The Long Aftermath: Cultural Legacies of Europe at War, 1936-2016 9781782381549

Citation preview

The Long Aftermath

Studies in Contemporary European History Editors: Konrad Jarausch, Lurcy Professor of European Civilization, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a Director of the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Studien, Potsdam, Germany Henry Rousso, Senior Research Fellow at the Institut d’histoire du temps présent (Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Paris) For a full volume listing, please see back matter

The Long Aftermath Cultural Legacies of Europe at War, 1936–2016

( Edited by

Manuel Bragança and Peter Tame

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2016 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2016, 2018 Manuel Bragança and Peter Tame First paperback edition published in 2018 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The long aftermath : cultural legacies of Europe at war, 1936-2016 / edited by Manuel Bragança and Peter Tame. pages cm. -- (Studies in contemporary European history ; volume 17) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-78238-153-2 (hardback: alkaline paper) -- ISBN 978-1-78533820-5 (paperback : alkaline paper) -- ISBN 978-1-78238-154-9 (ebook) 1. World War, 1939-1945--Social aspects--Europe. 2. World War, 1939-1945--Influence. 3. Spain--History--Civil War, 1936-1939--Social aspects. 4. Spain--History--Civil War, 1936-1939--Influence. 5. Arts and society-Europe. 6. Arts and society--Spain. 7. Europe--Intellectual life. 8. Spain-Intellectual life. 9. War and society--Europe. 10. War and society--Spain. I. Bragança, Manuel, 1973- II. Tame, Peter D., 1945D744.7.E8L66 2015 940.53’4--dc23 2015013055 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78238-153-2, hardback ISBN 978-1-78533-820-5, paperback ISBN 978-1-78238-154-9, ebook

Contents

(

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements

x

Foreword. Between World Wars: Remembering War in Europe before 1945 Richard Overy

xi

Introduction: The Long Aftermath of the Long Second World War Manuel Bragança and Peter Tame

1

Part I: Spain Chapter 1 Violence and the History and Memory of the Spanish Civil War: Beyond the Crisis of Inherited Narrative Frameworks Pablo Sánchez León Chapter 2 Poetry and Silence in Post-Civil-War Spain: Carmen Conde, Lucía Sánchez Saornil and Pilar de Valderrama Jean Andrews Chapter 3 On Civil-War Memory in Spanish Women’s Narratives: The Example of Cristina Fernández Cubas’ Cosas que ya no existen Alison Ribeiro de Menezes

23

40

60

vi | Contents

Part II: The United Kingdom Chapter 4 Narrating Britain’s War: A ‘Four Nations and More’ Approach to the People’s War Daniel Travers and Paul Ward Chapter 5 ‘Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans’: The Representation of Germans in British Second World War Films Robert Murphy Chapter 6 Memory and Nation in British Narratives of the Second World War after 1945 Mark Rawlinson

77

96

114

Part III: France Chapter 7 A Capital Problem: The Town of Vichy, the Second World War and the Politics of Identity Kirrily Freeman Chapter 8 Tracking the Past in the Places and Spaces of Patrick Modiano’s Early Fiction Peter Tame Chapter 9 Vercors and the Second World War Cristina Solé Castells

131

152

166

Part IV: Germany Chapter 10 Reconstructing D-Day Memory: How Contemporary Politics Made Germans Victims of the War Harold J. Goldberg

181

Contents | vii

Chapter 11 Memories of World War II in German Film after 1945 Christiane Schönfeld Chapter 12 Ilse Aichinger’s Novel The Greater Hope: Poetic Narrative to Deal with Trauma Marko Pajević

200

219

Part V: Italy Chapter 13 Victimhood Asserted: Italian Memories of the Second World War 237 Richard J.B. Bosworth Chapter 14 Re-picturing the Myth: American Characters in Post-war Popular Italian Cinema Daniela Treveri Gennari Chapter 15 Italian Resistance Writing in the Years of the ‘Second Republic’ Philip Cooke

252

269

Part VI: Poland Chapter 16 The Second World War in Present-Day Polish Memory and Politics Andrzej Paczkowski Chapter 17 Wounded Memory: Rhetorical Strategies Used in Public Discourse on the Katyń Massacre Urszula Jarecka Chapter 18 The Second World War in Recent Polish Counterfactual and Alternative (Hi)stories Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż

287

302

316

viii | Contents

Part VII: USSR/Russia Chapter 19 History Politics and the Changing Meaning of Victory Day in Contemporary Russia Markku Kangaspuro Chapter 20 War and Patriotism: Russian War Films and the Lessons for Today David Gillespie Chapter 21 Russian Fiction at War Greg Carleton

333

344

358

Afterword: Memories of War: From the Sacred to the Secular Jay Winter

373

Index

379

Illustrations

(

Figure 7.1 La Ville d’eau éternelle, Vichy spa publicity poster, 1946 Figure 7.2 Eau minérale naturelle, a bottle of Vichy mineral water, 1954 Figure 7.3 Vichy-État, Vichy spa publicity poster, 1950 Figure 7.4 ‘Soyez élégants !’ [Be elegant!], Vichy spa publicity poster from the early 1950s

133 137 138 141

Reproduced with the kind permission of Dr Claude Malhuret, Mayor of Vichy, France.

Acknowledgements

(

The editors would like to thank the members of the War and Memory Research Group based at Queen’s University Belfast and colleagues at the University of Manchester and Nottingham Trent University for their advice and comments on many chapters. They would also like to express their thanks to the editorial team at Berghahn, especially Chris Chappell and Charlotte Mosedale, for their patience and help with the manuscript.

Foreword

Between World Wars Remembering War in Europe before 1945

( Richard Overy

In December 2011, the recently founded European Network Remembrance and Solidarity held a conference in Budapest on the theme of ‘The Loneliness of Victims’. It was an attempt to get historians together from a number of (chiefly) Eastern European countries to discuss the issues raised by counting the number of the dead in the Second World War and to try to reach some kind of consensus on how the manifold forms of victimhood should be treated. Solidarity was little in evidence. There were profound disagreements about how the term ‘victim’ should be used or about the establishment of any kind of hierarchy of victimhood. Some delegates were inclined to accept the idea that the dead from the war were the collective victims of war itself, whatever their role; others refused to accept that perpetrators, widely defined, deserved to be counted in the same breath as casualties of war. Towards the end of the final day, a German delegate suggested that if all the dead were indeed victims of a brutal conflict, why was it not possible to count an SS officer shot in Russia and a murdered Russian Jew as moral equivalents? The conference was in the end a useful barometer to measure how far reconciliation between wartime enemies, both civil and military, still has to go. Nothing quite like this happened after the First World War when it came to counting casualties and victims (though there was argument about how many Germans had died as a result of the Allied blockade). Most of those who died were soldiers or sailors whose sacrifice was recorded in numerous war memorials across Europe. Civil conflicts certainly occurred – in Ireland or in Turkey – but the memory of the war was not scarred as it was after 1945 by the concept of collaboration or the black-and-white distinction made between perpetrators and victims when it came to remembering

xii | Richard Overy

the suffering of civilian populations. The First World War (or rather the Great War, as it was known before 1939 in most European languages) nevertheless had profound consequences that went well beyond the simple counting of the dead. The ‘long shadow’ of the war, as David Reynolds has recently characterised it (2013), lay across post-1918 Europe, though the degree of shade varied with national circumstances and the nature of the national myths associated with the conflict. The sociologist Frank Furedi has suggested in his account of the legacy of 1914 that the long shadow is still with us in the form of a sustained cultural malaise in which the ambivalent Western memory of the war has continually undercut the sense of certainty and self-belief that existed prior to 1914, and encouraged a frustrating search for shared meaning and common identity, which the nature of the Great War rendered insecure and fractured (2014). The ambiguity underlying the memory of what the Great War represented followed two distinct paths. One led to rejection of war through memories of a shared, and often futile, suffering inflicted on a lost generation. European pacifism and anti-war sentiment were a way of remembering in order to forget and to move on to construct a world in which peace could somehow be made more certain. The other was quite different. Memory of the war was shaped by the opposite idea, that this was unfinished business whose settlement might well result in further wars. This perspective on the memory of the conflict flourished on ressentiment, a dangerous resentment at the outcomes of war in which memory focused on issues of national humiliation or betrayal. The difference can perhaps be captured in two German examples: Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) was an elegiac recollection of a shared suffering experienced by a lost generation, widely interpreted as an indictment of war; on the other hand, the Langemarck memorial to the dead German studentsoldiers of 1914 was exploited by Hitler’s National Socialists as a symbol of national exaltation and a call to further sacrifices for the fatherland. Hitler visited the site in Belgium after victory in the West in the summer of 1940, linking the new war of conquest to the lost war of 1914–1918. The rejection of war after 1918 did not mean that it was not to be remembered, but it did involve profoundly new ways of thinking about issues of national competition and about the responsibility of the individual citizen to the state. The discourses of the pacifist and anti-war movement (they were never entirely the same, since those who were anti-war did not rule it out as a way of settling disputes) relied on a version of war memory that saw the conflict as the fruit of historical forces – imperial competition, alliance diplomacy, the greed of the armaments industry – rather than a conflict brought about by human volition. Europeans had been made to suffer as a result and the answer to avoiding war in the future was to encourage

Foreword | xiii

greater international collaboration of a clearly transparent nature, to limit armaments and their manufacture and to replace imperial competition with a greater commitment to the idea of a common European culture and shared values. These ambitions were personified in the work of the French foreign minister in the late 1920s, Aristide Briand, who not only got the states of Europe to endorse the Kellogg–Briand Pact of Paris in 1928 outlawing war as an instrument of national policy, but also contributed to the idea of a European community of nations. Rather than dwell on memory of the war, Briand used the disruptive experience of war to move on to a more peaceful and co-operative continent. The high point of European pacifism and anti-war feeling came in the first five years of the 1930s, when the severe economic recession made collaboration for peace more urgent because it opened up the spectre of national competition and the danger of rearmament. When in 1932 at the behest of the League of Nations Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, Albert Einstein asked the psychologist Sigmund Freud to write a response to his question ‘Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?’, both men knew very well that they were haunted still by the memory of the conflict as a manifestation of the capacity for civilised man to tear away the thin shroud that separated him from the primitive reality of war. Freud’s pamphlet Why War? summed up the dilemma facing those who thought the memory of war should unfailingly promote the desire never to repeat it. Freud acknowledged that all thinking people ought to be constitutionally pacifist, but concluded that the primitive urge to violence was as characteristic of humans as it was of all animals (Einstein and Freud 1933: 2–3). The second path that memory of the war took was far more dangerous for the future of European peace. War as unfinished business separates the reaction to the Great War from the reaction to the end of war in 1945. There was, indeed, much unfinished business in 1945, but this was seldom seen as the possibility for more wars in the countries that had been defeated, while the encroaching Cold War could be interpreted as a clearly new conflict, connected to but not directly a product of the war that ended in 1945. The long, messy end to the war in 1918 – the war beyond the war – provoked national resentments and political confrontations that festered away in the Europe of the 1920s, to explode with violent force in the 1930s. At the heart of the resentments lay the Versailles Settlement, which had indeed settled very little. For many Germans, and not just those on the radical nationalist right (including Adolf Hitler, the personification of the politics of resentment), the memory of the Great War focused on the unbearable accusation of ‘War Guilt’. The costs of that accusation were severe in terms of territorial and economic losses and the emasculation

xiv | Richard Overy

of German armed forces, but the memory that seems to have rankled most was the accusation of international crime implicit in the war guilt clause, which seemed to make Germany responsible for all the sufferings provoked by the war. Memory of the war was permanently tarnished, not only because it was a lost war, but because Germany was viewed as an international pariah for starting it. Victory would have created quite different circumstances, so that resentment was at first turned inwards to find someone to blame for German defeat. The ‘stab-in-the-back’ myth which asserted that Jews and Socialists had undermined the war effort for selfish ends became an enduring memory associated with defeat and was to have terrible consequences for European Jews and European Socialists when German resentment was turned into European conquest. Germany was not the only European nation to sustain dangerous memories of betrayal and injustice. The Soviet Union, created out of the Russian Civil War (1918–1920), harboured deep resentments toward the Tsarist state’s former Allies, Britain and France, and the counter-revolutionary impulses that led to Allied intervention in the Civil War and the isolation of the Soviet Union in the 1920s. When the West tried to use Russia as a counter-weight to the rise of European radical nationalism in Germany and Italy, Stalin and the Soviet leadership became permanently suspicious of Western motives. There was no memory of victory in 1918 to share, unlike the shared victory of 1945, but a guiding belief in the Leninist argument that the West waged wars to sustain capitalist imperialism. Italian resentment at the war and its outcome was based on the belief that Italian sacrifices had been made under false premises: the promise of post-war territory in what became Yugoslavia was not redeemed, while Italy had been treated as a lesser nation at the peace conference by the big three, Britain, France and the United States. Mussolini, like Hitler, could trade on his experience as a veteran of the war while promising Italians that the unfinished business begun during the conflict would not be forgotten. The violence directed first against Ethiopia, then in civil-war Spain, and finally in the declaration of war on the West in June 1940, was a direct product of a memory culture that saw Italy’s struggle born in the Great War and finally consummated twenty-five years later by one of those who had fought in it. Both pacifists and radical nationalists, for different reasons, shared the belief that memory of the war did not rule out the possibility that it would be repeated. This was certainly a fear in the early years after 1945 when there was widespread talk of a Third World War, but memory of the Second World War, unlike that after the First, did not assume that this was so much unfinished business. In Germany, Italy and the other former Axis states, there was never any question that there would be a revival

Foreword | xv

of radical nationalism that would avenge the consequences of the last war through further conflict. There is a profound difference between the memory cultures developed after the first conflict and those of the second. After 1918, the memory of war encouraged European populations and governments to look outwards, either towards greater international institutional collaboration or the international peace movement or towards a new international order founded on war and expansion. In the German case, memory of defeat also encouraged the projection of violence against ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ all across Europe. But following 1945, memory of war was focused much more on issues internal to particular nations, a consequence of the tensions and hostilities generated by collaboration, perpetration (of atrocities) and resistance, a projection inwards rather than outwards. The essays collected here illustrate that difference very clearly. The memory wars of the post-1945 era have seen infra-national confrontations between memories of collaboration and memories of resistance, between different versions of civil courage and civil responsibility and between Left and Right. The rejection of war as such was more muted, since the victors believed that the Second World War was a necessary war to destroy Fascism and militarism. Memory of the war resulted in a much more contested and ambiguous domestic legacy after 1945, as the complex attitudes of German society to collective guilt, selective victimhood and bystander responsibility make evident. The explanation lies in the nature of total war in which whole societies became, whether they liked it or not, part of a broad international civil war. The ‘long shadow’ that has continued to hover over Europe since 1945 takes its shape from the civilianisation of warfare between 1939 and 1945 and the social, political and ethnic confrontations that it produced.

References Baird, J.W. 1992. To Die for Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bucur, M. 2009. Heroes and Victims: Remembering War in Twentieth-Century Romania. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Caedel, M. 1980. Pacifism in Britain 1914–1945: The Defining of a Faith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Einstein, A. and S. Freud. 1933. Why War? London: League of Nations. Eksteins, M. 1989. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. New York: Doubleday. Furedi, F. 2014. First World War: Still No End in Sight. London: Bloomsbury.

xvi | Richard Overy

Gregory, A. 2008. The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knox, M. 1983. Mussolini Unleashed: 1939–1941. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lowe, K. 2012. Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II. London: Penguin Viking. Niven, B. (ed.). 2006. Germans as Victims. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Overy, R. 2009. The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilization between the Wars. London: Allen Lane. Remarque, E. M. 1929. All Quiet on the Western Front. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. Reynolds, D. 2013. The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century. London: Simon & Schuster. Shepard, B. 2010. The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War. London: The Bodley Head. Todman, D. 2005. The Great War: Myth and Memory. London: Hambledon. Winter, J. 1995. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Richard Overy is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He has published more than twenty-five books on the European dictatorships and the Second World War. His book The Dictators won the Wolfson Prize for history in 2004. His latest books include The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilization between the Wars (2009) and The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 (2013). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the European Academy for Sciences and Arts.

Introduction

The Long Aftermath of the Long Second World War

( Manuel Bragança and Peter Tame

This edited volume investigates the cultural legacies of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War in Europe from 1936 to the present. It brings together scholars from across the arts, humanities and social sciences. They include historians, political scientists and sociologists, but given our emphasis on culture it is hardly surprising that most ­contributions come from scholars in literature, film and cultural studies. The Second World War represents a major watershed in the history of humanity. Whilst it is impossible to give an exact figure, scholars tend to agree that it caused between fifty and seventy million deaths between 1939 and 1945.1 Europe was the continent most affected by this war, with around forty million people killed, soldiers and civilians, the latter being far greater in proportion than in the First World War. Technical and industrial progress, turned to military uses, made mass destruction possible on an unprecedented scale. Not only was the Second World War responsible for far more casualties and material damage than the First, it shattered the humanistic values that were at the very basis of Western thought. Paradoxically, whilst the subsequent Cold War divided Europe into two blocs, it also contributed to bringing back together Western Europeans, to move them closer in a new and ever-evolving supranational European political entity that, to this day, has managed to avoid direct conflict between its member-states. More recently, the end of the Cold War has seen Western and Eastern Europe moving closer. This, however, does not mean that the sense of belonging to a nation has decreased; on the contrary, nation-states remain the most ‘natural’ political entity for most Europeans.

Notes for this chapter begin on page 16.

2 | Manuel Bragança and Peter Tame

The Europe of the Ancien Régime, endowed with large states that were often multinational, collapsed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries under the weight of nationalist feelings that raised the nation-state to the status of a political ideal, the ‘national community’ being often depicted as a natural extension of the family, as the etymology of the word nation (from the Latin nascere, to be born) suggests. Subsequently, the number of recognised nation-states has grown considerably in the course of the previous century, particularly in Europe, after the dismemberments of the AustroHungarian, Turkish and, more recently, Soviet empires. The nation-state is still today the dominant political regime in Europe and in the world, one that seems to us the most natural and the most consonant with democratic ideals (Breen and O’Neill 2010). Within many states, however, minorities consider themselves to be nations, even though they do not (or not yet) have their own independent state. Many of them – the Basques, the Catalans, the Flemish, the Scottish, not to mention many other complex cases such as Cyprus and Northern Ireland – are challenging situations established centuries ago. This is not merely a symbolic question for it is independent states, as recognised and politically governed entities, rather than nations – those large groupings of people who share a common history and sense of belonging – that have an international voice. The United Nations, created in the aftermath of the Second World War with the aim of preventing another world conflict, is based on this premise. This situation, however, raises a paradox in the context of the European Union, namely that the construction of a supranational or supra-state entity and the sense of belonging to a wider community do not defuse tension within member-states. This paradox can be explained to a certain extent by the fact that the nation is a powerful ‘imagined community’ – to use Benedict Anderson’s terminology (1991) – that is emotionally charged and justified by a cherished and binding past, discovered, rediscovered, interpreted and, in Europe, often partly invented in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries.2

The European Union: An Imagined Community in the Making? Like the nation-states, the European Union is both an anchored and a contested entity. Being an ever-evolving project, the European Union is to some extent a sort of vacuum in which anyone can project his or her ideas and ideals but also fears. It may sometimes be perceived as a protective shield against globalisation, a phenomenon that outstrips the powers of the nation-states and, consequently, threatens national identities. For

Introduction | 3

others, on the contrary, the European Union contributes to the globalisation process, for example in terms of its rather uninspiring economic and fiscal policies, and perhaps also because of its fast-track enlargement that seems to diminish a sense of belonging. Many ‘old’ Europeans – those belonging to states that have been members of the European Union for decades – probably find that they have little in common with the ‘new’ or ‘aspiring’ Europeans.3 And when supranational or supra-state institutions are seen as being imposed on people, when the nation is perceived as being in danger and weakened, nationalist feelings are intensified. Obviously, the current economic downturn does nothing to ease these tensions, and the continent-wide crisis is giving rise to xenophobic feelings across Europe. Extreme right-wing parties in Austria, Norway, Finland, Greece, France, Switzerland and other countries have all been on the rise in the last few decades, gaining more than 20 per cent of the total number of votes in local or national elections on certain occasions (Walker and Taylor 2011; Mammone, Godin and Jenkins 2012). Yet, most European countries have a rich history and a long-term heritage in common. It is interesting to note that Anthony D. Smith writes of a ‘family of cultures’ when discussing the existence of a European culture, indulging in a comparison of Europe with the family: These patterns of European culture – the heritage of Roman law, Judeo-Christian ethics, Renaissance humanism and individualism, Enlightenment rationalism and science, artistic classicism and romanticism, and, above all, traditions of civil rights and democracy, which have emerged at various times and places in the continent – have created a common European cultural heritage and formed a unique culture area straddling national boundaries and interrelating their different national cultures through common motifs and traditions. In this way an overlapping family of cultures has been gradually formed over the centuries, despite many breaks and schisms. (Smith 1991: 174)

Nevertheless, it is often the differences, breaks and schisms to which Smith refers that claim the limelight. The inherited memories of which he writes overlook the fact that this common history is often military and bloody and usually constitutes a justification of the existence of the nation. Commemorations of victories confirm the greatness of the nation while those of defeats evoke its suffering; all of them consolidate the legitimacy of its past, present and future struggles. Naturally, most conflicts were waged against neighbours since, until relatively recently, a sustained war against a more distant nation or state would have been difficult if not impossible. And here we find another paradox: this neighbour who often resembles us most closely is also the one who, in the past, represented the greatest threat to our identity. Sigmund Freud gave to this phenomenon

4 | Manuel Bragança and Peter Tame

the term ‘the narcissism of minor differences’ (1961: 114). In contributing to the causes of wars, however, perhaps these differences were not quite so minor as Freud allowed. Challenged but surviving (surviving because openly challenged?), nation-states are still celebrated in terms of their great men and women: politicians, scientists, philosophers and artists are all invoked to illustrate the greatness of their respective nations. With the rise of nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe, historians, encouraged by the political leaders of their time, became privileged vectors of memories, responsible for demonstrating and, often, even constructing or ‘enhancing’ the singularity and the grandeur of a particular nation’s past (Berger, Donovan and Passmore 1999). Could it be that a nation must be exceptional – to its citizens – or it ceases to exist? As far as nations are concerned, exceptionality may well be the rule. Hayden White, whose arguments can be somewhat controversial among historians, is nevertheless certainly right when he states: Now what is striking in looking at the foundation of history as a discipline is that until the nineteenth century, history was an amateur activity [in Europe]. Anybody could practice it. It wasn’t even taught in the university; universities taught antiquities but they did not teach history. It’s only in the nineteenth century that they turned history into a discipline and put it in the curriculum, in the 1830s and 1840s. And its function, primarily, was to serve the state and to provide a genealogy for the nation-state, because throughout Europe when the nations were being formed, there was resistance to the idea of the centralization that it was incumbent upon the sovereigns to impose upon these various national entities in order to transform, let’s say, Burgundians into Frenchmen. So the professional historians were employed by the state in the universities, and the universities were all run by the state, they served the state. Insofar as there was political diversity in the electorate, they served one or another of the parties – all under the guise of being objective, or, if not objective, at least neutral. (Rogne and White 2009: 72)

The construction and justification of the nation goes beyond the strictly political domain. In a continent or subcontinent where traditional religions are steadily losing ground, the nation functions as a transcendental entity that makes sense of the world; it functions as a ‘super-family’ (Smith 1991: 161). One could even go so far as to say that the nation is religious in the sense that it binds (religare, in Latin) its members together. It has in fact often been said that commemorative ceremonies, both military and civilian, borrow from religious rituals, reminding people that they belong to a community not only of the living, but also of the dead. Wars are also such nationally founding events. And because of its intensity, its duration and its brutality, the Second World War remains for Europeans a major event whose impact is still felt strongly today.

Introduction | 5

The dates 1939–1945 define the armed conflict but not the latent conflict that preceded the Second World War. They do not account either for the Spanish Civil War, which, as a number of historians have argued, can be perceived as a dress rehearsal for, or a grim prelude to, the more generalised European war that broke out in September 1939 (see Pablo Sánchez León’s nuanced view, infra). The terminology ‘the long Second World War’ is now used with increasing frequency.4 Yet even an extension of the chronology from 1936 to 1945 does not allow for the memories that followed the conflict: the long Second World War was followed by a very long aftermath. As Patrick Finney put it, ‘the Second World War still shapes our lives’ (2016, forthcoming). The past may be ‘a foreign country’, as L.P. Hartley defined it (1953), but it is also very much ‘present’ and always with us. This is hardly surprising since history is always narrated to contemporaries to inform them about the present through their past; or, as R.G. Collingwood put it, echoing the thought of the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce: ‘all history is contemporary history’ (Collingwood 2005: 202). For a variety of reasons (mainly psychological, social and political), memories do not all surface at the same moment. At any given time, certain memories appear to be hegemonic while others remain marginal. Often Manichean in the immediate post-war period, fault lines in the composition of each and every nation’s dominant narratives emerge with the passage of time. Enjoying a greater freedom of expression, countries in the West saw such conflicting memories emerging more rapidly, whereas most of Eastern Europe languished under the influence of the Soviet Union that sought to stifle memories of its pre-war, geo-strategic wheelings and dealings, particularly the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 by which, less than a month before the beginning of the conflict, Germany and the Soviet Union divided up the countries of Central Europe along a line that ran from Finland to Romania. This, of course, explains why Russia still focuses on the ‘Great Patriotic War’, which began in 1941, when the Soviet Union was attacked by the Axis powers (see Markku Kangaspuro, infra). It also explains why, in many Baltic and Eastern European countries, it is often said that the Second World War did not end until the 1990s when they regained their independence (Droit 2007). But matters are of course even more complex since, within each European state, war memories are written in the plural, both in time and space. In France, for example, the memories of the 1.5 million French prisoners of war in Germany have little in common with those of the 130,000 ‘malgré-nous’ (literally, ‘despite-ourselves’) Alsatians and Lorrains who were forcibly incorporated into the German army, and little in common either with the French in exile during this period, not to mention those

6 | Manuel Bragança and Peter Tame

who collaborated and those who resisted. In the same way, the memories of the Channel Islanders, whose territory was occupied by the Germans, have little or nothing in common with those of the British on the mainland, and little in common either with those in Northern Ireland (see Daniel Travers and Paul Ward, infra). The number of such examples is vast because, ultimately, collective memories are located in the minds of individuals whose perspectives on the past also evolve with the passage of time.

