron, fired to 1350 C – generally the highest temperature possible for ceramics – produced the glaze effect, as did slow cooling in kilns. Particularly rare are the three National Treasure tea bowls with iridescent silver spots (yōhen) as they are the only of their kind known in the world (images 25, 26, 27). One theory as to why there are so few yōhen bowls, and why all of them are in Japan, is that Chinese potters saw the iridescent spots as ominous signs and destroyed them; further, the colour black was associated with yin and the afterworld, thus black glazed wares did not see a strong following in China after the end of the Song dynasty.33 However, Japan became a repository for such objects, and contemporary potters have sought to mimic them. One example made in 2014 by Kyoto-based Oketani Yasushi (1968-) is a yōhen tea bowl (image 29) that closely mimics its counterparts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Japanese collectors today hold tenmoku tea bowls made by Oketani and others in great acclaim, a phenomenon in a long spectrum of Japanese ceramics’ indebtedness to China.34 Most critical to these works’ icon formation in terms of cultural subjectivity and identity are their provenances and past historical valuations. The five tenmoku bowls are tethered to Japan’s warrior elite past. In the 32 Cai Xiang, Chalu [Record of Tea], in Chashi Chadian [Standard works on tea and its history], ed. Zhu Xiaoming (Taipei, 1981, p. 90) in Mowry, p. 30-31. 33 Peng, p. 14-15. 34 See Honoho Geijutsu.

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fifteenth century, tenmoku tea bowls sometimes sold for prices much higher than paintings.35 Using Chinese elite goods like tea bowls signaled among Muromachi warriors their cultural capital through a connection to what was perceived as all-powerful China.36 Wealthy merchants and provincial lords alike prized Chinese tenmoku wares.37 For example, the Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka bowl (image 24) connects postwar Japanese officials to iconic warriors of the past. Toyotomi Hidetsugu (adopted son and heir to Japan’s late sixteenth century warlord unifier, Toyotomi Hideyoshi) initially owned it. Later it went to the Nishi Hongan-ji temple and on to the Mitsui family (in the seventeenth-nineteenth centuries, the largest ‘merchant house’ of Japan, which dealt in a wide range of activities, from textile sales to money lending). Then the prominent Sakai family owned it, followed by Ataka Eiichi, whose collection is the basis of the Museum of Oriental Ceramics in Osaka where the bowl is preserved today. It is hard to imagine a more perfect pedigree for this object. Even given the endorsements by the highest cultural authorities of the Muromachi period and the postwar administration, one may still wonder what accounts for five of the eight National Treasure bowls being Chinese. Would not a Japanese ‘National Treasure’ suggest a work with singular Japanese characteristics? At the time of their designation, Chinese tea bowls were well established as vessels in Japan for serving dignitaries. Thus, these five bowls certainly reveal, in terms of cultural iconicity, a reinforcement of the Chinese ‘roots’ of Japanese cultural identity. Additionally, Hō Tan postulates so many Chinese tea bowls are Japanese National Treasures since ‘there is an inclination in Japanese culture to absorb conflict and contradiction.’38 Hō (writing under the name Dan Peng) has also argued that the designations of tenmoku tea bowls as National Treasures arose out of a mix of ‘adoration’ of and a ‘challenge’ to Chinese culture by Japanese potters who began making black-glazed tea bowls in the late sixteenth century, and whose professional descendants continue to create in the present.39 Such a strong presence of Chinese bowls within the National Treasures designated in the early 1950s – in the wake of the second Sino-Japanese war

35 A 1498 record states that a painting by the celebrated Chinese monk painter Mu Qi sold for 22 kan, and a tenmoku bowl with spotted glaze for 1000 kan. Kundaikan sayu chōki, in Chadō koten zenshū, 2:313, quoted in Guth, p. 49. 36 See Pitelka, Spectacular Accumulation. 37 Guth, p. 46-47. 38 Hō, p. 99. 39 See Peng.

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(1937-1945) – suggests an enduring reverence for and desire for ownership of Chinese ceramics amidst a complex modern political climate.

Kizaemon, Unohanagaki, and Fuji-san In contrast to the five Chinese bowls, the three other National Treasure bowls reveal aesthetic values of a much different order, yet all share with the Chinese bowls an embodiment of exemplary qualities and national identity. In complete contrast to the symmetrical forms and even, shiny glazes of the tenmoku bowls first used for tea, the next stage, typified by Ido (‘well-shaped’) tea bowls made on the Korean peninsula and domesticallymade tea bowls of the Momoyama period in Japan, ushered in the subdued aesthetics of humbleness and simplicity known as wabi. These were generally larger and varied in form, such that Japanese-made bowls like Unohanagaki (image 22) and Fuji-san (image 31) had comparatively straight sides and broader bases. These bowls and others like them embodied a rustic aesthetic ideally suited for the thatched roof tea rooms advocated in the late sixteenth century by Sen no Rikyū (1522-91), tea master and cultural advisor to the most powerful warlord of his day, the aforementioned late sixteenth century leader Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The extremes of aesthetic variation we find in the eight National Treasure tea bowls are testament to the historical preservation of the first two major stylistic tendencies for tea bowls in Japan, which roughly correspond to the continental and formal versus the domestic and rustic. The Kizaemon tea bowl (image 23) presents a conundrum for several reasons, and may seem at first glance to be the least likely candidate for National Treasure.40 It exemplifies how icon formation, as Scott and Tomaselli describe it, ‘eliminates contradiction’ and ‘denies history.’41 Until recently, Kizaemon has been regarded as an object made initially in mid-sixteenth century Korea not for the refined, ritualistic drinking of tea, but for ordinary use as a rice bowl. In this sense, it demonstrates what Solaroli notes in defining iconicity – ‘no icon was born [an] icon.’42 As Yanagi Sōetsu observed of it, ‘It is just a Korean food bowl, a bowl, moreover, that a poor man would use every day – commonest crockery. 43 But tea bowls of the Ido type to 40 41 42 43

For a full analysis, see Cort. Scott and Tomaselli, p. 20. Solaroli, p. 2. Yanagi, p. 191.

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which it belongs were recorded as early as 1537 as esteemed tea bowls in the Matsuya kaiki (Matsuya family’s records of tea gatherings). 44 Kizaemon’s name refers to its early owner, Takeda Kizaemon, an Osaka merchant who became ill and is said to have died clutching it. Most scholarship on it refers to its exemplary status as exuding the rough-hewn, asymmetrical form and surface of wabi aesthetics, which gained their meaning from a process of identification and appreciation. It is also a contentious object as ceramics like it sparked an interest in Korean pottery so great that during the 1590s Japanese invasions of Korea, potters were kidnapped and brought to Japan to set up workshops that in some cases continue to thrive. Since that time, copying Kizaemon and other Ido-style bowls has been the pursuit of many potters in Japan. Tsujimura Shirō (1947-), one of the most successful potters creating tea ceramics today, is known for his Ido-style bowls such as one from 2003 in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (image 30). He also has reenacted in contemporary Japan the relationship between potter and government official; for 18 months, he welcomed former Prime Minister (19931994) Hosokawa Morihiro to his studio to be his pupil. Hosokawa is titular sixth Marquis of the same Kumamoto Hosokawa clan as the aforementioned Committee for the Protection of Cultural Assets’ Hosokawa Moritatsu. Perhaps in no nation other than Japan is a former national leader a potter. Unohanagaki (image 22.) is a prime example of Shino ware, referring to the feldspar-rich white to orange glaze first developed at Mino kilns in the late sixteenth century Momoyama period. Shino ware represents the first white glaze with iron decoration (tetsu-e) in Japanese ceramics. The term Shino associated with this ware emerged only in the early eighteenth century, perhaps referring to Shino Sōshin (1444-1523), a tea master in the Muromachi period who owned a beloved white Chinese tea bowl and who is said to have commissioned Mino potters to produce white glazed ceramics. Thus, even in the case of this ‘native’ National Treasure, there is a Chinese association. Its anonymous maker likely fired it at the Mutabora kiln in Mino, and it entered the wealthy merchant Fuyuki’s collection in the Edo period, coming to the Mitsui collection in the late 1880s. The aforementioned Taishō meikikan describes it as follows: Its lip is rounded at the rim and even in thickness. A reddish tinge suffused the white glaze that covers the entire body. Dark cross-hatches have been faintly drawn on the sides in a manner that suggests a woven fence. Cloud-white glaze surrounds and partially obscures this design, 44 Akanuma, p. 129.

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giving the impression of white deutzia blossoms – hence the name… The grace of this deep tea bowl is eloquent testimony to the skills of the potter who made it. 45

Similarly, one of the most inf luential recent writers on tea bowls, Hayashiya Seizō, in Meiwan wa kataru, postulated that the highly articu­ lated sense of space (ma) of the bowl suggests that either a person deeply knowledgeable about chanoyu directed it, or a highly skilled craftsperson made it. 46 Hon’ami Kōetsu (1558-1637) is the only named individual associated with one of the eight National Treasure tea bowls: Fuji-san (image 31), named after Japan’s sacred volcano peak Mt. Fuji. As ceramics authority Yabe Yoshiaki described, this bowl is not only the ‘greatest masterpiece’ of Kōetsu’s dozen tea bowls, but ‘within Japanese wabi tea bowls, it is the acme.’47 Yabe’s remark suggests this bowl’s iconicity is multivalent. Kōetsu is considered one of the greatest artists of his time, who worked in mediums ranging from calligraphy and painting to lacquer to garden design. Born to a family who provided swords to the imperial family, Kōetsu would be associated with a revival of classical native Japanese aesthetics through the Rinpa style, for which he is considered a co-founder, with Tawaraya Sōtatsu. As a non-professional potter, Kōetsu represents the pursuit of tea bowl-making as an erudite amusement. As the Kizaemon bowl was not ‘born an icon,’ by definition Kōetsu’s bowl was not either, since he lacked any formal training in the medium. Of the three national origins of tea bowls – Chinese (karamono), Korean (kōrai chawan), and Japanese (wamono chawan) – all have been taken up by twentieth-century potters, but Japanese-style tea bowls have drawn the most focus. Kōetsu’s Fuji-san bowl (image 31) symbolizes the phenomenon of Raku as popularized among hobbyists. As Okuda Seiichi described in a 1951 article on his tea bowls, Kōetsu’s Raku ceramics are of the type that could be readily attempted by amateur makers (shirōto). 48 Hand-formed and then fired in a small updraught kiln, Raku became a type of ceramics popularized in backyards among Edo period (1615-1868) tea practitioners. Beginning in the 1930s, explorations of old kiln sites led by ceramist Arakawa Toyozō (1894-1985) prompted more potters to look to Momoyama era models 45 46 47 48

Kuroda and Murayama, p. 29. Hayashiya, p. 189. Yabe, p. 200. Okuda, p. 11.

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such as Shino wares and Unohanagaki. Returning to Oakes’s descriptions of National Treasure types, the designation of Unohanagaki served as an important literal National Treasure in terms of its providing a model for a technically obtainable result, in contrast to yōhen bowls, which have only been duplicated to a close degree in recent years, and thus served more importantly as figurative National Treasures. Unohanagaki’s designation thus raised the status of Arakawa’s productions as well, and in 1955 he received the title colloquially known as ‘Living National Treasure’ (formally, Holder of Important Intangible Cultural Property) for his work in Shino ceramics. Further, Shino and Raku’s influence extends globally to contemporary North American studio pottery, popularized most notably by Minnesota potter Warren Mackenzie (1924-2019) for Shino and California ceramist Paul Soldner (1921-2011) for Raku. To contemporary American potters, the Unohanagaki and Fuji-san tea bowls and others like them have become, as Scott and Tomaselli have described similar disarticulated icons, ‘open symbolic sign[s].’49 Meaning has shifted for contemporary makers around the world, from a set of attributes associated with Japanese cultural contexts and chanoyu practice, to open interpretations not necessarily tethered to function.

Conclusion Fully accounting for the wide range of economic, social, and cultural contexts that gave rise to the eight designations of National Treasure tea bowls is beyond what is possible in this essay, but I have introduced some of the key issues at stake in the how the Japanese cultural icon of the tea bowl as National Treasure developed and persists in Japan. These eight National Treasure tea bowls designated in the immediate aftermath of World War II are important cultural icons in Japan since they provided, in the midst of a war-ravaged present, material linkages to an idealized past as well as an economically ambitious future. They reflected a conceptualization of the nation’s aesthetic tradition according to cultural exemplars of both pre-modern and modern Japan. Designations of National Treasures in the 1950s largely followed historic precedents for designations of meibutsu in the sixteenth century, when Chinese ceramics were considered the most desirable, followed by Korean. Additionally, the designations of National Treasure tea bowls reflect the importance of 49 Tomaselli and Scott, p. 19.

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these objects as models for reproduction by contemporary makers. Icon formation in this sense, as the eight National Treasure tea bowls attest, is the product of motivations to preserve particular styles of production that keep the past alive.

References Akunama Taka, Chatō no sōsei: karamono kara wamono e [The creation of tea ceramics: from Chinese objects to Japanese objects], Kyoto, Tankōsha, 2004. Benn, James A. Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 2015. Cort, Louise Allison, ‘The Kizaemon Teabowl Reconsidered: The Making of a Masterpiece’, Chanoyu Quarterly no. 71, 1992, 7-30. Guth, Christine, Art, Tea, and Industry: Masuda Takashi and the Mitsui Circle, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993. Guth, Christine, ‘Kokuhō: From Dynastic to Artistic Treasure’, Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 9, 1996, pp. 313-322. Haga Kōshirō, ‘The Wabi Aesthetic Through the Ages’, in P. Varley and K. Isao (eds.), Essays on the History of Chanoyu, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 1989, pp. 195-230. Hayashiya, Seizō, Meiwan wa kataru [Famous bowls speak], Tokyo, Sekaibunka Publishing Inc., 2015. Hō Tan, Chūgoku to chawan to Nihon to [China, tea bowls, and Japan], Tokyo, Shōgakukan, 2012. Honoho Geijutsu special issue “Gendai no tenmoku” [Tenmoku today], no. 131, 2017. Inui Yoshiaki et al., ‘Zadankai: Gendai tōgei no arikata o tō [Roundtable discussion: considering the ways of contemporary ceramics’], Tōsetsu 710 (May, 2012), pp. 24-40. Kaneko Kenji, Gendai no chatō [Contemporary tea ceramics], Ibaraki Prefecture, Ibaraki-ken Tōgei Bijutsuken, 2017. Kawahara Masahiko, “Nihonjin ga kononda Chūgoku tōji,” in Kyoto National Museum, ed., Nihonjin ga kōnonda Chugoku tōji [Chinese ceramics preferred by the Japanese], Kyoto, Kyoto National Museum, 1991, pp. 11-16. Kira Fumio, Chawan to Nihonjin [Tea bowls and the Japanese], Tokyo, Asuka Shinsha, 2016. Kono, Toshiyuki (ed.), The Impact of Uniform Laws on the Protection of Cultural Heritage and the Preservation of Cultural Heritage in the 21st Century, Leiden, Brill, 2010. Koyama Fujio, ‘Yōhen tenmoku chawan’, Museum 6, Sept., 1951, pp. 19-20.

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Kumakura Isao and P. McMillan, ‘Reexamining Tea: “Yuisho”, “Suki”, “Yatsushi”, and “Furumai”’, Monumenta Nipponica Vol. 57, No. 1, Spring 2002, pp. 1-42. Kuroda Ryōji and Murayama Takeshi, Classic Stoneware of Japan: Shino and Oribe, Tokyo, New York, and London, Kodansha, 2002. Mowry, Robert, Hare’s Fur, Tortoiseshell, and Partridge Feathers: Chinese Brown- and Black-Glazed Ceramics 400-1400, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Art Museums, 1996. Oda Eiichi, Chawan no hanashi: chawan no mikata to kanshō no tebiki [Talk of tea bowls: a guide to how to view and appreciate tea bowls], Tokyo, Gakushū Kenkyūsha, 1982. Oka Yoshiko, ‘Wamono chawan to kindai no chanoyu [Japanese tea bowls and the modern tea ceremony]’, Bijutsu Forum 21:26, 2012, pp. 94-100. Okuda Seiichi, ‘Kōetsu no chawan [Kōetsu’s tea bowls]’, Museum 1, April 1951, pp. 11-12. Peng, Dan, ‘Kokuhō chawan ni mieru Nihon bunka no mujun to sōkoku/Tea Bowls and cultural conflict’, Nihon kenkyū 45, 2005, pp. 11-50. Pitelka, Morgan, Japanese Tea Culture: Art, History and Practice, London, Routledge, 2003. Pitelka, Morgan, Spectacular Accumulation: Material Culture, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and Samurai Sociability, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 2015. Purtle, Jennifer and Hans Bjarne Thomsen (eds.), ‘Japan’s National Treasure System and the Commodification of Art’, Looking Modern: East Asian Visual Culture, Chicago, University of Chicago, 2009. Solaroli, Marco, ‘Iconicity: A Category for Social and Cultural Theory’, Sociologica 1, Jan.-April 2015, pp. 1-52. Surak, Kristin, Making Tea, Making Japan: Cultural Nationalism in Practice, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2012. Tokyo National Museum (ed.), Chanoyu – The Arts of Tea Ceremony, The Essence of Japan, Tokyo, Tokyo National Museum, 2017. Tomaselli, Keyan G. and David Scott, Cultural Icons, London/New York, Left Coast Press, 2009. Woodard, William P., The Allied Occupation of Japan 1945-1952 and Japanese Religions, Leiden, Brill, 1972. Yabe Yoshiaki, ‘Rakuyaki shirokata migawari chawan’, in Hamada Takashi, ed. Kokuhō daijiten [National Treasure encyclopedia] vol. 4, Tokyo, Kodansha, 1985, p. 200.

About the author Meghen Jones is a historian of modern Japanese art, material culture, craft theory, and global ceramics history. She is Associate Professor of Art History at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Trained as a ceramist at Musashino Art University in Tokyo, she received

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her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Boston University. Her recent publications include Ceramics and Modernity in Japan, co-edited with Louise Allison Cort (Routledge, 2019), and the article ‘Hamada Shōji, Kitaōji Rosanjin and the Reception of Japanese Pottery in the Early Cold War United States’, in Design and Culture (2017). She is currently curating an exhibition and editing a catalog on the tea bowl in global perspective, for the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum.



What to Lea(f) In, What to Lea(f) Out Pedagogical Opportunities of a Cultural Icon – Anne Frank’s Chestnut Tree Kirsten E. Kumpf Baele Abstract Anne Frank’s chestnut tree can be found on the pages of children’s books, in the frame of a video, as a digital leaf on a cyber-trunk or as a seedling shared throughout the world. The image can never represent Anne Frank’s entire story, but, as this chapter demonstrates, as a subsequent icon it does serve as a reminder for overcoming ignorance, respecting humanity and, most importantly, combatting prejudice. The chapter explores the complexity of the chestnut tree as a ‘pedagogical icon’ by studying the way it applies to and influences the educational sector both on literary and digital platforms. It follows insights from Cohen-Janca, Gottesfeld, Kohuth and Eisenberg Sasso, who state that it is the interplay between the remembrance of the Shoah and the sustainability of trees and the environment that inspires a fruitful compositional narrative for young readers. Keywords: collective consciousness, pedagogical icon, Anne Frank’s chestnut tree, education, Shoah, sustainability

When a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? This philosophical thought experiment has raised questions about observation and perception for centuries.1 The following chapter begins with a similar question: had Anne Frank not referenced the horse chestnut tree that stood in the courtyard behind Prinsengracht 263, would it still have garnered the fame it has? One can assume not. Most likely, the tree 1 For example, the Irish philosopher George Berkeley argued ‘esse is percipi’ (to exist is to be perceived). See also his comments on the perception of trees, Berkeley, pp. 524, 530.