Where is Homo Europeanus? Historians do not resuscitate the past: they construct a discourse that strives to remain free from their own prejudices and from those of their time. This is why they are often perceived as searchlights illuminating the past and why they have acted as witnesses in court hearings of various kinds (Golsan 2000 and Evans 2002). Historians inform citizens, that is to say the members of a politically organised community. In fact, they also play a major role in forming them: history is, in Henry Rousso’s words, the ‘citizens’ instruction manual’ (1990: 58). In doing so, historians reinforce patriotism and sometimes, for some people, even nationalism among the citizenry. Many definitions of the concepts of patriotism and nationalism have been proposed, but few of them are as clear and straightforward as that offered by the eminently ‘European’ writer Romain Gary, who wrote that patriotism is ‘the love of one’s own people’ while nationalism is ‘hatred of others’ (1956: 246). However, as is implied in the previous quotation from Hayden White, historians themselves cannot fully be free from their own subjectivity; they simply have to strive to be as objective as possible. They are in fact in thrall to the (often partial or partisan) sources that they have at their disposal and on which they base their accounts; and facts, contrary to general opinion, never speak for themselves. Furthermore, even if the facts can be established, it is much more difficult to explain the motivations of the different people who may only have had a partial grasp of them themselves. Historians’ subjectivity is evidenced by the constant rewriting of history and in the controversies that often arise from historians’ debates, such as the famous Historikerstreit of the 1980s in West Germany, for example (see Harold Goldberg, infra). Given the importance of political ideology in the Second World War, it is hardly surprising that, in this particular debate about Germany’s recent past, historiography became a subject of controversy in itself. What is really at stake is less the past than the present and the future. This is why these debates often come to resemble political

Introduction | 7

debates, a fact which caused Mikhail Pokrovsky to state that ‘History is politics projected on to the past’.5 Even though historians are trained (and therefore methodologically equipped) to interpret historical events, they remain rooted in their time and cannot entirely escape the dominant memory discourse of that specific time. ‘Men resemble their times more than they do their fathers’: thus runs an Arab proverb, quoted by the great French historian Marc Bloch (1952: 9). Historians, too, are influenced by the collective memory of their time, by what Maurice Halbwachs called, at the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘the social framework of memory’ (1925). Individuals do not exist in isolation but in society that imposes on them its language, its cultural, spiritual, intellectual norms, and its mindset. In other words, memory and history are not completely separate entities: the one nourishes the other. Historians, like all individuals, are also ‘cultural subjects’: All individuals are part … of a great number of different transindividual or collective subjects … [. T]he cultural subject is constructed in the psychic space of a single individual, a fact which does not mean that one should ignore collective phenomena that, in the framework of institutional practices, offer models of uniformity to those who participate. (Cros 2005: 19 and 41)6

If most historians refuse to accept Hayden White’s most extreme views on the ‘linguistic turn’ – that is to say the reduction of history to a form of ­fiction – all of them nevertheless acknowledge that there is a certain degree of subjectivity in their discipline, if only because the writing of history necessarily implies a narrative. The historian Paul Veyne articulated this by calling history ‘a true novel’: Historians relate true events in which man is the actor; history is a true novel … . History is a narrative of events: everything else flows from this. Since it is from the outset a narrative, it does not help us to relive any more than does a novel. Like novels, history sifts, simplifies, organises and covers one century in a single page. (1971: 10–14)

The philosopher Paul Ricœur, whose work has been translated into many languages, also insists on the fact that history cannot exist without a ‘plot’ (‘mise en intrigue’) or a narrative, and stresses the dynamics and links between ‘history, memory and forgetting’, in the terms of his most oftencited book, La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli [Memory, History, Forgetting] (2003). Through another important essay, Histoire et vérité [History and Truth] (1955), he also contributed towards placing human beings once again at the centre of the preoccupations of historians who were at the time more concerned with structures and institutions. Historians have acknowledged his concerns and have turned their attention towards

8 | Manuel Bragança and Peter Tame

representational subjectivities with, since the 1960s and 1970s, the development of a history of mentalities, cultural history or what is sometimes called ‘new history’. Researchers and critics increasingly seek to identify the mindset of a period in cultural artefacts including, of course, works of art such as paintings, sculptures, music, films and novels. For, like historians, artists are also men and women of their time. Their successes reveal the expectations of their time and the prevailing Zeitgeist (spirit of a time). Conversely, silences too are very telling: to express something involves choice, and choice implies exclusion. And, of course, the public too has the choice, which is why artistic and cultural failures are also very telling. It is well documented that, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, many Europeans found their personal sufferings difficult enough to deal with and so paid little attention to the horrific stories told by the Holocaust survivors, whose voices remained largely unheard until the 1960s or 1970s.7 Artistic and cultural artefacts are of course not only – and not mainly – documents, sources or objects to be analysed or consulted in order to understand their era; they are also autonomous creations that, although invented, often convey better than historical studies the emotions and subjective motivations or representations of people in the past. Emotions interfere with the historian’s objectivity and, for this reason, are often excluded from his/her narrative. This explains the reproach frequently levelled at historians, namely that they remain impassive in their analyses, even when their subject is intrinsically emotional like the Holocaust. ‘History misses the pain’, remarked Robert Eaglestone (2000: 103). Aharon Appelfield managed to put it more positively: ‘only art has the power of redeeming suffering from the abyss’ (1994: xv). This is probably because artistic and cultural representations do not claim to explain but to represent; they present over again and retell the story from different perspectives. These re-presentations allow us to relive painful events in mediatised form or vicariously, in what psychoanalysts call an abreaction. For, unlike historians who have to write blandly in order to remain as objective as possible, artists enjoy a greater freedom of expression. Beyond the facts, they draw on and elicit a fictional truth, set up emotional resonances through empathy, fear, doubt or uncertainty and create or recreate states of mind which historical accounts struggle to convey. Beyond these valid distinctions however, the reality is more complex since historians and artists address individuals, and any representation – historical, cultural or artistic – can move its readers, provided that it strikes a chord with their own memories. What should be stressed, however, is that history and art should not be seen as functioning in opposition

Introduction | 9

one with the other. On the contrary, allowing for their different registers, constraints and goals, they both facilitate our understanding of the past through different perspectives. As Colin Nettelbeck puts it, ‘only an inclusive approach to sources – audiovisual as well as written, fictional as well as factual, high culture as well as popular culture, religious as well as secular – combined with a rigorous use of archival materials, will satisfy our double need for scientific exactitude and affective understanding’ (2012: 63). Both approaches, therefore – those of the historian and the artist – are necessary to the continental focus of this volume, since understanding other perspectives and understanding the other are essential to the Europe of tomorrow. This is why the contributors to this volume were asked to reflect on the dynamics of identity and otherness through national perspectives. This may seem to be going against the grain at a time when transnational perspectives are receiving increased attention from scholars.8 Without denying what wider perspectives bring to our understanding of national viewpoints, we nonetheless believe that national approaches remain pertinent because, whatever form the new Europe takes, it can only find solidarity through a better understanding of the reasoning, the fears and the pains that haunt our neighbours. And these emotions are still very much anchored within national perspectives. Understanding these will also help us to understand each nation’s specificity for the concepts of identity and alterity are both inseparable and complementary: it is the Other, by contrast, that enhances the Self’s awareness of its own identity. Only a better understanding of the past of this Self/Other dualism can foster empathy or sympathy and create a common will to share a peaceful future. This, however, is not facilitated by the fact that the Other is often the one who, threatened, still threatens or is perceived to be threatening one’s nation and identity. Nor is it facilitated by the fact that Europe, unlike its different component nations, possesses none of the powerful symbols or myths that have shaped nation-states for centuries. Nor will such a ‘European feeling’ – as the French writer and ardent Europeanist Jules Romain dubbed it (Bogain 2013) – be achieved by complex financial policies that are only understood by technocrats and, rightly or wrongly, often perceived by the Europeans as a threat to their nation and to their identity (Chebel d’Appollonia 2002). Culture, in its broadest sense, represents a unifying force that can bring Europeans closer together. It is commonly believed that Jean Monnet, one of the founding fathers of post-1945 Europe, said: ‘If we had to do it all over again, I would begin with culture’. Even though he probably never said this, it is significant that people believe that he did since this appears to be the missing link between individuals, their respective nation or

10 | Manuel Bragança and Peter Tame

nations and Europe. A better knowledge and understanding of the cultures of others tends to reveal that they are neither rivals nor harmful. The ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dichotomy does not make much sense in contemporary Europe: not only do ‘they’ resemble ‘us’ closely, they are already part of our own culture to a large extent. Europe may signify different things to different people and may have generated many myths, but Europe itself is not a myth: the common history of its different nations has contributed to shaping a common culture. Mozart means something to most Europeans. And so do Shakespeare, Homer, Beethoven and, in completely different genres and registers, Sherlock Holmes, Tintin, Brigitte Bardot and many others.9 In this regard, the conundrum of the European continent may be that whilst art has no particular homeland, artists do. Every artist and every work of art are anchored in a certain territory and in a particular nation. And, of course, the language barrier itself inhibits exchange, quite apart from the problems that arise from identity politics.10 One solution to this conundrum might be to encourage transnational initiatives. Many are already in place. The recent introduction of a FrancoGerman history textbook (Defrance and Pfeil 2013) and the developing trend of travelling cultural exhibitions – such as the ‘Vichy posters’ in 2002 (Wlassikoff and Delanghe 2002) – are to be welcomed. The miniEurope theme park in Brussels may not be everyone’s ideal of promoting European culture (Lähdesmäki 2012), but it is conveniently located and offers a glimpse of European culture to as many as two hundred thousand tourists each year, including children for whom the park appears to be principally designed. Similarly, town twinnings, cycling events like the ‘Tour of the Future’, European sporting competitions and so on are also to be welcomed. Yet, realistically, because they are often very mundane and chronologically or geographically very limited, such events and initiatives cannot by themselves create a ‘European feeling’, a sense of belonging. Quite significantly, and for whatever reason this may be, Europe Day, created in 1985, remains little known (Rousso 2007b: 33–34). Noting that ‘the European Union offers little that can inspire collective enthusiasm’, the historian and political scientist Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia argued that it is necessary to create strong symbols to ‘ground a real European identity’: Beyond the political and economic problems created by the possible enlargement of the European Union lies the necessity of creating strong European symbols, strong enough to transcend self-regarding local identities. Since the eighteenth century, political nationalism has used culture and cultural symbols to legitimate institutions and governments. Today, however, European nationalism is very far from its symbols. Apart from a flag, a hymn and a few festivals that occur only intermittently, the European Union offers little that can inspire collective enthusiasm. It takes longer to accept a symbol than a Brussels regu-

Introduction | 11

lation, if it is accepted at all. But it is the only way to ground a real European identity and, perhaps, to limit the upsurge of aggressive national nationalisms. The European Union must become a visual and compelling identity. It needs myths as strong as those that sustain the individual nations of which it is composed. As Condorcet observed, ‘Citizens are not born; they are created through instruction.’ Homo Europeanus is still waiting to be made. (2002: 189–90)

There is no doubt that myths and symbols can foster a sense of belonging. The danger here is that of creating a ‘European nationalism’ of the bad kind (that Chebel d’Appollonia calls ‘national nationalism’ in the quotation above) which would be exclusive, a nationalism which would be synonymous with a ‘hatred of others’, in the words of Romain Gary’s definition. The Internet – which deterritorialises information and renders it easily available to everyone at the same time – will no doubt have a major role to play in the development of a common European culture, and one can only regret that scholars and policymakers have been quite slow to endorse this relatively new means of communication to cascade their findings and connect or reconnect Europeans. In a global context of political and economic crisis, rising nationalism and Euro-scepticism, it is more important than ever to debunk stereotypes, national myths and fears, and to find common forums to discuss some of the more painful and divisive memories in order to move forward. In a modest way, this is what this edited volume aims to offer through multidisciplinary perspectives on the bloodiest events of the last century, our common scar.

Ever-Evolving Memories of the European Wars of 1936–1945: A Multidisciplinary Approach These memories, as stated above, emerge also through the mediums of fiction and art that, in a sense, reflect but also contest other memories. Here, we touch on another of the principal aims of this volume, namely to provide a dialogue between scholars working in different disciplines all over Europe and beyond. Although there are many volumes on the Second World War, few are as truly multidisciplinary as this one, and none, as far as we are aware, contain as many different national perspectives. Among the predecessors to this volume, some are purely literary11 while others are exclusively historical, historiographical12 or sociological.13 Other volumes of interest not already mentioned in this introduction include: The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration edited by T. G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson and Michael Roper (2000), even though it offers a somewhat uneven coverage of Europe (UK, Portugal and Finland only)

12 | Manuel Bragança and Peter Tame

as well as other countries elsewhere in the world; Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth’s co-edited A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance (2010), whose chapters track and analyse the recent shift of interest from history to memory in both Western and Eastern Europe; and Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe, edited by Karine Tilmans, Frank van Vree, and Jay Winter (2010), which stresses, as might be expected from the title, the performative nature of history, memory and identity in a very broad and eclectic cultural sweep, but which focuses neither on Europe nor on the Second World War. One of the most original recent publications on Europe is Johan Fornäs’s Signifying Europe (2012), in which the author offers expert coverage of the semiotics and symbolism of Europe (mottoes, flags, anthems, currencies and so on). It focuses on the founding myth of Europa and very competently illustrates the recurrent themes of hybridity, dislocation and decentredness in the various types of discourse on Europe. Finally, the recently published Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe, edited by Eric Langenbacher, Bill Niven and Ruth Wittlinger (2013), offers very interesting theoretical contributions, together with case studies, on cultural memories from national (mainly German) and transnational perspectives in contemporary Europe. It should be added here that this brief review of the relevant literature is by no means exhaustive. The present volume offers a different approach. First, it has a broad European scope since it deals with the seven demographically most populated countries of Europe, namely Spain (for reasons explained previously), the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Poland and Russia, which were also the major European players in the long Second World War. Second, each of these countries is the focus of a specific section, itself divided into three chapters. In this tripartite structure, the first chapter presents a recent development in the historiography of the country discussed. Since most readers, including specialist researchers, will not necessarily have a clear or complete overview of the history and historiography of the seven countries discussed, particular attention has been paid to the historical contextualisation to which the Foreword by Richard Overy and the Afterword by Jay Winter substantially contribute. Following the initial historical or historiographical chapter, each section contains two further chapters that deal either with an aspect of that country’s ‘low’ and ‘high’ cultures or with two different cultural approaches or genres. Special attention has been given to popular culture since it is more widely shared across classes, genders and communities (Billig 1995; Edensor 2002; Heinich 2005). This introduction will conclude with a brief overview of the sections and chapters that follow. In the first section, on Spain, Pablo Sánchez

Introduction | 13

León’s chapter looks at the current state of the Spanish Civil War’s historiography and, regretting the deontological flaws and ideological bias of many recent accounts, argues that historians should learn from the attitude, sensibility and rigour of the documentary filmmaker Carlos García-Alix who recently reconstructed the complex profile of an anarchist, Felipe Sandoval, who perpetrated dozens of crimes against civilians in besieged Madrid between 1936 and 1939. In the second chapter, Jean Andrews compares the lives and the work of three female Spanish poets (Carmen Conde, Lucía Sánchez Saornil and Pilar de Valderrama) from different backgrounds who lived through the Civil War. Examining the responses of these three poets to the war, Andrews raises significant issues concerning the role of gender in the conflict and in their representation of the war. Coming to terms with the aftermath and the long-term sociopolitical implications of the Spanish Civil War is also the focus of the chapter by Alison Ribeiro de Menezes on Cristina Fernández Cubas’s memoirs, Cosas que ya no existen [Things that No Longer Exist], published in 2001. Using Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory, she finds that this memorialist moves beyond the traditional focus on women in the intimate domain of the family in order to represent their position in a nexus of transnational cultural memories. The section on the United Kingdom begins with Daniel Travers and Paul Ward, who examine and analyse the Churchill-inspired myth of the People’s War and British unity in the face of the Nazi menace. They show how the official version – adopted by the majority of accounts, exhibitions and museums until relatively recently – depended on the silencing of regional and unorthodox variations in attitudes and opinions throughout the British Isles. Robert Murphy then surveys a wide range of British films about the Second World War in order to analyse the various representations of the Germans from the immediate aftermath of the war to the present. His analysis of examples and illustrations reveals a surprisingly complex variety of types from the most human to the most barbarous. Finally, Mark Rawlinson highlights the complexity and richness of war narratives in British fiction from 1945 to the present. While they offer varied perspectives, Rawlinson questions to what extent they really challenge other vectors of memory and traditional views on history. In the third section, on France, a chapter by Kirrily Freeman examines the place of the town of Vichy in past and present French memories, Vichy being where the collaborationist French wartime government ­settled between 1940 and 1944. She analyses the various explicit representations of Vichy and the significance of its iconic symbols, together with the awkward, embarrassed silences on the subject in some quarters of ­officialdom. In the second chapter of this section, Peter Tame analyses

14 | Manuel Bragança and Peter Tame

how the novelist Patrick Modiano uses places and spaces in the context of the Occupation to blur past and present boundaries in order to question what has been a grey and obsessive past for the French since the late 1960s. Finally, Cristina Solé Castells traces the development of thought in the work of Jean Bruller (Vercors) on the subject of Germany, Germans and their Nazi past as he expressed it in many fictional writings and essays published from the immediate post-war period to the beginning of the 1980s. She shows how the writer progressively managed to dissociate the Nazis from the Germans while also calling for a new humanism in which individuals, once aware of their weaknesses, would make remembrance a human duty. The following section, on Germany, begins with a chapter by Harold Goldberg, who assesses the historical importance and memorial significance of D-Day from the 1980s onwards. He argues that two specific events, the Bitburg Cemetery controversy (1985) and the Historians’ Dispute, the Historikerstreit (1986), were crucial in metamorphosing D-Day ceremonies from being commemorations of a decisive battle in the war in which the Allies were victorious to becoming celebrations of FrancoGerman reconciliation and unity in Europe. In the following chapter, Christiane Schönfeld presents an evolving cinematic history of German identity construction and reconstruction from documentary films produced for German audiences after 1945 to more recent films and television series, highlighting their pedagogical aims and values, but also their flaws. Memory and post-war exorcism of trauma feature also in the realm of literature, as represented in Ilse Aichinger’s The Greater Hope (Die grössere Hoffnung, 1948), which, Marko Pajević argues, aims at raising the reader’s awareness of the functioning of language and, in doing so, can provide a means of coming to terms with the irrationality of the past and an ‘opening-up’ to life where reasoned analysis and the logical approach of objective historiography may fail. In the fifth section, on Italy, Richard Bosworth first examines the transformation of Italy’s image in the Second World War from perpetrator to victim. He traces the development of the country’s post-war image in the decades that followed the Second World War, giving examples of wilful distortions and omissions in the transmission of the (Fascist) past from one generation to the next. He shows how the echoes of past misdeeds and collaboration with Nazi Germany, along with the manipulation of iconic commemorative dates, are frequently muted, particularly in recent times in Berlusconi’s ‘infotained’ Italy. By taking examples of Italian films produced after the Second World War, Daniela Treveri Gennari looks at the cultural influence of the Americans in Italy, particularly in terms of masculinity and femininity. She illustrates the way in which Italy reacts

Introduction | 15

to the Americanisation of its culture, both positively and negatively, often focusing on the moral implications involved, as well as the crucial issue of national identity. Her analysis of the wide range of female roles in post-war Italian cinema is particularly rich, from the iconic and seductive American heroines with their glamour and material wealth to the less sophisticated but more authentic Italian women who illustrate Italy’s renewed self-confidence. Finally, Philip Cooke focuses on post-1990 fiction to demonstrate how the Resistance, despite its desacralisation, remains very much alive in Italian culture. In the section on Poland, Andrzej Paczkowski presents a conflicted portrait of current Polish attitudes to the Second World War and the way in which the memories (in the plural) of this event determine contemporary politics in Poland. Basing his analysis on a recent survey, he shows that, whilst Poles still hold Germany responsible for the war, official German recognition of the Third Reich’s atrocities have led to an easing of the trauma: hatred or resentment is in fact more in evidence towards many of Poland’s other neighbours, especially Ukraine and Russia. Paczkowski also argues that narratives of victimhood and heroism still help the Poles to cope with the fact that they remain surrounded by their former enemies from the Second World War and the Cold War. Urszula Jarecka then develops the concept of ‘wounded memory’ to investigate how Polish media – the word is applied in its broadest sense to include films – have depicted the massacre of over 20,000 Polish nationals by the Soviet secret police (NKVD) in April and May 1940, mainly in the Katyń forest. She identifies several strategies or attitudes from the discovery of the mass graves in 1943 to the present day: firstly unbelievable, these crimes were consequently silenced and covered up for decades by the Soviet regime before resurfacing after the fall of Communism in 1989. Silence led to trauma and the Katyń massacre is now deemed unforgettable. It is an open wound in Polish collective memory, a wound so deep that to forgive contemporary Russia(ns) is still simply unthinkable in twenty-first-­century Poland. Finally, Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż explores how the Second World War is depicted in recent Polish counterfactual or alternative histories and fictions. Whilst counterfactual narratives usually allow a better understanding of the past by showing how it could have been different, Sokołowska-Paryż argues that Polish alternative accounts have been somewhat disappointing in that they simply reaffirm traditional tropes. In the final section, on the USSR/Russia, Markku Kangaspuro focuses on the sixty-fifth Victory Day commemoration in 2010 and analyses the changing meaning of Victory Day in contemporary Russia. He shows how the attempts by Russian politicians to depict Russia as a traditional and natural ally of the West clash with the Great Patriotic War narratives

16 | Manuel Bragança and Peter Tame

embedded in Russian collective memory, as they also clash with many post-Cold-War narratives that have emerged in former satellite countries. David Gillespie explores the exemplary nature of Soviet and Russian historical films, together with the way in which hitherto taboo subjects, such as collaboration, betrayal and cowardice, have been presented in more recent, controversial films such as Dmitrii Meskhiev’s Svoi [Our Own] (2004) and Vladimir Khotinenko’s Pop [Priest] (2009). Finally, Greg Carleton describes Russian/Soviet fiction as ‘Janus-faced’, its representation of the celebration of victory over Nazism being almost immediately challenged by more sobering reflections on the huge human loss suffered and the overall cost of the Stalinist legacy to the Soviet Union and to the newly ‘liberated’ territories in the context of the Cold War. Two specific aspects of the organisation of this volume should be clarified here. The first concerns the use of translations: for reasons of length, the original language only appears in chapters that deal extensively with linguistic aspects (in the case, for example, of poetry or poetics). The second concerns the order in which the individual sections on different countries appear. The first section, on Spain and the Spanish Civil War as a ‘curtain-raiser’ to the Second World War, provides a chronological opening to the volume, whose focus then moves from west to east, in broad terms, to the other nations of Europe. This progression is intended to facilitate the Western European reader’s ‘voyage of discovery’, from the familiar to the less familiar aspects of the long Second World War. Conversely, Central and Eastern European readers will appreciate the refreshing focus on what may be less familiar to them in the opening sections of the book that offer new readings and reassessments of the way in which the war is perceived and represented in Western European history and culture. Readers will, in any case, find that each section forms a coherent entity, appropriately framed by the Foreword by Richard Overy and the Afterword by Jay Winter that provide a broad historical contextualisation of the Second World War in the twentieth century. This format is intended to allow readers to proceed through the volume in whatever order they wish.

Notes  1. The higher estimate is given by Johan Fornäs (2012: 67).  2. There is an abundance of writing on this topic, including Benedict Anderson (1991), Anne-Marie Thiesse (1999), Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (2010), and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (2012).

Introduction | 17

 3. See Cirila Toplak and Irena Šumi (2012).  4. Among many examples, see Bosworth (1993: 1–7) and, more specifically on the Spanish Civil War, Hurcombe (2011: 1).  5. Cited by Sergius Yakobson (1949: 123).  6. All the translations into English are our own.  7. It may be worth remembering that Se questo è un uomo [If This Is a Man] by Primo Levi sold fewer than two thousand copies when it came out in 1947. It only became a bestseller after its republication in the 1960s.  8. See, for example, Jarausch and Lindberger with Raumstock (2007), Rousso (2007a), and Iriye and Saunier (2009).  9. These names obviously also mean something to many outside Europe since culture knows no frontiers. 10. It also goes without saying that European languages do not all enjoy the same status demographically and strategically. 11. This is the case, for example, of The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II, edited by Marina MacKay (2009), a fine reference work that comprises the great, the classic and the canonical literary representations of the period concerned. European Memories of the Second World War, edited by Helmut Peitsch, Charles Burdett and Claire Gorrara (1999), is devoted solely to memories as represented in the literature of three countries, France, Italy and Germany. 12. Nationalizing the Past, edited by Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (2010), and Power and the Nation in European History, edited by Len Scales and Oliver Zimmer (2005), combine theoretical chapters and historiographical case studies. Most of the contributions in Histories of the Aftermath, edited by Frank Biess and Robert G. Moeller (2010), and Experience and Memory, edited by Jörg Echternkamp and Stefan Martens (2010), are written within the paradigm of national histories and historiographies, although some chapters also deal with more cultural matters. 13. Nation-Building and Identity in Europe by Rodanthi Tzanelli (2008) and We Europeans? Media, Representations, Identities, edited by William Uricchio (2008), present sociological and media reflections on nationhood and European identity today.

References Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Appelfield, A. 1994. Beyond Despair. New York: Fromm International. Ashplant, T.G., G. Dawson and M. Roper (eds). 2000. The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration. London: Routledge. Berger, S., M. Donovan and K. Passmore (eds). 1999. Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800. London: Routledge. Berger, S. and C. Lorenz (eds). 2010. Nationalizing the Past. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Biess, F. and R.G. Moeller (eds). 2010. Histories of the Aftermath: The Legacies of the Second World War in Europe. New York: Berghahn Books. Billig, M. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage. Bloch, M. 1952 (1949). Apologie pour l’histoire ou métier d’historien. Paris: Armand Colin. Bogain, A. 2013. ‘Jules Romains’ Vision of a United Europe in Interwar France: Legacy and Ambiguities’, Modern & Contemporary France 21.1: 89–105.

18 | Manuel Bragança and Peter Tame

Bosworth, R.J.B. 1993. Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War. London: Routledge. Breen, K. and S. O’Neill (eds). 2010. After the Nation? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Chebel d’Appollonia, A. 2002. ‘European Nationalism and European Union’, in A. Pagden (ed.), The Idea of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 171–90. Collingwood, R. G. 2005 (1946). The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cros, E. 2005. Le Sujet culturel, sociocritique et psychoanalyse. Paris: L’Harmattan. Defrance, C. and U. Pfeil. 2013. ‘Symbol or Reality? The Background, Implementation and Development of the Franco-German History Textbook’, in K.V. Korostelina and S. Lässig (eds), History Education and Post-conflict Reconciliation: Reconsidering Joint Textbook Projects. London: Routledge, pp. 52–68. Droit, E. 2007. ‘Le Goulag contre la Shoah’, Vingtième Siècle 94: 101–20. Eaglestone, R. 2000. ‘From Behind the Bars of Quotation Marks’, in G. Paizis and A. Leak (eds), The Holocaust and the Text. London: Macmillan, pp. 97–108. Echternkamp, J. and S. Martens (eds). 2010. Experience and Memory: The Second World War in Europe. New York: Berghahn Books. Edensor, T. 2002. National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg. Evans, R.J. 2002. Telling Lies about Hitler. London: Verso. Finney, P. 2016 (forthcoming). How the Second World still Shapes our Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fornäs, J. 2012. Signifying Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Freud, S. 1961. Civilisation and its Discontents in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: The Hogarth Press. Gary, R. 1956 (1945). Education européenne. Paris: Gallimard. Golsan, R.J. 2000. Vichy’s Afterlife. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Halbwachs, M. 1925. Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Alcan. Hartley, L.P. 1953. The Go-Between. London: Hamish Hamilton. Heinich, N. 2005. L’Élite artiste. Paris: Gallimard. Hobsbawm, E. and T. Ranger (eds). 2012 (1983). The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hurcombe, M. 2011. France and the Spanish Civil War: Cultural Representations of the War Next Door, 1936–1945. Burlington: Ashgate. Jarausch, K. and T. Lindenberger, with A. Ramsbrock. 2007. Conflicted Memories: Europeanizing Contemporary Histories. New York: Berghahn Books. Iriye, A. and P.-Y. Saunier. 2009. The Palgrave dictionary of transnational history. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lähdesmäki, T. 2012. ‘Politics of Cultural Marking in Mini-Europe: Anchoring European Cultural Identity in a Theme Park’, Journal of Contemporary European Studies 20 (1): 29–40. Langenbacher, E., W.J. Niven and R. Wittlinger (eds). 2013. Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe. New York: Berghahn Books. MacKay, M. (ed.). 2009. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mammone, A., E. Godin and B. Jenkins (eds). 2012. Mapping the Extreme Right in Contemporary Europe: From Local to Transnational. London: Routledge. Nettelbeck, C. 2012. ‘Getting at the Truth’, in M. Atack and C. Lloyd (eds), Framing Narratives of the Second World War and Occupation in France. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 49–63. Pakier, M. and B. Stråth (eds). 2010. A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance. New York: Berghahn Books.

Introduction | 19

Peitsch, H., C. Burdett and C. Gorrara (eds). 1999. European Memories of the Second World War. New York: Berghahn Books. Ricœur, P. 1955. Histoire et vérité. Paris: Seuil. _________. 2003. La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Seuil. Rogne, E. and H. White. 2009. ‘The Aim of Interpretation Is to Create Perplexity in the Face of the Real’, History and Theory 48: 63–75. Rousso, H. 1990 (1987). Le Syndrome de Vichy. Paris: Seuil. ________. 2007a. ‘Vers une mondialisation de la mémoire’, Vingtième Siècle 94: 3–10. ________. 2007b. ‘History of Memory, Policies of the Past: What For?’, in K. Jarausch and T. Lindenberger, with A. Ramsbrock (eds). 2007. Conflicted Memories: Europeanizing Contemporary Histories. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 23–38. Scales, L. and O. Zimmer (eds). 2005. Power and the Nation in European History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, A.D. 1991. National Identities. London: Penguin. Thiesse, A.-M. 1999. La Création des identités nationales. Paris: Seuil. Tilmans, K., F. Van Vree and J. Winter (eds). 2010. Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Toplak, C. and I. Šumi. 2012. ‘Europe(an Union): Imagined Community in the Making?’, Journal of Contemporary European Studies 20 (1): 7–28. Tzanelli, R. 2008. Nation-Building and Identity in Europe: The Dialogics of Reciprocity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Uricchio, W. (ed.). 2008. We Europeans? Media, Representations, Identities. Bristol: Intellect. Veyne, P. 1971. Comment on écrit l’histoire? Paris: Seuil. Walker, P. and M. Taylor. 2011. ‘Far Right on Rise in Europe’, The Guardian, 6 November. Wlassikoff, M. and P. Delanghe (eds). 2002. Signes de la Collaboration et de la Résistance. Paris: Autrement. Yakobson, S. 1949. ‘Postwar Historical Research in the Soviet Union’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 263: 123–33.

Filmography Pop [Priest]. 2009, dir. Vladimir Khotinenko Svoi [Our Own]. 2004, dir. Dmitrii Meskhiev

Part I Spain

(

Chapter 1

Violence and the History and Memory of the Spanish Civil War Beyond the Crisis of Inherited Narrative Frameworks

( Pablo Sánchez León

The Spanish Civil War is usually considered the prequel to World War II. In military terms this is certainly exaggerated, but when the war in Europe is regarded as a wider social phenomenon or, even more, as a civilisational crossroads where antithetical principles confronted each other in a mutually exclusive way – Fascism versus Liberalism, Capitalism versus Socialism, revolution versus counterrevolution – then the assault and defence of the Spanish Republic between 1936 and 1939 seems to both summarise and anticipate the violence unleashed throughout the continent in the early 1940s. Given the ‘iconic status of the Spanish Civil War’ in post-WWII culture, this overlapping extends also to patterns of memory and trauma for victims and civilians at large (Richards 2010: 124). Since the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, scholarly research and accounts have followed trends in popular literature. They have shifted their focus to political violence and notably to the persecution and assassinations of civilians during the Spanish war, and also well after the victory of Franco’s followers (Godicheau 2004; Ledesma 2007, 2008, 2009; Rodrigo 2008). Moreover, they have begun to challenge the long-established consensus that both sides were equally responsible for the violence committed during the war. In this line, and benefiting from the work of many professional and amateur historians, the prominent historian Paul Preston recently argued that, of the ‘200,000 men and women … killed far from the front, executed without a trial or after precarious judicial process’, the number of victims of pro-Francoist rebels ‘was around three times higher than [those] in the Republican zone’ (2011: 17, 23).1 These figures are placed within a narrative that, in considering the Notes for this chapter begin on page 36.

24 | Pablo Sánchez León

military uprising of July 1936 to have been an illegitimate and illegal coup d’état against the democratic Republic established in 1931, openly breaks with the notion of shared responsibility for the violence and the trauma of the Spanish Civil War. Preston’s account follows the path of other recent pro-Republican accounts of the outbreak and unfolding of the war. Especially noteworthy in this regard is Ángel Viñas. In three large volumes (2006, 2007, 2009), this senior historian has elaborated what is probably the most comprehensive narration of the conflict since the classic accounts by Gabriel Jackson and Hugh Thomas back in the 1960s. Although Viñas concentrates on political and diplomatic history, he and Preston share many views and offer complementary interpretations of relevant processes and events, including well-known mass killings and oppression perpetrated by Republicans. The focus of this chapter will not be on the empirical contributions of this literature to our understanding of the war, but on what I consider to be its theoretical, methodological and deontological flaws. I suggest that, in its blind backing of the Republican raison d’état, the work of Preston and Viñas ends up endorsing a sort of denialism that is morally unacceptable for a critical and self-aware civic public. Interestingly, very similar limitations and defects can be detected in another emerging interpretive line that, in contrast with Preston and Viñas, stresses the anti-democratic attitude and goals of most Republican leaders at the time (Rey Reguillo 2008a; Álvarez Tardío and Rey Reguillo 2012). A critical analysis of these two growing trends will show that research on the Spanish Civil War has led to a collective dead end. In contrast with these two trends, this chapter will consider the alternative approach to civil violence perpetrated by the Republicans that has been taken by the documentary filmmaker Carlos García-Alix. His work not only sheds light on the shortcomings of academic expertise but imaginatively explores the complex identity of civilians involved in violent activities in the 1930s. It will be argued here that by portraying an anarchist who was both a perpetrator and a victim, García-Alix has overcome a long-established habit among both witnesses and historians of simply shifting responsibility of political violence onto their ideological opponents.

Interpretive Renewals or Scholarly Dead End? Since its end in 1939, the Spanish Civil War has been recurrently at the centre of ‘wars of words’ that reproduce in ink the pro- and anti-Republican

Violence and the History and Memory of the Spanish Civil War | 25

positions dating back to 1936. From the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, the battlefield of accounts has begun to resemble a Hobbesian state of nature where different groups of scholars and amateurs fight for their own vital space by aggressively attacking the rest. In their effort to downplay all viewpoints that differ from their own, they misrepresent their rivals’ aims and intentions. In practice, this dynamic has had a very negative effect on the standards of academic historiography. In the wake of the conservative majority of 2000, the Spanish media publicised accounts of the Civil War that denied the mass killings of civilians by the pro-Francoist rebels. Renewing old interpretations from the ‘total victory and defeat’ regime of memory instituted under the dictatorship, this negationist literature openly accused ‘the Left’ of causing the war, blaming them for transgressing the rule of law as early as 1934 in a so-called ‘Revolution’ organised by the Anarchists and Communists, with the initial support of the main Socialist organisations (Moa 1999 and 2003). Partly in reaction to this trend, and partly due to the cultural effects of the wave of exhumations of massacred civilians from the 1930s, the past decade has seen the proliferation of a whole new series of narratives endorsing the legitimacy of the Republic in 1936. The flurry of non-professional public histories triggered a response by professional historians who reaffirmed the importance of methodological and deontological principles (Moradiellos 2004; Espinosa Maestre 2005; Reig Tapia 2006; Sánchez León and Izquierdo Martín 2006: 87–141). Some experts also quickly and stubbornly proclaimed that a clear dividing line should be drawn between the task of the historian and the social role and epistemological status of memory (Pérez Garzón and Manzano Moreno 2010; Juliá 2011). Yet over time, these developments drove a wedge into the ranks of professional historians, breaking the post-Francoist ‘shared responsibility’ consensus. In particular, a group of professional historians has sought to stake out a shared territory that would be as far removed from ‘neo-Francoist’ history as from frentepopulista standpoints (Álvarez Tardío and Rey Reguillo 2012: 6–7). Accusing post-dictatorship research of claiming equidistance but in fact having tended ‘to exonerate the forces of the left, while excoriating those of the right’ (Townson 2012: viii), this literature tries to monopolise the debate with a renewal of the discourse of shared responsibility and a new emphasis on the negative effects of violent rhetoric. A minimal consensus for debate seems, however, to be lacking for many reasons, including the unsubtle, ideologically inflected classification of professional rivals. Paul Preston and, especially, Ángel Viñas cannot be dismissed as simply ‘popular-frontist’, since their views are more far-reaching than it would seem. Their positioning in the growing academic battlefield bears a distinctive rationale: while openly opposing

26 | Pablo Sánchez León

negationist arguments, Viñas and Preston are also willing to deny any relevant revolutionary ingredient prior to the coup d’état of 1936. Both authors neglect the political goals, ideological principles and use of violence by large political minorities, especially the Anarchists from the CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo) and the FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica), and the anti-Stalinists of the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), and, consequently, excesses and misdeeds on the Republican side are exclusively attributed to autonomous groups and networks of more or less formally Anarchist or revolutionary Communist allegiance. The left-wingers are accused of using revolutionary ideals as a cloak for criminal activities (see, for example, Preston 2011: 307–10; Viñas 2007: 37–48). Both authors stress the fact that in July 1936, as the Republican authorities were overrun by the masses and popular organisations, hundreds of prisoners convicted for ordinary crimes were released from jail. From this fact, they deduce – rather than prove – that uncontrolled violence found its source in delinquency. Rather than a general endorsement of the 1936 Popular Front coalition, this anti-revolutionary mantra represents a more precise double positioning on the part of these historians: first, it implies that, after Franco’s coup d’état, the uncritical endorsement of government institutions, starting with the remnants of the regular army loyal to the Republic, was the only rational decision for any citizen who believed in the democratic system that had been established in 1931; and second, it insinuates that the only socially anchored political party that was committed, from beginning to end, to the defence of the legality of the Republic, was the Communist Party of Spain. This interpretive tour de force is quite novel in Spanish academic historiography. It is, however, also original in its lack of a proper analytical framework. Most of the assumptions made by Viñas and Preston are presented without a theoretical explication or even solid references. Ángel Viñas proudly declares that he has ‘not taken any step forward that is not documented or is not implacably inferred from the documental base’ (2007: 74, note 80). Many of the issues he raises, however, cannot be sorted out by simply producing empirical evidence without prior reflection and discussion on perspectives provided by the social sciences and the humanities at large. For example, his whole argument on the means to achieve military coordination and efficiency against the pro-Franco rebels is flawed by a reductionist focus on state expenditure, institutional centralisation and political unity. Modern history offers many examples of autonomous military forces drawn from the people that have been able to defeat much more organised and resourceful regular armies; interestingly, most of them, from the American Revolution to post-World War II anti-colonial civil

Violence and the History and Memory of the Spanish Civil War | 27

wars, either developed under revolutionary situations or were inspired by revolutionary rhetoric, especially in agrarian societies (Laqueur 1998; Asprey 2002; Sutherland 2009). Viñas himself recognises in passing – as did the Republican Prime Minister Juan Negrín (whom Viñas much admires) during the war – that, rather than material resources, what is at stake in a situation of total warfare is collective morale (2007: 641). Research on the Republican army suggests that reluctance to overcome traditional hierarchies weakened the spirit of comradeship among conscripts (Matthews 2012); moreover, studies on the social bases of the war effort have shown that the decline in commitment to the cause of the Republic coincided with the dissolution of the militias and the demise of the self-managed cooperatives in agriculture and industry (Seidman 2002). One of the many paradoxes inherent in Preston’s and Viñas’s interpretations is their conclusion that the Communist Party played a rather conservative, even anti-revolutionary role in Spain after July 1936, if not before. In any case, the chances of a revolutionary way out of the situation in 1936 cannot be retroactively assessed merely through a cogent narrative or by means of empirical evidence. At the very least, the issue requires devising comparative hypotheses tested on a variety of analogous historical processes. Nothing remotely similar to this is offered by either Viñas or Preston. In the case of the latter, theoretical shortcomings extend to his choice of title – El holocausto español – a conceptualisation that is not properly addressed in his work. In spite of an interesting summary of the repression theory and practice by Fascist eugenic specialists, including efforts for isolating a ‘red gene’ in pro-Republican prisoners (2011: 665–68), the purely cosmetic usage of a loaded term implicitly orients the reader to conclude that the ‘Spanish holocaust’ resulted from the aggregation of the two processes of extermination of civilians, from each contending side. Despite its pretensions, Preston’s narrative adheres to the framework of collective responsibility and blame. This implicit acceptance of the concept of shared guilt should work in favour of the other (anti-Republican) emerging line. Yet the members of this other emerging line seem even more reluctant to rely on theoretical reflection: as Álvarez Tardío and Rey Reguillo affirm, ‘[n]either Marxism, nor historical sociology, nor cultural anthropology nor an emphasis on linguistics, to give some examples’ are reliable means for the ‘understanding of the interwar period’ between 1919 and 1945 in Europe (2012: 5). This position, which prevents any analytical renewal, is all the more unjustified given their self-proclaimed interest in political violence – a topic that has regained centrality in the social sciences and humanities in the last decade, from micro-economics to moral and political philosophy, both within post- and neo-Marxism and

28 | Pablo Sánchez León

in the emerging history of concepts (Hirschleifer 2001; Imbush 2003; Sen 2006; Žižek 2008; Fiala 2010; Heitmeyer et al. 2010). This lack of theoretical framework follows Michael Seidman’s approach to Spanish history. Published a decade ago, his pretentious ‘social history’ of the Spanish Civil War – which in fact dispensed with social cleavages and identities in favour of a narrowly individualistic approach – became notorious for its theoretical simplifications (Richards 2004, on Seidman 2002). His more recent and rather benign study of the ‘material’ bases of Franco’s victory (Seidman 2011) not only fails to acknowledge the non-material dimension in the crucial issue of the fighters’ morale but has been criticised for being an account that ‘dispenses with theory altogether, and does not stop to consider the implications of [its] own approach’ (Faber 2013: 2). Apart from their reluctance to theorise, both these pro- and anti-Republican lines lack a hermeneutical foundation. Far too often, Preston, Rey and Viñas simply equate documentation with information, and information with truth. The result is a kind of perverse documentalist mystification which presents subjective testimony as self-explanatory, objective data. These scholars seem to take at face value the contents of files, reports and diaries written by political and unionist cadres and others, when, on the contrary, their use should require much caution. Viñas, for example, employs deeply biased reports produced by the British Foreign Office or the Comintern to discredit the anarchists or to justify repression undertaken by the Republican government (see, for example, Viñas 2007: 80–85; and Viñas and Hernández Sánchez 2009). Rey Reguillo, for his part, seeks to discredit particular leaders, organisations and ideologies by decontextualising their revolutionary proclamations and violent rhetoric (see, for example, 2011 and 2008b). Viñas’s declaration that his ambitious rewriting of the war relies solely on ‘documentary data, of the hard kind’ (2007: xi) is as self-limiting as Rey Reguillo’s call for a revival of traditional political history. Viñas merely adds traditional diplomatic and military history to this myopic focus, while followers of Álvarez Tardío and Rey Reguillo try to supplement it with a superannuated history of political ideas à la Arthur Lovejoy:2 not a single reference to the so-called Cambridge School of ‘ideas in context’ nor any significant appraisal of the burgeoning field of discourse analysis can be found in the studies they coordinate (on this, see Richter 1990 and Palti 2010). To summarise, no new theoretical framework is present in the two emerging lines of interpretation of the violent 1930s in Spain. What is evident, rather, is the unrestrained exhibition of partisan and personal interests. If anything, recent research on the Spanish Civil War exemplifies the collapse of the scholarly edifice built by the efforts of at least two generations of specialists.

Violence and the History and Memory of the Spanish Civil War | 29

Scientific Rhetoric and the Deontology of Pro-Democratic Denialism Given the theoretical and methodological analogies pointed out above, the two emerging interpretive lines should find common ground for consensus, or, at least, dialogue. This does not happen because of their exclusivist approach that consists in proclaiming themselves to be models of scholarly rigour. The books by both Viñas and Rey Reguillo are full of declarations of objectivity and disinterested truth. For example, Viñas assures us that his argumentations are ‘based on objective data’ and ‘against ideologised interpretations of any kind’, and that he has not ‘taken any step that cannot be irretrievably deduced from the documents’ (2006: 33, 57 and 74 n. 80, respectively); for his part, Rey Reguillo and his followers pride themselves on ‘avoiding the temptation to produce a history conditioned by the ebb and flow of contemporary politics’ and congratulate themselves for having been able ‘to analyse and write the history of the Republic in a way that is above all kinds of political polemics – past or present’ (2012: 2 and 7, respectively). Such claims are obviously not new: they are embedded in scholarly accounts produced under the memory regime of ‘shared guilt’ (Sánchez León 2006 and 2012). This kind of rhetoric has gathered momentum in the twenty-first century, however, as these two lines of interpretation are striving to dismiss all diverging accounts as ideologically inflected and non-scientific. The result is not only less analytical accuracy but also a shift in the ‘rhetoric of objectivity’ – the claim to be more objective – which both deters non-professional historians and involves verbal attacks on academic colleagues. What the exclusivist rhetoric deployed by these authors hides from view is the extra-intellectual, ideological dimension of their own scholarly practice. In this particular context, and in spite of their political differences, all of them may be labelled as conservative. Indeed, according to Michael Freeden, a core ingredient of conservatism is a rhetoric in which ‘[r]evolution is criminalised, utopianism ridiculed’ (2013: 112). Whereas Álvarez Tardío and Rey Reguillo’s open support of ‘the constitutional framework of Spain today’ places them squarely in the conservative camp (2012: vii), the conservatism of Viñas and Preston derives from their elitist and derogatory assessment of popular participation in a democracy by means other than the ballot box (Viñas 2006; Preston 2011, passim). This ideological dimension sheds light on the ways in which this literature deals with the issue of violence. In the case of Viñas and Preston, the whole argument on the nature and character of repression perpetrated by Republicans during the war is premised on anti-revolutionary

30 | Pablo Sánchez León

prejudice. El holocausto español affirms that whereas political violence on the Francoist side was planned, among Republicans it was ‘spontaneous’, meaning that it was not enforced by state institutions (Preston 2011: 18). This conclusion, however, contradicts his own account of the management of public order on the Republican side. It is unclear from Preston’s rather lengthy set of anecdotes whether public order really ‘collapsed’ after 18 July 1936. Rather, it appeared to have acquired a complex structure of agencies competing among themselves, but somehow sharing a certain legitimacy. Among these were the state-sponsored agencies, which often informally coordinated with their non-state-sponsored equivalents and sometimes even provided them with a legal cover for their operations (2011: 355–408). Álvarez Tardío (2012), for his part, is also ideologically oriented, though he writes from a formally opposed political position. His account of the CEDA (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas), the Catholic right-wing party during the Second Republic, strongly suggests that, for him, the extremist views expressed by its leaders simply matched the intensity of the threats supposedly felt by the Catholic community, a rather benign explanation which sidesteps the precise issue that he should be exploring. The epistemological shortcomings of this interpretive option should not pass unnoticed. Accounts by Viñas and the scholars orchestrated by Rey Reguillo and Álvarez Tardío are equally woven, not by means of interpreting the actions of relevant personalities of the 1930s, but by passing unchecked judgement on their deeds. This substitution of interest in what they did with assertions of what they ought to have done ends up making the historian adopt negative opinions voiced in the period. One contributor to Rey Reguillo and Álvarez Tardío’s book thus dismisses the strategy of radicalisation followed by the Socialist leadership after their electoral defeat of 1933 that ended in the harshly repressed 1934 general strike as a ‘trail of absurdities’ (Macarro 2012: 52), a characterisation that reproduces the kind of epithets employed by the conservative press in that context (Sánchez León 2015). Overall, what these narratives shield from view is a major deontological bias. In the case of Rey Reguillo and Álvarez Tardío, the uncritical support for the original consensus of post-Francoist democracy entails assuming a complacent rhetoric that denies the fact that parliamentary procedures may, under certain conditions, foster and even embed violent attitudes. Paradoxically, their studies clearly show that, during the Spanish Second Republic, the structure of political rivalries within the parliamentary system dramatically fuelled an already heated public debate. On a wider scale, their uncritical equation of parliamentary democracy with non-violent political exchange prevents them from assessing ‘the

Violence and the History and Memory of the Spanish Civil War | 31

subtle efforts’ of democratic regimes ‘to draw a veil over their own use of violence’ (Keane 2004: 2). Denial of responsibility in violent political processes makes its way into this literature disguised as ‘reasonable’ prodemocratic allegiance. In the case of Preston and Viñas, however, it expands into fully fledged denialism. What may appear superficially as a legitimate pro-Republican ideological stance committed to a democratic constitutional framework is in fact an anti-civic and anti-humanist endorsement of a reason of state. This is perhaps most evident in the detailed accounts that both Preston and Viñas give of the two major processes of repression of civilians under Republican authority: the mass killings of Paracuellos del Jarama at the end of 1936 and the so-called hechos (events) of 1937, when a major uprising sponsored by the CNT and the POUM against the Republican authority in Barcelona was brutally repressed. In general, Preston and Viñas not only exonerate Republican authorities from responsibility for these events, they also minimise the implication of Republican, Socialist and even Communist leaders and organisations (Preston 2012: 458–564; Viñas 2007: 35–87 and 489–530). When crimes against civilians perpetrated by Republicans are acknowledged, they are ultimately justified as very unfortunate consequences of the state of exception and total warfare, reducing their historical relevance to their diplomatic consequences (the negative impact and possible loss of support on the international scene). Furthermore, instead of assessing the level of autonomy that the secret services of the Soviet Union attained inside the Republican institutions, these historians are ready to transfer all responsibility to anarchist and revolutionary communist gangs, defined as external and inimical to the military effort of the Republic, going as far as to give credit to the accusations of disloyalty and defection levelled at the time by their political competitors. Thus we have come full circle: in fact, this narrative brings the reader back to the 1940s and 1950s, when literature on the Spanish Civil War was framed by the squabbles among witnesses attributing all the responsibility for the victory of Franco to their own political rivals from the Left. Recent appraisals of the burgeoning literature on political violence in the 1930s remind us that accounts by participants have until today been biased ‘by an ineluctable polemical tone closely related to the practices of de-legitimisation of the adversary and the justification of one’s own cause’ (González Calleja 2013). Instead of striving to keep this course of action outside the walls of academia, Preston and Viñas, Álvarez Tardío and Rey Reguillo are all consciously reinserting it into regular scholarly practice. Specialists of the Spanish Civil War seem to be trying to force readers back to a pre-democratic stage by offering a synthesis of the worst narrative

32 | Pablo Sánchez León

traditions from the two regimes of memory subsequently instituted since the 1940s: this includes harassment of one’s adversary by means of gratuitous rhetoric that invokes scholarly rigour. What makes this deontological dérapage a moral hazard for the Spanish public sphere is ultimately its potential integration into professional orthodoxies. For Viñas and Preston are not two lone authors on the margins of mainstream historiography of modern Spain. When, in 2010, the Real Academia de la Historia produced an utterly biased Diccionario Biográfico Español, full of prejudices in the treatment of the major protagonists of the Second Republic and dictatorship, Viñas himself successfully put together a team of experts that published a collective response (Viñas 2012). The quality of the entries in this alternative dictionary is as varied as the degree of expertise of its individual contributors; the ambition of the editor, however, is straightforward: its title – ‘In the Battle for History’ – consciously emulates the aims of the original French Annales school. There would be nothing to object to in this analogy, were it not for the fact that the generation championed by Marc Bloch did its best to overcome the limitations of diplomatic, military and political history framed by the same overall positivistic epistemology that Ángel Viñas is trying to revive. The ambition of Rey Reguillo and his followers is no less grand. They actually present themselves as the natural heirs of a long lineage of specialists on the war, appropriating for their narrow ends a genealogy of authors who would have objected to Tardío and Reguillo’s confessed desire to ‘dissociate’ ‘overtly from the structural interpretations – economic, sociological, cultural – that have been so in vogue among historians during the last few decades’ (Álvarez Tardío and Rey Reguillo 2012: 5). The very condition of the professional historian seems to be at stake. One important, if not basic, task of the historian, regardless of his or her ideological or political convictions, is to contribute with his or her work to demystify all sorts of narratives about the past. The twenty-first century seems to have brought about the opposite. To make things more difficult, these so-called ‘experts’ present themselves today as ‘demythologisers’ when they are in fact recurrently creating myths about liberalism, democracy, the merits of the Republican government or the Communist Party during the Spanish Civil War. Just as Herbert Southworth demythologised mythical pro-Francoist narratives in the 1950s and 1960s (1963, for example), paving the way for the emergence of scholarly research, this literature needs to be itself demythologised as a prerequisite for any reasonable narrative framework.

Violence and the History and Memory of the Spanish Civil War | 33

Insights into a Narrative Shift: The Identification of Perpetrators-Victims in Carlos García-Alix’s El honor de las injurias (2007) A common complaint stemming from all historians belonging to these two emerging interpretive lines on the Spanish Civil War is that the other’s perspective is so Manichean, biased and inflected by ideology that it cannot grasp the complexity of the historical phenomena it studies. This is probably true, but it certainly works both ways. A fresh perspective, from beyond the confined walls of academia, sheds a welcome light on this shortcoming. Carlos García-Alix’s biographical documentary of a sanguinary leader of an anarchist squad from the besieged Madrid of 1936–1939 offers a particularly good vantage point. El honor de las injurias [The Honour of the Wronged] (2007) reconstructs the life and deeds of Felipe Sandoval (1889–1939), also known as ‘Dr Muñiz’. Sandoval had a notorious reputation as a killer of civilians. It is not easy, though, to dispatch him as a mere gangster or an ordinary criminal who engaged in political activism in order to assuage his vices. During the 1930s, Sandoval organised several important bank raids in order to support the logistical needs of his political organisation, the aforementioned CNT. He was sentenced as a common burglar and had to wait for the popular takeover of the streets in the summer of 1936 to be released. From then, until his capture by the Francoist forces in April 1939, he was involved in activities such as the running of a ‘popular prison’ or checa, the detention and murder of civilians suspected of involvement in sabotage actions of the quinta columna – the ‘fifth column’ – and even the events leading to the sacas (‘emptying’) of the Cárcel Modelo of Madrid of political prisoners accused of conspiracy against the Republic and executed en masse. Despite his evident cruelty, Sandoval’s overall representation breaks with the Manichean classification proposed by Preston and many other specialists, and endorsed by Viñas. García-Alix’s Sandoval is both an idealistic fanatic and a brutal criminal, to the extent that these two dimensions of his personality cannot be easily separated. García-Alix’s film does not reinforce the stereotypes of Preston and Viñas, nor those of Rey Reguillo who denounces any aggressive behaviour as ultimately motivated by either ideological commitment or personal interests. García-Alix also shows that trying to impose a clearcut distinction between aggressor and victim actually hinders the possibility of fully understanding the identity of people like Sandoval. In order to stop brutal torturing by the intelligence services of Franco’s New State, Sandoval committed suicide in June 1939, putting an end to a hard

34 | Pablo Sánchez León

and resentful life in which the ideal of an anarchist utopia seems to have brought moral consolation and political orientation, even though it also provided ideological justification for unrestrained revenge. García-Alix’s portrait of Sandoval is anything but a free interpretation. On the contrary, his account is driven by a desire for the utmost intellectual rigour. In order to reconstruct the world where Sandoval unleashed his self-styled vengeance against the powerful and the wealthy, the film director has become one of the most reliable and knowledgeable experts on the police, counterintelligence and security organs of the Republican side during the war.3 García-Alix openly demonstrates his appreciation for the difficult task of the historian: El honor de las injurias starts with images of a storeroom in the national archives of Madrid where thousands of documents are kept in boxes, and the whole documentary is narrated as though we are following the steps of the narrator in his crucial and sequenced discovery of evidence. This process does not stop at information-gathering and basic hermeneutics. García-Alix, a professional painter and an underground amateur writer, acknowledges the role of fiction in a book on the research that made the documentary possible (2004). Moreover, he has also devoted several exhibitions to the portrayal of some of the comrades and allies of Sandoval (García-Alix 2003), confirming thus not only the role of memory for the very definition of his subject but also that of imagination as part of the anthropological assessment of unknown characters from the past. Carlos García-Alix stands out not only in relation to his object of study but in his own presentation as an observer. Unlike academic historians hiding their ideological inclinations behind scientific rhetoric, García-Alix is a committed civic activist from the Left who has regularly contributed to the CNT’s monthly magazine. He even asked for money and advice from anarchist foundations, forcing their cadres to debate on the issues he raises in his documentary. But he lays no claim to originality and, in fact, his work can be placed within a tradition that goes back to the final period of the dictatorship, when former anarchist combatants started to acknowledge their responsibility in the Republican repression (see especially Guzmán 2008). For García-Alix, people like Sandoval are not to be excluded from the history of Anarchism, nor should they be neglected: on the contrary, they should be reflected upon and recognised as part of a complex legacy that involves facing violence as an embedded ingredient in revolutionary ideology and organisations. Unsurprisingly, scholarly literature to date has yet to take into account the radical narrative shift that a project like García-Alix’s documentary outlines. Paul Preston, after summarising the deeds of Felipe Sandoval, acknowledges in a footnote the existence of the documentary which he

Violence and the History and Memory of the Spanish Civil War | 35

describes as ‘fascinating’, offering no further comment (2011: 747, note 76): the film clearly does not influence his view of Sandoval, whom he simply dismisses as a mere criminal (2011: 382–83). Here, as other experts elsewhere, Preston exhibits prejudice against the agents of a violence that came from a variety of social and cultural backgrounds, thus sharing a moral contempt that is common to old and new pro-Francoist approaches and old and new ‘left-wing’ interpretations alike, as well as to neo-conservative perspectives such as that of Rey Reguillo. The value of a work like El honor de las injurias lies not, however, in its implicit denunciation of a self-indulgent historiography, but in its epistemological achievement. Instead of being moved by the desire to attribute errors or crimes to others, Carlos García-Alix provokes in the spectator precisely the sense of complexity that experts claim true historical research should offer, to the extent that a simple condemnation of Sandoval for his killings becomes problematic. Aside from this, García-Alix’s account leaves no space for the argument that pro-Republican repression and mass killings were in any significant sense ‘spontaneous’. Rather, he shows them to have been sufficiently well planned and organised, though not always by formal state institutions. Ultimately, what El honor de las injurias demonstrates is that one cannot aspire to understand otherness without a minimum of recognition and empathy. Here lie the limits to knowledge demonstrated by many Spanish historians who write on the 1930s, though there are notorious exceptions such as Javier Ugarte (1998).

Conclusion As Mary Douglas (1986) has cogently explained, all institutions – ­including the parliamentary system and political organisations – use the projection of images of themselves from the past to reinforce their legitimacy in the present. This is the meta-narrative basis for all kinds of denialism, even those which support the pro-democratic values at the core of this chapter. It should also be clear by now that the meta-narrative of ‘collective error and equal responsibility’ has been dramatically eroded from both outside and inside the academic world. This does not mean, however, that it has been completely superseded. For it is one thing to question the notion that all responsibility for the traumatic past may be attributed equally to both sides of the ideological divide in Spain; it is quite another to deny in the present any responsibility for past deeds committed by individuals, organisations or ideologies with whom the historian implicitly identifies.