Boven, Erica van, and Marieke Winkler (eds), The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463728225_kumpf

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would have had an unassuming 180 years of life and one day simply ceased to exist. A quick perusal of past news reports and online editorials yields a different fate: ‘Anne Frank’s Spirit Lives on in Chestnut Tree’; ‘Seeds of Solace: Anne Frank Tree Saplings Span the World’; ‘Anne Frank’s Chestnut Tree Lives on to Inspire a New Generation’.2 These articles in addition to many others reveal how inextricably linked the tree has become to Anne’s story and memory. Remarkably, however, the tree never belonged to Anne. It had already been growing generations before her birth in 1929 in one of the many hidden ‘gems’ of Amsterdam, the ‘hofjes’ – inner courtyards dating to the seventeenth century that serve as focal points for the almshouses that encircle them.3 Even prior to Anne’s time of hiding in the Secret Annex, one can imagine that local residents regularly peered out their windows and noticed this tree. If by recognition, we mean acknowledging something’s existence or validity, then we can affirm that the tree indeed possessed a physical significance. But perception is a human experience. Had Anne not emotionally connected with and creatively translated her experiences of the tree in three entries in her diary, the many saplings taking root throughout the world in her honour today would simply not be. What becomes an important question to ask then is how, when, and why did the tree assume such an important role in the collective consciousness – after all, in Anne’s writings, the tree was seldom cited. 4 The ‘iconic turn’has significantly influenced how scholars think about Anne Frank.5 Although Anne’s diary continues to hold literary and cultural value, research in recent years has placed heavy emphasis on the phenomenological signif icance of her image – the ways in which she has been 2 See Fimrite; Cohen; Payne. 3 See Bellico. 4 In her diary, Anne only mentions the tree three times: Wednesday 23 February 1944, Tuesday 18 April 1944, and Wednesday 13 May 1944. Interesting to note is that these three references surface towards the end of her stay in the annex pointing to her increasing desire to break free from hiding. Moreover, the significance of nature and of the tree specifically increase as she develops her relationship with Peter. In fact, he is the only member of the annex who shares time with her in the attic and consequently the experience of the tree. 5 In the early 1990s, Gottfried Boehm, William Mitchell, and Hans Belting proposed the beginning of the supposed pictorial and/or iconic turn. This turn toward images has altered the vernacular of those who study the iconic and/or visually discernible. As Krešimir Purgar discusses in his study ‘Visual Studies and the Pictorial Turn: Twenty Years Later’, the turn has led to ‘visual studies as an emergent discipline [that] has [allowed] for the proliferation of images to take part in the continual processes of the discipline’s legitimization, no matter from what kind of institutional or media background its new visual objects have been taken (from museums, from street art, from virtual communication space, etc.)’. See Purgar; see also Bertolini, pp. 121-130.

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perceived, presented, and represented – as a way to better understand the evolving cultural and ideological interpretations of and associations with her story. Not surprisingly, in today’s digital age it is the appeal of Anne, one of the most recognizable faces of the Shoah, that has ignited and generated popular as well as intellectual responses. One can argue that Anne has received a type of posthumous ‘celebrity status’. How have individuals and nationalities across the globe viewed Anne Frank and then, in turn, selected and (re)appropriated her persona and her story, with the intent to better understand their own past and to further engage with the Shoah? The documentary In Line for Anne Frank (2014) underscores that knowledge about and affinity with Anne Frank are rooted personally, culturally, and nationally.6 As individuals wait to enter the famous museum that houses the annex, directors Schinkel and Bink celebrate personal testimony by drawing attention to the diversity of experiences of the visitors and how these relate with Anne’s own predicament. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler chart the prodigious amount of cultural production created in response to Anne Frank and the (often contentious) impact these adaptations have had on Anne’s international fame.7 An entire chapter in Oren Baruch Stier’s study on Holocaust symbols details the amalgamation of emblems surrounding Anne Frank and how she functions on a cultural consumption level. Anne as a ‘multi-faceted icon’ – to adapt Shandler’s label, reinforces the power of the visual in (re)interpreting the ‘phenomenon’ that surrounds her. Of course, the shift from exploring literary representations of Anne and her diary to symbolic, iconic ones that ‘connot[e] materiality’8 comes with its own set of challenges. As each generation cherry-picks elements for the sake of making their own meaning, there is the danger of losing perspective, of failing to fully understanding the Shoah and the Frank family’s experience of that historic moment. Perhaps it is the copious associations and interpretations made with regard to Anne Frank that poses a legitimate concern: could it be that Anne has moved beyond the position of icon and is now merely, as French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss coined, a ‘floating signifier’, a mere name ‘without referents, a word that does not point to any actual object and has no agreed upon meaning’ that possesses ‘symbolic value zero’?9 As demonstrated in this paper, it is instructive, particularly 6 See Schinkel and Bink. 7 See Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Shandler (eds.). 8 Stier, p. 6. 9 The term ‘floating signif ier’ coined by French anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss identifies entities as ‘represent[ing] an undetermined quantity of signification, in itself void of meaning and thus apt to receive any meaning’. Lévi-Strauss, p. 63.

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at this time – seventy some years after the end of World War II – to rethink the representation of Anne Frank and her waning status as icon. Recent polls such as those conducted by the Washington Post in 2018 reveal that twenty-two percent of American millennials stated that they have not heard of the Holocaust or are not sure whether they have heard of it.10 This current reality of an increasingly empty and even lost icon calls for scholarly attention to those budding offshoots that augment the memorialization of Anne’s narrative. I contend that the chestnut tree has usurped a unique position, particularly with regard to the way younger generations of non-Jewish and non-European backgrounds are being instructed about the events that unfolded in Nazi Germany. It is interesting to note, for example, that within the last ten years, four distinct children’s books have been published in which not Anne Frank, but the chestnut tree she observes from the Secret Annex, is the primary focus for readers between the approximate ages of five to twelve. Equally compelling, the tree has assumed a virtual component via interactive digital websites and curated video exhibits. These recent publications and media creations are emblematic of our current era’s fascination with the power of the visual. In this regard, my study is guided by theoretical findings on icons as identified. However, instead of adding to the already comprehensive body of literature on Anne Frank as icon, I will explore something less acknowledged: the chestnut tree as a subsequent icon, or, as I coin in this study, as a ‘pedagogical icon’. It is this pedagogical icon which I argue has been tactically employed and perhaps one can even say created, particularly by educators, for the sake of cultivating, of adding life and accessibility to the fading reality of Anne’s memory. Before I can discuss Anne’s tree as possessing ‘iconic power’11 and cultural value, I will briefly chart its referential process and in what way it has come to serve as a metonym for Anne.12 Unlike Anne, who became an icon in part because she died, the tree has achieved its iconicity both in death and in life. Had it succumbed without warning, it may have merely been a footnote in history – a gentle reminder of Anne’s companion outside her window. However, its recognized status as an icon arose out of its drawn-out demise, ailments spanning twenty-plus years which successively weakened 10 See Zauzmer. 11 See Alexander, Bartmański and Giesen (eds.). 12 See wereldboom.org/wereldbomen/anne-frankboom/geschiedenis/ for a detailed overview of the tree’s legacy. Also see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Shandler, especially ‘Epilogue: A Life of Its Own-The Anne Frank Tree’.

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the century-old tree, in tandem with the public’s growing response to it. We might also bear in mind that, of the only 25,000 trees that survived the Second World War in Amsterdam, many of those were dismembered of their limbs and used as fuel by residents during the last year of the war, when German Nazis had prohibited Amsterdammers from access to necessary supplies.13 The first public response to the tree took place in 1989 when residents in the Prinsengracht neighbourhood vehemently and successfully opposed the cutting off of the tree’s root system by the Anne Frank Foundation in order to accommodate the Foundation’s extension of buildings. In an odd twist of fate, the prying eyes of those dwelling in the adjacent buildings, which the Frank family had feared for months during their internment, are now those of allies defending her legacy by means of their efforts to protect her beloved tree. The tree received local attention again in 1993, this time when an oil spill from a nearby fuel tank led the municipal government to call for the soil near the tree to be cleaned. At this time, the Amsterdam City Centre Borough also assumed responsibility for caring for the tree. For more than ten years, the tree continued its existence in the courtyard, growing in its icon status by providing tourists to the Anne Frank House perhaps some small connection with Anne. Ironically, Anne’s relationship with the tree was also predicated on a purely visual level – not once was she able to touch it or play in its branches. Moreover, the attic from which she observed the horse chestnut tree was the one area in the hideout on Prinsengracht that was not covered by curtains. It was only here where Anne could gaze at, bond with, access and witness the natural world without fear of being seen. As remarked by Hans Westra, former executive director of the Anne Frank House, ‘All her longing for freedom came to be tied up in that tree’.14 In 2005, urgency to protect the tree set in when the Borough announced that the tree behind the Secret Annex was sick, and more devastatingly, in 2006 it was announced that the tree needed to be felled. It was at this point that the tree became, as Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites have argued, a ‘familiar marke[r] of a distinctively public subjectivity.’ The pressing issue of the tree’s inevitable demise has ‘activated strong 13 The resistance of the neighbours to chop down the tree answers to a general resistance of the inhabitants of Amsterdam to reduce the surface of city garden. See http://www.dutchamsterdam. nl/127-amsterdam-trees. 14 See Harman.

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emotional identification and response’, as local, national and international newspapers reacted to what was until that time an insular story.15 Seemingly overnight, the entire world was rallying to preserve ‘Anne’s’ tree. On the local level too, an alliance began to form; concerned neighbours, local tree experts, the national Dutch Tree Foundation and the Support Anne Frank Tree Foundation, the latter founded in 2007, fought to sustain the life of the increasingly popular chestnut tree. Ultimately, the tree fell without human intervention during a violent storm in August of 2010. Looking back at the neighbourhood’s repeated initiatives to save the Anne Frank Tree, one senses a parallel between, in her diary, Anne’s yearning, and then, in recent history, the local residents’ fervour for both nature and the preservation of the past.16 This preservation of the past also manifests itself as an exercise in education. When people today see Anne’s picture or hear her name, are they aware of her particular struggles and her untimely death, or do they simply equate her with the Shoah itself – or, even worse in years to come, something else entirely? Such confusion is already emerging in the United States. ‘She hid Jews?’ This ventured guess, made by 17-year-old Aleatha Hinds while waiting in line at the renowned museum, is how Nina Siegal begins her bewildering article, ‘Anne Frank Who?’ written for the New York Times in the spring of 2017.17 As Siegal pointedly argues, ‘Many of the younger and foreign visitors who flock [to the Anne Frank House] have little knowledge about the Holocaust – and sometimes none about Frank.’18 This level of uncertainty, of misperception of signifiers, has compelled those who work on Anne Frank to ask new questions and to rethink how best to present her and her story. The Anne Frank House has taken a preliminary step in engaging with this issue with a two-year-long renovation completed and inaugurated by Dutch King Willem Alexander in November of 2018. The modernized and expanded exhibition now provides more context, 15 Hariman and Lucaites, p. 27, and Stier, p. 6. 16 For a detailed overview of the many measures taken by the local neighbourhood and community in attempting to save the chestnut tree, see the ‘Save Anne Frank Tree’ website: http:// www.support-annefranktree.nl/history or the ‘Foundation World Tree’ website: wereldboom. org/?lang=en (accessed 3 November 2020). 17 See Siegal. 18 It is important to note there are significant differences between different countries and cultural groups. In Germany, for example, Anne Frank’s diary is still a compulsory object of study in many schools as is the Nazi period in history classes. See, www.kmk.org/themen/ allgemeinbildende-schulen/weitere-unterrichtsinhalte/holocaust-und-nationalsozialismus. html (accessed 3 November 2020).

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educational materials and activities to fill the gaps for the latest generation of visitors. Museum managing director, Grance Reus-Deelder, observes the declining understanding of Anne Frank and the events of the Shoah: We find that, with the war being further removed from all of us, but especially for young people and people from outside of Europe, our visitors don’t always have sufficient prior knowledge of the Second World War to really grasp the meaning of Anne Frank and the people in hiding here. We want to make sure that Anne Frank isn’t just an icon, but a portal into history. (Nina Siegal, ‘Anne Frank Who? Museums Combat Ignorance about the Holocaust’ The New York Times, March 21, 2017)

With a new entrance hall and redesigned exhibition spaces, the museum has been adapted for a younger public who requires more historical background and awareness in understanding and relating to the story of a teenage Jewish diarist who hid and died over seventy-five years ago. The museum’s main objective has shifted from a ‘what happened’ to a ‘how was it possible’ approach. ‘The young people, whose grandparents have been born since the end of the war, have a very different relationship [to this history] and they often know a lot less about it […] I myself grew up with the subject of World War II and the persecution of the Jews – my parents told me about it,’ says 58-year-old Dutch native and director of the Anne Frank Foundation, Ronald Leopold.19 Tourists who visit the museum today are not being asked to recall facts, but instead encouraged to reflect and to question how humans can engage in acts of genocide and terror towards one another. What remains untouched in the museum is the Secret Annex itself. Technology and audio cease the minute one enters the Frank’s hiding space to establish a place for silence and contemplation. Without question, the tree from which Anne had gained solace and hope has, as Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett testifies in her epilogue in Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory (2012), developed a ‘life of its own’. Since the tree’s passing in 2010, saplings have been planted all over the world to share Anne’s message of humanitarianism. Scholarship, however, overlooks a very curious epistemology: why is it that the tree behind Prinsengracht 263 is being observed separately from the most well-known Shoah narrative for the purpose of instructing our youngest generation about Anne Frank, and how is this being done? In 2006, the 19 See Lambeck and Holm, also see TicToc by Bloomberg, https://twitter.com/tictoc?lang=en. (accessed 3 November 2020).

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Anne Frank House took initial steps in creating educational material in their museum and on their website that placed emphasis on the ailing chestnut tree. Quickly, the tree became a materialization of Anne herself and offered a way of reflecting poetically on the emotional qualities of her hiding. Not only was a webcam installed so that the entire world could view the tree live out of the same window that Anne did, but a component of the museum’s exhibit as well as its website counterpart memorialized the tree via its ‘Leave your leaf in the Anne Frank Tree’, a digital platform that encouraged its younger, tech-savvy visitors to add their names, locations and their own virtual leaves in any language and attach a story or poem about what Anne Frank means to them. Anne’s wish was to become famous. Her elaborate picture wall of Hollywood celebrities and her short tale ‘Delusions of Stardom’20 are clear indicators of this dream. In 2006, British actress Emma Thompson formally initiated the online project of the tree by giving a speech and then attaching her own individual leaf to officially launch the virtual monument. As Thompson herself notes in her speech, it is no coincidence that she was chosen to inaugurate the exhibit but in line with Anne’s interest in stardom and Hollywood: ‘Anne was a huge film buff. She knew about all films, all the stories, all the stars, all the reviews – she knew them all even within her confinement, and I think that she’d quite like an actress to have done this.’21 Emma Thompson’s unveiling of the website is a pivotal circumstance: it is here where fame and the chestnut tree collide in a most unique way. In addition, though, as of 1 August 2015, the website was permanently decommissioned and replaced by a new exhibit, ‘Reflections on Anne Frank’, the tree in the courtyard had now forever been captured in the public imagination.22 Much like the interactive tree to which Thompson attached her name and message for inspiration, similar curious artistic responses would follow that would also emphasize the tree’s imparting value. 20 See Anne’s collection of writings beyond her well-known diary, Anne Frank’s Tales from the Secret Annex. Her short story ‘Delusions of Stardom’ focuses on the connection she develops with Priscilla Lane, an American actress, which ultimately takes Anne to Hollywood. 21 In a speech on 1 February 2006 at the launch of the website at the Anne Frank House, Academy Award-winning actress Emma Thompson spoke about Anne Frank and how alive, truthful and humorous she was in her writing. Emma read two bits from the dairy that make her laugh. She continued by telling what kind of person she thought Anne Frank would have become, had she survived the holocaust. She was most known for saying ‘The only thing we have to remember is: all her would-haves are our real possibilities. All her would-haves are our opportunities.’ See uploaded video from the Anne Frank House, www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XhGv9xLT5U&t=17 2s&index=96&list=UUlJAYpfNwjEXuhP3ssj71Ug. 22 For more information regarding the exhibit ‘Reflections of Anne Frank, see: www.annefrank. org/en/museum/inside-museum/reflections-anne-frank/

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Indubitably, the chestnut tree has moved beyond Kirschenblatt-Gimblett’s ‘epilogical’ value. For children’s authors Irene Cohen-Janca, Jeff Gottesfeld, Jane Kohuth and Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, it is the interplay between the remembrance of the Shoah and the sustainability of trees and the environment that inspires a fruitful compositional narrative for their young readers.23 Children find in trees a sense of refuge – a carefree, adult-free and adventurous place, or as Shelly Saguaro describes in her 2016 article ‘The Republic of Arborea: Trees and the Perfect Society’, a ‘utopian locus of liberty and individual authenticity’24 . Ecopedagogy, a discourse that emerged from leftist educators in Central and South America in the early 1990s and which encourages education to be viewed through an ecological perspective, has encouraged a recent trend in children’s literature to shift away from what the tree can offer the child to what the child can offer the tree.25 Examining Anne’s story through an ecocritical lens is appropriate and overdue, as it can enhance our understanding of Anne’s appreciation for and relationship with nature. For example, not quite as well-known are Anne’ short stories. In ‘Happiness’, she alludes to a chestnut tree and the joy she receives when she can ‘go outside on a nice day with lots of sun and blue sky’26. The narrator and neighbour friend Jacques, who visits frequently, daydream together while looking through the window. The next time he came to my room, I was sitting in the same spot and he went over to the window again. The weather was exceptionally beautiful that day – the sky was deep blue (we were up so high that we couldn’t see any houses, or at any rate I couldn’t from the floor), the bare branches of the chestnut tree in front of our house were covered with drops of dew that glinted in the sunlight, as the branches swayed back and forth in the wind, seagulls and other birds flew past the window and chirping sounds were coming from every direction.27

Each of the aforementioned writers tells a story in which Anne’s treasured tree takes central stage as a learning tool, as a pedagogical icon – a symbol through which children can better access, ask questions about and grasp the Shoah while simultaneously becoming inquisitive about nature through 23 See Cohen-Janca; Gottesfeld; Kohuth; Sasso. Important to note is that Cohen-Janca’s book has been translated into Dutch, English, and German. 24 Saguaro, p. 42. 25 For an introduction to the field of ecopedagogy, see Kahn. 26 Frank, p. 112. 27 Frank, p. 114.