36 | Pablo Sánchez León

Twenty-first-century Spanish citizens deserve a historiography on the Spanish Civil War of better quality, led by professionals bound by the same deontological values, namely intellectual honesty, academic rigour and an aspiration to analytical objectivity. This, however, is not enough: historians also need to convey, with great sensitivity, more clearly and more effectively than the tendentious historiography of contemporary academic historians of Spain, the complexities and ambiguities inherent in the study of violence against civilians, as exemplified during the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. This is not an easy task, but Carlos GarcíaAlix’s recent documentary demonstrates that it is possible.

Notes 1. The Spanish edition of Preston’s book (2011) is used here, partly because this version is better known in Spain, and partly because it includes symbolic peculiarities; for example its subtitle, ‘Odio y exterminio en la Guerra Civil y después’ (Hatred and Extermination in the Civil War and after). The English version, published after the Spanish one, bears the subtitle ‘Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain’. All English translations are my own. 2. Arthur Lovejoy (1873–1962) is today considered as the epitome of the intellectual historian for whom ideas and semantics do not change through time. He maintained that the history of ideas should focus on ‘unit ideas’, single concepts (often with a one-word name). Study of history, he believed, should be concerned with the way in which ‘unit ideas’ combine and recombine with one another over a period of time. 3. See an interview of February 2010, http://www.contratiempohistoria.org/?p=409 (accessed 29 September 2014).

References Álvarez Tardío, M. 2012. ‘The CEDA: Threat or Opportunity?’, in M. Álvarez Tardío and F. del Rey Reguillo (eds), The Spanish Second Republic Revisited: From Democratic Hopes to Civil War (1931–1936). Eastbourne, Portland and Thornhill: Sussex Academic Press, pp. 58–79. Álvarez Tardío, M. and F. del Rey Reguillo. 2012. ‘Introduction’, in M. Álvarez Tardío and F. del Rey Reguillo (eds), The Spanish Second Republic Revisited: From Democratic Hopes to Civil War (1931–1936). Eastbourne, Portland and Thornhill: Sussex Academic Press, pp. 1–8. Asprey, R.B. 2002. War in the Shadows: The Guerrilla in History, vol. 2. Lincoln: Wilson Morrow. Douglas, M. 1986. How Institutions Think. New York: Syracuse University Press. Espinosa Maestre, F. 2005. El fenómeno revisionista o los fantasmas de la derecha española. Seville: Del Oeste Ediciones. Faber, S. 2013. ‘Review of Michael Seidman, The Victorious Counterrevolution: The Nationalist Effort in the Spanish Civil War’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 14 (1): 89–92.

Violence and the History and Memory of the Spanish Civil War | 37

Fiala, A. 2010. Public Wars, Private Conscience: The Ethics of Political Violence. London and New York: Continuum Books. Freeden, M. 2013 (2003). Ideología: Una brevísima introducción. Santander: Universidad de Cantabria/McGraw-Hill. García-Alix, C. 2003. Madrid-Moscú. Madrid: T Ediciones. _______. 2004. El honor de las injurias: Busca y captura de Felipe Sandoval. Madrid: T Ediciones/ No hay penas. Godicheau, F. 2004. La Guerre d’Espagne: République et Révolution en Catalogne (1936–1939). Paris: Odile Jacob. González Calleja, E. 2013. ‘La historiografía sobre la violencia política en la Segunda República española: Una reconsideración’, Hispania Nova 11 (http://hispanianova.rediris. es, accessed 12 August 2013). Guzmán, E. de. 2008 (1974). Nosotros los asesinos. Madrid: Vosa. Heitmeyer, W., H.G. Haupt, S. Malthaner and A. Kirschner (eds). 2010. The Control of Violence in Modern Society: Multi-disciplinary Perspectives from School Shootings to Ethnic Violence. New York: Springer. Hirschleifer, J. 2001. The Dark Side of the Force: Economic Foundations of Conflict Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Imbusch, P. 2003. ‘The Concept of Violence’, in W. Heitmeyer and J. Hagan (eds), International Handbook of Violence Research, vol. 1. Norwell: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 13–40. Juliá, S. 2011. Elogio de historia en tiempo de memoria. Madrid: Marcial Pons. Keane, J. 2004. Violence and Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laqueur, W. 1998 (1976). Guerrilla Warfare: A Historical and Critical Study. New Brunswick: Transaction Books. Ledesma, J.L. 2007. ‘El 1936 más opaco: Las violencias en la zona republicana durante la Guerra Civil y sus narrativas’, Historia Social 58: 151–68. _______. 2008. ‘Total War behind the Frontlines? An Inquiry into the Violence on the Republican Side in the Spanish Civil War’, in M. Baumeister and S. Schüler-Springorum (eds), ‘If You Tolerate This…’ The Spanish Civil War in the Age of Total Wars. Frankfurt and New York: Campus, pp. 154–68. _______. 2009. ‘Quelle violence pour quelle révolution? Des violences dans le camp républicain de la Guerre Civile Espagnole’, in S. Prezioso and D. Chevrolet (eds), L’Heure des brasiers: violence et révolution au XXe siècle. Lausanne: Éditions d’En Bas, pp. 237–52. Macarro, J.M. 2012. ‘The Socialists and Revolution’, in M. Álvarez Tardío and F. del Rey Reguillo (eds), The Spanish Second Republic Revisited: From Democratic Hopes to Civil War (1931–1936). Eastbourne, Portland and Thornhill: Sussex Academic Press, pp. 40–57. Matthews, J. 2012. Reluctant Warriors: Republican Popular Army and Nationalist Army Conscripts in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moa, P. 1999. Los orígenes de la Guerra Civil Española. Madrid: Ediciones Encuentro. _______. 2003. Los mitos de la Guerra Civil. Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros. Moradiellos, E. 2004. 1936: Los mitos de la Guerra Civil. Barcelona: Península. Palti, E. 2010. ‘From Ideas to Concepts to Metaphors: The German Tradition of Intellectual History and the Complex Fabric of Language’, History and Theory 49 (2): 194–211. Pérez Garzón, J. S. and E. Manzano Moreno. 2010. Memoria histórica. Madrid: CSIC-La Catarata. Preston, P. 2011. El holocausto español: Odio y exterminio en la guerra civil y después. Madrid: Debate. Reig Tapia, A. 2006. Anti-Moa. Madrid: Ediciones B.

38 | Pablo Sánchez León

Rey Reguillo, F. del. 2008a (ed). Palabras como puños. La intransigencia política en la Segunda República española. Madrid: Tecnos. _______. 2008b. Paisanos en lucha: Exclusión política y violencia en la Segunda República Española. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva. Richards, M. 2004. ‘Egos and Ideals in the Spanish Civil War’, History Workshop Journal 58: 340–48. _______. 2010. ‘Grand Narratives, Collective Memory, and Social History: Public Uses of the Past in Postwar Spain’, in C. Jerez-Farran and S. Amago (eds), Franco’s Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 121–45. Richter, M. 1990. ‘Pocock, Skinner, and the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe’, History and Theory 29 (1): 38–70. Rodrigo, J. 2008. Hasta la raíz: Violencia durante la guerra civil y la dictadura franquista. Madrid: Alianza. Sánchez León, P. 2006. ‘La objetividad como ortodoxia: Los historiadores y el conocimiento de la Guerra Civil Española’, in J. Aróstegui and F. Godicheau (eds), Guerra Civil: Mito y memoria. Madrid: Marcial Pons, pp. 75–106. _______. 2012. ‘Overcoming the Violent Past in Spain, 1939–2009’, European Review 20 (4): 492–504. _______. 2015. ‘¡Uníos Hermanos Proletarios! Trayectoria de la metáfora conceptual de fraternidad en la España contemporánea’, in F. Godicheau and P. Sánchez León (eds), Palabras que atan. Metáforas y conceptos del vínculo social en la historia moderna y contemporánea. Mexico/Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 273–322. Sánchez León, P. and J. Izquierdo Martín. 2006. La guerra que nos han contado: 1936 y nosotros. Madrid: Alianza. Seidman, M. 2002. Republic of Egos: A Social History of the Spanish Civil War. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. _______. 2011. The Victorious Counterrevolution: The Nationalist Effort in the Spanish Civil War. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Sen, A.K. 2006. Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. New York: Norton. Southworth, H. R. 1963. El mito de la cruzada de Franco. Paris: Ruedo Ibérico. Sutherland, D. 2009. A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Townson, N. 2012. Preface by Series Editor, in M. Álvarez Tardío and F. del Rey Reguillo (eds), The Spanish Second Republic Revisited: From Democratic Hopes to Civil War (1931–1936). Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, pp. vii–viii. Ugarte, J. 1998. La nueva Covadonga insurgente: Orígenes sociales y culturales de la sublevación de 1936 en Navarra y el País Vasco. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva. Viñas, Á. 2006. La soledad de la República: El abandono de las democracias y el viraje hacia la Unión Soviética. Barcelona: Crítica. _______. 2007. El escudo de la República: El oro de España, la apuesta soviética y los hechos de Mayo de 1937. Barcelona: Crítica. _______. 2009. El honor de la República: Entre el acoso fascista, la hostilidad británica y la política de Stalin. Barcelona: Crítica. Viñas, Á. (ed.). 2012. En el combate por la historia: La República, la guerra civil, el franquismo. Barcelona: Pasado y Presente. Viñas, Á. and F. Hernández Sánchez. 2009. El desplome de la República: La verdadera historia del fin de la guerra civil. Barcelona: Crítica. Žižek, S. 2008. Violence. London: Profile Books.

Violence and the History and Memory of the Spanish Civil War | 39

Filmography El honor de las injurias [The Honour of the Wronged]. 2007, dir. Carlos García-Alix.

Pablo Sánchez León is a Research Fellow in the University of the Basque Country. He has published widely on the history and historiography of social and political movements in Spanish history. He is the author of Absolutismo y comunidad: Los orígenes sociales de la Guerra de los comuneros de Castilla (1998) and, with Jesús Izquierdo, La guerra que nos han contado: 1936 y nosotros (2006). He is also the co-editor of El fin de los historiadores: Pensar históricamente en el siglo XXI (2008).

Chapter 2

Poetry and Silence in Post-Civil-War Spain Carmen Conde, Lucía Sánchez Saornil and Pilar de Valderrama

( Jean Andrews

This chapter examines the work of three very different Spanish women poets writing in Spain during the Civil War and in the early years of the Franco dictatorship. Carmen Conde (1907–1996) began life in an impoverished bourgeois family and ended it as the first woman elected to the Spanish Royal Academy in 1978 during the transition to democracy. A committed liberal educationalist and poet, she was forced to go into hiding in the early years of the dictatorship, achieving a slow and painful rehabilitation over the course of the following decade. Pilar de Valderrama (1889–1978), the cosseted daughter of a well-to-do right-wing family, was a successful poet and playwright before the Civil War. She never fully recovered, however, from the loss of her only son, a serving Nationalist soldier, or the Franco regime’s unwillingness to accommodate the grief of those of its own supporters who had sacrificed sons to the war. From 1940 onwards, the regime actively discouraged all reference to the war in literature, even though, during the conflict, the publication of testimonials and novels glorifying the war effort in the Nationalist zone had been a cornerstone of right-wing propaganda, insisting, as many have before and since, that all eyes from then on be trained on the future and on rebuilding the shattered nation (Bordonada 2010: 33). Lucía Sánchez Saornil (1895–1970) was born to a working-class Madrid family. She trained as an artist while working full time, published poetry in avant-garde magazines under masculine pseudonyms and, in the thirties, became a major figure in the women’s anarchist movement. After the war, she fled across the Pyrenees but returned after the German invasion of France to live for the next decade Notes for this chapter begin on page 57.

Poetry and Silence in Post-Civil-War Spain | 41

and a half without official papers. For their different reasons, Conde and Valderrama were obliged to confine themselves to semi-clandestine methods of publication in the immediate post-war years. That these women’s work was published at all attests to a recognition by the censoring authorities that poetry, as a minority interest, could not be deemed a significant source of subversion in an otherwise highly controlled literary environment. One may also add that the black and white lines which divide victor and vanquished are never that clear in the wake of internecine conflict, and this is especially so amongst the intellectual elite. However, Sánchez Saornil, without influence or connections in the regime and without ever belonging to an elite of any kind, endured a more poignant fate, publishing nothing at all after the war. Until relatively recently indeed, her poetry, if not her brief political career, was almost entirely forgotten. This chapter will examine the responses of these three poets to the Civil War – in the case of Conde and Valderrama, by looking at material published in the immediate post-war period, and in the case of Sánchez Saornil, by considering poetry left unpublished at her death – to get a sense of the panorama of loss and accommodation reflected in poetry by women in this period in Spain.

Carmen Conde Carmen Conde’s immediate post-war poetry displays an overt change of formal approach that involves moving from prose poetry to free verse and towards an intensification of the layering of emotional complexity when compared to her two published and one unpublished pre-1939 prose poetry collections. The blending of the personal and the political would become central to this new style in the early 1940s. The manner in which she expressed a response to the harsh political realities of the times within this new aesthetic will be examined here. Though never completely orthodox in politics or religion (she remained a practising Catholic, for example, when adherents of the Republican cause were more likely to be anticlerical and atheist), Carmen Conde worked for and supported the legitimate Spanish government during the Civil War. At its end, one of the lucky few, she was able to escape from Valencia into hiding in Madrid the very evening victory was declared. What she avoided cannot be underestimated. During these years, those associated, even in the most incidental of ways, with the former government were at the very least denied work and at worst summarily executed or incarcerated in hellish prisons and concentration camps (Graham 2009: 38–48). Between the end of the war and July 1945, Conde and her more

42 | Jean Andrews

or less estranged husband, Antonio Oliver, did not see one another. With the help of her close friend (almost certainly her lover) Amanda Junquera, and Amanda’s immediate family, she lived out of sight of the authorities for the following three years. The fact that Amanda’s husband, Cayetano Alcázar, a professor of history, was a prominent right-wing figure (indeed he became director general of university education in 1945) in a sense renders the decency and loyalty of Amanda and Cayetano even more remarkable. In her first year in Madrid, Conde hid in a bedroom in the Junquera family flat, only daring to emerge on very rare occasions after dark, before moving in the spring of 1940, with Amanda, to San Lorenzo de El Escorial, a somewhat difficult exile for a native of the port city of Cartagena who experienced ‘la repulsa levantina al mundo de piedra que parecía inhóspito’ [the Levantine revulsion for the world of stone which seemed unwelcoming] (Conde 1986: I, 208–209). In 1940 she had been charged with political offences and the case against her, which she did not answer until August 1943 in Murcia, was built up over the next couple of years until January 1944, when it was finally dismissed for lack of evidence (Ferris 2007: 513–28). Nevertheless, these were fruitful and happy times, particularly the period spent in El Escorial, which Conde described as ‘una etapa inolvidable para mi’ [an unforgettable period for me] (Conde 1986: I, 209). Once her mother and husband joined her in Madrid, her freedom to spend long stretches with Amanda would be drastically curtailed, to her immense displeasure. However, when she finally set eyes on them on 27 July 1945, she was shocked by their condition: ‘¿por qué no me habré muerto antes de ver su estado?’ [I nearly died when I saw the state they were in] (Ferris 2007: 501). Both were emaciated and in poor health. This perhaps made it easier for her to accept the re-establishment of marital co-habitation against which she had railed in her years of internal exile (Ferris 2007: 528–34). Antonio, who suffered from a congenital heart condition, might well have been imprisoned with hard labour for up to twenty years were it not for the intervention of influential friends of his right-wing family (Ferris 2007: 460–62, 474–75). Instead, he was sentenced to conditional liberty in Murcia, which was not without its harshness. In her autobiography, years later, Conde noted bitterly the cruel treatment meted out to Antonio by his brother-in-law, ‘hombre oscuro y pedante cargado de ingratitud’ [a dark and pedantic man, full of ingratitude], alleging that he had conveniently forgotten how his own life and property had been protected from harm by herself and her friends and associates on the Left during the war (Conde 1986: I, 208). Her third collection, Mientras los hombres mueren [While the Men Are Dying], like the first two a book of prose poems, describes the effects of

Poetry and Silence in Post-Civil-War Spain | 43

war on soldier and civilian alike, and was written between 1937 and 1939. It was first published in its entirety in a limited edition facilitated by her friend, the Italy-based Hispanist Juana Granados de Bagnasco, in Milan in 1953. Conde prefaced this short volume with a declaration, not present in her autograph manuscript, that the poems were to be seen as laments for all those killed in war, no matter what their allegiance. In 1953, in the wake of the global conflict for which many came to see the Spanish Civil War as a dress rehearsal, these poems, written in response to a very specific and local experience of the destruction of war, were now to be taken as a condemnation of all wars. In this vein, Ansia de la gracia [Desire for Grace], her first commercially published post-Civil War collection, contains a poem, ‘Elegía’, which reacts to the destruction raining down on European cities in the early 1940s (Conde 2007: 215–16). Addressing the cities, the poet exclaims: ‘¡No os puedo soñar más / ni caben en mi pecho tantos muertos!’ [I am no longer able to dream of you / nor will so many dead fit in my breast!] (Conde 2007: 216). Such horror, a repeat of the aerial bombardment Conde herself experienced in Cartagena, Murcia and Valencia, proves unmanageable to the poet and she must retreat from it. For the most part, Conde’s day-to-day response to what she termed an ‘obligado enclaustramiento’ [enforced cloistering] in the early postCivil War years was to write, and, when not churning out children’s storybooks, children’s history books and hagiographies under pen names in order to make ends meet, she retreated almost completely into her inner spiritual space (Conde 1986: I, 208). After her exoneration in January 1944, she was more or less free to publish again under her own name, and Cayetano Alcázar procured an administrative post for her at the then Central University of Madrid and another as a librarian at the Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) where she remained until retirement. As her husband’s health never fully recovered, she became the breadwinner for her husband and mother. In July 1944, her first postCivil War collection, Pasión del verbo [Passion for the Word] was published privately in Madrid in a print run of 250 numbered copies for distribution amongst her friends and those sympathetic to her work and plight. Consisting of poems written in the Escorial years of 1941–1943, it marks a major change of direction (Ferris 2007: 504). While turning her back on the external world may well have been a natural progression in her poetic development in any case, it was the only path available to her in clandestine seclusion in the early 1940s. This new inwardness is also reflected in poetic form, this being her first collection in conventional verse. In 1945, it became possible to absorb Pasión del verbo into the larger collection, Ansia de la gracia, discreetly published in a limited print run by Adonais, a small but prestigious press established in Madrid a year before (Ferris 2007: 504).

44 | Jean Andrews

Not sticking her head above the parapet when it came to the publication of her work would be Conde’s conscious tactic for the next couple of decades. Looking back at the age of seventy-seven, she explained that firstly, there were those among the cultural elite associated with the Franco regime who were more than prepared to facilitate the artistic output of their friends on the side of the defeated, as they themselves had been protected before and during the war: ‘Entre las dos Españas, ha habido una inteligencia para salvar a media España en desgracia’ [Between the two Spains, there was a tacit determination to save the half of Spain in disgrace] (Conde 1986: III, 257). She recounted that she, for her part, did everything she could in these first decades not to attract too much attention to herself. In fact, the censor in the 1940s was a friend of Cayetano Alcázar, and this was enough for her collections of poetry, from 1944, to be published, with very minor emendations. However, she was also informed, via Cayetano, that her poetry (in the instance she cites, Mujer sin Edén [Woman without Eden]) was not to be reviewed in the press. If it were, it would be withdrawn immediately. Understandably, she therefore took the pragmatic approach and made sure that her poetry, shorn as far as possible of overt political content, was published in Spain without fanfare. Ansia de la gracia opens with three new poems, all of which focus on love in the abstract and set the tenor for the collection. These new poems underline the poetic withdrawal into the mystical and the spiritually erotic which characterises her post-war output. Emilio Miró describes this new orientation as a kind of existential diving into herself (Miró 2007: 15, 36). These three short poems are followed by the poems of Pasión del verbo. The second poem of the subsumed collection, ‘Entrega’ [Surrender], seems to provide the key defining statement for her change of approach in the 1940s. Interestingly, it alludes to political expediency as much as to the trajectory of her individual poetic development. In ‘Entrega’, the poetic voice sums up the conclusion she reached in the very difficult, introverted years between 1939 and 1943: Guardaré mi voz en un pozo de lumbre y será crepúsculo toda la vida. Ya girarán más leves los cuchillos porque no encontrarán donde herirme. Erguida de rocíos negros, para ti cantaré. ¡Que no me busquen los sin vista, que no me llamen los ahogados, que no me sientan los que huyo! A mi soledad de reflejos,

Poetry and Silence in Post-Civil-War Spain | 45

amor, sólo tú. (Conde 2007: 205) [I will keep my voice in a well of light, and it will be twilight all its life. Then the knives will circle more lightly because they will not be able to locate where to wound me. Raised up on dark dews, I will sing for you. Let those without sight not search for me, let the drowned not call me, let those from whom I flee not sense me! In my solitude of reflections, love, only you.]

While it is tempting to see no further than Conde’s material circumstances in this declaration of isolation and love, on a more abstract poetic plane, the speaker here is reminiscent of the prophet of her people who speaks the words of Mientras los hombres mueren: ‘la que canta desoladas provincias del Duelo’ [she who sings of desolate provinces of Suffering] (Conde 2007: 161). Taken as such, the voice now to be concealed in a well of light is the same one, necessarily silenced by the military defeat of the legitimate government. At this juncture, the voice appears to have no future, it will always be no more than twilight, even if this means it will not any more be vulnerable to the knives of the enemy stalking it, a reference, conceivably, to the bombing raids of the war. In Poem IV of ‘A los niños muertos por la guerra’ [To the Children Killed in the War] (in Mientras los hombres mueren, hereafter abbreviated as Mientras) the poet asks: ‘¿De qué ángeles perversos se desgajaron cuchillas de acero?’ [From which perverse angels were blades of steel released?], referring to the shrapnel (cuchilla meaning a broad blade or broad-bladed knife) unleashed from bombs dropped on children in cities (Conde 2007: 174). Such enemy blades will no longer reach her now. In Confidencia literaria [Literary Confidence], published in November 1944, Conde, perhaps not altogether inadvertently, creates a parallel between the poet-seer role established for her female speaker in Mientras and that of Solomon, legendarily wise ruler of Israel and mystical son of King David. She describes Mientras as: unos poemas … que eran lamentos por la vida que se derrochaba ciegamente. Comprendí cuánto pesa el Eclesiastés, sobre todo en quien sólo había leído a Sulamita’. (Conde 2007: 202) [poems … which were laments for the life which was being spilt blindly. I understood the weight of Ecclesiastes, especially as one who had only read Shulamite.]

46 | Jean Andrews

Sulamita, the Shulamite, is an enigmatic female figure mentioned twice in the Song of Solomon: Tórnate, tórnate, oh Sulamita; Tórnate, tórnate, y te miraremos. ¿Qué veréis en la Sulamita? Como la reunión de dos campamentos. (Santa Biblia, Reina Valera version, 1909, Cantares 6:13) [Return, return, O Shulamite; Return, return, that we may look upon thee. What will ye see in the Shulamite? As it were the company of two armies. (King James Bible, Canticles 6:13)]

Since the Shulamite is mentioned by name only twice in the Song of Solomon, both times in the same verse and in the third person, the relationship of the Shulamite to the voice of the female lover who utters her love and declaims her sensuous experience throughout the Canticle is, in fact, far from clear.1 However tenuous the justification, and there is more justification in Catholic translations of the Bible than in the versions quoted above, Conde’s recasting of the Song of Solomon into a gynocentric ‘Song of the Shulamite’ takes for granted an equivalence between the Shulamite and the female voice in the Canticle, which, of course, in turn offers a very cogent complement to the spiritualised female eroticism of Pasión del verbo, Ansia de la gracia and, her most famous work, Mujer sin Edén (1947), especially championed by devotees of écriture féminine (Evans 1993). However, it would be a mistake to rule out political import in this work, simply because the lure of the spiritual and the erotic seems too powerful. The parallel drawn between the poetic voice of Mientras, on the one hand, and the Book of Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon, on the other, in essence points to the retention of the role of poet as public prophet in Conde’s immediate post-war collections. The female prophet of Mientras has become a new Solomon, a Shulamite prophetess who can encompass the voice of Ecclesiastes and that of the Song of Songs in one. To begin with, the meditations of the Book of Ecclesiastes, lamenting the transitory and vain nature of human life in which all must come to a dismal end, and the erotic lyricism of the Song of Songs, as juxtaposed by Conde in Confidencia literaria, set up an opposition of pre-war jouissance versus post-war dystopia which may be said to enable, or justify retrospectively, the transition of her own poetic voice from ‘la que canta provincias del Duelo’ openly to the woman who must hide her voice in ‘un pozo de lumbre’. However, to add to the complexity of the manoeuvre, Conde’s equivalent of the meditations of Ecclesiastes will be accompanied

Poetry and Silence in Post-Civil-War Spain | 47

by an inward eroticism of which there was very little evidence in the hard-bitten, angular, insomniac paragraphs of war-torn Mientras or the gaiety and innocence of her first two collections, Brocal (1929) and Júbilos (1933). In this new place of refuge, among the water of dark dews (‘rocíos negros’), the poet will be hidden from those who were her charges or enemies in Mientras: ‘los sin vista’, ‘los ahogados’, ‘los que huyo’. The third category, those from whom she flees, is the easiest to identify. The first two: those, literally, without sight and/or something to look upon and the drowned may be generally considered to be the defeated, like herself. Anyone hidden in a well may be drowned, anyone hidden in a well will be unable to see and without anything to see because of the dark, only rocíos negros [dark dews]. Thus, while resistance when still possible, as in Mientras, is communal, refuge must be solitary and contained in darkness. The confinement of a female fugitive in a well has a further genderspecific connotation, particularly to anyone from the southern, more Arab-influenced half of the Iberian peninsula and especially to Conde, who had spent part of her childhood in the Spanish enclave of Melilla in north Africa (Morocco). In these regions, there had been a tradition in rural areas of throwing unfaithful or dishonoured women, especially those pregnant outside marriage, into wells as a form of execution, and of such women pre-emptively committing suicide by jumping into wells. This is a practice famously alluded to in Lorca’s Romance somnámbulo, in which ‘sobre el rostro del aljibe / se mecía la gitana’ [on the face of the well / floated the gypsy girl]: a young gypsy woman, possibly the victim of a love triangle gone tragically sour, ostensibly through no fault of hers, floats dead on the surface of a well or cistern while the two men fight over her (Harris 1991: 31, 100). Conde’s relationship with Amanda Junquera and her fraternisation with the liberated and progressive women of the Lyceum Club Feminista de Madrid in the 1930s, an association which aroused the ire of her querulous and possessive husband, place her in opposition to the moral Puritanism of the Franco regime which closed down women’s social and political access to near-Mediaeval levels (Ferris 2007: 279–94). By choosing the well, symbolic of misogynistic oppression, as refuge and by using it as a means of survival if not outright subversion, Conde implicitly recognises the restrictions on women’s freedom under the Dictatorship and resists them, in typically defiant, feminist fashion. The voice of Pasión del verbo, speaking from its seclusion within a well, therefore makes a powerful, progressive political statement, albeit in highly coded form. Conde did eventually produce a collection of overtly political poetry which she sent for publication, under her own name, to Buenos Aires in the late 1950s. It appeared in 1960, as En un mundo de fugitivos [In a

48 | Jean Andrews

World of Fugitives]. The third and final section of this collection contains three short poems dated 1939 and a series of long poems written in the mid-1950s excoriating the Franco regime (Andrews 2009). In consonance with the sympathy for the plight of the rest of Europe during the Second World War expressed in ‘Elegía’, the three 1939 poems had appeared in 1945 in a brief collection, Signo de amor, published in a private edition in a print run of 101, by Vientos del Sur, Granada, under the collective title, ‘Tres poemas por el dolor del mundo’ [Three Poems for the Sorrow of the World]. Remarkably, Fugitivos, only her second collection of poetry to be published outside Spain, along with Mientras in 1953, was included, as was Mientras, in Emilio Miró’s 1967 collected edition of her work to date, Obra poética, on which he collaborated closely with Conde herself, in changing times when the more permissive censorship regime that was overseen by the reforming Minister for Culture, Manuel Fraga, allowed their inclusion.

Lucía Sánchez Saornil While Conde was certainly the most significant left-wing female poet to remain in Spain after the defeat, others suffered worse fates. Lucía Sánchez Saornil may never have matured into a poet of much significance but she was a figure of left-wing political prominence, and the aftermath of the Civil War condemned her to clandestinity and silence. Nevertheless, she continued to write and reflect on her own experience of the war and thus her contribution, available posthumously, is now of considerable ­importance and will be scrutinised here. Sánchez Saornil seems to have been a rather reclusive individual who, as a young, working-class woman poet, preferred to submit her work under the masculine pseudonym Luciano de San Saor to avant-garde Ultraísta magazines then dominated, inevitably, by young men wealthier and better educated than herself.2 In the early 1930s, she became actively involved with the anarcho-syndicalist union, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), and founded the feminist anarchist association Mujeres Libres in 1936 with Mercedes Comaposada (1901–1994), a working-class autodidact and anarchist educationalist, and Amparo Poch y Gascón (1902–1968), an obstetrician who was devoted to bettering the lives of poor women and who served under Federica Montseny (1905–1994) when she was Minister for Health (Nash 1975). During the war, in 1937, Sánchez Saornil published, this time under her own name, the Romancero de mujeres libres [Free Women’s Balladeer], a collection of poems which had appeared in the eponymous Mujeres Libres monthly magazine. Like all Spanish

Poetry and Silence in Post-Civil-War Spain | 49

poets involved in war propaganda, she amended her style during the war to produce poetry in simple verse forms and accessible vocabulary which made clear statements relating to the fortunes of the Republican side. This would be her only individual publication. When the war ended, she fled across the border to France with her partner, América Barroso, and they lived in Perpignan, Paris and Montauban. They returned to Spain, América legally and Lucía illegally, at some time between 1941 and 1942, fearing they would be sent to German concentration camps. They lived first in Madrid, then moved to Valencia when Lucía was recognised in the street as a former anarchist. Her sister and father, who had returned legally to live in A Coruña, joined them and Lucía made a living retouching photos and making hairnets while América became a secretary at the Argentine consulate. In 1954, Sánchez Saornil was able finally to regularise her situation and she got a job in a pharmaceutical factory and later worked as a representative for a lace manufacturer. She also began to take commissions to produce copies of paintings, returning to her fine art training. She never published in Spain again. She is known, like Conde, to have sent a collection of poetry to a publisher in Argentina, possibly in the 1950s after emerging from clandestinity. She never heard back from the publishers and the typescript was apparently lost. As she had not kept a copy of the typescript, claiming to know the poems by heart, this appears to have been the end of her publishing ambitions. At her death, all that was left was a collection of twenty-three typed, unpublished poems, mostly sonnets, written towards the end of her life when she was suffering from lung cancer (Martín Casamitjana 1996). These finally appeared in a collected edition of her poetry in 1996. One of these retrospective and surprisingly conventionally Catholic spiritual poems may provide a flavour of the memories harboured by Sánchez Saornil all those years. The ‘Poema de la caridad’ [Poem of Charity] considers the plight of Judas, the apostle who betrayed Jesus and then hanged himself in inconsolable grief. A person who had lived without papers for fifteen years might be imagined to have some fellow feeling with this most maligned of Biblical figures, as indeed might also one who may have begun to feel that her atheism as a young person had been misguided. On the other hand, it may be a consideration of the possible repentance of some of those more sensitive souls on the Nationalist side. Sánchez Saornil left no testament which might prove this one way or the other. However, the poem itself contains sufficient ambiguity to allow these possibilities. In it, the poet is prepared to do for her brother Judas what she has not been prepared to do for herself. Filled with distress or anguish (congoja) by the plight of a man who had no pity for himself, and for whom nobody has had any since, she will show compassion.

50 | Jean Andrews

Whether the last line, quoting the ‘Our Father’, indicates prayer for his soul on the part of one who prays habitually or, more fundamentally, a first engagement or re-engagement after a long gap in the act of prayer is, ­appropriately, left open to interpretation:    ¡Hermano Judas! Nada se te ha perdonado, ni siquiera por tu remordimiento – elemento ya de redención.    Nadie, ni tú mismo, tuvo piedad de ti.    Hermano Judas, tu nombre me llena de congoja. Por ti mi corazón desborda de caridad. Por ti, lo que no hago por mí… Padre nuestro que estás en los cielos… (Sánchez Saornil 1996: 144)    [Brother Judas! You have been pardoned nothing, not even because of your remorse – this an element of redemption.    No-one, not even you yourself, had pity on you.    Brother Judas, your name fills me with anguish. For you my heart overflows with charity. For you, what I will not do for myself… Our Father, who art in Heaven…]

These wise and humane late poems become remarkable when viewed in the light of the passionate and unrelenting reportage of the horrors of battle and its aftermath recounted in Sánchez Saornil’s Civil War Romances. In these, she observes the familiar rules: the story-telling imperative, the in medias res opening, the simple vocabulary, the use of direct speech; and she adopts the short line and strict rhyme-scheme of the Spanish ballad form. Like many distinguished poets before her, she takes this most clearly delineated of traditions and uses it for her own ends, in her case to encapsulate an easily recognisable political viewpoint. She also, and this is certainly not a claim that can be made on behalf of the majority of Civil War balladry published at the time, invariably creates a poem. The most striking of these is the ‘Romance de la vida, pasión y muerte de la lavandera de Guadalmedina’, first published in the Mujeres Libres magazine in June 1937 (Sánchez Saornil 1996: 127–31, 176). Here, she tells the story of the summary execution of Encarnación Giménez, an illiterate washerwoman, seemingly with a very low IQ, who carried out her work on the shores of the Guadalmedina which runs through the Andalusian port city of Málaga. Málaga fell to Francoist forces, which included Italian legionaries, under the incendiary General Queipo de Llano in early February 1937 after sustained naval bombardment from the German ship Admiral Graf Spee and aerial bombardment by the German and Italian expeditionary air-force

Poetry and Silence in Post-Civil-War Spain | 51

detachments whose first deployment this was. The ensuing repression of the traumatised population of Málaga was extreme, with conservative estimates of those executed in the wake of the Nationalist takeover reaching one hundred thousand (Preston 2011: 250–52; Málaga 1937 – Nunca Más). The fall of Málaga garnered added international notoriety because German and Italian forces bombarded the refugees, over one hundred thousand of them, fleeing on foot northwards along the coast road to Almería. It would take over sixty years before the citizens of Málaga, in August 2008, finally began to exhume the bodies of their deceased family members from the cemetery of San Rafael, one of the largest mass graves in the whole of Spain and one which was used for executions until 1951 (Picón 2008). In such a situation of collapsing lines of defence, Sánchez Saornil’s response to the fall of Málaga was astute. She singled out a representative of the poorest of the poor, a woman who before the war had washed the shirts and other fine clothes of the well-to-do at the river and who then washed the bloodstained clothing of the local, probably anarchist, militia during the war, and who, for that, was summoned before a tribunal and summarily executed. In the second stanza of this long ballad, Encarnación herself bids farewell to a life of back-breaking toil and enforced ignorance: ¡Adiós las duras orillas que me miraron esclava, la rodilla hincada en tierra, arco agobiado la espalda, arrojar a la corriente con ignorancia heredada, hora por hora, una vida sin florecer, agostada! [Farewell unyielding banks which saw me enslaved, my knees sunk in the ground, my back an exhausted arch, throwing into the current with inherited ignorance, hour after hour, a life un-bloomed, burnt in the August sun!]

When she addresses the judge at her tribunal, she claims that she simply washed the stained clothes of the men of her community because they were of her community; she had no understanding of the political implications of her actions. Sangre y sudor como Cristo los hijos del pueblo daban.

52 | Jean Andrews

¡Si yo supiera porqué!… ¡Maldición de mi ignorancia!, Tan sólo sé que eran carne De mi carne atormentada. … Yo no sé nada buen juez estoy loca de palabras y nadie acierta a decirme por qué los hombres se matan. [Blood and sweat like Christ the sons of the people were giving. If I only knew why!… A curse on my ignorance! I only know they were the flesh of my own tormented flesh. … I know nothing good judge I am maddened with words and no-one has managed to tell me why the men are killing each other.]

If Encarnación had been politicised and an orthodox anarchist, she would not have made reference to the suffering of Christ on the Cross. However, even this oblique appeal to the judge’s supposed Catholicism does her no good and there is no reprieve. At the close of the ballad, the authorial voice injects a rage and a political consciousness to which the confused and simple Encarnación probably could not aspire. Sánchez Saornil is unequivocal and unforgiving: Encarnación fell beneath a ‘hurricane of bullets’ because she was poor, because she was seen as one of the filthy rabble. Therefore, even if everything is destroyed in their wake, she calls on the poor of the world to rise up in an ‘overflowing torrent’. The impetus towards reconciliation in her ‘Poem of Grace’, written in the late 1960s with no real hope yet of an end to the dictatorship, is truly remarkable in the light of her attitude in the summer of 1937. She offers forgiveness of the unforgivable – the internecine betrayal which happens in civil war and has been symbolised since medieval Christianity by the actions of Judas Iscariot.

Pilar de Valderrama Pilar de Valderrama is another poet largely consigned to oblivion. However, her work is important because she gives voice to the sufferings of the women on the side of the victors who were also victims of the

Poetry and Silence in Post-Civil-War Spain | 53

war, not through personal deprivation but by virtue of losing sons to the conflict. Her voicing of her bereavement emerged in the grey years of the immediate post-war period, and it provides a crucial element in the mosaic of female response to the war in the early Franco years. As such, it will be explored here. Valderrama is probably best known now as the supposed last, platonic love of the poet Antonio Machado (1875–1939). From a well-to-do, conservative family, she married at the age of nineteen the equally well-off Rafael Martínez Romarate, who proved to be an unfaithful husband and an indifferent financial manager. She had four children in quick succession, and produced the first of five collections of poetry in 1923, with illustrations by her husband. She became estranged from him for a period in the late 1920s, during which time her relationship with Machado began. From poetry, she moved on to writing poetic plays, one of which was published in 1934, and to hosting chamber theatre in her own home. She and Martínez were eventually reconciled, and he subsequently, out of interest but also financial necessity, developed a highly successful career as an innovative theatre-lighting engineer under the Franco regime, being appointed Director of Technical Services for the National Theatres of Spain in 1943. When her son and youngest child, Rafael Martínez (1915–1939), died in April 1939, Valderrama, who had suffered all her life from bouts of nervous illness, succumbed entirely to her grief. Partly as a means of coaxing her out of this, her daughters and some of her literary friends persuaded her to publish poems she had written in response to her ‘deep and imperishable’ loss (Valderrama 1981: 74). Holocausto was published privately in 1942. She had decided to make it a memorial to her son and the central sequence, ‘Versos a mi hijo’ [Poems for My Son] indeed laments the loss of Rafael, who, having survived active service since July 1936 when he joined the Nationalist forces in Salamanca, died of complications following an operation to remove a diseased kidney a month after the end of the war (Valderrama 1981: 58, 70–74; Romero López 2010). The loss of her son was ‘la mayor prueba que pasé en mi vida’ [the greatest ordeal of my life]. This is encapsulated in the use of the word ‘holocaust’ at a time when it had not yet acquired its horrific modern connotation of industrialised mass extermination of peoples. In the Book of Genesis, the holocaust demanded of Abraham by God is the sacrifice of his only son, Isaac: ‘[God] said to him: Take thy only begotten son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and go into the land of vision: and there thou shalt offer him for an holocaust upon one of the mountains which I will shew thee’ (Douai Rheims Bible, 1909, Genesis 22:2). In contrast to Isaac, there was no final reprieve for Rafael. His kidney condition was occasioned by the hardships he had experienced on the

54 | Jean Andrews

front line. In his mother’s eyes, therefore, he had been sacrificed for a cause whose leaders refused, in victory, to acknowledge the price paid by those who had lost their sons to the crusade. ‘Clamor del hijo ausente’ [Clamour for an Absent Son] was written, as its title suggests, in August 1938. With the same emphasis on the spiritual as Conde, Valderrama has recourse to Catholic spirituality, evoking in the opening lines St John the Baptist crying out in the desert, in order to express her desire to be re-united with the son then away on active service: Como clamaba Juan en el desierto clamo por ti, pedazo de mi carne, espíritu formado de mi espíritu. Ave lanzada al vuelo cuando el cañón, la bomba y la metralla retumban en el aire… (Valderrama 1958: 167) [As John cried out in the desert, I cry out for you, flesh of my flesh, spirit formed from my spirit. Bird launched into flight while cannon, bombs and shrapnel revolve in the air…]

Valderrama notes the same cannon, bombs and shrapnel which fell on the towns and cities of Conde’s Levant and made smithereens of other mothers’ children. While her son is a bird launched into flight as all these lethal weapons are tumbling about in the air and the danger to him is evident in the relative fragility of the bird compared to the ordnance, Conde, for her part, begs the same weapons, in the first poem of ‘A los niños muertos por la guerra’ [To the Children Killed in the War] to desist, not to shatter the bodies of the little children: ‘¡No los deshojéis, cañones; no los tricéis, ametralladoras; bombas grandísimas que caéis del cielo hondo y que parecéis dones de las nubes anchas, no rompáis los cuerpecitos de los niños!’ (Conde 2007: 173) [Don’t flay them, cannon; don’t shred them, machine guns; great bombs which fall from the deep sky and which seem to be gifts from the wide clouds, don’t shatter the little bodies of the children!]. In the closing lines of her poem, Valderrama adds layers of complexity to the voice of the mother clamouring for her son: Clamo por ti, mi voz se vuelve ronca y mis pasos se tornan vacilantes…

Poetry and Silence in Post-Civil-War Spain | 55

De tanto abrir los brazos soñando en el momento de estrecharte en cruz se me han quedado ¡y noche y día en cruz vivo esperándote! ¡Oh Señor, de la paz y de la guerra, dueño de vidas y de voluntades; en mi desierto escucha este clamor como a Juan escuchaste! (Valderrama 1958: 168–69) [I call out for you, my voice grows hoarse and my steps become hesitant… From so much opening of my arms dreaming of the moment in which I will embrace you they have become stuck in a cross, and day and night in a living cross I await you! Oh Lord, of peace and of war, ruler of lives and wills; in my desert hear this clamour, as you heard John!]

The mother has spent so much time dreaming of when her son will return and she will be able to embrace him that her arms have remained open in the shape of a cross, and in that shape she remains day and night. This is a reference both to the crucifixion and also to the penitential attitude assumed by professed monks and nuns in the more austere orders before the Tabernacle: lying face down on the ground with arms outstretched in the form of a cross. Thus, the poetic voice here is trivalent: devout penitent; Christlike-sacrificial victim; and the last prophet of Christianity, John, the cousin of Christ who paved the way for his coming. Interestingly, Valderrama’s models are overtly masculine. While she may have been wary of any apparent comparison of herself with the Blessed Virgin, there are many other mothers of saints who might have provided appropriate parallels for her maternal loss. They would not, however, have provided models for her vocation, and prominence, as a writer. That being a factor, the alignment of the bereft mother with John the Baptist becomes clearer, the prophet and the poet fulfilling a comparable function in the world. The collection as a whole retains the accent of devoutness epitomised in the prayerful exhortation in the last four lines. This orthodox piety, as well as Valderrama’s impeccable right-wing credentials, probably ensured that the book was not instantly withdrawn. In fact, there is only one poem in the central section devoted to the ‘hijo amado que Dios me llevó’ [beloved son God took from me] which appears to engage more directly with the war-torn reality which brought about his death (Valderrama 1958: 143). However, she retains her impunity by employing the discourse of the

56 | Jean Andrews

victors. ‘Aniversario’ reflects on the day on which Rafael left for Salamanca in July 1936: Aniversario de esta mi agonía. ¡Cómo le veo, en la mañana clara, partir por los caminos azarosos a la conquista de la nueva España! (Valderrama 1958: 180) [Anniversary of this my agony. How I see him, in the clear morning, leaving along the hazardous roads for the conquest of the new Spain!]

Valderrama places side by side, and without irony, the high-minded ideals for which Rafael went off to fight, and in which her entire family believed, and her own suffering as a mother, compounded by the fact that her son did not come back to enjoy the spoils of victory: Tres años de dolor, de sacrificio, de inquietudes y lágrimas que, con las de las otras madres, han tejido la bandera sagrada que un día cobijó, de punta a punta, esta tierra de España. Como le vi partir no volví a verle tornar de nuevo[.] (Valderrama 1958: 180–81) [Three years of suffering, of sacrifice, of worry and tears which, with those of the other mothers, have woven the sacred flag which one day covered, from end to end, this land of Spain. As I saw him leave I did not see him return once more(.)]

In this way, behind a screen of impregnable loyalty to the cause, she managed to foreground the anguish of all those mothers whose testimony would not otherwise have been allowed in print after the war and the anxiety and weeping out of which the sacred flag of the new, Fascist Spain was woven. She would not be the only mother whose son did not return. Those other mothers, unlike her, would be condemned to individual silence, though, of course, the state would commemorate its war dead en masse, most pointedly in the cemetery, basilica and monastery of the Valle de los Caídos [Valley of the Fallen] to the north-east of Madrid, inaugurated on

Poetry and Silence in Post-Civil-War Spain | 57

the twentieth anniversary of the end of the war, on 1 April 1959. It is of equal significance that, in the immediate post-war years, the Franco regime went to enormous lengths to ensure that the fallen on the Nationalist side were repatriated to their home communities and buried with full Catholic rites. It goes without saying that no such energy was expended on the remains of the Republican dead (Olmeda 2009: 22, 313–18). The recourse of these three very different women poets, with three radically different experiences of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, to spirituality in the post-Civil War years is strikingly consistent. In the case of Sánchez Saornil, the late poems attest to a return to a more or less conventional Catholic spirituality, even if that does not in any way imply adherence to Catholic doctrine on the part of a former militant anarchist. Pilar de Valderrama was known for her ultra-Catholic views throughout her life, so perhaps her taking refuge in spiritual contemplation as a means of coping with the loss of her son is to be expected, and yet, her alignment of her own anguish with the figure of John the Baptist crying out in the desert is an act of some daring for an ultra-Catholic female, who would be expected to associate herself with female saints and keep strictly to a feminine role, as became the official Spanish Catholic norm in the first decades of the Franco regime. Conde, as might be anticipated, fits between these two extremes. A woman of deep, though hardly orthodox, spirituality, she withdrew into the realms of a highly personal mysticism as Europe collapsed around her and her own world became near impossible to negotiate, but retained an ear which was never at any point entirely deaf to the nuances of the political realities around her. As the poet observes in the final stanza of ‘Elegía’: De lejos y de oídas tenía que enamorarme con un ardor inútil, de Europa derrumbada. Y vivo a solas hoy Castilla, la rugiente de tantos huracanes como galopan. Sola. (Conde 2007: 216) [At a distance and on hearsay I had to fall in love with a useless ardour, with Europe in ruins. And I live Castile alone now, which bellows with every galloping hurricane. Alone.]

Notes 1. Here I have used the King James English translation and the Lutheran Reina Valera (1602, revised 1909) Spanish translation which follow the same chapter divisions and offer the

58 | Jean Andrews

same translation solutions. Conde may well have read the Reina Valera version, because of the beauty of expression, though, of course, the Bible in standard use in Catholic worship in the first half of the twentieth century would have been the Latin Vulgate incorporated into the Roman Missal, with the 1825 Petisco/Torres Amat parallel translations into the vernacular used in Spain. The Latin Vulgate, in the Douai Rheims translation into English, makes its views on the identity of the Shulamite more explicit than the Protestant versions, by chapter organisation. Verse 13 of King James Chapter 6 is the first verse of the Latin Vulgate Chapter 7. This links the Shulamite more explicitly to the female lover. 2. Ultraísmo was a movement established in 1918 by a group of Madrid-based poets which sought to introduce European literary modernism into Spanish poetry in reaction against the decadent fin-de-siècle aesthetic of Spanish modernismo, prevalent since the last decade of the nineteenth century. Sánchez Saornil never attended any of the Ultraísta gatherings or meetings but did publish in their magazines. See Martín Casamitjana (1996: 11–17).

References Andrews, J. 2009. ‘Carmen Conde and the Consequences of War’, in A. Ribeiro de Menezes, R.A. Quance and A.L. Walsh (eds), War and Memory in Contemporary Spain. Madrid: Verbum, pp. 67–83. Bordonada, A.E. 2010. ‘Escritoras republicanas y escritoras franquistas: Dos visiones de la Guerra Civil’, in M. Mayoral and M. del Mar Manas Martínez (eds). Memoria de la Guerra Civil en las escritoras españolas. Madrid: SIAL, pp. 13–52. Conde, C. 1944. Pasión del verbo. Madrid: Edición no venal de la autora. _______. 1945a. Ansia de la gracia. Madrid: Adonais. _______. 1945b. Signo de amor. Granada: Vientos del Sur. _______. 1953. Mientras los hombres mueren. Milan: Cisalpino. _______. 1960. En un mundo de fugitivos. Buenos Aires: Losada. _______. 1986. Por el camino, viendo sus orillas, 3 vols. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés. _______. 2007. Poesía completa, ed. E. Miró. Madrid: Clásicos Castalia. Evans, J. 1993. ‘Carmen Conde’s Mujer sin Edén: Controversial Notions of Sin’, in C. Davies (ed.), Women Writers in Spain and Twentieth-Century Latin America. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, pp. 71–83. Ferris, J.L. 2007. Carmen Conde: Vida, pasión y verso de una escritora olvidada. Madrid: Temas de Hoy. Graham, H. 2009. ‘The Memory of Murder: Mass Killing, Incarceration and the Memory of Francoism’, in A. Ribeiro de Menezes, R.A. Quance and A.L. Walsh (eds), War and Memory in Contemporary Spain. Madrid: Verbum, pp. 9–49. Harris, D. 1991. Federico García Lorca: Romancero gitano. London: Grant & Cutler. Málaga 1937 – Nunca Más. http://www.malaga1937.es/primera.html (accessed 12 February 2013). Martín Casamitjana, R.M. 1996. ‘Introducción’, in L. Sánchez Saornil, Poesía, ed. R.M. Martín Casamitjana. Valencia: Pre-Textos/IVAM, pp. 7–28. Miró, E. 1967. ‘Introducción’, in C. Conde, Obra poética, ed. E. Miró. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, pp. 39–51. _______. 2007. ‘Cita con la vida: Júblio y corrosión’, in C. Conde, Poesía completa, ed. E. Miró. Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, pp. 9–38. Nash, M. 1975. Mujeres Libres: Anarchist Women in the Spanish Civil War. Barcelona: Tusquets. Olmeda, F. 2009. El valle de los caídos: Una memoria de España. Madrid: Península.

Poetry and Silence in Post-Civil-War Spain | 59

Picón, J.L. 2008. ‘El holocausto de Málaga’, Málaga Hoy, 18 August. Preston, P. 2011. El holocausto español: Odio y exterminio en la Guerra Civil y después. Barcelona: Debate. Romero López, D. 2010. ‘Las poetas del 27: Identidad femenina en tiempos de Guerra’, in M.  Mayoral and M. del Mar Manas Martínez (eds), Memoria de la guerra civil en las escritoras españolas. Madrid: SIAL, pp. 75–108. Sánchez Saornil, L. 1996. Poesía, ed. R.M. Martín Casamitjana. Valencia: Pre-Textos/IVAM. Valderrama, P. de. 1981. Sí, soy Guiomar: Memorias de mi vida. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés. _______. 1958 (1942). Holocausto, in Obra poética. Madrid: Siler, pp. 141–85.

Jean Andrews is Associate Professor in Hispanic Studies at the University of Nottingham. She has published an edition of the Civil War poetry of the Spanish poet and first woman member of the Spanish Royal Academy, Carmen Conde (1907–1996). She has also published a translation of Conde’s war poetry and, more widely, she is now pursuing comparative research on women war writers from this same period, including Lynette Roberts, Sheila Wingfield, Irène Némirovsky and Lucía Sánchez Saornil.

Chapter 3

On Civil-War Memory in Spanish Women’s Narratives The Example of Cristina Fernández Cubas’ Cosas que ya no existen

( Alison Ribeiro de Menezes

The ‘story of Spain’ (historia as both history and story) in the twentieth century is a hotly contested narrative. From fin-de-siècle debates concerning crisis and regeneration, through Republican discourses of change and modernisation, and Civil War discourses on identity and ideology, to Francoist myths of origins and traditionalist discourses of social and political order, the story of Spain has conventionally been read in terms of mutually exclusive binaries of old and new, castizo and foreign, change and stasis, order and disorder, belonging and non-belonging. In short, it has been viewed through the lens of a crude narrative of ‘two Spains’ diametrically opposed to one another and supposedly condemned to repeated conflict (Pérez Díaz 1993: 23). If this paradigm was, for the period of the transition to democracy, pushed into the background in favour of a consensual discourse of strategic historical ‘forgetting’ that was, in Santos Juliá’s view, not so much an amnesia regarding the recent past as a desire not to let that past shape the future (1999: 11–54), its spectre is raised in current memory debates regarding the legacy of the Civil War and the period of Francoist repression. Sebastiaan Faber recently noted that the conceptual frame of the ‘two Spains’ has not disappeared from Spanish historical discourse (2007: 168–69). There is, indeed, a danger that a conflict between memories and counter-memories is emerging in contemporary approaches to the Spanish Civil War and Francoist dictatorship, embedding yet again a binary vision of ‘two Spains’ predicated upon the positions of winners and losers, perpetrators and victims, and authentic and inauthentic claims to Notes for this chapter begin on page 71.