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the act of gazing, of observing – out the window just like Anne once did. How to introduce and ultimately teach stories like Anne’s and the larger complexities of Nazi history, including its scope and scale of events age appropriately has challenged artists, scholars of pedagogy and others working on social studies and language arts curricula throughout the United States and abroad.28 Countless articles and essays have raised a variety of questions about aspects of suitability and how best to in- or exclude materials about the Shoah; Cohen-Janca, Gottesfeld, Kohuth and Eisenberg Sasso are no exception for trying to unravel this complex practice.29 As the following discussion will reveal, these four authors recognize in the tree a participatory narrative – one that moves beyond the horrific and into the hopeful and which offers children and their adult accompanying readers a new way of literally ‘looking’ at and engaging with Anne’s story. In her diary, Anne only mentions the tree three times: Wednesday 23 February 1944 (‘From my favourite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind’); Tuesday 18 April 1944 (‘We are having a superb spring after our long, lingering winter; April is glorious, not too hot and not too cold, with little showers now and then. Our chestnut is already greenish and you can even see little blooms here and there’); and finally Wednesday 13 May 1944 28 In his 2013 memoir The Death of Santini, American author of the south, Pat Conroy, an apt description of the challenges but also the need to expose children to the Holocaust in particular to Anne’s story. ‘But there was one story of our reading life that our mother made perfect – and no novelist or poet could add a word to improve it. The year we moved to the pretty coastal town of New Bern, North Carolina, my second-grade year was when my mother read The Diary of Anne Frank to her children. As a young boy, I was caught up in the immediacy and brightness of Anne Frank’s unmistakable voice. I studied photographs of Anne Frank and noted how pretty she was, and how she looked exactly as I expected her to look: fresh and knowing and – this was important to me – smarter than the adults around her. I fell in love with Anne Frank and have never fallen out of love with her. But my mother did not prepare her children for the abruptness of the diary’s ending. Anne’s voice went silent after the Nazis invaded her family’s attic hideaway, a place I visit every time I find myself in the watery, cross-stitched city of Amsterdam. ‘What happened to Anne, Mama?’ I asked. ‘Why’d she stop writing? Carol Ann asked. And my Georgia-born mother began telling us about the coming of the Nazi beast, the cattle cars, the gas chambers, and the murder of six million Jews, including babies and children and the lovely Anne Frank. I will always honor my mother when I think of the words she spoke next. ‘Carol Ann and Pat, listen to me. I want to raise a family that will hide Jews.’ As Conroy suggests, the onus of filling in the horrible realities of this story lies heavily on the parent who is reading to the child. See Conroy, pp. 235-236. 29 As identified by Nicole Russel, one alarming concern is that in recent years, American young adults ‘receive an education that has placed more importance on social justice issues rather than an emphasis on history […]. See Russell.

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(‘Our horse chestnut is in full bloom, thickly covered with leaves and much more beautiful than last year’).30 What was a very minor character in Anne’s diary has become the main character in the expressions of her story. ‘I was planted in the heart of Amsterdam, a city of skinny streets, of canals and bridges.’31 So begins Sandy Eisenberg Sasso’s text Anne Frank and the Remembering Tree. In no way a silent witness to history, Eisenberg Sasso’s tree stands majestically front and centre as a first-person narrator. Published by the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, which features one of the most unique American permanent exhibitions of Anne Frank32 and which planted the first of eleven saplings in the United States via the Sapling Project led by the Anne Frank Center in New York City, one cannot overlook the pedagogical musings behind Eisenberg Sasso’s message. As the director of the Religion, Spirituality and Arts Initiative at Butler University in Indiana and as the first woman ordained as rabbi (Hebrew for master and educator) in Reconstructionist Judaism, a modern Jewish movement that views Judaism as a progressively evolving civilization, Eisenberg Sasso is by nature qualified and compelled to teach. In Anne Frank and the Remembering Tree, the inevitable death of Anne achieves another level of emotionality due to Sasso’s compositional choice to give the chestnut tree human child-like tendencies. ‘Anne and Margot, come out to play! […] Come sit in my shade, pick my chestnuts, and play games.’33 Through playful, communicative language offered by the tree in first-person form, Eisenberg Sasso creates a reading experience and an historical link with the Shoah that is participatory; via the tree, children can learn actively about the Frank sisters. Furthermore, child readers come to understand the privilege of their position, since ‘only children can understand the language of trees.’34 Eisenberg Sasso’s contribution is unique as no prior picture book about the Shoah yet alone about Anne Frank has allowed the child reader to engage directly with the victim, even if through an anthropomorphic tree. One could argue that, while Anne Frank and the Remembering Tree subdues and, yes, even omits the true horrors of Anne’s story – with no mention in the book of the concentration camps or of her death, Anne simply does 30 See Frank. 31 Sasso, p.1. 32 The exhibit, ‘Power of Children: Making a Difference’ was developed in collaboration with the Anne Frank House and The Anne Frank Center USA. It includes a replica of Anne’s Secret Annex, live theatrical performances, as well as sound and light shows. 33 Sasso, p. 14. 34 Sasso, p. 19.

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not return – the tree’s sad, lonely reaction to her family’s capture conveys sentiments just as powerfully. Although ‘just a tree’35 for the majority of the narrative, the child reader quickly comes to learn that the tree holds symbolic value and, as the end of the book proclaims, in recent years has achieved international fame. In this sense, Eisenberg Sasso demonstrates that even ‘just a child’ has the power to tell and cultivate Anne’s story by watching and listening, by engaging in dialogue and by holding on to hope like the tree so poignantly has done. In contrast to the books that follow in my analysis, Sasso’s interestingly does not require young readers to confront death; Anne and Margot leave – never to return – and the tree merely becomes sick and breaks. In this manner, Eisenberg Sasso’s message has a sustainable thrust. Controversial, certainly, but if children can be instructed to participate in a living history while viewing the chestnut tree as a growing, sharable entity, so might Anne’s story, that to which the tree so strongly is connected, similarly never perish. I would like to interject here for a moment and consider the important work that Jewish Studies scholar Oren Baruch Stier has offered on the symbol-making process that has and continues to occur in conjunction with the Shoah. In his study, Holocaust Icons, Stier identifies four icons – four symbols used culturally to refer, directly or obliquely, to the Holocaust: the railway cars, those that transported Jews to their deaths; the ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (‘work sets you free’) slogan, appearing on a sign at the entrance of Auschwitz; the number six million, which is used to denote the number of Jewish victims killed by Nazi Germany; and lastly Anne Frank, the young girl who defines victimization. I ascribe to Stier’s reasoning and feel that his discussion on icons associated with the Holocaust supports my argument that the chestnut tree holds similar value. For Stier, a Holocaust icon is a ‘symbol that has come to represent the Holocaust in encapsulated form – one that summarizes complex narratives of the Shoah, simplifying, condensing and distilling these narratives and then producing meanings for cultural consumption.’36 Although not included in Stier’s analysis, I suggest that the chestnut tree should be added as an iconic underpinning to his already determined Holocaust icon of Anne Frank. The chestnut tree is not only a recognizable and powerful image, but it conveys ‘the essence of the Holocaust’ – it is tied precisely to Anne without ‘directly communicat[ing] [the] brutal violence’ associated with her.37 The chestnut tree is a logical 35 Sasso, p. 4. 36 Stier, p. 2. 37 Stier, p. 2.

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symbolic choice for pedagogues, museum curators and children’s book authors who have located in it a seemingly benign metonym, an aspect of Anne that can stand in for her larger and, yes, much more dire narrative to naïve young minds. If, as Nina Siegal candidly revealed in her New York Times article mentioned earlier, there seems to be a missing link for accessing and grasping the significance of Anne Frank among today’s generation, then the ever-flourishing chestnut tree is a productive tool, the fitting ‘pedagogical icon’ to effectively bridge the gap between ignorance and familiarity when imparting Anne’s message. While Anne Frank and the Remembering Tree evades the concept of death entirely, Les arbres pleurent aussi (The Trees Also Cry) by Irene Cohen-Janca, the only European of the four authors, at first glance seems only to accentuate it. Unlike the abundance of green foliage and warm brown branches that cover the book jacket of Anne Frank and the Remembering Tree, Cohen-Janca’s illustrator Maurizio A.C. Quarello presents black bark, barren limbs and only a few scattered, blood-red leaves. Published in 2009, one could assume that the book is a premature obituary to Anne’s beloved white horse chestnut tree, since it was at that time in a life and death crisis. The tree behind Prinsengracht 263 officially had been declared ill in 2005 by the AmsterdamCentre Borough; consequently, in 2008, it required a support structure and its crown had to be anchored to help it stand upright. Cohen-Janca’s text published in 2009 surfaces in the midst of this uncertain time. Deliberately, I am certain, the book has been designed with Quarello’s full-page images on the right with the text strictly on the left. This presentational choice differs from the other three books under discussion which consistently intermix text with image. If not yet able to read, a child who picks Les arbres pleurent aussi off the bookshelf has the ability only to engage with a set of very large, gloomy if not apocalyptically themed images. Taken at face value, Quarello paints a very bleak picture for a young, inquisitive person. A city appears to be burning, bombs are dropping, Nazi officers are beating, dead leaves are falling and perhaps most chilling, a barbed wired fence is dividing. If the analphabetic child can muster enough courage to flip through this set of despairing pictures and reach the final page, it will encounter a different set of circumstances: the smallest of twigs that bears eight true green leaves and text and image finally collide. The tree, albeit in the form of an offcut, must still be alive. Upon reading Cohen-Janca’s text, suspicions are affirmed. Employing the same narrative strategy as Eisenberg Sasso, Cohen-Janca too tells the story from the tree’s own vantage point. The tree is present and can reveal its experiences. What differs, however, is that Cohen-Janca’s tree never

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utters a word. Her tree does not call out to Anne asking her to play or engage with it. Interaction of any form is missing. Instead, Cohen-Janca decides to offer her readers the tree only through multitudinous thoughts and feelings – a sense of stream of consciousness. Furthermore, these thoughts are laden with suppositional and existential questions. In only a few pages, the thoughts of the chestnut tree express ‘maybe’, ‘probably’ and a variety of hypothetical questions only to be left unanswered. Also, interesting to note is that Les arbres pleurent aussi intersperses the storyline with actual entries from Anne’s diary – something the other books do not include. In this sense, it presents Anne’s story in the most realistic fashion. Whereas the other three books gloss over death and most notably the event of the Shoah – there is no description of the concentration camps or of Anne’s gruelling death – Cohen-Janca assigns it a full-page spread. Via text and an image of an all too resonant electrified barb-wired fence, the reader learns of Anne’s exhausting struggle with typhus, her death and that, except her father, no one from the annex survived. The first book in terms of chronology, which isolates the chestnut tree for pedagogical reasons, is indeed the most depressing portrayal, yet it sets a precedent for others to follow. After all, a sapling has been procured, but as the text proclaims, only the memories of Anne can make it be able to grow. The sapling that surfaces on the last page of Cohen-Janca’s text literally has spread its branches by growing into three supplementary narratives. Based on the mostly positive reception of all four books, it is apparent that the chestnut tree serves as a vehicle for the young to achieve a level of familiarity with Anne Frank. As Stier signals in his study, the purpose of an icon such as I have argued for Anne’s tree is ‘not to show and tell but rather to generate meaning in an ongoing, even recurring fashion […] the Holocaust icon point[s] back to the Shoah and mediate[s] its presence for contemporary viewers, who themselves are implicated in a web of relationships that link them, and the icons, to past and present.’38 The perpetual, multivalent influence of the icon could not be more clearly expressed than in the texts The Tree in the Courtyard: Looking Through Anne Frank’s Window by Jeff Gottesfeld and Anne Frank’s Chestnut Tree by Jane Kohuth. In almost identical fashion, Gottesfeld and Kohut, along with their respective illustrators Peter McCarty and Elizabeth Sayles, draw attention to the powerful act of looking through the physical window of the attic space. Both books, written in third person, offer a gaze, a different one in each case, which reinforces Stier’s assertion that icons allow us to 38 Stier, p. 188.

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view history in a Janus-like manner. In Gottesfeld’s story, we are privy to the tree’s view of Anne whereas Kohut’s version provides a repeated examination of the tree through Anne. The saying that a book is a child’s window to the world is worth considering. It is through the window and through the tree as pedagogical icon that young readers are offered a portal to the story of Anne Frank. The attention paid to the word/image interaction in the studied material of this chapter forces readers and viewers alike to consider the icon of the chestnut tree on visual, textual and narratological levels. Much as the children’s book authors identify the tree but also the attic window as a portal to Anne’s story, so does visual artist, Jason Lazarus, acknowledge the tree as an instrumental conduit to Anne’s memory. Via his fifteen-minute video installation, entitled ‘The Top of the Tree Gazed Upon by Anne Frank While in Hiding, Amsterdam’, he allows the real-time footage to connect us with Anne’s particular circumstance, albeit from a twenty-first-century perspective.39 The video format can impart remarkable similarities: the restricted and confined viewpoint, much like the attic window limited and focused the extent of Anne’s view on the tree alone, or the passage of time marked by the wind rustling through the leaves and the gradual movement of the clouds overhead. In an even greater example of passing time, the gentle clang of the Westerkerk’s chimes punctuates every quarter hour – today, as it did in 1942 when Anne wrote, ‘I loved [the Westertoren clock] from the start, and especially in the night it’s like a faithful friend.’40 This act of looking and listening plays a significant role in Jason Lazarus’s work, who became interested in the horse chestnut tree after he learned that it was diseased. For Lazarus, it is crucial to consider how the environment affects visibility of moments, both in poetic or real form. ‘What do you do with icons like this? As an artist you are looking for portal moments of intimacy and the tree of course is akin to that but also photographically charged.’41 By choice, Lazarus has chosen a ‘less is more’ approach in his visible rendering, as he frames the shot in order to depict only the very top of the tree guiding the reader’s view upward. Teaching about the Shoah boils down to creating visibility. As generations become further and further removed from the events of the genocide of the Jews, and as websites, archives and media stories become trickier to 39 See Lazarus. For photograph see, https://jasonlazarus.com/projects/2004-present/ (accessed 3 November 2020). 40 Frank, p. 20. 41 Interview with Jason Lazarus via phone in the winter of 2019.

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navigate critically, it is increasingly important to offer the impressionable windows, doors and other access points through which to empathize, establish connection and ultimately participate in acts of reverence and remembrance. As argued in this chapter, Anne Frank’s chestnut tree has assumed a powerful educational role. Standing majestically on the page of a children’s book, in the frame of a video, as a digital leaf on a cyber-trunk or as a seedling shared all over the world, it can never tell the entire story, but it does offer guidance, and it serves as a reminder to look out and up in true Anne Frank fashion for overcoming ignorance, respecting humanity and, most important, combatting prejudice. In this sense, the tree as icon will never fall down – it is captured in observable form, and, coincidentally, it does make a sound.

References Alexander, Jeffrey C., Dominik Bartmański and Bernhard Giesen (eds.), Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Barnouw, David, The Phenomenon of Anne Frank, trans. Jeannette K. Ringold, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2018. Bellico, Matthew, ‘Amsterdam’s Hidden Gems: The Inner Courtyards’, Boston Globe, 17 February 2017, www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/travel/2017/02/16/amsterdamhidden-gems-the-inner-courtyards/Q2yWfcwUL8L0S9tZQEqZbP/story.html. Berkeley, George, ‘Of the Principles of Human Knowledge’, The English Philosphers From Bacon to Mill, Burtt, E.A. (ed.), New York City, Random House, 1939. Bertolini, Michele, ‘The “Pictorial Turn” as Crisis and the Necessity of a Critique of Visual Culture’, Philosophy Study 5, no. 3, 2015, pp. 121-130. Cohen, Rick, ‘Seeds of Solace: Anne Frank Tree Saplings Span the World’, NonProfit Quarterly, 26 March 2013, https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2013/03/26/seeds-ofsolace-anne-frank-tree-saplings-span-the-world/ (accessed 3 November 2020). Cohen-Janca, Irene, Les arbres pleurent aussi, Arles, Éditions du Rouergue, 2009. Conroy, Pat, The Death of Santini, New York, Random House, 2013. Fimrite, Peter, ‘Anne Frank’s Spirit Lives on in Chestnut Tree’, SFGATE, 3 February 2010, www.sfgate.com/news/article/Anne-Frank-s-spirit-lives-on-in-chestnuttree-3201678.php. Frank, Anne, Anne Frank’s Tales From the Secret Annex, Van der Stroom, Gerrold and S. Massoty (eds.), trans. Susan Massotty, London, Bantam Books, 2003. Frank, Anne, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, trans. B.M. Mooyaart-Doubleday, New York, Bantam Books, 1993.

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Gottesfeld, Jeff, The Tree in the Courtyard: Looking Through Anne Frank’s Window, New York, Penguin Random House Books, 2016. Hariman, Robert and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Harman, Danna, ‘Why Anne Frank’s Tree Stood for so Much’, The Christian Science Monitor, 24 August 2010, www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2010/0824/ Why-Anne-Frank-s-tree-stood-for-so-much. In Line for Anne Frank, directed by Robert Schinkel and Martijn Bink, Amsterdam, The Media Brothers, 2014. Izadi, Elahe, ‘Anne Frank and Her Family Were Also Denied Entry as Refugees to the U.S’, Washington Post, 24 November 2015 www.washingtonpost.com/news/ worldviews/wp/2015/11/24/anne-frank-and-her-family-were-also-denied-entryas-refugees-to-the-u-s/?utm_term=.8209dd1c8121. Kahn, Richard, Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy & Planetary Crisis: The Ecopedagogy Movement, New York, Peter Lang, 2010. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara and Jeffrey Shandler, eds., Anne Frank Unbound: Media Imagination, Memory, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2012. Kohuth, Jane, Anne Frank’s Chestnut Tree, New York, Penguin Random House Books, 2013. Kulturminister Konferenz, ‘Unterricht über Holocaust und Nationalsozialismus’, www.kmk.org/themen/allgemeinbildende-schulen/weitere-unterrichtsinhalte/ holocaust-und-nationalsozialismus.html. Lambeck, Petra and Carl Holm, ‘Amsterdam’s Anne Frank House Remodeled for Younger Public’, Deutsche Welle, 11 November 2018, www.dw.com/en/ amsterdams-anne-frank-house-remodeled-for-younger-public/a-46402438. Lazarus, Jason, ‘The Top of the Tree Gazed Upon by Anne Frank While in Hiding’, 2008, https://vimeo.com/50956836 (accessed 3 November 2020). Levi-Strauss, Claude, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, Oxon, Routledge, 2002. Noack, Rick, ‘At 7, Bana al-Abed told the World About the Siege of Aleppo on Twitter. Now, She is Safe’, Washington Post, 19 December 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/ news/worldviews/wp/2016/12/19/bana-al-abed-told-the-world-about-aleppo-ontwitter-now-she-is-safe/?utm_term=.33c46a04e9e5. Payne, Steven, ‘Anne Frank’s Beloved Chestnut Tree Lives on to Inspire a New Generation’, Daily Kos. 24 March 2013. www.dailykos.com/stories/2013/3/24/1196501/Anne-Frank-s-beloved-Chestnut-tree-lives-on-to-inspire-a-new-generation?. Purgar, Krešimir, ‘Visual Studies and the Pictorial Turn: Twenty Years Later’, IMAGES – Journal for Visual Studies 2, no. 2, 2014, http://www.visualstudies.com/ images/no2/purgar.html.

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Russell, Nicole, ‘Kids Don’t Know about the Holocaust because Schools are Pre-Occupied with Social Justice’, Washington Examiner, 13 April 2018, www. washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/kids-dont-know-about-the-holocaustbecause-schools-are-pre-occupied-with-social-justice. Saguaro, Shelley, ‘’The Republic of Arborea’: Trees and the Perfect Society’, Berry, Geoffrey (ed.), Utopias and the Environment, New York, Routledge, 2016. Sasso, Sandy Eisenberg, Anne Frank and the Remembering Tree, Boston, Skinner House Books, 2015. Siegal, Nina, ‘Anne Frank Who? Museums Combat Ignorance about the Holocaust’, The New York Times, 21 March 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/03/21/arts/design/ anne-frank-house-anti-semitism.html?login=smartlock&auth=login-smartlock. Stier, Oren Baruch, Holocaust Icons: Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 2015. Zauzmer, Julie, ‘Holocaust Study: Two-Thirds of Millennials Don’t Know what Auschwitz is’, Washington Post, 12 April 2018. www.washingtonpost.com/news/actsof-faith/wp/2018/04/12/two-thirds-of-millennials-dont-know-what-auschwitz-isaccording-to-study-of-fading-holocaust-knowledge/?utm_term=.4ab6c31d5901.

About the author Kirsten E. Kumpf Baele is a lecturer of German in the Division of World Languages, Literatures & Cultures at the University of Iowa and holds a PhD in Germanic Literatures and Languages. Kumpf Baele strives to connect her research to the classroom. A recent publication of hers focused on the forced adoption scandal of the 1970s in Flanders, Belgium which can be found in McFarland’s publication: Contraception, Family Planning, and Reproductive Choice in Popular Fiction and Media Around the World. Her research on the representation of hair in politics, art and literature has been featured in LIT Verlag, and her work on Anant Kumar, a German author of Indian descent, can be found in Utah Foreign Language Review. Kumpf Baele was a participant in the 2015 summer Marbach Archive seminar. She also was selected for the 2019 Digital Bridges Institute funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation which allowed her to incorporate aspects of digital storytelling into her seminar ‘Anne Frank & Her Story’. Kumpf Baele’s latest projects explore the representation of violence, the cultural outsider, and the act of crocheting in Elfriede Jelinek’s play Steck, Stab und Stangl, and youth oppositional responses in the former GDR.



Exploring the Iconic in History Museums Pieter de Bruijn

Abstract This chapter explores how iconic events and objects manifest themselves in museum exhibitions, providing case studies on the representation of the World War II Blitz and the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in the UK. De Bruijn shows how these historical events have acquired iconic status and how museums further contribute to their ‘iconization’ through the repetitive use of objects relating to air raid precautions and shelters, and of images and objects that have their roots in the abolition campaign of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. With some exhibitions also showing attempts to confront the ‘iconization’ process, the chapter offers insight into how museums navigate the dynamic cultural memory of specific histories, whilst preserving their own aim and mission. Keywords: representation of the past, museum display, narrative structures and templates, myth of the Blitz, Brookes slave ship diagram

Introduction In 1619, the famous Dutch legal philosopher Hugo Grotius, who as a political and legal advisor to the chairman of the States of Holland had played an important role in the religious conflict taking place in the Netherlands at the time, received a life sentence of imprisonment in Loevestein Castle. Two years later, Grotius managed to escape the prison in a book chest regularly sent to him by his family, as Grotius was allowed to study during his imprisonment. The story of Grotius’ escape inspired many authors

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and poets of the time and has since become an important part of Dutch cultural memory.1 Although the chest initially disappeared, already in the late eighteenth century a book chest said to be associated with Grotius’ escape was claimed as a relic.2 Today, three museums in the Netherlands have a book chest in their collection that they link to the escape of the seventeenth century jurist. Although all of these objects have been dated to the seventeenth century, it has been established that none of them can be the chest that Grotius had actually used. As the curator of Loevestein Castle, which is now a museum, said in 2013, ‘people who visit Loevestein expect a chest, so we give them a chest. But it is not the real one and we tell that as well.’3 This example illustrates how the choices that museums make in presenting and narrating history are much influenced by a historical culture in which specific historical events have acquired a strong iconic status. The book chest has become such an important part of cultural memory that museums dealing with Dutch history of the seventeenth century are expected to have one in their collection. It also clarifies that in such cases it does not matter whether the object is authentic or not. The book chest acquires significance through the story that is attributed to it, which can provide people with an experience of authenticity. 4 In this paper I will explore how iconic events and objects manifest themselves in museums and how museums themselves play a role in the ‘iconization’ process. Drawing from previous research, this paper examines this process in exhibitions on World War II and the transatlantic slave trade in the UK.5

Iconic objects and events When studying the ‘iconization’ process in history museums, it is important to consider the complex nature of museum exhibitions as historical representations. As the concept of the icon is at first glance often associated with the realm of visual and material culture, our attention is directly drawn to the objects put on display. Def ining the icon as a ‘sharpened and standardized image of reality’, we can see these objects as simplified 1 2 3 4 5

Nellen, pp. 258-262. Spaans, p. 156. See Schravesande. Jones, p. 190. See De Bruijn.

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representations of more complex historical events and processes that act as a vehicle between the past and the present.6 Objects in history museums can carry a symbolic and aesthetic power to convey experiences and meanings from the past in a condensed way.7 This characterization brings into the mind the notion of museum objects in themselves carrying meaning that goes beyond what they physically represent.8 As part of an exhibition, however, these objects also take on meaning from the broader narrative in which they are presented. Object labels, text panels and the structure and context of the exhibition – or even of the museum itself – support, add to or even alter the narrative that is already inherently attributed to the objects on display. As I state above, in developing exhibitions, history museums operate within a broader historical culture in which processes of canonization have already brought specific histories to the forefront, while others have been pushed to the side or are simply being ignored.9 Although museums sometimes go against the grain, they often focus (or provide new perspectives) on narratives that have become dominant in society. Within this context it is important to highlight that, beyond their visual representations, events in themselves can acquire iconic status, in the sense that they can become a condensed version and symbol of a broader and more complex reality.10 Most – if not all – objects and events presented in history museums are intended to provide access to a broader reality than what they physically represent. Not all of these are, however, deemed iconic. In order to study the process of ‘iconization’ in museums, it might hence be useful to look at research that has been done on the canonization of iconic photographs. The American scholars Robert Hariman and John Lucaites have argued that the iconic nature of a photograph not only stems from its broad recognition and ability to foster emotional engagement with the historical event it represents, but also from the fact that it is reproduced and reconfigured in other media and genres.11 The Dutch scholar Martijn Kleppe has added the importance of an ‘extraordinary composition; that can refer to archetypes and/or has the potential to become an archetype, and hence has a meaning beyond what is actually represented.’12 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Frijhoff, p. 52. See Solaroli. De Jong, p. 11. See, for instance Grever, pp. 34-37. Smith, p. 172. Hariman and Lucaites, p. 27. Kleppe, p. 25.

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Applying these characteristics to objects and historical events presented in history museums, we may argue that their iconic nature not only stems from aesthetic qualities, but also from the degree in which they are reproduced and appropriated. Museums play an active role in the reproduction and appropriation of objects and events and, hence, contribute strongly to further creating or reinforcing their iconic status. In the following sections, I show how iconic events and objects can manifest themselves in museum exhibitions. The paper provides two case studies: the representation of the intensive night-time bombings by the German Luftwaffe in Britain (a period known as the Blitz) in exhibitions on World War II, and the display of abolitionist objects and imagery in British exhibitions on the transatlantic slave trade.

An iconic experience of World War II After more than seventy years, the history of World War II still has a lingering presence in British society. There is a wide range of books, music, films, and television shows that continue to be popular today, as well as photographs, monuments, and museum exhibitions.13 On top of that, World War II also shines through in advertising and commodities like mugs and T-shirts that carry slogans or images relating to the war.14 Most of these expressions of popular culture recall the military campaigns that the British fought and endured in World War II. The image of Britain’s role in World War II revolves around events like the evacuation of Allied forces to Britain in 1940 (the Battle of Dunkirk), Britain’s defence against the air bombings by the German Luftwaffe (the Battle of Britain), and the landing operations of Allied forces in Normandy (D-Day).15 Historians have argued that the ways in which these events are dealt with have become mythological and together form an overarching myth of Britain in World War II. In short, this myth can be summarized as a narrative in which Britain is represented as being extremely unprepared at the beginning of the war, facing tremendous humiliation and defeat, but after organizing a successful evacuation, while standing alone and suffering through difficult times, managed to fight its way back and eventually emerged victorious.16 13 Noakes and Pattinson, p 2. 14 Ibid. 15 Rose, pp. 1-2. 16 Connelly, pp. 1-2.

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This myth has changed subtly over time with political and societal changes, but its core elements are always the same. It emphasizes Britain as a heroic nation able to suffer through and stand together in dark times, and comes back strong from it. In addition, the myth frames Britain as an island nation at its best when operating in isolation.17 According to military historian Mark Connelly, construction of this myth already began during the war with governments, journalists, soldiers and other participants creating interpretations of contemporary events that were informed by narrative patterns underlying representations of other British histories.18 In his well-known study The Myth of the Blitz, the Scottish historian Angus Calder has examined this process of mythologization for one historical event: the period of intensive night-time strategic bombings of major British cities carried out by the Luftwaffe over nine months from September 1940.19 The myth of the Blitz emphasizes how the British people stood together as a collective, facing the terrifying attacks that rained down upon them.20 Based on distinct political ideologies, this myth has highlighted different aspects over time, with left-wing interpretations emphasizing the strength of the British people and right-wing interpretations stressing Britain as a patriotic nation and the role of Winston Churchill. 21 The attitude of the British people has been framed as the ‘Blitz spirit’: a term still used in interpretations of modern-day events.22 Historian Lucy Noakes cites the facts that, one, the Blitz was a dramatic event that affected both men and women and, two, that it had a strong impact on people’s personal memories of the war as possible reasons for the dominance of this historic event in the cultural memory of the war. Although not everyone in wartime Britain experienced these air attacks, the fact that the Blitz also affected ordinary citizens ensured that it could be framed as a nationwide event in which the British people acted in unison. Moreover, the Blitz corresponded with the phenomenon of large-scale civilian bombings that was increasingly seen as a defining feature of the history of the twentieth century.23 The visual memory of the Blitz is primarily built around the different air raid shelters that people used for protection against the German bombings, 17 Ibid., pp. 8-15. 18 Ibid. 19 See Calder. 20 Connelly, pp. 128-129. 21 Smith, p. 93. 22 Noakes and Pattinson, pp. 10-11. 23 Noakes, pp. 89-90.

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including the curved Anderson shelter that people could install in their garden, the public shelters in London tube stations and underground tunnels, and to a lesser extent the cage-like Morrison shelter that people could use for inside their home. An interesting fact about these shelters is that, while the dominance of the image suggests otherwise, only a small percentage of the British population have actually used them.24 However, the image of the shelters contributes to an idea of the British people organizing their own defence and ‘taking it’ together. This is reinforced through images that show the work carried out by the Air Raid Precautions (ARP) and fire services that to a large degree relied on volunteers.25 Although other British cities were also severely affected by the Blitz, the visual memory of the event strongly focuses on London, with for example the images of tube stations as shelters and a photograph of a bright St. Paul’s Cathedral amid dark clouds and smoke symbolizing heroic resistance. Images such as these have often been replicated from newspaper articles or films made at the time of the Blitz.26 The myth of the Blitz is, hence, a narrative that strongly influences how the history of World War II is dealt with and perceived in British society, and as a narrative structure, for instance, also influences school textbooks.27 It can be seen as an iconic event in that it stands for a broader historical reality and conflates the individual experiences of people in the past into a single event. The Blitz has become a symbol of collective resilience and has been widely reproduced and appropriated as such. In the next section, I examine how this iconic historical event is reproduced in museum exhibitions through objects that in themselves may acquire, or already have gained, iconic status.

The Blitz in museum exhibitions The cultural memory of World War II already manifests itself in English exhibitions through a strong focus on the military operations of the British and Allied forces and on the experiences of civilians on the home front. These exhibitions can be found at the world-renowned Imperial War Museum (IWM) – which was founded in London in 1917 and has since seen an 24 25 26 27

Connelly, pp. 141-142. Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., pp. 132-141. See Crawford.

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expansion into other British regions, such as Duxford and Manchester – but also at many local museums in the UK. An exploratory analysis of four random exhibitions on the subject reveals how aspects of the myth of the Blitz are also being reproduced in museums. These exhibitions include the permanent exhibitions of the D-Day Museum in Portsmouth (on display until 2017), the Imperial War Museum in London (on display until 2014), the IWM North in Manchester, and Newhaven Fort. In all exhibitions, the theme of the British people acting together and playing a role in their own defence was highlighted through displays that showed the role of the ARP and fire services in helping people, preventing fires, and providing assistance after bombings. Although all exhibitions did show some images of the work done by these services, their importance was emphasized more strongly through tangible objects on display. These included for instance an air raid warden’s lamp, armbands to identify ARP personnel, ARP bells, helmets, and badges. Most exhibitions also presented medals highlighting the heroic actions of individuals. The D-Day Museum even provided a full reconstruction of the living room of an ARP warden and personalized history by linking the objects on display to an individual from Portsmouth’s Civil Defence service through a photograph and identity card. The repetitive use of ARP-related objects may contribute to a process of ‘iconization’, although the exact form they take varies. Hariman and Lucaites, however, argue (drawing from Karin Becker) that there are indications that an iconic photograph also does not necessarily have to refer to a single image. Iconicity can comprise a set of photographs that roughly provide the same image, but that are taken from a slightly different angle or are configured in various ways.28 In the case of the ARP objects, we might argue that their iconic nature develops more from the meaning attributed to them than from the material form they take. While the exhibitions showed strong parallels in the objects on display regarding the role of the civil defence services, the ways in which this history was narratively dealt with showed slight differences. For instance, the IWM London exhibition described the work of the ARP, fire, and other defence services in a neutral tone, merely providing an indication of the work they did. On the other hand, Newhaven Fort attributed a sense of value to their actions, stating that ‘it is difficult to describe in a few words the tremendous work of the ARP!’ and arguing that ‘without them the Home Front could not have been won.’ The D-Day Museum similarly drew attention to the

28 Hariman and Lucaites, p. 304.

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heroic actions of people helping others during the Blitz, emphasizing how the British people appeared to act in unison: All across the country, young and old people, men and women, all played their part in dealing with wartime threats and dangers. There were frequent acts of selfless heroism, and many people tirelessly gave up their sparse time to help others.

Another theme featured prominently in the exhibitions on the Blitz was the use of different air raid shelters, with for instance shelter tickets, signs, and permits referring to using public communal shelters, and historic photographs showing how people in these shelters suffered through air raids together. All museums also payed attention to the use of (indoor) Morrison shelters and (outdoor) Anderson shelters, sometimes through images, but often by having these shelters on display as a reconstruction. The fact that in the exhibition of the D-Day Museum an object was attributed significance through its relation to a shelter illustrates the iconic nature of this object for the history of the Blitz: a figurine of a dog was exhibited as being given as a present and taken into an Anderson shelter during raids. Shelters often appeared to play a specific role in the museum exhibitions, namely as vehicles to foster empathy among visitors. This becomes evident from the ways in which attention is drawn to the things that people using these shelters might have experienced during an air raid. The D-Day Museum, for instance, asked visitors to ‘imagine your whole family having to sleep in an air raid shelter like this one [an Anderson table shelter] night after night.’ According to the museum they were often ‘damp and uncomfortable’. Many museums, however, also provided a so-called ‘Blitz experience’: a trend started by the IWM London in 1990, which in that year opened an interactive exhibit about the London bombings of 1940 and 1941.29 At Newhaven Fort, visitors similarly could take a seat in a reconstruction of an underground public shelter, where a combination of sound and light effects created the illusion of German planes flying over, dropping their bombs nearby, while anti-aircraft guns attempt to shoot them down. Meanwhile, the voice of an ARP warden could be heard, asking the visitors if they were ‘all nice and snug’ and wondering if everyone was okay after the bombing. A narrator described what was happening and set the scene by asking questions such as ‘Did you go the toilet before you came down?’ and ‘Have you brought any pillows and blankets?’ thus inviting visitors 29 Winter, p. 154.

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into a first-person-perspective. The experience ended with the sound of the siren, this time for the ‘all clear’. Exhibits such as these reinforce the idea of a unified Britain during the war and, according to Lucy Noakes, offer ‘a sanitized version of a minority experience presented as a majority experience’ in order to support the construction of national identity.30 The myth of the Blitz also revealed itself in other aspects of the studied exhibitions. The exhibition of the IWM London, for example, showed extracts from the film Britain at War of night fires and the aftermath of air raids on London, while in a prominent display case objects were organized in front of a large print of the aforementioned iconic St. Paul’s Cathedral photograph. Furthermore, both the IWM London and the D-Day Museum highlighted visits of the king and queen to bombed cities in order to show how they contributed to morale and unity. In terms of the focus on London in the myth of the Blitz, most exhibitions featured images of shelters in London, but often the role of this city was contextualized with text panels emphasizing that other cities also suffered heavily from German bombings. Even the exhibition of the London-based IWM included references to bomb damage in other British cities such as Coventry, Hull, and Exeter. Although all exhibitions thus reproduced elements of the myth of the Blitz, the IWM North also took a more reflective approach in an exhibit that focused on how wars are dealt with and constructed into a narrative when they are over. According to one text panel, ‘1940 created more myths than any other year of the Second World War. Myth has often clouded the truth. One of the myths is that Britain fought alone.’ One display case presented objects that, according to their label, could be regarded as ‘iconic items from Britain’s home front’, including an ARP warden’s helmet and a stirrup pump for extinguishing fires. A panel also asked visitors whether London was the only city that was ‘blitzed’, to reveal that half of the civilian casualties of this event were suffered by other British cities. Having this more reflective approach in mind, it is interesting that the IWM North still relied on aspects of the myth of the Blitz and, just like the other museums, in their regular displays included objects that can be deemed as iconic.

‘Iconization’ of the abolition Regarding exhibitions on the history of the transatlantic slave trade in the UK, we can see a similar process of ‘iconization’ that has its roots in the 30 Noakes, pp. 96-98.