On Civil-War Memory in Spanish Women’s Narratives | 61

victimhood. Juliá’s argument regarding a strategic sidelining of memory is based on the very same binary structures that drive the discourse of ‘two Spains’, and herein lies the difficulty: the desire to put the past to one side in order not to let it shape the future shows, paradoxically, a fear of the power of the past as well as an ability to seek ways to manage that fear. But these conceptual categories need not be mutually exclusive. The past, as Labanyi has argued, has become a ghost, an officially unsanctioned presence regarded as an absence (2000: 78). The past has also opened up to gendered memories and processes of remembrance, and I have suggested elsewhere that there are potentially enriching intersections between feminism and cultural memory to which critics should attend (Ribeiro de Menezes 2011). Indeed, it might seem tempting to include women’s writing on the Civil War within the broad parameters of Labanyi’s Spanish cultural ghost story – by which she means all previously ignored or suppressed dimensions of Spanish culture, not just traumatic historical memories (Labanyi 2002: 1). Yet to do so would be to underestimate the importance of the women’s studies contribution to Spanish memory debates, for the evidence of recent decades suggests that research and cultural production on and by women has been at the forefront of moves towards a contemporary revision of the legacies of the war and dictatorship periods. This should not surprise us. As Sally Alexander has noted (1994: 19), ‘feminist history tries to identify the gaps and silences in history – not only in the hope of restoring a fuller past, but of writing a history which might begin from somewhere else’. If the majority of the works that constitute Spain’s so-called ‘memory boom’ have appeared in the last decade or so (Ryan 2012), Josefina Aldecoa’s trilogy – comprising Historia de una maestra (1992), Mujeres de negro (1994) and La fuerza del destino (1997) – was a precocious literary exploration of the intergenerational transference of Civil-War and dictatorship memory, anticipating that wave of memorial narratives, by both men and women, that would emerge at the turn of the millennium. Since then, numerous female-authored narratives have been published, including Dulce Chacón’s Cielos de barro (2000) and La voz dormida (2004), Almudena Grandes’ El corazón helado (2007) and Inés y la alegría (2010) and Ángeles Caso’s Un largo silencio (2002), to name but a few. There has also been a strong interest in women’s participation in the Civil War, with historical studies such as Fernanda Romeu Alfaro’s El silencio roto: Mujeres contra el franquismo, from as early as 1994; Shirley Mangini’s Memories of Resistance: Women’s Voices from the Spanish Civil War, from 1995; or Carmen Alcalde’s Mujeres en el franquismo, published in 1996, all of which anticipate by some years Ricard Vinyes’ Irredentas: Las presas políticas y sus hijos en las cárceles franquistas (2002). In other media, Emilio Mártinez Lázaro has more recently explored women’s experience

62 | Alison Ribeiro de Menezes

of Francoist repression in the rather saccharine Las 13 rosas (2007), which draws upon Jesús Ferrero’s book on thirteen young women executed by the Nationalist forces for their political views. One of the features of this research has been a focus on female solidarity and on the domain of the family as a significant source of repressed memories that could have no public or shared circulation. Mangini views the female voices that she brings together in her oral history as articulating shared experiences rather than individual narratives (1995: 68), as does Romeu Alfaro, for whom the stories that she records could be those of any women living under the oppressive weight of Francoism (1994: 16). Several of the novels mentioned above explore the past in terms of intergenerational relationships, stressing the need for a bridging of the rupture of tradition that occurred within families as a result of the Nationalist victory in 1939. This is particularly the case with La voz dormida, in which emphasis is placed upon the recovery of a silenced tradition. Aldecoa’s trilogy, on the other hand, stands apart from other works by women in that it explores both intergenerational misunderstandings between its mother and daughter protagonists, and their growth towards mutual understanding (Ribeiro de Menezes 2012). The Franco regime’s domestic policies – which amounted to an invasion of the private sphere by the state, intent on exerting control in all areas of life – have been widely studied (Nash 1996, 1999), and much of the research on women and Francoism has been presented under the umbrella of motherhood/mothering and mother– daughter relations, a nexus of themes that has a broader resonance within women’s studies (Leggott 1998; Kenny 2008; Ramblado Minero 2008). Yet, there is a danger here – a potential fetishisation of the family as the privileged locus in which to explore fully traumatic memories and the experience of victimhood, thus displacing the public and shared dimensions of cultural memory with an overemphasis on the private and intimate. The novels mentioned above, for instance, focus on family sagas, although Aldecoa’s use of the family as an allegory of the nation broadens her perspective notably. It may be that Marianne Hirsch’s The Mother/ Daughter Plot (1989), as Karin Voth Harman (2004) suggests with regard to discussions of motherhood and mothering, has led to too much emphasis on intergenerational ‘overmeshment’ (Hirsch 1989: 153) which, in the context of collective memory (and more so of Hirsch’s own theory of postmemory), privileges gestures towards solidarity and transference over the exploration of disruption and conflict. Certainly postmemory privileges the domain of the family and intimacy as the locus of memory’s survival. Contrary to this perspective, I wish to examine here the ways in which Cristina Fernández Cubas’ elegantly written memoir, Cosas que ya no existen (2001), evades these dangers. Fernández Cubas locates family memories

On Civil-War Memory in Spanish Women’s Narratives | 63

within a nexus of transnational cultural memories, rather than simply by drilling down into the intimate domain of the family, and she concludes her book by critiquing an excessive emphasis on the family as the location of a resolution of a traumatic past. In the ‘Guayaquil’ section of Cosas que ya no existen, which tells of an encounter with a storyteller on a boat trip on the Amazon River, aboard the Ermelinda, Fernández Cubas reflects on the nature of place as a locus for storytelling and its remembrance: De repente tuve la sospecha de que yo volvería a oír la misma historia alguna que otra vez. El Amazonas podía convertirse en el Orinoco. La Ermelinda en un camión. El español tendría ahora otros nombres y apellidos, y los nuevos narradores asegurarían conocerle íntimamente. A él, a sus hermanos, a sus hijos o a su viuda. Otros, menos escrupulosos, la contarían probablemente como propia. Quizás la guerra no sería ya la misma. Ni el continente. Ni la lengua. Hay historias – todos conocemos tantas – que pueden con culturas y fronteras. (Fernández Cubas 2001: 120–21) [Suddenly I suspected that I would come to hear that story again. The Amazon might become the Orinoco. The Ermelinda a truck. The Spaniard would have other names and the new narrators would swear that they knew him intimately. Him, his brothers, his children or his widow. Other, less scrupulous storytellers would probably recount it as their own. Maybe the war would not be the same one. Nor the continent. Nor the language. There exist stories – we all know so many – that traverse cultures and borders.]1

As Jessica Folkhart argues, citing Judith Butler, discursive norms and mythical tales ‘often set themselves up as an original, immutable authority, yet … are actually constructed through the act of repetition or citation’ (2003: 454). Folkhart links this repetitive circulation of tales to the character Antonia García Pagès in Fernández Cubas’ ‘La Muerte cautiva’ [Death Held Captive]. While I agree with Folkhart’s reading of Antonia’s role as the transmitter of a popular wisdom embodied in her reference to ‘dicen’ [they say] as the source of her particular world-view (Fernández Cubas 2001: 49), I want to leave behind postmodernism’s subversion of ‘metanarratives’ and take the analysis of the circulation of stories and memories in Cosas que ya no existen in a new direction, one more in line with recent theoretical studies of transnational cultural memories. Michael Rothberg’s recent study, Multidirectional Memory (2009), in particular, poses interesting questions about the global circulation of memory discourses that are exemplified in the individual and collective dimensions of Cosas que ya no existen. Beginning from a dissatisfaction with what he terms the competitive ‘zero sum game’ of different collective histories and memories, especially those which, in a multicultural society, for instance, might be antagonistically defined, Rothberg proposes a model of ‘multidirectional memory’,

64 | Alison Ribeiro de Menezes

in which diverse and potentially divergent collective memory horizons are ‘subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive, not privative’ (Rothberg 2009: 3). Although Rothberg’s starting point is dual – multicultural society, on the one hand, and arguments regarding the uniqueness or not of the Holocaust, on the other – his concentration on the manner in which collective memories and debates surrounding the revisiting of traumatic events may ricochet globally, in unexpected, potentially anachronistic and even contradictory ways, is an important contribution. As Rothberg argues (2009: 5), ‘Memory’s anachronistic quality – its bringing together of now and then, here and there – is actually the source of its powerful creativity’. Or again (Rothberg 2009: 11), ‘thinking in terms of multidirectional memory helps explain the spiralling interactions that characterize the politics of memory. … The model of multidirectional memory posits collective memory as partially disengaged from exclusive versions of cultural identity and acknowledges how remembrance both cuts across and binds together diverse spatial, temporal, and cultural sites’. It is this focus on memories as malleable, as part of negotiations of identity and belonging in the present, and ricocheting across geographic and temporal boundaries, that is especially relevant to Cosas que ya no existen. Recent studies of current cultural preoccupations with memory – such as Andreas Huyssen’s Twilight Memories (1995) and Present Pasts (2003) – stress shifting perceptions of temporality as part of the rapid acceleration of modernity in the past few decades. This concern with time plays out in two ways: first, as a disruption of linear flow, as the past invades or contaminates the present (a shift towards remembrance and memorialisation is particularly evident here), and second, as a preoccupation with elements that linear temporality and modern rationality have excluded (fantasy, fairy tales, popular wisdom, ghosts and haunting). Both these elements are present in Fernández Cubas’ narration of her past. In ‘La Muerte cautiva’, the importance of death as a marker of the end of life is highlighted in an existentialist manner; but it is in ‘El salón’ [The Lounge], in which the author introduces the image of the clock on the landing at the centre of her childhood home, that time acquires a multivalent presence and role in her memoirs. This clock, which rules over the house from its ‘puesto vigía’ [place of vigilance] (Fernández Cubas 2001: 51), marking the passage of time with its tick-tock beat, in fact keeps time badly and constantly has to be reset. Indeed, the clock’s miskept time is transformed into a question of memories for the author, as temporal disruptions signal a return both of repressed recollections – notably the death of the author’s elder sister, Ana María, to which I shall return presently – and a return of repressed cultural elements. Rather than view this as the ‘struggle’ of ‘any

On Civil-War Memory in Spanish Women’s Narratives | 65

desmemoriado’ with ‘syncopated, deceitful time’, as Folkhart does (2003: 459), I want to suggest that Fernández Cubas makes use of the motif of non-linear or disrupted time in order quite deliberately to disrupt prevailing collective memory horizons and to posit her own personal ‘working through’ of family trauma as having a significance for society more broadly. In short, key elements of Fernández Cubas’ Cosas que ya no existen exemplify Rothberg’s multidirectional memory aesthetic; they are not part of a negative, zero-sum game, with the result that they contribute to a ­productive view of memory’s potential. The various sections of Cosas que ya no existen constitute traces of a past that are, in David Herzberger’s words, ‘discovered or imagined in the present’ (2005: 200). The linkages between these various fragments of memoir – fifteen in all – are neither consistent nor coherent at first sight, although they are significant and they begin to multiply from the fourth one (‘El olor de Evita’ [The Smell of Evita]) onwards. This chapter will concentrate on two groups of short narratives: ‘Los regresos’ [Returns], ‘La guerra’ [The War] and ‘Guayaquil’, which weave together references to the dirty war in Argentina with echoes of the Spanish Civil War and subsequent exile of many Spaniards; and ‘Ana María en casa’ [Ana María at Home] and ‘Bernarda Alba abre el portón’ [Bernarda Alba Opens the Door], both of which deal with the death of the author’s elder sister. I argue that these two series of memories, the first more clearly public and the second much more private, not only approach the past through imaginative speculation and emotional investment, as Herzberger indicates, but work together to create telling movements between individual and collective memories that are both cathartic for the author and a lesson for the reader. ‘Los regresos’, as its title suggests, is about the return or re-emergence of forgotten stories. It begins with a reference to the Spanish Civil War via the documentary Mourir à Madrid (1963) by Frédéric Rossif, thus establishing this conflict as a backdrop to the ensuing narrative about figures the author encountered in Argentina ‘cuando Videla’ [under Videla] (Fernández Cubas 2001: 103). Señor Ulled constitutes a link across these Spanish and Argentinian national contexts, being an exile who fled Spain to Argentina as a consequence of the Republican defeat in 1939. Fernández Cubas thus establishes an associational memory aesthetic through which national memory dilemmas traverse national borders. Indeed, the memories that the author recounts are revealed as belonging to others (‘un recuerdo prestado’, 97 [a borrowed memory]) and as a mix of different conversations anachronistically fused together (‘entremezclar imágenes y oír retazos de conversaciones de otros tiempos’, 96 [to mix images and hear snippets of conversations from other times]). Fragmentary snippets

66 | Alison Ribeiro de Menezes

of the past thus become detached from the intimacy of personal recollection, and in ‘Los regresos’ they traverse time and space in the more public realm of shared storytelling. In this respect, Fernández Cubas’ narrative underlines Maurice Halbwachs’ (1992) contention that all memories are shared and collective by their very nature. ‘Los regresos’ weaves together two stories that at first appear to be entirely separate: the disappearance of a young woman as witnessed by Señor Ulled, and the discovery of an abandoned baby by one of the author’s neighbours, whom she disparagingly names ‘Acto Fallido’ [literally, Failed Act]. Indeed, the narrator mocks Acto Fallido, discussing her apparent lack of understanding of Freud and mistakenly viewing Acto’s presentation to her of a copy of the Psychopathology of Everyday Life as evidence of her lack of social skills and intellectual capability. This judgement will, in fact, spectacularly backfire on the narrator as the dénouement of ‘Los regresos’ ultimately reveals her own ignorance of the political persecution around her. When she later returns to Argentina, to the street where Acto Fallido and Señor Ulled were her neighbours, she is unable to enter the building in which she lived. She is conscious of her desire to avoid the place – ‘como si’ [as if] is used as a linguistic metonym for her evasion of personal responsibility (102), keeping on memories a ‘tapadera’ (105), or lid. This then forces a ‘coming to terms’ with the events around her, which at the time of writing, in the late 1970s, she has also evaded, or, perhaps better, excluded from conscious reflection. Indeed, the notion of exclusion ultimately underpins the various memories that return in ‘Los regresos’. It is significant that mention is made of the narrator’s attendance at a literary conference in ‘un bonito edificio a orillas del Wannsee’ (105–106) [a beautiful building on the shores of the Wannsee] which seems to Fernández Cubas to be haunted: ‘noto ese algo en la atmósfera que se empeña en deslucir la velada. No sé lo que es; no encuentro la palabra para nombrarlo. Las puertas chirrían, las ventanas no acaban de ajustar, por los dinteles se filtran ráfagas de aire’ (106) [I note something or other in the atmosphere which threatens to spoil the evening. I don’t know what it is; I can’t find the right word for it. The doors creak, the windows don’t quite fit, the lintels let in draughts]. As if in echo of Rothberg’s argument regarding the cross-fertilisation of different memory debates, Fernández Cubas’ story here shifts from referencing the ‘disappeared’ in Argentina, which itself is prefaced by references to the Spanish Civil War, to an evocation of the Holocaust via reference to the location of the Wannsee Conference at which the deportation, exploitation and extermination of the Jews was planned in January 1942.2 The underlying connection between each of these past events is political decision-making based

On Civil-War Memory in Spanish Women’s Narratives | 67

on the exclusion of elements from society – whether on racial or political grounds. As Fernández Cubas writes, estamos frente al Wannsee, en una de las majestuosas residencias, propiedad, en otros tiempos, de acaudaladas familias judías. No precisan aquí tiempos ni cómo o por qué los antiguos moradores fueron desposeídos de sus bienes. Tampoco adónde se los llevaron. Pero los muros lo saben perfectamente. (106–107) [we look out on the Wannsee, from one of the majestic residences, formerly the property of rich Jewish families. They don’t specify when, or how, or why those who used to live here were dispossessed of their property. Nor where they were taken. But the walls know perfectly well.]

As a site of memory, the walls of the Wannsee palace bear witness to history, and Fernández Cubas’ evasive commentary – with its indirect evocation that refuses to mention the ‘Final Solution’ and the destination and fate of dispossessed Jewish families – exemplifies an associational and metonymic aesthetic that draws together various historical episodes of persecution. As Rothberg argues in his book, the Holocaust in this sense does constitute a unique event, but it also stands as a symbol for similar, if much less extensive, cases of deliberate exclusion – the underlying common principle being the notion precisely of exclusion of unwanted elements from a socio-political group. Fernández Cubas links her sense of the Wannsee house’s walls knowing lost stories from the past with her own inability to enter her old flat in Argentina, and contrasts her own lack of action with that of Acto, who – no longer regarded as ‘Fallido’ – ­intervened to save an abandoned baby belonging to one of the ‘disappeared’: ‘El acto de Acto, en las alturas, cada vez me parece más encomiable. Cuán fácil acusar a los sentimientos, engañarse a uno mismo y mirar al otro lado. … Pero Acto – y nunca tan bien dicho – no escurrió el bulto’ (108–109) [Acto’s action at the time seems to me more and more commendable. How easy to blame sentiment, to deceive oneself and look the other way. … But Acto – never was a name more merited – didn’t ignore that bundle]. Heroism, in this context, becomes simply recognising what is not publicly stated, and then acting accordingly; the author concludes, ‘yo, dejándome de rodeos, no era digna’ (107) [I – not to beat about the bush – didn’t behave in a manner worthy of respect]. Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire are here transformed into sites of silenced and traumatic memories, rather than nostalgic and celebratory moments of national affirmation. Fernández Cubas’ use of an associational aesthetic that brings to light contentious and unmastered pasts is confirmed by the episode which follows ‘Los regresos’, namely the rather enigmatic ‘La guerra’, in which a boatman on the Amazon recounts how the Spanish Civil War was the

68 | Alison Ribeiro de Menezes

greatest radio drama he has heard. The function of this short piece is surely to note both the international circulation of stories and the possible fusion between fiction and history that occurs in remembrance. ‘La guerra’, the reader is informed at the start of the next chapter, which is entitled ‘Guayaquil’, is a second-hand story recounted to the narrator in 1974 in a place which she has come to regard as the essence of storytelling and the transmission of shared narratives: ‘En la memoria, ahora, quedan todas concentradas en el mismo lugar: aquel patio umbrío’ (124–25) [In my memory, they are all concentrated now in one place: that shady patio]. In 2001, when Cosas que ya no existen was first published, the unresolved legacy of the Spanish Civil War and Francoist dictatorship was just beginning to emerge into public discourse, via such movements as the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica, founded the same year. It is difficult not to read Fernández Cubas’ allusions to Germany and Spain as part of the broader perspective offered by Mark Mazower on Europe’s ‘dark heart’ in his book Dark Continent (1998). This boomerang rebound of the colonial metaphor to the colonising continent (which of course echoes Aimé Césaire’s judgement on Fascism) fits nicely with Rothberg’s own study of the ways in which the emergence of Holocaust remembrance in the 1960s intersected with discourses of decolonisation.3 It may be added that, in choosing the case of Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ in order to point to Spain’s own unresolved past, Fernández Cubas not only follows the pattern of this particular discursive engagement with colonialism and Fascism, but also the actual pattern of events in which Latin America’s confrontation of dictatorship atrocities – mainly via the case of Pinochet in Chile, but also in Argentina – has sparked off debate in the former colonial power. Rothberg opposes his notion of multidirectional memory to the dangers of an abstract universalism that may conceal the role played by other histories and memories in bringing about changes in a particular instance of historical remembrance (his main focus of attention here is, of course, the Holocaust). His interest, not just in the global circulation of Holocaust memory, but in the ways in which coming to terms with particular instances of unmastered pasts may not necessarily align with national borders – and, indeed, may be sparked off by memory discourses that at first sight do not appear to ‘belong’ to the immediate context – is important. This is also exemplified in Fernández Cubas’ book, despite its apparent concentration on the potentially universalist theme of exclusion, the reason being that Fernández Cubas undermines any claim to universality by ending her memoir with a highly personal account of family trauma and loss. She not only traverses borders of national history and collective remembrance, but also borders between the public and

On Civil-War Memory in Spanish Women’s Narratives | 69

private dimensions of repressed memory and difficult remembrance. In so doing, she becomes an agent of memory, drawing attention to diverse memory horizons and debates, and linking them metonymically in order to engender in the reader an awareness of what Rothberg calls ‘the ethics of multidirectional memory’ (2009: 273). In this respect, the use of the genre of memoir, or life-writing, in relation to personal and public remembrance is not an innocent and unmotivated choice, although limited space ­precludes a fuller examination of this aspect here. In the second set of narratives, the author of Cosas que ya no existen tackles the traumatic memory of her elder sister’s death, and again the connection is based on the notion of the exclusion of particular experiences from conscious recognition and shared family discourse. Fernández Cubas notes the manner in which she and her family ‘closed doors’, or erased her sister from their daily life: ‘yo misma cerré puertas y corrí pestillos. La expulsé de la casa – de la casa – agitando sahumerios, exorcizando, fumigando muebles, estancias y rincones’ (214) [I closed the doors and ran home the bolts. I expelled her from the house – from home – ­brandishing purifying perfumes, exorcising, fumigating the furniture, the rooms, every little corner]. But this exclusion of a ghost from family life constituted a disservice to her sister’s memory, erasing not her death, which continued as an unacknowledged traumatic wound, but her life, and leaving them all with a haunting past, described by the author as ‘una sombra que nos impedía recordar’ (215) [a shadow that would get in the way of our remembering her]. She continues, ‘los recuerdos, como todos sabemos, necesitan ser cultivados’ (215–16) [memories, as we all know, need to be cultivated]. If the ending of ‘Ana María en casa’ acknowledges the author’s coming to terms with the tragic death of ‘Mi hermana mayor. La amiga muerta’ (217) [My older sister. My dead friend], ‘Bernarda Alba abre el portón’ narrates how it came about. The sense of oppressive mourning in this section of Cosas que ya no existen is arguably an evasive strategy, or screen, which permits the author’s mourning family to avoid any process of coming to terms with, or working through, their loss. ‘Perplejidad’ [Perplexity] is the term that she uses to designate their state of mourning: ‘perplejidad. Sin adjetivos. Una ofuscación que impide pensar, un letargo, la extraña sensación de que la vida es un tablero de ajedrez en el que se ha perdido una ficha’ (223) [perplexity. Without qualifiers. A concealment that prevents thought, a lethargy, a strange sense that life is a chessboard from which one piece is missing]. Similarly, the family’s focus on the reaction of their father to the death seems like an evasive tactic to avoid dealing with the impact that it has on themselves. For the author, the denial of normality by the family is a consequence of their sense of survivor guilt – ‘a pesar de todo, los demás siguiéramos

70 | Alison Ribeiro de Menezes

vivos’ (229) [in spite of everything, the rest of us were still alive] – and it ultimately constitutes a denial of Ana María’s own life and personality. Transformed into ‘tragedia, estupor, mente en blanco’ (228) [tragedy, stupor, a blank mind], the Bernarda Alba-esque oppressive mourning is a betrayal of Ana María’s life and memory, a crystallisation of her as embodied trauma rather than a recollection of her as an individual. Lo cuento en el capítulo anterior y sospecho que sucede en toda familia en la que uno de los miembros, en su desespero, se arroga la exclusividad del dolor. No se puede hablar aquí … de egoísmo, de complacencia en la melancolía, o de la obscenidad que acompaña a toda exhibición ostentosa de una pena. El lenguaje cinematográfico es, una vez más, preciso, frío, implacable. Alguien, no importan ahora las razones, le está chupando plano al muerto. (252) [I recount it in the previous chapter and I suspect that it happens in every family in which, out of desperation, one of the members becomes the single focus of pain. It’s not possible to speak here … of egotism, of complacency or melancholy, or of the obscene nature of all ostentatious exhibitions of grief. The cinematic idiom is, once again, precise, cold, implacable. Someone – it doesn’t matter why – is forcing the deceased out of the spotlight.]

Moreover, the remaining sisters are condemned to traumatic repetition via this imposed mourning, against which the author rebels in declaring to her father, ‘Se te ha muerto una hija. Pero te quedan cuatro’ (250) [You’ve lost one daughter. But you still have four]. Whether or not the author is indeed the stimulus to ‘el inicio de una toma de conciencia o el abandono del difuso mundo de sombras’ (251) [the beginning of a coming to awareness or the abandonment of that diffuse world of shadows] in which her family has been living is open to doubt; in the epilogue to Cosas que ya no existen, she notes the importance of a family friend in breaking the strict mourning in the home, but earlier on she had conveyed the sense that in her protest she was speaking for another, ‘como una médium, un muñeco de ventrílocuo, el canal por el que fuerzas condenadas al silencio tomaban prestada una voz, un cuerpo, una presencia’ (251) [like a medium, a ventriloquist’s doll, the channel through which forces condemned to silence found a borrowed voice, a body, a presence]. Given the stress in Fernández Cubas’ epilogue on the family’s insistence on traumatic repetition via oppressive mourning that is not being worked through, it is clear that the author sees her words of rebellion as the ventriloquised words of her dead sister who, haunting them until they confront their loss, refuses to be ‘la excusa … para que, en su nombre, los demonios de la intolerancia y la desidia se adueñaran de la casa’ (259) [the excuse … by which, in her name, the demons of intolerance and apathy should take hold of the house].

On Civil-War Memory in Spanish Women’s Narratives | 71

Behind Fernández Cubas’ apparently postmodern play with subject positions and narrative voice is an engagement with the ethics of mourning and memory, an acknowledgement of the issue of survivor guilt (which has marked Holocaust discussions, including the concept of postmemory as an imposition upon later generations), and a recognition of the potentially distorting nature of trauma as a mode of remembrance not only for those who remember but also for the dead and the victims who are remembered. In this sense, I read the final words of Cosas que ya no existen not as a negation of memory, but as an affirmation of ‘working through’. When the author notes of the large clock that dominated her family home, ‘No sé si se volvió a estropear. Ya no me acuerdo’ (262) [I don’t know if it stopped again. I can’t recall], she affirms the benefit of moving on – but she also affirms the importance of doing so directly to her reader. She has earlier noted (240), ‘Vivimos en un país de desmemoriados, no estoy revelando nada nuevo. Un país que emigró y que no se reconoce en los que ahora inmigran’ [We live in a country of people without memories, I’m not revealing anything new. A country of people who emigrated, a country no longer recognisable in those who now come here]. This explicit allusion to what elsewhere is presented via the multidirectional allusions that weave the Spanish Civil War into a network of violent and unresolved pasts points to the importance of agency – of Acto’s acts and of Fernández Cubas’ final recognition of the disservice done to the dead both in forgetting them and in refusing to acknowledge the need to move on in order to be faithful to the past. This understanding of the need not to eternally victimise goes hand in hand with the need not to fetishise the intimate domain of the family as a privileged locus for memory work.

Notes 1. There exists no published English translation of Cosas que ya no existen, whose title literally means ‘Things that no longer exist’; all translations are my own. 2. ‘The disappeared’ – ‘desaparecidos’ in Spanish – refers to the thousands of Argentines arrested between 1976 and 1983 on suspicion of left-wing terrorism by the military junta in power. The majority were murdered without trial and their bodies disposed of. The families of the victims were not informed. These operations were part of what came in the English-speaking world to be called Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ against ‘dissident citizens’. 3. To quote Rothberg (2009: 262), the ‘glaringly obvious missing piece is the question of French complicity in the Nazi genocide. The analogy as it was articulated at the time took the form of a colonial comparison: the Nazis were to the French and the Jews as the French are today to the Algerians. This analogy obscures the fact that some of the French were also to the (French and foreign) Jews as the French are to the colonized of the Empire.

72 | Alison Ribeiro de Menezes

Today that seems obvious, but it wasn’t at the time. … French society in general was in a state of denial about collaboration and the role of the Vichy regime.’

References Alcalde, C. 1996. Mujeres en el franquismo: Exiliadas, nacionalistas y opositoras. Barcelona: Flor de Viento. Aldecoa, J. 1999. Historia de una maestra, 6th edn. Barcelona: Anagrama. _______. 2000. Mujeres de negro, 7th edn. Barcelona: Anagrama. _______. 2003. La fuerza del destino. 2nd edn. Barcelona: Anagrama. Alexander, S. 1994. Becoming a Woman, and Other Essays in 19th and 20th Century Feminist History. London: Virago. Caso, Á. 2002. Un largo silencio. Barcelona: Planeta. Chacón, D. 2000. Cielos de barro. Barcelona: Planeta. ______ 2004. La voz dormida, 17th edn. Madrid: Alfaguara. Faber, S. 2007. ‘The Debate about Spain’s Past and the Crisis of Academic Legitimacy: The Case of Santos Juliá’, Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies 5: 165–90. Fernández Cubas, C. 2001. Cosas que ya no existen. Barcelona: Lumen. Ferrero, Jesús 2003. Las 13 rosas. Madrid: Siruela. Folkhart, J.A. 2003. ‘Cristina Fernández Cubas’ Cosas que ya no existen: The Mnemonics of Place and Time in Truth and Fiction’, Revista Hispánica Moderna 56 (2): 447–61. Grandes, A. 2007. El corazón helado. Barcelona: Tusquets. _______. 2010. Inés y la alegría. Barcelona: Tusquets. Halbwachs, M. 1992. On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Herzberger, D. 2005. ‘Narrating the Self and the Contingencies of Memory in Cosas que ya no existen’, in K.M. Glenn and J. Pérez (eds), Mapping the Fiction of Cristina Fernández Cubas. Newark: University of Delaware Press, pp. 200–210. Hirsch, M. 1989. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Huyssen, A. 1995. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. London: Routledge. ______ 2003. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Juliá, S. 1999. Víctimas de la guerra civil. Madrid: Temas de hoy. Kenny, N. 2008. ‘Gender and Memory in the Novels of Josefina Aldecoa’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, University College Dublin. Labanyi, J. 2000. ‘History and Hauntology; or, What Does One Do with the Ghosts of the Past? Reflections on Spanish Fiction and Film of the Post-Franco Period’, in J. Ramon Resina, Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 65–82. _______. 2002. Constructing Identity in Twentieth-Century Spain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leggott, S.J. 1998. ‘History, Autobiography, Maternity: Josefina Aldecoa’s Historia de una maestra and Mujeres de negro’, Letras Femeninas 24: 111–28. Mangini, S. 1995. Memories of Resistance: Women’s Voices from the Spanish Civil War. New Haven: Yale University Press. Mazower, M. 1998. Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century. London: Penguin.

On Civil-War Memory in Spanish Women’s Narratives | 73

Nash, M. 1996. ‘Pronatalismo y maternidad en la España franquista’, in G. Bock and P. Thane (eds), trans. J. García Bonafé, Maternidad y políticas de género: La mujer en los estados de bienestar europeos, 1880–1950. Madrid: Cátedra, pp. 279–307. _______. 1999. Rojas: Las mujeres republicanas en la guerra civil. Barcelona: Taurus. Pérez-Díaz, V.M. 1993. The Return of Civil Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ramblado Minero, M.C. 2008. ‘Madres de España/Madres de la anti-España: La mujer republicana y la transmisión de la memoria republicana’, Entelequía: Revista Interdisciplinar 7: 129–37. Ribeiro de Menezes, A. 2011. ‘Cultural Memory and Intergenerational Transfer: The Case of Inês Pedrosa’s Nas Tuas Mãos’, in A. Ribeiro de Menezes and C. O’Leary (eds), Legacies of War and Dictatorship in Contemporary Portugal and Spain. Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 79–102. _______. 2012. ‘Family Memories, Postmemory, and the Rupture of Tradition in Josefina Aldecoa’s Civil War Trilogy’, Hispanic Research Journal 13: 250–63. Romeu Alfaro, F. 1994. El silencio roto: Mujeres contra el franquismo. Madrid: Romeu Alfaro. Rothberg, M. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: University of Stanford Press. Ryan, L. 2012. ‘The Development of Child Subjectivity in La lengua de las mariposas’, Hispania 95: 448–60. Vinyes, R. 2002. Irredentas: Las presas políticas y sus hijos en las cárceles franquistas. Madrid: Temas de hoy. Voth Harman, K. 2004. ‘Immortality and Mortality in Contemporary Reworkings of the Demeter/Persephone Myth’, in A. O’Reilly (ed.), From Motherhood to Mothering: The Legacy of Adrienne Rich’s ‘Of Woman Born’. New York: State University of New York Press, pp. 137–57.