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very history being narrated. In the UK, the history of this trade and of the system of slavery associated with it for a long time has been told from the perspective that the British were the first to abolish the slave trade in 1807.31 Most if not all museums focused on the history of ‘anti-slavery’ instead of on the slave trade and slavery itself, with for instance Hull and Wisbech, the hometowns of abolitionist campaigners William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, hosting the exhibitions.32 Due to this focus on ‘anti-slavery’, a narrative structure of dealing with the history of the slave trade developed that has been called the ‘abolitionist myth’ or ‘abolition discourse’.33 Based on an analysis of newspaper coverage of the 2007 bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade, heritage scholars Emma Waterton and Ross Wilson have identified several features of this ‘abolition discourse’, such as creating distance between Britain in the past and in the present, focusing on ‘slavery’ as an independent process (instead of highlighting the role that governments, companies, and individuals played), and emphasizing Britain’s benevolence.34 Just like the Blitz, the abolition of the slave trade has hence become an iconic event that refers to and simultaneously obscures a broader history and aims to generate an emotion of pride. However, the pervasiveness of this iconic event has been challenged since the 1980s, when the history of slavery itself started to gain more attention. This attention resulted in a stronger support for commemorative activities and in new perspectives in exhibitions and other narratives on the slave trade.35 Regarding museums, this meant that exhibitions started to acknowledge the perspective of enslaved Africans and include displays on themes like Africa before the transatlantic slave trade, the legacies of this history, and the resistance of enslaved people. In addition, the focus on new perspectives often translated into a stronger emphasis on the horrors of the slave trade, with displays showing the brutal ways enslaved Africans were treated during their transportation and on the plantations.36 This development should be understood in migrant communities increasingly seeking recognition for other aspects of the history of the transatlantic slave trade, combined with academics highlighting black perspectives, government initiatives that stimulated inclusive 31 32 33 34 35 36

Hall, pp. 1-2. Oldfield, pp. 119-121. Cubitt, Smith and Wilson, p. 3; Waterton and Wilson, pp. 382-383. Waterton and Wilson, pp. 382-383. Oldfield, p. 2. Wallace, pp. 227-228; Smith and Fouseki, p. 98.

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citizenship, and ideas about democratic and participative approaches in the museum sector.37 Despite this development towards highlighting new perspectives, scholars have argued that more recent commemorative activities, political speeches, and newspaper articles still were shaped by the ‘abolition discourse’.38 Exhibitions similarly experienced difficulty in escaping the abolitionist narrative. For instance, to a large degree they still framed the abolition as a noble cause, neglecting the political and economic arguments that were also part of the abolitionist campaign.39 Historian Geoffrey Cubitt has argued that museums often struggled with integrating new perspectives while also catering to their traditional audience. 40 In the next section, I examine how iconic objects associated with the abolition of the slave trade are reproduced in museum exhibitions. For this analysis, I focus on the permanent exhibitions of the International Slavery Museum (Liverpool), the National Maritime Museum (London), the Museum of London Docklands, and the Wilberforce House Museum (Hull).

Horrors of the slave trade on display All museums did feature displays on the abolition of the slave trade, but they were always placed near the end of the exhibition, falling in naturally with the chronological order of events and diminishing its iconic status. Moreover, by emphasizing the continuation of slavery after the event and the effects on society until today, most museums subverted the significance of the event even more strongly. Only at Wilberforce House could one argue that the abolition retained some of its iconic value, since the museum is based in the former house of the famous abolitionist William Wilberforce. What is interesting, however, is that abolition continues to have its influence on the way the history of the slave trade is presented in museums, as all exhibitions featured images and objects that were developed for propaganda purposes in the actual nineteenth-century abolition campaign. Instead of emphasizing pride over having abolished the trade, however, they are used for their original political purpose: to show the horrors of the slave trade. 37 38 39 40

Oldfield, pp. 119-121. Waterton, pp. 137-138; Waterton and Wilson, pp. 389-395; Paton and Webster, p. 163. Paton, pp. 278-282. Cubitt, 2010, p. 159.

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Image 32  Engraving of The Brookes slaveship around 1788

Public domain

An iconic image of this campaign is, for instance, the Description of a Slave Ship diagram of the Liverpool slaver named the Brooks that was commissioned by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the late eighteenth century. This image, which schematically shows how enslaved Africans would have been transported across the Atlantic on the different decks of a slave ship, has become an icon of the transatlantic slave trade through endless reproduction in various media, including poetry, literature, visual art, sculpture, performance, f ilm, newspaper articles, and even

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T-shirts.41 According to visual studies scholar Jacqueline Francis, the image of the ‘Brookes’ slave ship has become a ‘universal symbol of exploitation, oppression, and injustice.’42 Despite its problematic nature as a product of the abolitionist campaign, the Brookes image is often used to show the realities of the second stage of the triangular trade in which African people were transported across the Atlantic (also known as the Middle Passage). The International Slavery Museum (ISM) did, for example, contextualize this image to some extent in its displays on the abolition, describing it as ‘the ship that launched a thousand petitions’, but still used it on a text panel on the voyage of a different slave ship, only indicating in a small byline that the Brookes image was reproduced from an anti-slavery pamphlet. Wilberforce House emphasized more strongly that the image was produced by abolitionists and has become ‘one of the iconic images of the slave trade’, but also used it to illustrate the Middle Passage, highlighting that ‘in many cases, people were packed in more tightly than the Brookes image suggests.’ The Museum of London Docklands and the National Maritime Museum only included the image in their displays on the abolition. Based on interview material, historian Geoffrey Cubitt indicates that some curators did regard the image as problematic, but many museums still used it as an illustration or symbol of the Middle Passage. 43 A second object linked to the history of abolitionism almost always used in exhibitions on the transatlantic slave trade is the autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African (1789) in which the author, who later became a writer and abolitionist living in London, described his experiences as a slave and his way to freedom. Although the publication of his life story was explicitly meant as a political pamphlet about the slave trade and was addressed to members of parliament, 44 quotes from Equiano’s autobiography are often used to provide insight into the horrors that African people experienced during their enslavement. For instance, the Museum of London Docklands, which extensively deals with the abolition campaign and also contextualizes Equiano’s work as a ‘powerful propaganda tool’, used extracts from his book in an introductory video to the exhibition to stress the horrors of slavery and invoke a sense of empathy. The exhibition of the Wilberforce House Museum was littered 41 42 43 44

See Wood. See Francis. Cubitt, 2011, p. 230. Huisman, p. 21.

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Image 33 Illustration by Cristoforo dall’Acqua for a 1818 Italian translation of Captain John Stedman: A negro hung by his ribs from a gallows, 1792

Public domain

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with quotes from Equiano’s biography to provide a personal voice in firstperson perspective to a history otherwise narrated in more general terms. This approach attributed a sense of authenticity to these experiences, as they were framed as evidence to the historical events and processes that the exhibition described. Other iconic images that are often encountered in exhibitions on slavery and the slave trade are the engravings made by the English poet and painter William Blake for The Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam by John Stedman (1796). In this book, Stedman recounts his experiences as a soldier in the Dutch army to assist in fighting against groups of escaped slaves in Surinam. Although Stedman himself did not explicitly agitate against the system of slavery, his detailed descriptions of the horrific ways slaves were handled, together with the Blake engravings of these atrocities, became a powerful instrument for abolitionists campaigning against the slave trade. 45 The engravings created by Blake were often reproduced in exhibitions without contextualization and reflection on their background as illustrations for Stedman’s book. 46 Both the Wilberforce House, the Museum of London Docklands and the International Slavery Museum used them as an illustration in sections on how enslaved people were treated on plantations and in the colonies in general, making these extreme acts of brutality a strong part of people’s image of this history. The iconic images and objects of the history of the transatlantic slave trade thus have clear roots in the abolition campaign of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, with images like the Brookes diagram and the Blake engravings having acquired a status of symbolizing atrocity, according to Cubitt ‘perhaps at the cost of obscuring the more specific histories to which they may originally have referred.’47 Due to their endless reproduction, these iconic images and objects have become so familiar that the question could be raised as to whether they still have an effect on visitors. 48 Although some curators expressed not wanting to focus too much on horrific images and objects,49 the fact that several museums have started to explore other means to convey the most brutal aspects of the transatlantic slave trade might indicate these iconic images have lost their originally intended effect. In 45 46 47 48 49

See Klarer. Cubitt, 2011, p. 234. Ibid., p. 229, 233. Ibid., p. 226. Ibid., p. 225.

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order to generate shock and foster a sense of empathy, museums for instance draw parallels between the lives of slaves in the past and in the present or create immersive experiences to bring this history closer to visitors.50 This approach of connecting different histories might be interpreted as a way to revitalize the effect of the icon.

Conclusion In this paper, I have examined how history museums deal with iconic events, objects, and images in their exhibitions, and how they both contribute to and counteract the ‘iconization’ process. In both case studies, we see how historical events directly or shortly after their occurrence were already constructed in a way that allowed them to acquire iconic status. Both the abolition of the slave trade and the Blitz in World War II have gained wide recognition through continuous reproduction and have come to stand for broader historical realities than what they if taken at face value represent. The exhibitions studied in this paper deal with these iconic events in different ways. In the case of the Blitz we have seen that museums still tend to reproduce this event through the display of objects that in themselves take on (or already have taken on) iconic value. While a museum like the IWM North also challenges the ‘iconization’ process by communicating to the visitor that the cultural memory of World War II contains many iconic objects, it appears to be difficult to actually transcend the iconic aspects of this history and provide visitors with new perspectives. Partly this may be explained by museums aiming to meet visitors’ expectations and not wanting to alienate their audiences by deconstructing narratives that are deeply embedded in society. In the case-study on abolition, we see a completely different picture. Here, the iconic status of this historical event has become a topic of debate, particularly due to migrant communities seeking recognition for other perspectives on the history of the transatlantic slave trade. Museums have deviated from the traditional abolition-perspective, contextualizing and softening the iconic status of this event. Strikingly, however, in this process, iconic objects and images of the nineteenth century campaign for abolition have still found their way in exhibitions, fulfilling their original propaganda purposes. In an effort to acquaint visitors with the horrors of the slave trade, 50 See De Bruijn.

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all exhibitions studied in this paper use objects and images produced to drive home the message that the slave trade should be ended. This way, museums further cement the iconic status of these artefacts, which through endless reproduction may have lost some of their emotional power. As mentioned above, this paper also shows attempts by museums to confront the process of ‘iconization’ by contextualizing events and objects as such and making visitors aware of this context. Museums are, however, always limited by the collection that has developed over time in response to changing goals and circumstances. Furthermore, they have to manoeuvre between their own aim and mission and the expectations of their visitors, which can make it difficult to go against the grain. In order to better understand the process of ‘iconization’ in museums, more systematic research would be required that also looks at the ideas of curators and ideally takes a historical approach towards the study of exhibitions. Such an approach can contribute to a better understanding of how images and narratives of past events are disseminated and (re)constructed in museums, and can provide further insight in how to break developing trends of ‘iconization’.

References Calder, Angus, The Myth of the Blitz, London, Pimlico, 1992. Connelly, Mark, We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War, Harlow, Routledge, 2004. Crawford, Keith, ‘Constructing National Memory: The 1940/41 Blitz in History Textbooks’, Internationale Schulbuchforschung, 2, 2001, pp. 323-338. Cubitt, Geoffrey, ‘Lines of Resistance: Evoking and Conf iguring the Theme of Resistance in Museum Displays in Britain around the Bicentenary of 1807’, Museum and Society, 8, no. 3, November 2010, pp. 143-164. Cubitt, Geoffrey, ‘Atrocity Materials and the Representation of Transatlantic Slavery: Problems, Strategies and Reactions’, in Smith, Laurajane, Geoffrey Cubitt, Ross Wilson, and Kalliopi Fouseki (eds.), Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums, New York and Oxford, Routledge, 2011, pp. 229-259. Cubitt, Geoffrey, Laurajane Smith, and Ross Wilson, ‘Introduction: Anxiety and Ambiguity in the Representation of Dissonant History’, in Smith, Laurajane, Geoffrey Cubitt, Ross Wilson, and Kalliopi Fouseki (eds.), Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums, New York and Oxford, Routledge, 2011, pp. 1-19. De Bruijn, Pieter, ‘Bridges to the Past. Constructions of Historical Distance in English and Dutch Heritage Educational Resources’, PhD diss., Erasmus University Rotterdam, 2014.

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De Jong, Ad, Vitrines vol verhalen. Museumcollecties als bron voor cultuurgeschiedenis, Amsterdam, Vossiuspers, 2010. Francis, Jacqueline, ‘The Brooks Slave Ship Icon: A “Universal Symbol”?’ Slavery and Abolition 30, no. 2, June 2009, pp. 327-338. Frijhoff, Willem, Heiligen, idolen, iconen, Nijmegen, SUN, 1998. Grever, Maria, ‘Plurality, Narrative and the Historical Canon’, in Grever, Maria and Siep Stuurman (eds.), Beyond the Canon. History for the Twenty-First Century, Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 31-47. Hall, Catherine, ‘Introduction’, History Workshop Journal 64, no. 1, October 2007, pp. 1-5. Hariman, Robert and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed. Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Hariman, Robert and John Louis Lucaites, ‘Icons, Appropriations, and the Coproduction of Meaning’, in Kjeldsen, J.E. (ed.), Rhetorical Audience Studies and Reception of Rhetoric: Exploring Audiences Empirically, Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 285-308. Huisman, Marijke, Verhalen van vrijheid. Autobiografieën van slaven in transnationaal perspectief, Hilversum, Uitgeverij Verloren, 2015. Jones, Siân, ‘Negotiating Authentic Objects & Authentic Selves’, Journal of Material Culture 15, no. 2, September 2010, pp. 181-203. Klarer, Mario, ‘Humanitarian Pornography: John Gabriel Stedman’s “Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam” (1796)’, New Literary History 36, no. 4, Autumn 2005, pp. 559-587. Kleppe, Martijn, Canonieke Icoonfoto’s. De rol van (pers)foto’s in de Nederlandse geschiedschrijving, Delft, Eburon, 2013. Kowaleski Wallace, Beth, ‘Uncomfortable Commemorations’, History Workshop Journal 68, no. 1, October 2009, pp. 223-233. Nellen, Henk, Hugo de Groot. Een leven in strijd om de vrede 1583-1645, Amsterdam, Uitgeverij Balans, 2007. Noakes, Lucy, ‘Making Histories: Experiencing the Blitz in London’s Museums in the 1990s’, in Evans, Martin and Kenneth Lunn (eds.), War and Memory in the Twentieth Century, Oxford and New York, Berg Publishers, 1997, pp. 89-104. Noakes, Lucy and Juliette Pattinson, ‘Introduction: “Keep Calm and Carry on”. The Cultural Memory of the Second World War in Britain’, in Noakes, Lucy and Juliette Pattinson (eds.), British Cultural Memory and the Second World War, London and New York, Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 1-24. Oldfield, John, ‘Chords of Freedom’. Commemoration, Ritual and British Transatlantic Slavery, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007. Paton, Diana, ‘Interpreting the Bicentenary in Britain’, Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 30, no. 2, June 2009, pp. 227-289.

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Paton, Diana and Jane Webster, ‘Remembering Slave Trade Abolitions: Reflections on 2007 in International Perspective’, Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 30, no. 2, June 2009, pp. 161-167. Rose, Sonya O, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain 1939-1945, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003. Schravesande, Freek, ‘De kist van Hugo de Groot is er nog’, NRC Handelsblad, 2 May 2013, www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2013/05/02/de-kist-van-hugo-de-grootis-er-nog-12651170-a1128400. Smith, Laurajane and Kalliopi Fouseki, ‘The Role of Museums as ‘Places of Social Justice’. Community Consultation and the 1807 Bicentenary’, in Smith, Laurajane, Geoffrey Cubitt, Ross Wilson, and Kalliopi Fouseki (eds.), Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums, New York and Oxford, Routledge, 2011, pp. 97-115 Smith, Malcolm, Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory, London, Routledge, 2000. Smith, Philip, ‘Becoming Iconic: The Cases of Woodstock and Bayreuth’, in Alexander, Jeffrey C., Dominik Bartmański, and Bernhard Giesen, Iconic Power. Cultural Sociology, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 171-183. Solaroli, Marco, ‘Iconicity. A Category for Social and Cultural Theory’, Sociologica 1, April 2015, pp. 1-52. Spaans, Joke, ‘Violent Dreams, Peaceful Coexistence. On the Absence of Religious Violence in the Dutch Republic’, De zeventiende eeuw 18, 2003, pp. 149-166. Waterton, Emma, ‘Humiliated Silence: Multiculturalism, Blame and the Trope of ‘Moving on’, Museum and Society 8, no. 3, November 2010, pp. 128-157. Waterton, Emma and Ross Wilson, ‘Talking the Talk: Policy, Popular and Media Responses to the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Using the ‘Abolition Discourse’, Discourse & Society 20, no. 3, May 2009, pp. 381-399. Winter, Jay, ‘Museums and the Representation of War’, Museum and Society 10, no. 3, November 2012, pp. 150-163. Wood, Marcus, ‘Significant Silence: Where was Slave Agency in the Popular Imagery of 2007?’ in Kaplan, Cora and John Oldfield. (eds.), Imagining Transatlantic Slavery, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 162-190.

About the author Pieter de Bruijn is Assistant Professor in Cultural History at the Open University (the Netherlands). His research focuses on heritage learning, historical representation in museums and sites, and the relationship between history and citizenship education. De Bruijn studied History at Erasmus University Rotterdam and obtained his PhD at the same university in 2014

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on the study of English and Dutch heritage educational resources on the Transatlantic Slave Trade, World War II, and the Holocaust. He also carried out a small-scale study at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies on approaching the history of World War II from a citizenship education perspective. Recently, De Bruijn was involved in studies on the process of historical empathy in a museum context, and the use of cultural heritage in teaching sensitive histories. Furthermore, he is coordinator of a project that facilitates the exchange of knowledge and expertise between academia and heritage (education) professionals.



Hitler Goes Pop Reflections on Media Representation and Collective Memory Yvonne Delhey Abstract Today, history has penetrated daily life, appearing to meet a multitude of needs within society. Given the modality of modern mass media, historical representation also includes increased visualization, where recognizable images – icons – are a favoured vehicle of expression. Hitler functions as one of these icons. His image can be found in all forms of popular culture. This strong media presence goes together with a paradoxical situation caused by the taboo, which to this day engulfs his legacy. This chapter describes several examples of Hitler-representations as a means to discuss the different angles and cultural meanings that the use of Hitler’s image elicit. The aim is to establish an interdisciplinary framework for analysis of such icons and their significance for the study of collective memory in general. Keywords: mass entertainment, politainment, cartoons, comics, media figure, war propaganda

Introduction The title of this chapter is, of course, provocative.1 In order to avoid any misunderstanding, I clarify here that I neither wish to trivialize nor deny historical fact. It is important to establish at the outset that this article deals with Adolf Hitler as a media figure. This does not mean there is no relation 1 I would like to thank Sigrid Newman for translating this article from German into English and Fiona McKinnon for her comments.

Boven, Erica van, and Marieke Winkler (eds), The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463728225_delhey

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to the historical figure. However, while historians investigate historical facts and focus on the question of factuality with regard to the representation of history in the media, the challenge for researchers in cultural studies is in analysing the manner of representation and the resulting intertextual and intermedial references. I argue that representations can be a resource for both disciplines since, in the end, studying representations is essentially about how the past is dealt with and how it is portrayed in present-day media. Furthermore, the title alludes to the trend, growing since the 1980s, in which history appears to be ‘an object of representation, production, and consumption within popular culture’.2 This trend can also be summarized by the phrase ‘the representation of history and the perception of the past in the modern media’, while we must also bear in mind the technological developments in the media over the last thirty years.3 The consequence of this mediatization can be regarded as the omnipresence of history; the literary scholar Barbara Korte and the historian Sylvia Paletschek refer to it in this way in the introduction to their edited volume, History Goes Pop (2009). 4 They regard this development as part of the rapid societal change which the sociologist Ulrich Beck has termed the ‘Zweite Moderne’ [second modernity],5 which refers to changing value systems, lifestyles, and working practices. Two key factors related to this development are the increasing globalization of social relationships and digitalization. Although Korte and Paletschek do not explicitly refer to digitalization, it is an important part of this rapid societal change, together with the increasing significance of the internet as a defining medium within society. According to Korte and Paletschek, within the process of increasing mediatization, history ultimately serves very different ends, since, in addition to its function as education, history is also about entertainment, relaxation, distraction, identity, orientation, adventure, new experiences, and escape from the everyday.6 This is precisely the point of departure for this article: in media representations, reference to historical facts is by no means the only thing which plays a role. In the portrayal of history orientated towards popular entertainment – Korte and Paletschek refer to a ‘populäre Geschichtskultur’ [popular history culture] – it is not only about 2 3 4 5 6

Korte and Paletschek, p. 9. See Meyer, E. (ed.). Korte and Paletschek, p. 9. Ibid., p. 10. Cf. ibid., p. 9.

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history, but also about the other functions and contexts revealed, and the communicative intentions connected to them. This article attempts to develop a working concept regarding the definition of ‘cultural icons’ in light of popular history culture. First, it considers the image-text relationship, for although our memory is strongly visually oriented,7 and images immediately capture our attention, a narrative is nevertheless still necessary to interpret and analyse them. Regarding icons, from a semiotic perspective, the same overlay of connotations can be found present in myths. Second, following up on this, the article explains the particular importance attached to Hitler as a media figure within the history of the popular media and uses various examples by way of illustration. Particular attention is given to the influence of comics, to show how amid information, visualization, and entertainment, a certain non-current expression can be used, through which humour and taboos are adopted into the political discourse. In such discourse, as is generally the case in communication, the presence of entertainment and humour can quickly give the impression that something is being trivialized or relativized. Finally, the examples in this article show that these forms of communication can be employed for critical reflection.

Cultural icons As cultural historian Kees Ribbens provocatively stated during the conference ‘The Icon as Cultural Model’ (January 2018, Amsterdam), the Second World War could essentially be recounted on the basis of two cultural icons: Adolf Hitler and Anne Frank. Such a comparison offers plenty of scope for a lively discussion, but it also raises the question as to what is understood by the term ‘cultural icon’. According to Tomaselli and Scott, the cultural icon can be understood as ‘a term used nowadays in journalism and popular speak to signify a celebrity or cult object. Icon, in this sense, encodes the person or object so identified as personifying the exemplar of a particular generation, a stylistic epoch, and a feeling about a particular set of social experiences.’8 They assert that 7 See Assmann. Assmann refers to the Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) and his reflection on the meaning of the written word in connection to images: ‘Der Mensch denkt, spricht und schreibt in Bildern’ [Humans think, speak, and write in images]. Assmann, p. 305. 8 Tomaselli and Scott, p. 17.

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icons are media constructions which, although they have their origins in the real, are transformed by the process of iconization into simulacra or, if you like, that they take on hyperreal dimensions.9 Accordingly, icons denote not only images or iconic signs (in terms of Peirce’s semiotic model), but also more complex contextual meanings: ‘Cultural icons are iconic signs to which a transparent but often complex overlayering of connotations has accrued, usually after a certain period of time.’10 Through this overlayering of indexical and symbolic meanings (the other two levels of reference within Peirce’s model) the connection to reality is lost: ‘Icons can be deceitful to the extent that they occlude as much as represent their object.’11 This overlayering of contextual meanings is not only connected to the visual sphere. Tomaselli and Scott point to Roland Barthes’ concept of myth, which questions the meaning of myth for our time and which subjects the process of mythologization to critical semiotics.12 Barthes examines not only celebrities but also the symbolic meaning of everyday objects, such as cars (Citroën DS as ‘La Deesse’, which means ‘goddess’), groceries, and advertisements.13 Icons, like myths, serve to de-historicize – they rupture or lessen historical reference and open up real historical reference to fiction, which is the crucial point for this article with regard to the cultural icon Hitler.14 Here it becomes apparent why this approach is helpful in understanding the media’s preoccupation with the Hitler phenomenon, which surprisingly has intensified over the last three decades, particularly in the German context.15 We should be aware that we are talking about a political myth consciously constructed during the Third Reich by means of propaganda relating to the leader of National Socialism. Even if one is not immediately familiar with the various individual mythemes (cf. Levi-Strauss16) from which the myth is 9 The term ‘Simulacrum’ was coined by Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), see Baudrillard. 10 Tomaselli and Scott, p. 19. 11 Ibid., p. 18. 12 See Barthes. 13 In a certain respect, Barthes’ approach corresponds to the concept of ‘lieux de mémoire’ (Realms of Memory (1996-1997)), which Pierre Nora developed in the 1980s as an alternative to the historiographical approach which had been used up to then with respect to France. 14 Obviously, this could also be applied to Anne Frank as contemporary cultural icon, but her representation stands for a different tradition of remembrance, in which taboo and the use of humour evoke questions dissimilar to the following. 15 See, for example Erk; Moshe; Hissen. Hissen concludes that Hitler has been becoming mainstream. For a historical study which goes beyond the context of the mediatization and has a transnational focus, see Rosenfeld. See also Moshe, Delhey, Gebauer and Jung. 16 This refers to representations of Hitler as a redeemer, a soldier, an orator, an artist, an animal lover, an abstainer, a vegetarian, etc., see Atze, p. 433 (image with overview). Atze, a librarian with a doctorate, focuses on the significance which Adolf Hitler has within the collective memory of

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generated, one should at least realize that an enormous complexity of overlaid meanings is connected to an image, a contextual meaning which, no matter how tenuous, acquires presence on account of the image.17 The political scientist Andreas Dörner, has addressed the relation between politics, historical facts, and myth, all of which come to meet fictionalization. According to Dörner, in terms of Baudrillard’s simulacrum, media figures are ‘hyperreale Größen, die an realen Personen anknüpfen und sie in einem semiotischen Prozeß zu Zeichen transformieren, an denen sich Diskursformationen festmachen lassen’ [Media figures are hyperreal variables, which refer to real persons and transfer them in a semiotic process into signs with different meanings and discourses].18 To illustrate his point, Dörner describes a scene from the SPD conference during the German elections in 1998, then compares the performance of the then candidate for chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, with the role of ‘jenes in “Airforce One” inszenierten Superhelden, der als amerikanischer Präsident im Alleingang eine ganze Terroristengruppe außer Gefecht setzt’ [the superhero in ‘Airforce One’, who as the American president, single-handedly vanquishes a whole terrorist group].19 Dörner argues that the hyperreal status of a media figure results from the ‘ständigen Oszillieren zwischen Realität und Fiktion’ [continuous oscillation between fiction and reality].20 The point here is that fictionalization creates opportunities for identification with which we can then engage. Regarding Hitler, this is rather problematic because the cultural icon Hitler also personifies the antithesis of humanity. It becomes even more difficult, when humourous forms of presentation like irony or satire are chosen. Nevertheless, Hitler’s image is recognizable everywhere, thus offering a visual template which can be used to impart a whole range of other meanings. How one responds to this depends on one’s knowledge of the context and one’s own position. As we shall see in this text, this can include different analytical topics and a transnational perspective, which can best be explained by using an historical approach. Germans. He labels the various mythemes of which the myth consists and examines both the process of the production of the myth and its reception within the German context. 17 Hartmut Boehm examines the question of presence in his article ‘Representation, Presentation, Presence: Tracing the Homo Pictor’: ‘The linguistic usage is vague, but “presence” seems to mean something else than mere physical “being-at-hand”, (Vorhandenheit); it describes an enhanced presence (Gegenwart) of the image, which reaches beyond historical, referential, or documentary functions.’ Boehm, 2012, p. 16. 18 Dörner, p. 126. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid.

214 Y vonne Delhey Images 34 and 35 Walter Moers, Adolf, the Nazi Pig (1998) & Little Asshole and Old Curmudgeon (1993)

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Hitler and the history of popular media In the 1990s, the German writer and cartoonist Walter Moers published two comic books about Adolf, die alte Nazisau (1998, Adolf, the Nazi pig), an absurd parody about the Führer in today’s world. In these comics, Hitler has been shrunk to the size of a gnome, and in appearance and character he resembles two other comic figures of Moers: Dem kleinen Arschloch and Dem alten Sack (The Little Asshole and The Old Curmudgeon). In Moers’ works, all the themes of the Führer myth are adopted, turned round, carried to an extreme and reduced to absurdity: Hitler drinks alcohol, uses drugs, and has sex with a prostitute none other than Hermann Göring as transgender Hermine Göring. Adolf, die alte Nazisau was developed from a comic strip which had appeared in 1997 in the satirical magazine Titanic, the German equivalent of Charlie Hebdo, with the title ‘Ein Abend mit mehreren Symbolen’ [An Evening with Many Symbols]. Another cartoonist, Achim Greser, began caricatures in Titanic in 1995 entitled Der Führer privat [The Leader in Private]. They addressed current political issues and at the same time reflected that Adolf Hitler had tried to keep his private life as far away from the public gaze as possible. For Greser, as for Moers, it was about deconstructing the Führer myth. The aim was to portray Hitler as an idiotic and laughable figure. There remains the question, however, as to whether in doing so they undermined Hitler’s iconic status, or rather that through these repeated interpretations of the media figure Hitler, he took on a greater significance. Looking at a more current example, there is a similar consideration regarding the American web-comic Hipster Hitler by James Carr and Archana Kumar, which came on to the American market as a book in 2012 and whose German translation appeared in 2013. The introduction to the book edition begins provocatively with a quote from Henry Ford, ‘history is more or less bunk’,21 then poses the question of authenticity, referring to the fake diaries of Adolf Hitler which the journalist Gerd Heidemann claimed to have discovered in 1983. The argument is then put forward that ‘Dieses Buch jedoch schildert nichts als die Wahrheit, wie wir sie uns vorstellen’ [This book, however, depicts nothing but the truth as we

21 What Ford, the American inventor and business magnate, meant is not clear, but it is most likely that the statement goes back to an interview which he gave on 15 May 1916. In the book neither the source nor the context is given, which gives the impression that the statement is an absolute one, see Butterfield.

216 Y vonne Delhey Image 36  Cover of James Carr and Archana Kumar, Hipster Hitler (2013)

imagine it to be].22 As in the example of the Master Comics, we are thus confronted with the fictionalization of the political, albeit combined here with a critique of the hipster lifestyle. Even so, the myth certainly can be regarded here as being undermined. At the same time, the visual repertoire is complemented by a further chain of associations, and the iconic potential is thereby intensified. Instead of adding more current examples, and despite Henry Ford’s damning indictment, a closer look into history appears reasonable; regarding said satires on Hitler, we need to realize that we are dealing with a small but vivid tradition which is closely connected to developments within the modern mass media. As mentioned above, the contemporary cultural icon has emerged as result of the interference between political 22 Carr and Kumar, p. 9.

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discourse and modern mass media from the transformation of the historical person into a media figure. The following examples will illustrate how the political discourse is influenced by entertainment and, along with this, by humour in all its verbal and visual forms of non-actual communication. In addition, it should be noted that these samples were chosen deliberately for their different relations to Dutch, American, and French cultural contexts. In the summer of 1939, shortly before the start of the Second World War, the Dutch weekly organ, De Groene Amsterdammer, had a cover in the style of a superhero comic. It depicts Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and Hermann Göring in a type of improvized kitchen laboratory with a homemade bomb whose time fuse they are in the process of setting. The bomb is to be sent to Danzig, as indicated on the wooden transport crate on which the much smaller Goebbels is sitting. Goebbels is grinning and rubbing his hands, Göring is holding the bomb, and Hitler is attempting to set the alarm clock which is being used as the time fuse. Hitler’s expression is one of puzzlement. The image composition and the message of the cartoon clearly show that Hitler is the central character. The comic effect is heightened by all three men being masked in the style of comic book superheroes. Their small black masks are in fact reminiscent of the Beagle Boys, who of course did not exist at that time. The cartoonist may well have taken his inspiration from the comic strip The Phantom by Lee Falk, which appeared in American newspapers from 1937 onwards. De Groene Amsterdammer was established in 1877 as a weekly newspaper for business, industry, and art, and it originally had a standard front page. However, in November 1934 the format changed, and from then on until its forced closure in October 1940, it always had a cartoon on its front page. Most of these cartoons were the work of Leendert Jurriaan (Leo) Jordaan (1885-1980), who took over from Johan Braakensiek as chief illustrator in 1931. Jordaan had established a reputation as a political caricaturist ever since he began his cartoon ‘Het Leven in Caricatuur’ (Life in Caricature) in 1911 in the weekly Het Leven: Geïllustreerd (1906-1941). The front page of De Groene is a good example of how political discourse has been influenced by entertainment and humour. This particular cartoon provides a visualization of the current events of the time and captures it in an image, an image which is presented against the background of the Golden Age of comic books. This context does not detract from the political message, but rather packages it in a media form which has multiple meanings. This dynamic between entertaining popular media and political messaging can also function in reverse, as can be seen in the American war propaganda to be found in comic books. On the

218 Y vonne Delhey Image 37  Cover De Groene Amsterdammer, July 8, 1939

Cartoon by L.J. Jordaan

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cover of the first issue of Captain America, for example, which appeared in March 1941, we see the eponymous hero Captain America in action inside the Führer Headquarters: he punches Hitler so hard in the face that Hitler simply falls over. At this time, Hitler regularly appeared in American comic books, whose monthly circulation increased to tens of millions over a few years. Another example from 1944 goes so far as to depict Hitler himself as a superhero or, more precisely, a wannabe superhero, ‘Corporal Hitler Jr’. In 1944, in the February edition of Master Comics, a story was published which linked contemporary political events to the imagination of young readers. In the story, Hitler discovers how popular comics are among American children and takes it upon himself to become a superhero. He orders his scientists to develop a magic formula for him so that he can change into a superhero with superhuman powers. They set about the task and indeed find a solution: when the magic word ‘Ersatz’ [imitation] is spoken, Hitler transforms into the superhero ‘Corporal Hitler Jr.’, a lookalike of Captain Marvel Jr., who in turn is inspired by the figure of Superman. Luckily the fake hero is quickly identified, and the real hero Captain Marvel Jr. fights him. This story is a good example of the interaction between political discourse and pure mass entertainment, because here the historical figure Hitler loses his relation to reality and is transformed into a fictional character. In historical context, the story’s objectives are clear: the comic ensured that, as a new, interdiscursive medium, even the most remote region of the USA would be aware of the fight against Hitler, and that the fight itself would receive the necessary attention. Issues of the comic contained advertisements for war bonds and stamps for the National Defense Savings Program, and it was through this that the US government financed a significant part of their military activities. Nevertheless, returning to the example at hand, the fictional character of Corporal Hitler Jr. gains an overlaid meaning in which it is removed from its actual historical context and is placed in the sphere of superheroes. The fictionalization of the political employs iconization, the result of which is that the historical person is transformed into a hyperreal reference. A further example of how this contextual meaning can become autonomous can be seen in a cartoon which appeared on the cover of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in November 1978. The cartoon plays with the superhero image using satire (for which the publication is renowned), brings the significance of political discourse back into the representation, and breaks several taboos, all while remaining accessible, even if one does not have a good command of the French language. The cover portrays a figure in a military outfit, which is only vaguely, if at all, reminiscent of Hitler. In the pose of an entertainment host, the figure calls out with a beaming

220 Y vonne Delhey Image 38  Page from Master Comics 47 (1944), ‘Capt. Marvel meets Corp. Hitler Jr.’

The Digital Comic Museum

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smile: ‘Salut les youpins! Ça gaze!’ (‘Hello, Yids! It’s going great!’).23 As an accompanying commentary, there is a notice in large black letters saying: ‘Enfin on peut dire: Hitler Super Sympa’ (‘Finally it can be said: Hitler is nice’). The cover drawing is by George Wolinski (1934-2015), a cartoonist who was famous in France for his political cartoons and who was murdered in the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo on 7 January 2015. At first glance, the cartoon can be interpreted as very cynical and anti-Semitic. It was a direct response, however, to the scandal which broke a week earlier on 28 October 1978, in an interview with Louis Darquier de Pellepoix (18971980), former commissioner for Jewish Affairs under the Vichy Régime. The interview was published in the French news magazine L’Express under the title ‘À Auschwitz, on n’a gazé que les poux’ (‘In Auschwitz, Nothing But Lice Were Gassed’).24 Darquier, who thus revealed himself to be a Holocaust denier, had been sentenced to death in absentia in 1947 for his part in the murder of Jews in France. By that time, however, he had fled to Spain, where he was protected by General Franco’s dictatorship. If one takes the contemporary events of the time into account, the message is changed and a new perspective is given instead, one in which dark humour visualizes the horrendous nature of Darquier’s trivialization of the Holocaust. The breaking of the taboo in this representation seems to have been precisely calculated within the ambivalence of Darquier’s message. However, one cannot speak of a trivialization of political discourse. These three examples specifically relate to cartoons, and there are additional similar examples that could be given. Yet the connection to historical or current events is not always immediately clear. Sometimes the full significance can be realized only retrospectively, and due to the historical distance, it can then also enter into a new context of reception within society. To give an example of this: the American author Michael Chabon illustrated his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) with a nod to superhero comics. The book, which Chabon dedicated to his father, tells the story of two young Jewish men, Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay, who devote themselves to the comic book, the latest novelty to hit America in the 1930s. They meet in New York, where Joe Kavalier, who escaped Czechoslovakia just before it was occupied by Nazi Germany, finds refuge with his aunt and her son, Sammy Clay. Joe has a talent for painting and has also been trained in a special magic 23 ‘Youpin’ is an anti-Semitic term used to refer to Jewish people in a derogatory way. The verbal attack is reinforced by the colloquial phrase ‘ça gaze’, which in this context refers to the extermination of Jews in gas chambers. 24 See Bacqué. See also Ory, pp. 112-113.

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trick, the escapology of Harry Houdini (Ehrich Weiss, 1874-1926). His cousin Sammy, who has no special talent besides being an eloquent narrator and networker, sees a career for both in the comic book industry. Together they invent ‘the Escapist’, a superhero, who turns the war against Nazi Germany into his own personal mission. In Chabon’s version, the history of the comic book is a conscious act of political resistance, which takes on a particular significance given that the two friends are both Jews. While their publisher at first insists that comic superheroes should not be involved in politics, in the end Joe Kavalier prevails with an irresistible logic: The Escapist fights evil and Hitler is evil!25 In this way, whether one can put ‘the hitting and punching Hitler thing’ on the cover to draw attention to a comic story seems answered. The question of the fictionalization of politics seems reflected here, albeit indirectly. It is also about entertainment; Superman is ‘pure trash’ and, with the invention of comic books, ‘the devolution of American culture’ would just take ‘another great step forward’.26 Chabon is working with irony here. No matter how we may wish to interpret his account, with the overlay of meanings he creates with it, he also reaffirms the cultural icon. Considering all these examples, the question remains what function humour has in this context, or rather, what function could it have for interpreting cultural icons. This is relevant because humour is one of the most important communicative techniques within mass media entertainment. It is not about trivialization or relativization, but rather we should consciously focus on the critical reflective function of the humour.