Filmography Las 13 rosas. 2007, dir. Emilio Mártinez Lázaro Mourir à Madrid. 1963, dir. Frédéric Rossif

Alison Ribeiro de Menezes is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Warwick. Her publications include Juan Goytisolo: The Author as Dissident (2005), A Companion to Carmen Martín Gaite (2008, co-authored with Catherine O’Leary), War and Memory in Contemporary Spain/Guerra y memoria en la España contemporánea (2009, co-edited with Roberta Ann Quance and Anne L. Walsh) and Embodying Memory in Contemporary Spain (2014).

Part II

The United Kingdom

(

Chapter 4

Narrating Britain’s War A ‘Four Nations and More’ Approach to the People’s War

( Daniel Travers and Paul Ward

Since 1940, memories of the Second World War have been central to understandings of British national identity.1 During the war itself, there was a concerted effort by the state to produce an unproblematic account of the war as one of Britain standing alone in adversity. At the centre of the development of this war story was Winston Churchill, charismatic leader of his people, whose lionisation proved pivotal to the creation of the British national narrative. Elements of the war considered to be in the spirit of ‘Britishness’ were deliberately maintained into the post-war period by national consensus, and features of this story, such as snatching victory from the jaws of defeat at Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, rationing, evacuation and social levelling, became the accepted version of the war experience. National commemorations across subsequent decades drew from and reasserted this particular experience, while divisive and tangential aspects of the war were largely marginalised. Though this image of the war was constructed in the immediate post-war period – indeed John Ramsden has shown that much of Churchill’s aggrandisement was ‘substantially achieved by 1955’ (2003: 80) – it has been maintained into the present.2 Historians have played a part in this construction of the British war narrative. Richard Titmuss’s official history of the war (1950) encouraged the interpretation that a ‘People’s War’ had created a ‘People’s Peace’ in the British welfare state. And A.J.P. Taylor, in an otherwise prosaic biographical note in English History 1914–1945, declared Churchill to be ‘the saviour of his country’ (1965: 4). As early as the 1960s, however, some historians set about deconstructing the ‘myth of the Blitz’, as Angus Calder later called it, a trend that re-emerged in the 1980s and 1990s (Calder 2008). This chapter explores wartime and post-war Notes for this chapter begin on page 91.

78 | Daniel Travers and Paul Ward

construction of the myth and its historiographical discussion. It examines the continuing engagement of British society with the Second World War through commemoration and memorialisation. The chapter considers the complexities of the public history of the Second World War by taking a ‘four nations and more’ approach, suggesting that the ‘Churchillian paradigm’ (Sanders 2005: 256) masks the assertion of local, regional and national identities through commemoration of the diverse experiences of war across the United Kingdom. The traditional British war narrative suggests unity and uniformity, yet there were many different experiences of war, which were often tangential to the ‘national narrative’. These other experiences, overshadowed until recently by the dominant narrative, have recently resulted in the articulation of ‘new memories’. A nuanced understanding is therefore necessary to unpick the real significance of memories of war in the formation of British identities. This chapter will take an inclusive look at the people of the United Kingdom and some of its islands, gauging the engagement with the Churchillian paradigm in populations which it has seemed to marginalise and in regions whose distinct history diverges from the ‘accepted’ version of events.

Constructing the People’s War, 1940–1951 The nature of the Second World War necessitated a massive propaganda effort by the British government. This was especially the case after 1940, when France had been invaded and defeated. The coalition government, formed in May and headed by Churchill, emerged from a bitter internal political dispute and the fall of Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister. It was essential that a sense of unity should be engendered among the British people. It was widely felt that France had fallen because it was morally weak and internally divided. In order to prevent a similar defeat in Britain were invasion to come, political leaders drew together to encourage the population to believe in victory based on moral strength and a sense of their past.3 Churchill led this propaganda campaign, and his speeches and broadcasts were grounded in British history as a struggle for freedom. Emphasising a partnership between elites and the people, he referred, for example, to ‘the spirit of the British nation … the tough fibre of the Londoners, whose forebears played a leading part in the establishment of Parliamentary institutions and who have been bred to value freedom far above their lives’.4 Churchill emerged from the war as the twentieth century’s greatest Englishman, and indeed the ‘Greatest Briton’.5 During

Narrating Britain’s War | 79

the war, however, his version of national identity was constrained by political circumstances. Churchill was a Conservative, yet he saw himself as leader of the nation rather than of his party, which had been discredited by the appeasement policy of Neville Chamberlain and his predecessors. They had been branded as the ‘guilty men’ who had brought Britain to the verge of defeat. The events of 1940, the fall of Norway and France and the retreat of the British Army to Dunkirk annulled the economic patriotism of the 1930s, when the National Government had pulled Britain through the depression. ‘MacDonald and Baldwin’, the authors of the bestselling Guilty Men declared, ‘took over a great empire, supreme in arms and secure in liberty. They conducted it to the edge of national annihilation’ (Cato 1940: 19).6 Churchill’s leadership was not the logical outcome of Conservative patriotism but a mark of its weakness, and he could not fully rely on Conservative backbenchers, the majority of whom had continued to support Chamberlain in the crucial House of Commons vote in May 1940. Churchill was therefore reliant on Labour Party support. In the late 1930s, some prominent Labour figures had vocally criticised the foreign policy of the National Government, and had called for rearmament to combat Fascism. They combined two forms of patriotism; an outwardlooking patriotism that sought to defend the nation was linked to an inward-looking version that concerned itself with the condition of the people (Ward 2002). In 1940, Labour pursued both of these patriotic agendas in parallel, and added considerable strength to the notion of the People’s War. Many propagandists used the ‘People’s War’ solely to promote unity but Labour’s version suggested a forced realignment of ideas of national identity. J.B. Priestley, second only to Churchill in broadcasting popularity, tied patriotism into the material needs of the people, calling for radical social change. Priestley and Churchill can be seen as complementary, one valorising the homely (the little pleasure-steamers evacuating soldiers from Dunkirk), the other offering ‘blood, toil, tears, and sweat’, the traditional needs of patriotism (Baxendale 1999). But Churchill sought to have Priestley prevented from broadcasting on the BBC. Politics had not been forgotten. Labour served in the government but prepared for an early post-war election. Throughout the war, the party emphasised a democratic and working-class version of national identity. It argued that its socialism was suited to British conditions. The outcome, in 1945, was an electoral landslide for the Labour Party. The new Labour government maintained this commitment to combining patriotism and socialism, constructing a nationalised rather than socialised welfare state in the National Health Service, National Insurance

80 | Daniel Travers and Paul Ward

and the National Coal Board. In 1951, the Labour Government organised the Festival of Britain to reaffirm its Britishness. The Festival, which saw two thousand events staged across the country and eighteen million people visiting its various sites, can be deemed a success but it was the last episode in Labour’s dominance of the People’s War message (Conekin 2003). In 1951, Labour lost the general election. Churchill was restored to Downing Street, and outward-looking patriotism, signified in the imperial context of the coronation in 1953, was once more dominant. Whereas wartime propaganda emphasised the role of millions of ordinary Britons, 1950s British culture saw a reassertion of the contribution made by elites and individuals. Films such as The Dam Busters (1954), The Colditz Story (1955) and Reach for the Sky (1956) reiterated the Churchillian message that the many owed so much to ‘the few’ (Ramsden 1998; Aldgate and Richards 2007). The ‘People’ were still presented as being engaged in the war but in supporting roles and, as such, not entitled to share in the fruits of a hard-won victory.

Collective Remembrance and the Churchillian Paradigm The publication of Churchill’s The Second World War in six volumes between 1948 and 1953 certainly helped to cement Churchill’s image, as well as reinforce popular conceptions of the war already being solidified within the minds of the public. This is not to say, however, that the conservative Churchillian myth is unchanging. As Mark Connelly has shown (2004: 11), it is always in evolution, much like Britain itself. Britain’s changing demography is partly responsible. As veterans grow old and leave the custody of Britain’s heritage in the hands of a younger generation, the new group memorialises events which it did not experience.7 Immigration and Britain’s developing ethnic diversity have also fostered an interest in the contribution of West Indians and other ethnic groups during the war.8 Such shifts in the politics of meaning associated with the memory of war have not dislodged its significance in popular cultural representations of national identity. Interest in the war has resulted in the production of thousands of books, films, television programmes, BBC documentaries and websites,9 museums, heritage sites, festivals and plays. The extent of public consumption of war heritage is such that Raphael Samuel has likened it to ‘religious fervour’, with sites and museums as ‘shrines’ to Britain’s war memory (1994: 153). While there has been much change, most war commemoration in Britain continues to be based on the series of myths which focus largely on the events of 1940.10 The prevalence of this collective remembrance has resulted in the construction of a standard set

Narrating Britain’s War | 81

of images, utilised for commemoration and memorialisation of Second World War events. The Union Flag, Vera Lynn songs, the Spitfire, V for Victory and Churchill’s image with hat and bow tie are perennial favourites. These commemorative tropes have proved sufficiently powerful to frame the way in which people remember the war (Ward 2005). At times, the myth surrounding the war has actively shaped British politics. In 1982, Michael Foot, the leader of the Labour Party (and co-author of Guilty Men in 1940), accused Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister, of appeasement of Argentina over the Falklands Islands: yet she responded by calling for a return to ‘Churchillian values’ to see Britain through a time of crisis.11 In the late 1980s and 1990s, dates of remembrance such as D-Day and VE Day became more than just religious services in local churches: they were big events designed not only to commemorate the dates but to celebrate Britain’s victorious involvement in the war. Performative commemorations of the war became national celebrations, and the fiftieth anniversaries witnessed ‘a sustained and popular expression of remembrance [which] has no precedent within British history’ (Evans and Lunn 1997: 12). Hundreds of veterans turned out for celebrations in London, with fireworks, displays and concerts.12 Since the late 1960s, a number of scholars have sought to understand or deconstruct the many myths of the Churchill paradigm.13 In 1969, Angus Calder’s The People’s War (163–225) challenged the view of the unity of the home front by examining wartime labour disputes and class divisions. He argued that the war did not eliminate class grievances and ‘sweep society onto a new course’ at all, but instead hastened ‘its progress along the old grooves’ (Calder 1969: 17). Henry Pelling (1970) suggested that there was much less support for the war effort in Britain than had once been thought, and that support lessened the closer to victory the nation came. Such scholarship created an environment in which nearly all aspects of the war could be questioned – in parallel with the continuing public commemoration of the war. Churchillian rhetoric from Margaret Thatcher encouraged the deconstructionists, who sought to undermine her use of the past to support her political programme.14 Nicholas Harman, for example, sought to show the retreat from France as defeat rather than victory – the rout of a disorderly mob fleeing for their lives across the English Channel. The concept of the ‘Dunkirk spirit’, he argued, was constructed ‘necessarily’ to preserve British morale in one of the darkest periods of the war, and was maintained into the post-war era (Harman 1981: 10–11, 235–49).15 Most controversial of the ‘myth-busters’, the civil servant-turned-writer Clive Ponting placed considerable importance on debunking the myth of the ‘finest hour’, both the personalities and politics of the era, and demanded that Britain ‘face up to reality’ (1990).

82 | Daniel Travers and Paul Ward

Mark Connelly has labelled Harman, Ponting and others ‘sensational revisionists’ (2004: 10). Though sensational, they certainly have some of their ‘facts’ right. There is a series of unfortunate incidents on which they can draw to support their debunking, such as the Bethnal Green tube disaster in 1943, when 173 people were crushed to death in a disorganised attempt to get to the safety of an air-raid shelter. Such incidents tend to undermine the spirit of unity that the Churchillian paradigm privileges. In 1969, Calder argued that ‘if a mythical version of the war still holds sway … every person who lived through those years knows that those parts of the myth which concern his or her own activities are false’ (15). However, the popular conception of events such as the defeat at Dunkirk or ‘the Blitz spirit’ is not based entirely on falsehoods, for, as Lucy Noakes has shown, the fact that there is a persistent, dominant popular conception of the war at all indicates that there is ‘truth’ behind the myth. Popular memory is created when public discourse and private memory intersect; therefore, the images that are exposed to the public about the war cannot be alien from their own remembrance. In order for such memories to exist, they must ‘have purchase’ on people’s personal experiences (Noakes 1998: 12–25). While Harman stresses the difference between the ‘reality’ of the events at Dunkirk and popular memory and celebration, he too recognises that, ‘as with all good working myths, parts of the traditional Dunkirk story are true. The truth of other parts is poetic rather than literal’ (1981: 10). The current academic trend is to favour the interpretation of the Churchillian myth as a well-adhered-to explanation of the war’s events, rather than outright fiction. Calder’s The Myth of the Blitz, Malcolm Smith’s Britain and 1940 and Connelly’s We Can Take It! all seek to explain the hold that Second World War imagery has over public imagination rather than to dismiss it. Smith has suggested that popular culture has had significant agency in controlling ‘big facts’ of the war like Dunkirk, the Blitz and Churchill, whereas historians have maintained control over only ‘small facts’ (Smith 2000: 3–4). As David Lowenthal has argued, memory of the past is not a solid object; it can be forgotten, revised and made to conform (1985: 200–209). Though events that occurred inform contemporary memory, it is prosthetic memory, a creation of the intersection between memory, history and popular culture. The Churchillian myth is so widely held, so well rehearsed and so well celebrated that it actively shapes remembrance, both public and private. It no longer matters which aspects of the myth can be pigeonholed into ‘true’ and ‘untrue’. Such common mythology is integral to the nation as a social group, and a ‘common sense of the past’ is important to collective identity (Smith 2000: 2). Sonya Rose has argued that although Britons ‘could not articulate a unitary

Narrating Britain’s War | 83

national identity’ during the war this does not necessarily mean that they did not pull together to defeat the enemy. Despite divisions based on class, gender, ethnicity and region, efforts made during the war were not dependent on a single ‘core identity’ (Rose 2003: 290). Likewise, ‘being British’ after the war has involved a sense of ownership of the myth, as a national narrative, and a way of reflecting present British cultural values (Noakes 1998: 3–11). However, to achieve this common mythology, aspects of the war which would prove detrimental to it have tended to be downplayed. The prevalence of the images of war prescribed by the Churchillian myth have, by and large, overwhelmed other aspects of Britain’s war, minimising more divisive and tangential aspects of the British wartime experience. In the more disturbed circumstances of France during the Second World War, Henry Rousso has called this ‘a structuring of forgetfulness’ (Rousso 1995). Negative history is often concealed, because forgetting divisive aspects of the war, such as occupation, internment, racism and antiSemitism, is as important for perception as remembering those which are optimistic and unifying. The sense of heroism, glory and unity that was created out of the events of 1940 filters some of the more distasteful aspects of the war in order to maintain its own power. This in turn impacts on which elements of the myth manifest themselves in Britain’s ‘sites of memory’.

Museums and the Myth The perpetuation of a largely consistent national mythology over the last seventy years has ensured that a heritage legacy has been created which encapsulates it. The Churchillian paradigm now manifests itself as one dominant version of British national identity displayed in heritage sites and museums. As Jenni Calder has argued, ‘museums today have a much keener awareness of their public’, and, in pragmatic terms, this means that to attract visitors, a museum or heritage site must be prepared to display objects and exhibits which are expected of them (Calder 2000: 41). Factual liberties taken by heritage sites and commemorations in Britain often mirror the selectivity of the Churchillian paradigm. Museums often tend to celebrate those aspects of the past which are integral to a sense of national unity and downplay those which are detrimental to it (Lowenthal 1996: 156–62). Through selection of artefacts, storyboards, information and exhibits, museum curators often reconstruct the Churchillian myth in Britain’s museums. Though reception of the message conveyed by conventional museums is dependent on the individual, all museums have the

84 | Daniel Travers and Paul Ward

capacity to reflect the interests of a nation, often by omitting aspects which are in direct opposition to it (Merriman 1991: 16–18). Over the last sixty years, museum exhibits, living-history sites and special exhibitions in the United Kingdom have been created in response to the people’s desire to reflect the dominant image of the war which exists in public consciousness. Museums such as the Imperial War Museum (IWM), with its carefully preserved war relics, can be considered conduits of Britain’s beliefs and values (Duncan and Wallach 1980). As Andrew Whitmarsh has argued, Myths are notably present at the IWM. The IWM’s flyer for its Spitfire Summer exhibition, marking the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Battle of Britain, provides an example. Described as a ‘commemorative exhibition’ about ‘Britain’s “finest hour”’ (a phrase from wartime propaganda), its very title alludes to one of the mythic icons of the war, the Spitfire. The flyer is illustrated with famous images such as propaganda posters of Sir Winston Churchill and members of the RAF and WAAF, a London bus in a bomb crater, and Tower Bridge with smoke billowing in the background. Surmounting the images is an extract from Churchill’s famous ‘We shall fight them on the beaches’ speech. (Whitmarsh 2011)

The opening of the Cabinet War Rooms in Whitehall, in conjunction with a museum dedicated to Winston Churchill, provides additional confirmation of the importance of Churchill’s image within the British imagination. As Malvern argues (2000: 179), ‘The Imperial War Museum displays its collections to tell stories and to represent the nation to itself. The assumption that the nation is a homogenous ethnic grouping has implications for the status and definition of its assembled artefacts, including its works of art’.16 ‘Theme museums’ also display elements popular to common perception of the war. At Eden Camp, a history theme museum housed in a disused prisoner-of-war camp in North Yorkshire, visitors can smell the smoke from a bombed-out building during the Blitz and walk down a typical British ‘street at war’. The image of the home front, of a British family sitting around a radio set listening to news on the outbreak of war, is deliberately contrasted with the militarism of Germany, with soldiers in beer halls and children giving Fascist salutes. As Stuart Hannabuss has shown (2000), this type of heritage is about what the provider expects the visitor to know and want, as well as what the visitor is interested in seeing. The Churchillian paradigm, therefore, has a particular hold on public imagination in Britain, and museums generally choose to exhibit artefacts which visitors expect.

Narrating Britain’s War | 85

New Narratives Such representations have often been in conflict with the diversity of the British Isles. In 1989, Hugh Kearney identified eight cultures in the archipelago, combined with a number of other ‘distinct subcultures’, and this is complicated further by the variety of constitutional relationships within the isles (2006: 10).17 Since 1998, Scotland has had its own parliament, and Northern Ireland and Wales have had assemblies (with different powers). The Isle of Man, Jersey and the other Channel Islands are self-governing British Crown Dependencies and, additionally, some areas of the country can be considered to have strong regional identities, such as northeast and south-west England and Yorkshire. Equally, David Cesarani has drawn attention to the relationship between the myth of the war and Britain’s developing ethnic diversity. The resonances of war in British national identity continue to divide the population along racial lines. Thousands of West Indians and Indians served in the British armed forces in 1939–45, but this fact hardly registers in public memory of the war … . The war is taken to evoke the British at their best, the qualities of Churchill’s ‘island race’ … . It helps construct a sense of nation and nationality that excludes the bulk of post-1945 immigrants. (Cesarani 1996: 69)

As Cesarani points out here, there is some demythologising to be undertaken. When Britain ‘stood alone’, it was an empire that stood alone, and internal migration had already created a multi-racial Britain (Spencer 1995). Over the last fifteen years, a number of memorials and special exhibitions have explored these diverse war experiences and events, and this shift in representation is reflected in the official story of the war at the Imperial War Museum. With the election in 1997 of a Labour government that considered Britishness to be the product of diversity, there has been a considerable shift in the way in which the Second World War has been remembered and memorialised. Hence the history of ethnic minorities in Britain during the war is beginning to get some recognition. In 2008, the Imperial War Museum held a special exhibition called ‘From War to Windrush’ on the contribution of West Indians in Britain during and after the war. The exhibition was curated in conjunction with the Equiano Society and Windrush Foundation, with the aid of historians, including Stephen Bourne.18 It estimated that there were somewhere between fifteen thousand and forty thousand West Indians in England, Scotland and Wales when war broke out. Such examples of minority representation within British heritage represent ‘a small flare into the night sky’ in

86 | Daniel Travers and Paul Ward

an aspect of the war that is grossly underrepresented (Bourne 2010: 13). Many museums still elide the contribution of Black Britons with the imperial contribution (as is the case at Eden Camp) rather than considering them as part of the British home front. Likewise, the territorial diversity of the contribution to the war effort is now being explored by historians, heritage sites and museums. The historiography and memory of the war in Wales and Scotland have shifted from considering the common British experience to seeking to understand difference alongside common purpose.19 Angela Gaffney has written about the memory of the war in Wales (2007). When a fallen soldier is memorialised in Wales, she argues, he or she is commemorated as a British rather than Welsh citizen, reflecting the sense of Britishness that was felt during the war. Matthew Cragoe and Chris Williams (2007: 5) have also argued that there was an ‘absence of a clear Welsh dimension to the conflict’, but that does not negate the need for more to be written specifically on Wales and the Second World War.20 The common British experience of war in Scotland is symbolised in the number of books about Scottish regiments of the British Army.21 More recently, the distinctive experience of Scotland’s contribution has been emphasised, and developing devolution, especially in the wake of the independence referendum in 2014, is likely to ­encourage this further.22 Historiography and memory in Northern Ireland are affected by the divided nature of national identity in the six counties. Books that emphasise Northern Ireland’s participation in the war effort are likely to be divisive. John W. Blake’s 1956 work, Northern Ireland in the Second World War, with its comprehensive 569 pages covering every aspect of the war from population trends during the war to Northern Irish regiments in north Africa, continues to be the official ‘war diary’ of Northern Ireland but is effectively a history of the Unionist population.23 On the other hand, Brian Girvin (2006) and Tony Gray (1997) have explored Northern Ireland’s role in the war in the context of ‘Irish history’.24 Ethnic and national diversity do not operate in parallel to one another, and recent work by Wendy Ugolini analysing the experience of those born in Scotland of Italian parentage during the war also explores the construction of a more complex memorialisation of the war. For example, she describes the memorialisation of the eight hundred internees and crew killed on the SS Arandora Star when it was sunk by a U-boat in July 1940. In 2005, Colonsay islanders unveiled a granite tablet to victims of the sinking, while, in 2008, Liverpool unveiled a memorial plaque at Pier Head, from where the ship sailed.25 Yet Ugolini (2011: 228–30) warns that the tragedy threatens to overshadow other aspects of Italian-Scottish wartime experience, such as the enlistment of second-generation Italians in the

Narrating Britain’s War | 87

British Forces and the experiences of women on the home front in a period of intense anti-Italian hostility. Contributing additional complexity to the war story and its commemoration are ‘the other British Isles’ (Moore 2005) of the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. These islands experienced a different war from the United Kingdom and at the same time, because of their size, find it more difficult to have their voices heard against the dominant noise of the Churchillian paradigm. On the Isle of Man, 1940 served not as the moment of constructed glory, but rather signalled a massive change in fortunes for the Manx. As the situation in Europe reached crisis levels in late spring, the British government took radical steps to protect Britain against ‘fifth columnists’. In a broad sweep, German, Italian and Japanese civilians living in Britain were apprehended and interned (Gillman and Gillman 1980). The Isle of Man was selected by the British government as a site to house fourteen thousand enemy aliens, and ‘camps’ were created from commandeered hotels and private residences along the Manx coastline. The ‘little Manx nation’ was, for a short time at least, an island prison (Chappell 2005). The inherently divisive nature of the Isle of Man’s experience of the war, combined with strong notions of what it is to be ‘Manx’, means that commemorations of the war’s events are different from those of its British neighbour. To take one example, the ‘Wire and Wool’ festival, a promenade play in Port Erin in 2005, showcased the island’s domestic role during the war by exploring the experience of internment from both internee and islander perspectives.26 Accepting the divisiveness caused by the arrival of internees on the Isle of Man and embracing a darker side of the ‘People’s War’ were not in keeping with the traditional ‘finest hour’ celebrations in which the United Kingdom participates. However, the ‘official’ version of Manx war history emphasises the centrality of internment. The Manx Museum, the island’s flagship cultural institution, stresses this aspect of the island’s wartime experience and limits representation of Man’s military role to a very small section of the museum. The uniqueness of internment on Man is neatly packaged and made accessible for consumption by resident and visitor alike (Travers and Heathorn 2008). Contrary to the United Kingdom, which gives pride of place to the celebration of its military role and the contribution of the home front, Manx National Heritage celebrates its own sense of place by stressing its part in what was described by a Conservative MP in 1940 as ‘a bespattered page of our history’ (Cazalet). The Channel Islands were the only part of the British Isles to be occupied by the Nazis: and they therefore have a particularly distinct wartime history. Until very recently, war memory in the islands was strongly linked with the Churchillian paradigm, perhaps deliberately overshadowing

88 | Daniel Travers and Paul Ward

some of the disunities and inglorious aspects of the islands’ wartime narrative (Sanders 2005). The uniqueness of their situation and the fact that Britain continued to fight on their behalf makes this an understandable choice – islanders never considered themselves ‘conquered’ as long as Britain remained undefeated and defiant. By aligning their part in the war with Britain’s experience, rather than with their conquered continental neighbours, islanders found consolation in a narrative which saw Britons as victors and not victims. The Channel Islands’ story, therefore, was fastened to the experience in Britain. It became a meta-narrative, with the war seen as a time when the population pulled together during crisis and privation. This allowed both Britain and the islands to ‘save face’ over the events of Occupation and to stress the continuity of association with the Crown. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, Channel Islanders were obliged to look introspectively at their society and its wartime role. The burgeoning of Holocaust studies in the 1980s and the opening of new files on the Occupation in London in the early 1990s meant a renewed scholastic interest in the Channel Islands’ wartime experience. A series of publications in the mid-1990s, the most famous of which was Madeleine Bunting’s The Model Occupation, cast a critical eye over the behaviour of islanders during the war years (Bunting 1995). In light of these new developments, divisive and unsavoury aspects of the Occupation were openly discussed, perhaps for the first time since the war. German forces implemented restrictions on islanders, actively sought out Jews and deported many non-Jewish islanders to Germany, while some islanders collaborated in varying degrees with the occupying forces. Another dark aspect of the Channel Islands’ experience was the use of slave labour by the Nazi Organisation Todt, a civil and military engineering organisation which constructed gun-turrets, bunkers and observation towers for the defence of the islands, many of which remain in the current landscape (Cruickshank 2004). Since the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war in 1995, a transition has occurred in the Channel Islands’ commemorations, memorials and museums, as a result of the new historiography (Carr 2010). This has resulted in the development of a number of events and sites which break with the traditional British wartime narrative. In Jersey, for example, a tablet dedicated to citizens killed while attempting to escape was placed in the Occupation Tapestry Gallery in 1995, and the parishioners of Saint Ouen voted to add the name of a woman deported to a German concentration camp for harbouring an escaped slave-worker to the parish’s war memorial. In 1996, a memorial was erected outside the Maritime Museum in Saint Helier to deportees who did not return. The ‘Occupation Memorial’, a website created out of a partnership between Jersey Heritage, the Société Jersiaise and the Jersey Evening Post, provides details of deportees, slave-workers, Jews

Narrating Britain’s War | 89

and military deaths for all of the Channel Islands.27 The Channel Islands now display their dissonant wartime heritage to emphasise their different experience from mainland Britain. The most recent addition to memorialisation of the Second World War in the United Kingdom emerged from international developments. The UK Government was a signatory to the statement of commitment negotiated in Stockholm by forty-four countries in 2000 to ‘recognise that the Holocaust shook the foundations of modern civilisation’ and agreed that ‘we believe the Holocaust must have a permanent place in our nation’s collective memory’.28 This implied recognition of the ‘universal’ nature of war memorialisation, through recognition of the ‘unique’ nature of Nazi extermination policies. Holocaust Memorial Day was established to ‘preserve the memory’ of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides. Such examples show that different experiences of the war are beginning to be memorialised and celebrated alongside the primary narrative. The presence of new memorials, such as the memorial to civilian workers in Coventry Cathedral built in 1999, reflects what Angela Gaffney has described as groups ‘belatedly seeking recognition for their efforts’ (2007: 196).