Humour and historical experience Recently there has been an increase in the number of attempts which seek to both reflect on humour in connection with National Socialism and to critically analyse its significance for society. From an American perspective we have the recent contribution by the historian Gavriel D. Rosenfeld with his book Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past Is Being Normalized In Contemporary Culture (2015). As the title indicates, Rosenfeld perceives a tendency towards normalization regarding dealing with the National Socialist past, arguing this can be seen no more clearly than on the internet 27 and in the increased 25 Chabon, p. 160. 26 Ibid., pp. 156-157. 27 Rosenfeld puts forward his point using the phenomena of image macros, known as internet memes, which circulate on the internet. At the time of his book’s publication he states that there

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use of comic representations. Rosenfeld explains regarding the title of his work, which is a corruption of the Nazi salutation ‘Heil Hitler!’ [‘Hail Hitler!’]: ‘In light of this trend, the phrase ‘Hi Hitler’ can be interpreted as a gesture of welcome to a new view of the Nazi dictator – one that regards him as a symbol of humor instead of horror.’28 Rosenfeld further asserts that the goal of these efforts lies in ‘overturning the perceived exceptionality of the Nazi era’.29 Then he discusses normalization in relation to the collective memory function of communicative and cultural memory and the historian, whereby the uniqueness of the Holocaust is of central importance.30 Collective and cultural memory in this context is also discussed within the German context, with different perspectives from the Humanities being put forward. For example, there is the historical overview of film, Hitler im deutschsprachigen Spielfilm nach 1945, which was published by the film studies scholar Alexandra Hissen in 2010. Hissen postulates, regarding the films analysed, that Hitler had become ‘mainstream’ in the media by the 1990s.31 Using humour in the representation of Nazis was the focus of Monika Socha’s 2014 literary study Komisches Selbstverkennen. Zur Darstellung von Nationalsozialisten in Heinrich Manns Lidice, Günter Grass’ Die Blechtrommel und Edgar Hilsenraths Der Nazi & der Friseur. As the subheading indicates, the analysis focuses on a few literary works where the moral integrity of the authors leaves no doubt as to the intention behind the satires on the Nazis. Socha points to the strong moral system which limits engagement with her research topic. She argues that too often the discussion about the victims is linked to the representation of the National Socialists. ‘Der Diskurs über das NS-Regime ist stark reglementiert. Betroffenheit über das Leiden der Opfer sowie Entsetzen und Wut über die Nationalsozialisten müssen stets deutlich zum Ausdruck kommen und bei den Rezipienten evoziert werden’32 [The discourse on the National Socialist regime is sharply regimented. Anguish at the suffering of the victims, and outrage, and anger at the National Socialists, always has to be expressed and evoked by the recipients]. are 61,000 Hitler-related image macros listed on Meme Generator, Rosenfeld, p. 3, 350. See also http://memegenerator.net/memes/search?q=hitler. (accessed 3 November 2020) 28 Ibid., p. 6. 29 Ibid., p. 7. 30 Ibid., especially ‘Chapter 2: From History to Memory and Back Again: Debating the Holocaust’s Uniqueness’. 31 Hissen, p. 152. Hissen uses this formulation in a programmatic way in the subheading for the chapter on the twenty-first century. 32 Socha, p. 15.

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Socha maintains that humour and comedy in the portrayal of Nazis has scarcely been examined systematically, and sees the reasons for this lying in the moral impetus which determines engagement with National Socialism: the comic continuously has ‘des Vorwurfs der Obszönität und der Verhöhnung der Opfer zu erwehren, wenn es im Zusammenhang mit der Darstellung des Faschismus und der Shoah begegnet’33 [to resist accusations of obscenity and mockery of the victims when it occurs in connection with the representation of fascism and the Shoah]. It should be clear that the analysis of these novels is only part of her work. In her theoretical approach, Socha attempts to find a basis for the systematic analysis of satires, first by differentiating the comic from the humorous, and second by zooming in on the analysis of techniques of representation. Here, she draws on the work of the literary scholar Meike Mattick.34 Mattick also analysed literature: Alfred Döblin’s four-part literary documentation November 1918, which dealt with the revolution at the end of the First World War in Germany, written by the author while in exile in France and America in the 1930s and 1940s. Mattick examines the work explicitly with regard to the function of the comic within it as a ‘Form der Geschichts- und Gegenwartskritik’35 [type of critique of both history and the present]. She maintains that from an academic viewpoint, there is no consensus as to what constitutes the comic. Furthermore, the Aristotelian idea of the comic (in terms of the laughable) as the initial idea would already provide an inadequate approach.36 It is the ambivalent nature of the comic, with its multiple meanings, which can cause the merciless representation of historical realities. The relation to the topic at hand may appear to be tenuous, but it is consciously established by Mattick and clarified in that she highlights that the author, as a socialist of Jewish descent, found himself in exile at this time. Humour offers ‘eine von wenig Möglichkeiten, dem Grauen des Krieges, der Vertreibung und des Holocausts künstlerisch zu begegnen’37 [one of the few options for facing the cruelty of war, displacement, and the Holocaust artistically]. Mattick draws on, for example, Ernst Bloch, who in 1938 recommended the use of alienation techniques such as the grotesque, satire, and the comic as effective literary means for portraying the crimes of National Socialists.38 At this point, we can refer to the aforementioned cartoon which appeared in 1939 in De 33 34 35 36 37 38

Ibid., p. 16-17. At this point Socha refers to Steinlein. See Mattick. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 31. See also Aristotle, Poetics, Book V. Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., p. 37. See also Bloch, pp. 110-114.

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Groene Amsterdammer – depicting Hitler, Goebbels, and Göring as a trio of crooks putting together an amateur bomb shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War could be interpreted as a complete trivialization of the situation at the time. Yet the icon is carrier of many, often contradictory meanings, even in such a way it is also called an ‘empty signifier’ (e.g. a sign overloaded with meaning it lacks meaning: it can be filled in by anyone in every possible way). In that sense, the confusing multiple meanings and ambivalence of the cartoon could have been also consciously selected as a way of encouraging the reader to critically reflect. If one refers to Mattick’s observations, then the comic representation in fact generates exactly that type of alienation which raises awareness and encourages critical thinking: ‘Komisierendes Erzählen erscheint in dieser Perspektive nicht als ignorierendes Verarbeitungsverfahren, sondern vielmehr als eines, das gerade den Ernst in besonders treffender Weise zu thematisieren vermag’39 [comic narratives appear, in this perspective, to function not as a method of ignoring, but rather as an apt means of thematicizing that which is seriousness].

Conclusion Icon and myth are part of the process of collective remembrance: icon from the visual sphere, myth from the narrative sphere. Together they form the basis for a relation to the past which is more vivid than any historical representation could ever be. This is connected to the non-literal communication which is characteristic for the type of entertainment the modern mass media offers and, furthermore, is largely based on visual stimuli. This relation is not new. What is new, however, is the extent and the intensive use of visual media in the last twenty years. In terms of the cultural icon, which was the main focus of this article, the link between humour and taboos in political discourse is of particular significance, because they can be conveyed communicatively by the use of humour. Humour facilitates ‘the violation of borders’ and thus makes it possible for taboos to be discussed within political discourse. This relation is demonstrated in this text by using very different examples which show that the media figure Hitler is much alive as a cultural icon and that Hitler as a media figure constitutes a small but vivid tradition within the modern media. The examples also show that despite the high entertainment value, we are 39 Ibid., p. 38.

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dealing with approaches which critically engage with history. What is difficult is the strong visual stimulus which emanates from such representations. It is difficult because the icon thereby remains vivid and is made attractive for further reception. In this respect, it depends on the contextual meaning and its interpretation, along with our perception of the different levels of meaning. It also might become evident that humour is a crucial aspect that deserves more attention within the study of cultural icons in order to better understand icons’ societal function and role in shaping cultural memory. How humour can play a role as a means of critical and reflective communication and representation is briefly discussed here with reference to the work of the literary scholar Meike Mattick. Finally, once again, the essentially didactic intention relevant for this article is pointed out: Hitler as a cultural icon displays a certain magic, and the greater the distance from the actual historical events, the more attractive it becomes for various reasons. One can react by attempting to make it a taboo, or one can engage with it and be open to discussing the ambivalence of the representation, thereby going beyond the superficial, and creating a podium for debate and engagement with those moral values for which, at the end of the day, we all wish to take a stand.

References Assmann, Jan, ‘Die Frühzeit des Bildes – Der altägyptische “iconic turn”’, in Hubert Burda and C. Maar (eds.), Iconic Turn. Die neue Macht der Bilder, Köln, DuMont, 2004, pp. 304-322. Atze, Marcel, ‘Unser Hitler’. Der Hitler-Mythos im Spiegel der deutschsprachigen Literatur nach 1945, Göttingen, Wallstein, 2003. Bacqué, R., ‘Charlie Hebdo Hitler Censures, interdits et pressions’, Le Monde, 23 February, 2015. Barthes, R., Mythologies, Paris, Editions de Seuil, 1957. Baudrillard, J., Simulacres et Simulation, Paris, Edition Galilée, 1981. Boehm, Hartmut, ‘Representation, Presentation, Presence: Tracing the Homo Pictor’, in Jeffrey. C. Alexander, Dominik Bartmanski and Bernard Giesen (eds.), Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life, Basingstoke, Palgrave MacMillan, 2012, pp. 15-23. Boehm, Gottfried, ‘Jenseits der Sprache? Anmerkungen zur Logik der Bilder’, in Hubert Burda and Christa Maar (eds.), Iconic Turn. Die neue Macht der Bilder, Köln, DuMont, 2004, pp. 28-43. Burda, Hubert and C. Maar (eds.), Iconic Turn. Die neue Macht der Bilder, Köln, DuMont, 2004.

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Butterfield, R., ‘Henry Ford, the Wayside Inn, and the Problem of “History Is Bunk”’, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Third Series, Vol. 77, 1965, pp. 53-66. Carr, James and A. Kumar, Hipster Hitler, Köln, DuMont, 2013. Chabon, Michael, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, New York, Random House, 2000. Dörner, Andreas, Politainment. Politik in der medialen Erlebnisgesellschaft, Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp 2001. Erk, D., So viel Hitler war selten. Die Banalisierung des Bösen oder Warum der Mann mit dem kleinen Bart nicht totzukriegen ist, München, Heyne, 2012. Hissen, Alexandra, Hitler im deutschsprachigen Spielfilm nach 1945: Ein filmgeschichtlicher Überblick, Trier, WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2010. Korte, Barbara and Sylvia Paletschek (eds.), History Goes Pop. Zur Repräsentation von Geschichte in populären Medien und Genres, Bielefeld, Transcript 2009. Korte, Barbara and Sylvia Paletschek (eds.), ‘Geschichte in populären Medien und Genres: Vom historischen Roman zum Computerspiel’, in Barbara Korte and Sylvia Paletschek (eds.), History Goes Pop. Zur Repräsentation von Geschichte in populären Medien und Genres, Bielefeld, Transcript, 2009, pp. 9-60. Mattick, Meike, Komik und Geschichtserfahrung. Alfred Döblins komisierendes Erzählen in November 1918. Eine deutsche Revolution, Bielefeld, Aisthesis, 2003. Moshe, Y.B., Hitler konstruieren. Die Darstellung Adolf Hitlers in deutschen und amerikanischen historischen Spielfilmen 1945-2009: eine Analyse zur Formung kollektiver Erinnerung, Leipzig, Universitätsverlag, 2012. Moshe, Y.B., Y. Delhey, M. Gebauer and T. Jung, ‘Special Section: Geschichte als intermediales Narrativ: Pop Ikone Hitler’, andererseits. Yearbook of Transatlantic German Studies 7/8, 2018/19, pp. 216-303. Ory, Pascal, ‘Charlie/ Shoah’, in Didier Pasamonik and Joël Kotek (eds.), Shoah et bande dessinée. L’image au service de la mémoire, Paris, Éditions Denoël & Mémorial de la Shoah, 2017, pp. 112-115. Rosenfeld, Gavriel D., Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2015. Socha, Monika, Komisches Selbstverkennen. Zur Darstellung von Nationalsozialisten in Heinrich Manns Lidice, Günter Grass’ Die Blechtrommel und Edgar Hilsenraths Der Nazi & der Friseur, Hamburg, Verlag Dr., Kovač, 2014. Steinlein, Rüdiger, ‘Das Furchtbarste lächerlich? Komik und Lachen in Texten der deutschen Holocaust-Literatur‘, in M. Köppen (ed.), Kunst und Literatur nach Auschwitz, Berlin, Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1993, pp. 97-106. Tomaselli, K.G. and D. Scott (eds.), Cultural Icons, Walnut Creek, CA, Intervention Press, 2009.

228 Y vonne Delhey

About the author Yvonne Delhey is Assistant Professor of German Literature and Culture at the Department of Modern Languages at Radboud University Nijmegen. She obtained her PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 2002 with a thesis entitled Reform Socialism and Literature in the GDR. Her research focuses on two aspects within the broader context of German literature and culture. The first concerns autobiographical/autofictional writing and related types of texts in which the relation between the individual and society is explored. Delhey’s interest in satires on Hitler evolved out of this field. Although at first sight this might seem completely far-fetched, it has its origins in texts such as the exceptionally popular novel Er ist wieder da (2012) by Timur Vermes, where Hitler dominates the story as first person narrator. The second focus is on the conceptualization of space in literature: how space is perceived and how it is narrated. Both topics came together in the conference ‘Autofiction as Utopia’, which Delhey co-organized in spring 2018. In 2019 the proceedings were published by Brill under the same title.



Author Biographies

Paul van den Akker is Professor of Art History at the Open University (the Netherlands). His research focuses on two areas: the history of West European drawing in relation with art theory, and the history of the historiography of art and culture in Western Europe. In 2010, he published Looking for Lines: Theories on the Essence of Art and the Problem of Mannerism, on the eighteenth-century origins and the subsequent development of the modern idea of making a distinction between abstract design and figurative content, interpreted as a distinction between essential and non-essential qualities of a work of art. His publications on drawing and art theory concentrate on the history of changing drawing skills – their underlying cognitive as well sensorimotor qualities – in relation to changing artistic goals. Erica van Boven is emeritus Professor of Literature at the Open University (the Netherlands) and Associate Professor of Modern Dutch Literature at Groningen University. Her research focuses on Dutch literature and literary criticism of the interwar period, middlebrow culture, and gender studies. Until 2017, she was in charge of the research project Dutch Middlebrow Literature 1930-1940: Production, Distribution, Reception, funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Her recent publications (books and articles) concern bestsellers in the Netherlands (1900-2015), popular Dutch fiction of the twentieth century, gender debates in the interbellum, and the once famous Dutch author Arthur van Schendel (1874-1945). Maria Brock holds an MSc in Social & Cultural Psychology (LSE) and a PhD in Psychosocial Studies (Birkbeck). She is a lecturer and Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at Malmö University. Her research evaluates the psychosocial dynamics of transitional and post-transitional societies in the former Eastern Bloc, and the former GDR and Russia in particular, focusing on issues of representation, nationhood, memory, and gender. Previous and upcoming publications have reflected on the role of language and affect in reactions to the case of Pussy Riot, the status of memory objects and ‘museums of the everyday’ in the proliferation of post-socialist nostalgia in East Germany, the critical potential of irony and satire, and cinema and the Real. Pieter de Bruijn is Assistant Professor in Cultural History at the Open University (the Netherlands). His research focuses on heritage learning, historical representation in museums and sites, and the relationship between

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history and citizenship education. De Bruijn studied History at Erasmus University Rotterdam and obtained his PhD at the same university in 2014 on the study of English and Dutch heritage educational resources on the Transatlantic Slave Trade, World War II, and the Holocaust. He also carried out a small-scale study at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies on approaching the history of World War II from a citizenship education perspective. Recently, De Bruijn was involved in studies on the process of historical empathy in a museum context, and the use of cultural heritage in teaching sensitive histories. Furthermore, he is coordinator of a project that facilitates the exchange of knowledge and expertise between academia and heritage (education) professionals. Yvonne Delhey is Assistant Professor of German Literature and Culture at the Department of Modern Languages at Radboud University Nijmegen. She obtained her PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 2002 with a thesis entitled Reform Socialism and Literature in the GDR. Her research focuses on two aspects within the broader context of German literature and culture. The first concerns autobiographical/autofictional writing and related types of texts in which the relation between the individual and society is explored. Delhey’s interest in satires on Hitler evolved out of this field. Although at first sight this might seem completely far-fetched, it has its origins in texts such as the exceptionally popular novel Er ist wieder da (2012) by Timur Vermes, where Hitler dominates the story as first person narrator. The second focus is on the conceptualization of space in literature: how space is perceived and how it is narrated. Both topics came together in the conference ‘Autofiction as Utopia’, which Delhey co-organized in spring 2018. In 2019 the proceedings were published by Brill under the same title. Frank Inklaar is Assistant Professor in Cultural History at the Open University (the Netherlands). His research focuses on cultural transfer, Americanization, Disneyization and historical culture. Inklaar studied Modern History at the University of Amsterdam and obtained his PhD at the same university in 1997 on the subject of Dutch study visits to the US and their follow-up in the Netherlands as part of the Technical Assistance program of the Marshall Aid. Since then he has published mainly on the mechanism of Americanization in various post World War II contexts. The last few years his focus has shifted somewhat to studying the ways in which history is revived and remodelled in contemporary culture. Tourism, city branding and cultural events are the main fields of study within this context and Disneyization is one of the key concepts in this realm of research.

Author Biogr aphies

231

Meghen Jones is a historian of modern Japanese art, material culture, craft theory, and global ceramics history. She is Associate Professor of Art History at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Trained as a ceramist at Musashino Art University in Tokyo, she received her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Boston University. Her recent publications include Ceramics and Modernity in Japan, co-edited with Louise Allison Cort (Routledge, 2019), and the article ‘Hamada Shōji, Kitaōji Rosanjin and the Reception of Japanese Pottery in the Early Cold War United States’, in Design and Culture (2017). She is currently curating an exhibition and editing a catalog on the tea bowl in global perspective, for the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum. Kirsten E. Kumpf Baele is a lecturer of German in the Division of World Languages, Literatures & Cultures at the University of Iowa and holds a PhD in Germanic Literatures and Languages. Kumpf Baele strives to connect her research to the classroom. A recent publication of hers focused on the forced adoption scandal of the 1970s in Flanders, Belgium which can be found in McFarland’s publication: Contraception, Family Planning, and Reproductive Choice in Popular Fiction and Media Around the World. Her research on the representation of hair in politics, art and literature has been featured in LIT Verlag, and her work on Anant Kumar, a German author of Indian descent, can be found in Utah Foreign Language Review. Kumpf Baele was a participant in the 2015 summer Marbach Archive seminar. She also was selected for the 2019 Digital Bridges Institute funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation which allowed her to incorporate aspects of digital storytelling into her seminar ‘Anne Frank & Her Story’. Kumpf Baele’s latest projects explore the representation of violence, the cultural outsider, and the act of crocheting in Elfriede Jelinek’s play Steck, Stab und Stangl, and youth oppositional responses in the former GDR. Rui Lopes is a researcher at the Instituto de História Contemporânea (NOVA-FCSH), in Lisbon, and a member of the editorial board of Práticas da História: Journal on Theory, Historiography and Uses of the Past. He has a PhD in International History from the London School of Economics and Political Science and is the author of the book West Germany and the Portuguese Dictatorship, 1968-1974: Between Cold War and Colonialism (Palgrave Macmillan 2014), as well as of multiple articles related to cold war culture and Portugal’s international history. His current research projects focus on the transnational dimensions of European spy fiction and on the audiovisual depictions of the Portuguese dictatorship and empire.

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Jan Oosterholt is Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at the Cultural Studies department of the Open University (the Netherlands). He is specialized in nineteenth-century Dutch literature and published books and articles on literary poetics, imagology and adaptations. In 2012 he edited a special issue of Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde on the function of foreign literature in Flanders and the Netherlands. His current research focuses on literary transfers and Dutch theatrical texts in the nineteenth century. Ginette Vincendeau holds the chair of Film Studies at King’s College London. Her research focuses on French cinema, especially popular genres (thriller, film noir, comedy) and film celebrities. She has published widely on stardom in European and Hollywood film, with a special focus on the cinematic icon Brigitte Bardot. Ginette Vincendeau is a regular contributor to the international film magazine Sight & Sound, editor of The Encyclopedia of European Cinema (1995) and biographer of director Jean-Pierre Melville. Recent book publications entail Paris in the cinema: Beyond the Flâneur (2018) co-edited with Alastair Phillips that offers a new approach to the representation of Paris on screen. Marieke Winkler is Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at the Cultural Studies department of the Open University (the Netherlands). Her current research focusses on the interactions between science and literature, and the (literary) construction of images of the future and past. Currently she is the coordinator of the research program ‘Imagining the Future City: Envisioning Climate Change and Technological Cityscapes through Contemporary Speculative Fiction’. In 2018, with prof. Erica van Boven and prof. Paul van den Akker she organized the international conference ‘The Icon as Cultural Model’.



Index of Names

Ackermann, Niels 60 Aeschylus 35-36 Aiken, Stuart 127 Akunama Taka 168 Alexander, Jeffrey C. 11, 15, 18-19, 22, 65, 76, 78, 87, 105-106, 112-113, 127, 132, 174, 177, 186, 207, 226 Allégret, Marc 65 Andrews, David L. 14, 22 Angelopoulos, Theodoros 46 Aslan 69 Assmann, Jan 211, 226 Atze, Marcel 212, 226 Auden, W.H. 108 Autant-Lara, Claude 66

Boehm, Hartmut 213, 226 Bogart, Humphrey 114-115, 124 Boisrond, Michel 66 Bonaparte, Napoleon 33, 90, 92 Brennan, Frederik Hazlitt 121, 127 Briggeman, Jill 33, 41 Brink, Cornelia 16, 22, 105 Brown, D.B. 108-109 Bruni, Leonardo 95, 97, 106, 109 Bullen, J.B. 102-103, 106 Burckhardt, Jacob 83, 98-99, 101, 104-106 Burda, Hubert 226 Butterfield, R. 215, 227 Byron, Lord 16, 20, 27-43, 83, 100-102, 106 Byvanck, W.G.C. 28, 36, 38, 42

Bacqué, R. 221, 226 Bakhuizen van den Brink, R.C. 40 Bal, Mieke 13 Barber, Benjamin 139-140, 146 Bardot, Brigitte 16, 21, 63-79, 232 Barnouw, David 186 Baron, Hans 97-98 Barrett, Joe 119 Barringer, T. 87, 89, 106 Barthes, Roland 20, 212, 226 Bartmanski, Dominik 11, 18-19, 22, 49-50, 60, 105-106, 112-113, 120, 127, 132, 146, 174, 186, 207 Baudrillard, Jean 212-213, 226 Bayles, William D. 121, 127 Beauvoir, Simone de 66, 72-74, 78 Beck, Ulrich 210 Becker, Karin 195 Becker, Wolfgang 46-47, 60 Bellico, Matthew 172, 186 Belorusets, Yevgenia 58, 60 Benn, James A. 161, 168 Bentham, Jeremy 52 Berardi, Franco (Bifo) 55, 60 Berkeley, George 171, 186 Bernoud, Alphonse 86-87, 107 Bernstein, Anya 49, 51-53 Bernstein, Matthew 128 Bertolini, Michele 173, 186 Beyle, Marie-Henri (Stendhal) 99 Bijl, Paul 17, 22 Bilderdijk, Willem 36, 40 Binder, Werner 13, 16, 22, 105-106 Bink, Martijn 187 Black, Gregory D. 123, 127 Blake, William 203 Bloch, Ernst 224 Blumenberg, Hans 35, 41 Boehm, Gottfried 15, 18, 22, 172, 226

Cadogan, J.K. 85, 107 Calder, Angus 193, 205 Cardwell, Richard A. 33, 42 Carr, James 215-216, 227 Cashmore, Ellis 14, 23 Castelnuovo, E. 107, 109-110 Chabon, Michael 221-222, 227 Charrier, Jacques 68, 70, 75 Che Guevara, Ernesto 41, 48, 55 Chiarini, M. 89, 107-110 Churchill, Winston 121, 193 Clarkson, Thomas 198 Clough, Cecile H. 101-102, 107 Clouzot, Henri-George 66 Cocteau, Jean 74, 78 Cohen, Rick 186 Cohen-Janca, Irene 171, 179-180, 183-184, 186 Cole, Thomas 87-90, 106 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 33 Connelly, Mark 192-194, 205 Conroy, Pat 180, 186 Corot, Jean-Baptiste Camille 87, 89, 109-110 Cort, Louise Allison 151, 164, 168-169, 231 Cowans, Jon 124, 127 Crawford, Keith 194, 205 Cromwell, John 113 Cubberley, T. 100, 107 Cubitt, Geoffrey 198-199, 201, 203, 205, 207 Da Costa, Isaäc 27-28, 31-32, 35-38, 40-42 Dante 99 Darquier de Pellepoix, Louis 221 De Koomen, A. 97, 107 De Saussure, Ferdinand 17 de’Barbari, Jacopo 95, 97 de’Medici, Lorenzo 101-102, 107, 109 D’haen, Theo 33, 42 Döblin, Alfred 224, 227

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Doherty, Thomas 123, 127 Dongen, Kees van 68 d’Ormale, Bernard 76 Dörner, Andreas 213, 227 Dors, Diana 73 Drop, W. 42 Edwards, Brain T. 122, 124, 127 Eiichi, Oda 153, 156, 158, 163, 166, 169 Eisenberg Sasso, Sandy 171, 179-183 Ekberg, Anita 69 Eldridge, David 123, 127 Eliot, George 102-104, 107-108 Equiano, Olaudah 201, 203 Erk, D. 227 Esterel, Jacques 75 Evans, Robert 126, 206 Falk, Lee 217 Fanelli, G. 87, 107 Fellini, Frederico 69 Ferdinando III (duke) 90 Fimrite, Peter 172, 186 Fletcher, S. 101, 107 Ford, Henry 215-216, 227 Fouseki, Kalliopi 198, 205, 207 Francis, Jacqueline 201, 206 Franco, Francisco (general) 221 Frank, Anne 16, 171-188, 211-212, 231 Frey, Sami 70, 73 Frijhoff, Willem 13-17, 21, 23, 31, 42, 131-132, 144, 146, 191, 206 Fukuyama, Francis 59 Fumio, Kira 153, 168 Fussmann, K. 146 Gabin, Jean 73 Gauffier, Louis 83, 90-91, 93, 108-109 Genosko, Gary 60 Geraghty, Christine 65 Ghirlandaio, Domenico 84-85, 107 Giesen, Bernhard 11, 18-19, 22, 105-106, 127, 174, 186, 207, 226 Gobert, Sébastien 60 Godard, Luc 65, 70 Goebbels, Joseph 217, 225 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 35-36, 40, 99, 108 Gonzales, Bryan 22 Gorbachev 53 Göring, Hermann 215, 217, 225 Göring, Hermine 215 Gottesfeld, Jeff 171, 179-180, 184-185, 187 Gouze-Rénal, Christine 70 Grant, B. 60 Gréco, Juliette 71 Greenstreet, Sydney 114-115, 124 Greer, Germaine 28, 42 Greser, Achim 215

Grever, Maria 191, 206 Grotius, Hugo (Hugo de Groot) 18-19, 189-190, 206-207 Guth, Christine 157, 159, 163, 168 Guyard, M. 42 Haga Kōshirō 153, 168 Hakewill, James 99-102, 107-109 Hakewill-Brown, Maria Catherine 99 Hall, Catherine 198, 206 Hall, Stuart 23 Harbinger, Tim 89 Hariman, Robert 11-13, 16, 23, 55-56, 60, 176, 187, 191, 195, 206 Harman, Danna 175, 187 Hartmond, Myroslava 57, 60 Haskell, F. 99, 108 Hayashiya, Seizō 166, 168 Heidemann, Gerd 215 Hender, Susan J. 122, 128 Herrmann, L. 100, 107 Hidetsugu Toyotomi 163 Hideyoshi Toyotomi 163 Hietala, Mariatta 128 Hinds, Ealeatha 176 Hisato, Ichimata 158 Hissen, Alexandra 212, 223, 227 Hitchcock, Alfred 113, 122 Hitler 16, 20, 57, 209-228, 230 Hō Tan (Dan Peng) 163, 168 Hoffmeister, Gerhart 42 Holm, Carl 177, 187 Holt, Douglas 54, 60, 132, 146 Homer 95 Honings, Rick 30, 42 Hook, Derek 54, 60 Hoop jr., Adriaan van der 38, 40-42 Hopkins, Jeff 118, 127 Horrocks, Roger 21, 23 Horvat, Srecko 47, 57, 61 Hosokawa, Kumamoto 158, 165 Hosokawa, Morihiro 165 Hosokawa, Moritatsu 158, 165 Houdini, Harry 222 Huisman, Marijke 201, 206 Huprelle, Anne-Cécile 76, 78 il Magnifico, Lorenzo 98 Inui Yoshiaki 154 Izadi, Elahe 187 Jackson, Steven J. 14, 22 Jaeckin, Just 66 Jeanada, Philippe 73, 78 Jiro, Arimitsu 158 Johannes, G.J. 42 Jones, Christine Keynon 42 Jones, Siân 190, 206 Jong, Ad de 191, 206

235

Index of Names

Jordaan, Leendert Jurriaan (Leo) 217-218 Jowitt, Ken 57, 60 Jürgens, Curt 72 Kahn, Richard 179, 187 Kammen, M. 130, 147 Kaneko Kenji 153, 168 Kashin, Oleg 53, 61 Kawahara Masahiko 159, 168 Kemp, Martin 11, 14, 16-17, 23, 55, 61, 131-132, 147 Kempis, Thomas a 133, 136, 144 Kerner, Christine 46 Kira Fumio 153, 168 Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 177, 179 Kizaemon, Takeda 164 Kjeldsen, Jens E. 23, 206 Klarer, Mario 203, 206 Kleppe, Martijn 191, 206 Koetsu, Honami 161, 166 Kohuth, Jane 171, 179-180, 184, 187 Kolb, Anton 95 Kono, Toshiyuki 156 Kool, J.H. 38, 42 Koppes, Clayton R. 123, 127 Korte, Barbara 210, 227 Koster, Henri 68 Kowaleski Wallace, Beth 206 Koyama Fujio 157, 168 Kumakura Isao 168 Kumar, Archana 215-216, 227 Kuroda Ryōji 154, 165, 168 Kuryel, Aylin 47, 59, 61 Ladd, Alan 115, 124 Lamartine, Aphonse de 38-42 Lambeck, Petra 177, 187 Latour, Bruno 20, 23 Lazarus, Jason 185, 187 Lebo, Harlan 114, 127 Lelièvre, Marie-Dominique 70, 78 Lenin 16, 19, 21, 45-61 Leopold, Ronald 177 Leopoldo, Pietro 90, 94 Leuker, Maria-Theresia 40, 42 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 173-174, 187, 212 Lister, Martin 13, 23 Loren, Sophia 75 Lorre, Peter 114-115, 124 Lowenthal, D. 130, 147 Lucaites, John 11-13, 16, 23, 55-56, 60, 176, 187, 191, 195, 206 Luce, Henry 123, 127 Maar, Christa 226 Mackenzie, Warren 167 Mandela, Nelson 48, 53-54 Marabottini, A. 89-90, 107-110 Marcelle, Lou 118

Marie-Antoinette 70 Maslin, Janet 47, 61 Mathijsen, Marita 33, 42 Matthiesen, Patrick 92-94, 108 Mattick, Meike 224-227 Mazza, Barbara 87, 107 McCarthey, Joseph (senator) 123 McCarty, Peter 184 McLaughlin, Robert L. 114, 128 McMillan, P. 168 Merrill, Sylvia 126 Mesoudi, Alex 105-106, 108 Michelangelo 99 Michelet, Jules 99, 101 Milton 27 Miot de Mélito, Françios A. (count) 91-94, 98, 108 Mitchell, W.J.T. 13, 15-16, 23, 105, 108, 172 Mitsui (family) 152, 163, 165, 168 Moers, Walter 214-215 Mole, Tom 30-33, 42 Monroe, Marilyn 73 Moorby, Nicola 990-100, 108-109 Mother Theresa 21 Mowry, Robert 162, 168 Müller, William James 87, 109 Murayama Takeshi 165, 168 Nabokov, Vladimir 72 Nellen, Henk 190, 206 Nietzsche, Friedrich 11, 41 Nikiforov, Yevgen 56, 61 Noack, Rick 187 Noakes, Nicole 192-193, 197, 206 Nuti, L. 97, 109 Oakes, Julie 157, 166 Oda, Eiichi 153, 156, 169 Oka Yoshiko 159, 169 Oketani Yasushi 161-162 Oliveira Salazar, Antonio de 125-126 Ory, Pascal 221, 227 Palance, Jack 73 Paletschek, Sylvia 210, 227 Pantazzi, M. 109-110 Parker, Mike 34, 41, 43 Parry, Sally E. 114, 128 Patch, Thomas 90 Paton, Diana 199, 206-207 Payne, Steven 172, 187 Penrose, Thomas 90-91, 102, 108 Petit, Pascale 68 Philpot, John Brampton 86-87, 107, 109 Pierce, C.S. 17-18, 23 Piercian 17, 130 Pitelka, Morgan 163, 169 Pittis, Donald 122, 128 Pizzi, Katia 122, 128

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THE CONSTRUC TION AND DYNAMICS OF CULTURAL ICONS

Poettinger, M. 87, 109 Poggi, Giuseppe 83, 87, 103 Pomarède, V. 87, 109-110 Popma, T. 33, 43 Poppi, C. 90, 109 Potgieter 40 Powell, C. 99, 109 Prokosch, Frederic 121, 128 Purgar, Krešimir 172-173, 187 Purtle, Jennifer 157, 169 Putin, Vladimir 51, 60 Quarello, Maurizio A.C. 183 Ray, Robert 124, 128 Reagan, Ronald 124 Reus-Deelder, Grance 177 Ribbens, Kees 130, 147, 211 Rigney, Ann 50, 61 Rikyū, Sen no 164 Rogers, Everett 105 Roggi, P. 87, 109 Rojek, Chris 67, 78 Roscoe, William 83, 101-103, 105, 107, 109 Rose, Gillian 50, 61 Rose, Sonya O. 192, 207 Rosenfeld, Gavriel D. 212, 222-223, 227 Rosselli, Francesco 97-98, 109-110 Rozier, Jacques 68, 70 Russell, Nicole 180, 188 Ryōichi, Fuijoka 153 Sagan, Françoise 71-72 Saguaro, Shelly 179, 188 Sakai family 163 Salerno, Luigi 89-90, 109 Samuel, R. 130, 147 Sayles, Elizabeth 184 Scheepers, Alfred 95, 97, 106, 109 Schinkel, Robert 173, 187 Schravesande, Freek 190, 207 Schröder, Gerhard 213 Schults, U. 34 Scott, David 13, 15, 17-18, 23, 30-31, 41, 43, 53, 61, 107, 131, 147, 154, 164, 167 Seiichirō, Takahashi 158-159 Shandler, Jeffrey 173-174, 187 Shaw, Tony 123, 128 Shiro, Tsujimura 161, 165 Shively, JoEllen 126, 128 Shohat, Ella 113, 124, 128 Siegal, Nina 176-177, 183, 188 Sklair, Leslie 131, 147 Smith, G. 87, 109 Smith, Lauranjane 207 Smith, Malcolm 193, 207 Smith, Philip 191, 207 Sōan, Takahashi 158 Socha, Monica 223-224, 227

Sōetso, Yanagi 43 Solaroli, Marco 61, 154-155, 164, 169, 191, 207 Soldner, Paul 167 Solly, N.N. 87, 89, 109 Sōshin, Shino 165 Spaans, Joke 190, 207 St. John the Baptist 84 Stalin 49, 57-58 Stam, Robert 113, 128 Stedman, John 202-203, 206 Steele, Valerie 75, 78 Stendhal 83, 99, 101-102, 107, 109 Stewart, James 68 Stier, Oren Baruch 173, 176, 182-185, 188 Studlar, Gaylyn 128 Sturken, Marita 61 Surak, Kristin 153, 169 Tamassia, M. 87, 109 Tan, Hō (Dan Peng) 162-163, 169, 187 Tartuferi, A. 97, 110 Teerlink, Abraham 87, 89 Teicher, Jordan G. 56, 61 Ter Borch family 136 Thoburn, Nicholas 60 Thompson, Emma 178 Thomsen, Hans Bjarne 157, 169 Thorslev Jr., Peter L. 33, 43 Tindemans, Leo 138-139 Tinterow, G. 109-110 Tomaselli, Keyan G. 13, 15, 17-18, 23, 30-31, 41, 43, 53-54, 61, 131, 147, 154, 164, 167, 211-212, 227 Toshiyuki, Kono 156, 168 Toyozo, Arakawa 166 Trintignant, Jean-Louis 66, 72 Tucker, Robert C. 49, 61 Turner, William 29, 99-100, 102, 108-109 Ulyanov, Vladimir Ilich (Lenin) 19, 49 Vadim, Roger 65-69, 72 Varda, Agnès 75 Verneuil, Henri 68 Virgin Mary 30 Vogman, Elena 58 Walker, Shaun 57, 61 Warhol, Andy 68, 71 Warner Brothers 111 Waterton, Emma 198-199, 207 Watt, Ian 34-35, 43 Weibel, Peter 23 Weiner, Susan 71, 78 Welch, E. 105, 110 Westall, Richard 28-30 Westra, Hans 175 Wilberforce, William 198-199, 201, 203 Willem Alexander (king) 177

237

Index of Names

Winter, Jay 196, 207 Wolinski, George 221 Wood, Marcus 201, 207 Woodard, William P. 157, 169 Wordsworth 33 Xiang, Cai 162

Yabe Yoshiaki 166, 169 Yashiro Yukio 158 Yurchak, Alexey 45, 49-50, 52-53, 55, 60-61 Zanella A. 91, 110 Zauzmer, Julie 174, 188 Žižek, Slavoj 47, 57, 61 Zonn, Leo E. 127