Conclusion Memories of the Second World War have therefore been central to understandings of British national identity but such memories have not been static. In the 1940s, the war was fought and remembered as ‘the People’s War’, which had radical political implications. In the 1950s, with a Conservative government in power under Churchill, the war was remembered differently, celebrated as a democratic but Conservative version of Britishness, emphasising the importance of constitutional history rather than popular involvement. It was this version which gained dominance, continually reconstructed through popular culture and commemoration. Though the 1960s saw a shift in historiography, the ‘Churchillian paradigm’ survived challenges to its authority, and its central images remained in the official sphere and popular imagination. As Britain changed over the last half-century, the assertion of new collective identities became more common. Some of these emphasised differences with the dominant Churchillian version of the war, but others were claims to be included within British national identity, emerging in part from the desire to pluralise understandings of Britishness, particularly under the Labour ­government of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Such stories, however, have a long way to go before they gain the kind of recognition that Churchillian imagery still holds. Despite recent

90 | Daniel Travers and Paul Ward

developments, the iconography of a depoliticised ‘People’s War’ still heavily influences Second World War sites in Britain. The Churchillian myth has been deliberately preserved, available to be consumed by the British public, and called upon to exude values of unity and shared experience. Having been tied into a narrative for close to seventy years, the imagery that has accompanied it has found it difficult to accommodate variations. As Paul Connerton has shown, the continued performance of commemoration, in this case of events such as D-Day and VE Day, has ensured that such societal memory is transformed from being an aspect of Britain’s landscape of remembrance to being part of Britain’s national identity (1989: 3–4). Other stories have taken a back seat to Churchillian narrative. The emergence of new narratives stems from a new feeling of obligation to memorialise. The lack of enthusiasm for memorialisation in the immediate post-war period has led to conceptions of what Nick Hewitt has called an ‘Uncommemorated Generation’, based on the apparent lack of tangible memorials to the Second World War (2003: 82, 85). In the last fifteen years, people and organisations have pushed for the commemoration of individual stories, alongside, not as opposed to, the ‘national’ narrative. Such forms of commemoration, however, are still retrospective rather than forward-looking, as an attempt to ‘“turn the page” of history … is greeted with suspicion or scorn’ (Wood 1999: 1). There has been ‘heritage inflation’ – the growth of multiple, sometimes competing narratives – and some have met new narratives with a sense of hostility (Hoelscher 2006: 201). Exploring and commemorating the diversity of experience in Britain’s past has been seen as an attempt to undermine Britain’s story of greatness, in which Winston Churchill played the leading role. Historians in the 1960s sought to challenge what became known as the myth of the Blitz, suggesting that historical reality differed from propaganda and memory: yet historians had played a role in the construction of the People’s War and Churchillian narratives, and, since the 1990s, they have been more interested in understanding memory than in ‘myth-busting’. They have played a role in reinserting diverse experiences into the broader narrative; yet as long as the Churchillian paradigm maintains its public dominance, new narratives will need to battle for a share in Britain’s Second World War memories and, therefore, in its national identity.

Acknowledgements The authors are grateful to the Société Jersiaise for the provision of a Millennium History Grant that made some of the research for this chapter possible.

Narrating Britain’s War | 91

Notes  1. For comparative perspectives on national identity, history and memories of the war, see Alon Confino (2005) and Patrick Finney (2010).  2. For example, Lucy Noakes has shown how the notion of Churchillian values has been deployed in the War on Terror. See Noakes (2014: 47–61).  3. See, for example, Robert Mackay (2002).  4. Quoted in John Baxendale (1999: 309).  5. John Ramsden (2002) and ‘Great Britons: Churchill’, BBC Two, November 2002, http:// www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p008ltzv (accessed 7 November 2013).  6. ‘Cato’ was the pseudonym taken by three journalists, Michael Foot, Peter Howard and Frank Owen.  7. For the impact of age on national identity, see Steve Fenton (2007).  8. See, for example, Marika Sherwood (1985), Bousquet and Douglas (1991) and Webster (2014).  9. See, for example, ‘WW2 People’s War: An Archive of World War Two Memories’, http:// www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/ (accessed 7 November 2013). The site contains fortyseven thousand stories and fifteen thousand images. 10. For a more complete explanation of the Churchillian myth, see Connelly (2004: 1–3). 11. Thatcher invoked Churchill’s name 214 times in speeches, interviews and other statements between 1979 and 1990. See http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/default. asp (accessed 7 November 2013). 12. Nick Hewitt (2003) has argued that a ‘war-obsessed press’ bears responsibility for this expansion of memorialisation that coincided with ‘an explosion of commemorative journalism’. 13. This was related to a parallel historical revisionism about the First World War, explored, for example, in Dan Todman (2005). 14. Historians also attacked Thatcher for her championing of ‘Victorian values’: see Raphael Samuel (1992). 15. See also Stuart Hylton (2001). 16. See also Noakes (1998: 36–45). 17. This chapter does not discuss the role of Ireland in the Second World War or subsequent memory, for which see, for example, Jane Leonard (1997). 18. ‘From War to Windrush exhibition – extended due to popular demand’, Imperial War Museum, http://www.iwm.org.uk/server/show/ConWebDoc.5290/ (accessed 9 Aug 2013). The Imperial War Museum North held an exhibition on ethnic diversity in the Second World War, called ‘Mixing It’, in the autumn of 2015. 19. The changing nature of the historiography of the Second World War is represented in Ugolini and Pattinson (2015), reflecting the proceedings of a conference on this topic held recently at the University of Edinburgh. 20. See, for a recent example, Martin Johnes (2012), chapter 1. 21. See, for example, Saul David (1994) and Patrick Delaforce (2004: 109–204). 22. See, for example, Simon Wood’s work (1997), written to support the requirements of the national curriculum in History for five- to fourteen-year-old children, and Trevor Royle (2011). 23. See also Brian Barton (1989) and Stephen Douds (2011), who link the history of the city of Belfast with others in the UK. 24. See also Ian S. Wood (2010: 171–92). 25. There are also memorials to the disaster in Middlesbrough and Cardiff.

92 | Daniel Travers and Paul Ward

26. Interview with Dawn Maddrell, Director, Isle of Man Arts Council, conducted by the authors (15 May 2006). 27. Occupation Memorial, http://www.thisisjersey.co.uk/hmd/ (accessed 11 March 2013). 28. Holocaust Memorial Day, http://hmd.org.uk/about/timeline/ (accessed 11 November 2013).

References Aldgate, A. and J. Richards. 2007. Britain Can Take It: British Cinema in the Second World War. London: I.B. Tauris. Barton, B. 1989. The Blitz: Belfast in the War Years. Belfast: Blackstaff. Baxendale, J. 1999. ‘“You and I – All of Us Ordinary People”: Renegotiating Britishness in Wartime’, in N. Hayes and N. Hill (eds), Millions Like Us? British Culture in the Second World War. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 295–322. Blake, J.W. 2000 (1956). Northern Ireland in the Second World War. Belfast: Blackstaff. Bourne, S. 2010. Mother Country: Britain’s Black Community on the Home Front 1939–45. Gloucestershire: The History Press. Bousquet, B. and C. Douglas. 1991. West Indian Women at War: British Racism in World War II. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Bunting, M. 1995. The Model Occupation. London: Harper Collins. Calder, A. 1969. The People’s War. New York: Random House. ________. 2008 (1991). The Myth of the Blitz. London: Random House. Calder, J. 2000. ‘From Artefacts to Audience: Strategy for Display and Interpretation’, in J.M. Fladmark (ed.), Heritage and Museums: Shaping National Identity. Dorset: Donhead, pp. 41–52. Carr, G. 2010. ‘The Archaeology of Occupation: A Case Study from the Channel Islands’, Antiquity 84 (323): 161–74. Cato. 1940. Guilty Men. London: Victor Gollancz. Cazalet, V. 1940. House of Commons Debates, 22 August 1940, vol. 364 c1538, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/commons/1940/aug/22/internees-1/ (accessed 30 October 2011). Cesarani, D. 1996. ‘The Changing Character of Citizenship and Nationality in Britain’, in D.  Cesarani and M. Fulbrook (eds), Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe. London: Routledge, pp. 57–73. Chappell, C. 2005. Island of Barbed Wire: The Remarkable Story of World War Two Internment on the Isle of Man. London: Hale. Churchill, W. 1948-1953. The Second World War. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Conekin, B. 2003. The Autobiography of a Nation: The 1951 Festival of Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Confino, A. 2005. ‘Remembering the Second World War, 1945–1965: Narratives of Victimhood and Genocide’, Cultural Analysis 4: 46–65. Connelly, M. 2004. We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War. London: Longman. Connerton, P. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cragoe, M. and C. Williams. 2007. ‘Introduction’, in M. Cragoe and C. Williams (eds), Wales and War: Society, Politics and Religion in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, pp. 3–7. Cruickshank, C. 2004. The German Occupation of the Channel Islands. London: The History Press.

Narrating Britain’s War | 93

David, S. 1994. Churchill’s Sacrifice of The Highland Division, France 1940. London: Brasseys. Delaforce, P. 2004. Monty’s Northern Legions: 50th Northumbrian and 15th Scottish Divisions at War 1939–1945. Stroud: Sutton. Douds, S. 2011. Belfast Blitz: The People’s Story. Belfast: Blackstaff. Duncan, C. and A. Wallach. 1980. ‘The Universal Survey Museum’, Art History 3: 448–69. Evans, M. and K. Lunn. 1997. War and Memory in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Berg. Fenton, S. 2007. ‘Indifference towards National Identity: What Young Adults Think about Being English and British’, Nations and Nationalism 13: 321–39. Finney, P. 2010. Remembering the Road to World War Two: International History, National Identity, Collective Memory. London: Routledge. Gaffney, A. 2007. ‘“The Second Armageddon”: Remembering the Second World War in Wales’, in M. Cragoe and C. Williams (eds), Wales and War: Society, Politics and Religion in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, pp. 184–203. Gillman, P. and L. Gillman. 1980. Collar the Lot: How Britain Interned and Expelled its Wartime Refugees. London: Quartet. Girvin, B. 2006. The Emergency: Neutral Ireland 1939–45. Oxford: Macmillan. Gray, T. 1997. The Lost Years: The Emergency in Ireland 1939–45. London: Little Brown. Hannabuss, S. 2000. ‘How Real Is Our Past? Authenticity in Heritage Interpretation’, in J.M. Fladmark (ed.), Heritage and Museums: Shaping National Identity. Shaftesbury: Donhead, pp. 351–65. Harman, N. 1981. Dunkirk: The Necessary Myth. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Hewitt, N. 2003. ‘A Sceptical Generation? War Memorials and the Collective Memory of the Second World War in Britain, 1945–2000’, in D. Geppert (ed.), The Postwar Challenge: Cultural, Social, and Political Change in Western Europe, 1945–58. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 81–97. Hoelscher, S. 2006. ‘Heritage’, in S. Macdonald (ed.), Companion to Museum Studies. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 198–218. Hylton, S. 2001. Their Darkest Hour: The Hidden History of the Home Front 1939–45. Stroud: Sutton. Johnes, M. 2012. Wales since 1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kearney, H. 2006. The British Isles: A History of Four Nations, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leonard, J. 1997. ‘Facing “the Finger of Scorn”: Veterans’ Memories of Ireland after the Great War’, in M. Evans and K. Lunn (eds), War and Memory in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Berg, pp. 59–72. Lowenthal, D. 1985. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. _______. 1996. Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. New York: Free Press. Mackay, R. 2002. Half the Battle: Civilian Morale in Britain during the Second World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Malvern, S. 2000. ‘War, Memory and Museums: Art and Artefact in the Imperial War Museum’, History Workshop 49: 177–203. Merriman, N. 1991. Beyond the Glass Case: The Past, the Heritage, and the Public in Britain. London: Leicester University Press. Moore, D.W. 2005. The Other British Isles: A History of Shetland, Orkney, the Hebrides, Isle of Man, Anglesey, Scilly, Isle of Wight and the Channel Islands. Jefferson: McFarland. Noakes, L. 1998. War and the British: Gender and National Identity, 1939–1991. London: I.B. Tauris.

94 | Daniel Travers and Paul Ward

_______. 2014. ‘“War on the Web”: The BBC People’s War Website and Memories of Fear in Wartime in 21st Century Britain’, in L. Noakes and J. Pattinson (eds), British Cultural Memories of the Second World War, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 47–61. Pelling, H. 1970. Britain and the Second World War. London: Penguin. Ponting, C. 1990. 1940: Myth and Reality. London: Hamilton. Ramsden, J. 1998. ‘Refocusing “the People’s War”: British War Films of the 1950s’, Journal of Contemporary History 33: 35–63. _______. 2003. Man of the Century: Winston Churchill and his Legend since 1945. London: Harper Collins. Rose, S.O. 2003. Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain 1939–1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rousso, H. 1995. ‘The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944’, in J. Revel and L. Hunt (eds), Histories: French Constructions of the Past. New York: New Press, pp. 644–49. Royle, T. 2011. A Time of Tyrants: Scotland and the Second World War. Edinburgh: Birlinn. Samuel, R. 1992. ‘Mrs Thatcher’s Return to Victorian Values’, Proceedings of the British Academy 78: 9–29. _______. 1994. Theatres of Memory, vol. 1. London: Verso. Sanders, P. 2005. The British Channel Islands under German Occupation 1940–1945. Jersey: Société Jersiaise/Jersey Heritage Trust. Sherwood, M. 1985. Many Struggles: West Indian Workers and Service Personnel in Britain 1939–1945. London: Karia. Smith, M. 2000. Britain and 1940: History, Myth, and Popular Memory. London: Routledge. Spencer, I. 1995. ‘World War Two and the Making of Multiracial Britain’, in P. Kirkham and D. Thoms (eds), War Culture: Social Change and Changing Experience in World War Two Britain. London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 209–18. Taylor, A.J.P. 1965. English History 1914–1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Titmuss, R.M. 1950. Problems of Social Policy. London: HMSO. Todman, D. 2005. The Great War: Myth and Memory. London: Hambledon Continuum. Travers, D. and S. Heathorn. 2008. ‘Collective Remembrance, Second World War Mythology and National Heritage on the Isle of Man’, National Identities 10 (4): 433–48. Ugolini, W. 2011. Experiencing War as the ‘Enemy Other’: Italian Scottish Experience in World War II. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ugolini, W. and J. Pattinson (eds). 2015. Fighting for Britain? Negotiating Identities in Britain during the Second World War. Bern: Peter Lang. Ward, D. 2005. ‘Dance bands, street parties, Spitfires and veterans’ parades’, The Guardian, 9 May. Ward, P. 2002. ‘Preparing for the People’s War: The Left and Patriotism in the 1930s’, Labour History Review 67: 171–85. Webster, W. 2014. ‘Enemies, Allies and Transnational Histories: Germans, Irish and Italians in Second World War Britain’, Twentieth Century British History 25 (1): 63–86. Whitmarsh, A. 2011. ‘“We Will Remember Them”: Memory and Commemoration in War Museums’, Journal of Conservation and Museum Studies 7. Available at http://www.jcmsjournal.com/article/view/21/21/ (accessed 11 November 2011). Wood, I.S. 2010. Britain, Ireland and the Second World War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wood, N. 1999. Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe. Oxford: Berg. Wood, S. 1997. Scotland and the Second World War. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Narrating Britain’s War | 95

Websites ‘From War to Windrush exhibition – extended due to popular demand’, Imperial War Museum, http://www.iwm.org.uk/server/show/ConWebDoc.5290/ (accessed 9 August 2013). ‘Great Britons: Churchill’, BBC, November 2002, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ p008ltzv/ (accessed 7 November 2011). Holocaust Memorial Day, http://hmd.org.uk/about/timeline/ (accessed 11 November 2013). Occupation Memorial, http://www.thisisjersey.co.uk/hmd/ (accessed 11 March 2013). ‘WW2 People’s War: An Archive of World War Two Memories’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/ ww2peopleswar/ (accessed 7 November 2013). Margaret Thatcher Foundation’, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/default.asp (accessed 7 November 2013).

Filmography The Colditz Story. 1955, dir. Guy Hamilton The Dam Busters. 1954, dir. Michael Anderson ‘Great Britons: Churchill’. 2002, BBC Two Reach for the Sky. 1956, dir. Lewis Gilbert

Daniel Travers is currently a Sessional Professor of History at Laurentian University in Canada, and Visiting Professor at the University of Huddersfield, UK. He is the co-editor of Islands and Britishness: A Global Perspective (2012) as well as multiple book chapters and articles on the remembrance of the Second World War in Orkney, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. Paul Ward is Professor of Modern British History at the University of Huddersfield. He has written many articles and four books on aspects of British identity, including Britishness since 1870 (2004) and Huw T. Edwards: British Labour and Welsh Socialism (2011).

Chapter 5

‘Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans’ The Representation of Germans in British Second World War Films

( Robert Murphy

Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans, For they’re civilised, when all is said and done. Though they gave us science, culture, art, and music, to excess, They also gave us two world wars and Dr Rudolph Hess. (Noel Coward, 1943)

When Noel Coward first recorded his song ‘Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans’ in July 1943, the tide of war had turned against the Axis. The British victory at El Alamein, the US-led invasion of North Africa and the final defeat of the German armies at Stalingrad appeared to pave the way for total victory. Coward was warning that being magnanimous to the soon-to-be-defeated enemy would be a mistake, though his irony was lost on the BBC, which banned the song from being broadcast, perhaps fearing that impatient listeners would not wait to hear the savagery of later verses like ‘Let’s soften their defeat again – and build their bloody fleet again / But don’t let’s be beastly to the Hun’. But the confusion over what Coward was saying – which now appears blindingly obvious – is an indication of the volatility of British attitudes towards the German enemy. Given the horrors of the Second World War – bombing of civilians, concentration camps, brutal occupations, losses suffered by merchant ­shipping – the representation of Germans in most British films about the war is surprisingly mild. Although this changes over time, there are continuities as well as radical reassessments. Films made during the war are bound by patriotic agendas that determine how the enemy could be represented. Films made in the immediate post-war period exulted in Notes for this chapter begin on page 110.

Germans in British War Films | 97

telling stories of missions and exploits which would have been too secret or too sensitive to reveal while the war was being fought, but their representations of Germans were affected by the fact that post-war Germany was a solid and reliable ally in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Later Second World War films often revert to portraying Nazis as stereotyped villains in what are essentially adventure stories, though they are frequently balanced against more positively represented Germans. As the war has receded into history, new generations have uncovered more private, small-scale stories where the perspective is not necessarily a British one and German society is looked at from within. Anglo-German relations were close throughout most of the nineteenth century; France was perceived as the common enemy until the Entente Cordiale of 1904. Queen Victoria’s husband was Prince Albert of SaxeCoburg, and their eldest daughter had married Prussian Crown Prince Frederick, who for a brief period became Emperor of a united Germany. It was only after his death in 1888 and the accession of his son, the militaristic Kaiser Wilhelm II, that relations between Britain and Germany began to sour. The First World War brought a rapid and virulent switch of sympathies, and the British film industry enthusiastically encouraged jingoistic xenophobia, representing Germans as brutal, ignorant and merciless. Films such as In the Clutches of the Hun (1915), The Bells of Rheims (1915) and War’s Grim Reality (1915) showed German soldiers raping women and murdering children. As news of the reality of life in the trenches seeped back, these fantasies were superseded by patriotically slanted but factually based newsreel compilations such as The Battle of the Somme (1916) and The Battle of the Marne and the Advance of the Tanks (1917), which attracted large audiences eager for news of the war. In the period between the wars, the predominant emotion in Britain was revulsion and regret, together with a determination that such pointless slaughter should never happen again. German soldiers make only fleeting appearances in the adaptation of R.C. Sheriff’s Journey’s End (1929) and Anthony Asquith’s Tell England (1931) – where the Turks are the enemy – and they are the reluctant heroes of the Hollywood adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). An understandable desire to avoid war at all costs underpinned Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy and, when he mournfully informed listeners that ‘this country is now at war with Germany’ on Sunday 3 September 1939, it was a sad acknowledgement of failure rather than a belligerent call to arms.

98 | Robert Murphy

Good and Bad Germans Relations between the British and German film industries had been close from the mid-1920s. The enterprising young producer Michael Balcon had established good relations with German production companies, and his protégé Alfred Hitchcock had made his first two features in German studios. The prestigious German director E. A. Dupont was lured to Britain to work for British International Pictures (BIP), and when the international market for silent films was swept away by the advent of talking pictures, BIP responded by making ‘multi-lingual’ films with the same director, sets and crew but different French, German and English casts. Nazification of the German film industry not only put an end to co-operation but caused the expulsion of numerous Jewish and Left-inclined actors, directors and technicians to Britain, France and Hollywood. The British Board of Film Censorship (BBFC)’s prohibition of political controversy prevented unfavourable depictions of Nazi Germany, though veiled criticisms were made in Balcon’s 1934 version of Jew Suss (remade as a vehicle for anti-Semitism in Germany in 1940) and Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938). The BBFC had discouraged Roy and John Boulting from filming an adaptation of Ernst Toller’s Pastor Hall, a play built around the Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been arrested for his opposition to the Nazi regime. Once war was declared, the embargo was lifted and the Boultings cast Wilfrid Lawson, an actor best known for playing criminal masterminds in Edgar Wallace thrillers, as a saintly version of Niemöller. In Toller’s play, he is imprisoned; in the film, he escapes but, after delivering a passionate sermon denouncing Nazis as the enemies of God, he goes out to face his SS executioners; in real life, Niemöller, a robust former U-boat commander who had initially supported Hitler, survived internment in a concentration camp and became an outspoken advocate of disarmament and a critic of the US war in Vietnam. In Britain, critics greeted the film warmly, but in America the correspondent for the left-wing Documentary News Letter reported that, although it had attracted some admiration, ‘there is also a sneaking feeling that it is the old armless-baby-act of the last war being worked all over again … [.] Jewish maltreatment, concentration camps, sadistic lashings are, one is afraid, old stuff, alien, slightly discredited, and do not command people’s deepest attention’.1 Ironically, the propaganda excesses of the First World War had left a legacy which made people sceptical about the very real atrocities being carried out in the Second. Subsequent successful British films such as Night Train to Munich (1940) and Pimpernel Smith (1941), which do have

Germans in British War Films | 99

concentration camp episodes, defuse their critiques of Germany with jolly japes and derring-do. In Night Train to Munich (which was originally entitled Gestapo), a young man (Paul Henreid) is beaten up by concentration camp guards, but when he escapes to London he reveals himself as an ardent Nazi; the ‘beating’ is in reality a show to establish his credentials as a Czech patriot and win the confidence of a scientist who is abducted back to captivity in Germany. In the early months of the war, Ministry of Information (MoI) policy had been to make a clear distinction between good Germans and Nazis. In October 1939, an MoI pamphlet had gone so far as to suggest that: ‘National Socialism began as an honourable experiment’ whose leaders ‘started with many fine ideals and the German people had every right to expect that they would be realised’.2 No British films afford any such sympathy for the fine ideals of National Socialism, but Anthony Asquith’s Freedom Radio (1941), set in post-Anschluss Vienna, does balance its Nazi bullies with freedom-loving Austrian men of principle. Clive Brook’s Dr Roder is a society doctor (a throat specialist whose skills are appreciated by high-ranking politicians who overuse their voices). Sickened by Nazi thuggery, such as the murder of a priest, he teams up with a young engineer to set up a radio station to tell the German and Austrian people the truth behind Nazi propaganda. He is eventually tracked down and shot, along with his wife, who has abandoned her prestigious job as Hitler’s ‘director of pageantry’ to help him, but Roder has lit the torch of freedom and roused enough of his compatriots to ensure that resistance will continue. Louis MacNeice, writing in the Spectator, warned that the film’s attitude to the Nazi menace was dangerously simplistic: Propaganda either against the Nazis or to the German people must treat the Nazi revolution as something more than Machiavellian mumbo-jumbo if it is to make it comprehensible – and we must comprehend our enemy in order to combat him … [. W]e need more psychological subtlety and depth, a more imaginative grasp of that Nazi world which we ourselves – however indirectly – helped to create; it is a fantastic and horrible world, but it is not outside nature.3

In fact, an imaginative visual exploration of the Nazi world would have to wait until the 1970s, when David Puttnam and Sandy Lieberson produced The Double-Headed Eagle (1973) and Swastika (1974), making brilliant use of archive footage. British films, both during and after the war, tended to show Nazis as buffoons, sadists and brutes with no redeeming features. And after the conquest of Western Europe, the threat of invasion and the horrors of the Blitz, official policy switched to blaming the whole

100 | Robert Murphy

German nation for the war (essential to justify the growing bombing campaign against German towns and cities). Distinctions between good and bad Germans looked too much like appeasement, and the myth of widespread internal resistance to Hitler was abandoned. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who had come under suspicion for showing a German U-boat officer (Eric Portman) as dangerously resourceful in 49th Parallel (1941), attracted further condemnation for The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), structured around the long friendship between ‘Colonel Blimp’ and a German officer, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff. In their pamphlet, entitled The Shame and Disgrace of Colonel Blimp (1943), E.W. and M.M. Robson complained: When one character is called ‘Sugar’ Candy and the other Theo KretschmarSchuldorf, it is pretty certain what the eventual relationship between the two will be. The one will be a big, fat lollipop of a walrus-whiskered Englishman and the other, the noble, handsome, awe-inspiring, able and wise German. The scales are weighted against poor old Blimp right away.

War Minister P.J. Grigg complained that ‘the thug element in the German make-up of the German soldier is ignored and indeed, the suggestion is that if we were exactly like the Germans, we should be better soldiers’. As for Churchill, he was so incensed by what he thought was a scandalous attack on the British Army that he tried to stop the film being made.4 But Powell and Pressburger, with the luxury of a generous budget provided by J. Arthur Rank, were able to ignore such ill-informed attacks and assert that showing a good German helped rather than hindered the film’s belligerently anti-Nazi message. As Kretschmar-Schuldorff explains: ‘This time you’re fighting for your existence against the most devilish idea ever created by the human brain, Nazism, and if you lose, there won’t be a return match next year, or for 400 years.’

The Enemy Is Among Us One of the turning points for ‘Colonel Blimp’ is when he finds that his carefully rehearsed broadcast, appealing for a return to the standards of gentlemanly warfare, has been dumped in favour of one by the novelist J.B. Priestley. Throughout 1940, Priestley had broadcast a series of radio ‘Postscripts’ commenting on the war and its effect on British society. Although he was a fervent anti-Nazi, he was prepared to recognise a ‘bright face’ as well as a ‘dark face’ to Germany. But, he argued, if Germany’s bright face, ‘which speaks to us of beautiful music, profound philosophy, Gothic romance, young men and maidens wandering through

Germans in British War Films | 101

the enchanted forests’, could be eclipsed by the dark shadows cast by the Nazis, could not the same thing happen to Britain? (Priestley 1940: 17). The shock at how easily Western Europe had fallen to Hitler’s armies and the willingness to collaborate so evident in Norway and France suggested that ‘Nazis’ didn’t have to be German. Fear of a British fifth column was understandable, given the series of pre-war concessions granted Hitler, and spies and traitors figured prominently in a range of British films. The shortage of good news in the early years of the war, the change of events which could make a contemporary war film quickly outdated and the need to keep up morale in times of uncertainty and danger led filmmakers to concentrate on comedies where established comics joined up to do their bit or rooted out spies and fifth columnists. George Formby in Spare a Copper (1940) and Let George Do It (1940), Arthur Askey in Band Waggon (1940) and Back Room Boy (1942), Will Hay in The Ghost of St. Michael’s (1941) and The Black Sheep of Whitehall (1942), and a rabble of cheeky evacuees in Front Line Kids (1942), Those Kids from Town (1942) and Gert and Daisy’s Weekend (1942) cheerfully unmask plots and conspiracies organised by traitors and spies played by actors already typecast as villains in pre-war films. Motives beyond pecuniary ones are rarely provided, but, in comedy-thrillers, genial characters often reveal themselves to be evil German agents beneath their smiling exteriors. Paul Henreid in Night Train to Munich (1940) drops his friendly, attentive mask to explain that he is no Czech patriot but a Sudetenland Nazi; John Mills, the amiable Spitfire pilot, who has crash-landed near the home of a brilliant scientist in Cottage to Let (1941), is finally exposed not only as a cad (he does his best to entice his pretty nurse from her dull but decent boyfriend) but as a German spy. In both cases, rather too charming men become stiff and coarse once their Germanic identity has been revealed. Similar transformations occur in the two wartime films that deal seriously with German infiltration. The Next of Kin (1942) was planned as a short training film for the army. But Michael Balcon at Ealing Studios decided that a film about careless talk costing lives would have wide appeal as a feature film, and agreed with the War Office to add £50,000 to the £20,000 budget. Sequences, which show British forces suffering heavy casualties during a commando raid on a naval base in France because the Germans have had prior warning of the attack, caused consternation in government circles, and it was only after a screening before Army top brass that it was finally allowed to be shown. The preceding section of the film, which follows the activities of German agents gathering information about the planned raid, is also disturbing. We see two agents being sent over to England to make contact with a network of spies already in place.5 At their briefing, we learn only that both of them have spent long periods in England, so we must assume

102 | Robert Murphy

that, despite being well-known British character actors (John Chandos as a villain, Mervyn Johns as a stalwart Welshman), they are Germans rather than British traitors. Number Sixteen (Chandos), disguised as a soldier, is unlucky enough to encounter someone from the same regiment who can pick holes in his cover story, and he is quickly arrested. Number Twenty-Three (Johns) arouses suspicion for asking too many questions while posing as a bombed-out shopkeeper in ‘Westport’, where troops are training for the commando raid, but he is able to evade capture and transform himself into a down-on-his-luck labourer seeking work in a munitions factory. After successfully passing over damaging information, he reappears at the end of the film as an unobtrusive passenger in a railway carriage, eavesdropping on the careless talk indulged in by comic duo Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford. Neither of the two agents displays any stereotyped ‘Germanic’ characteristics, but Number Twenty-Three shows his loose moral standards by leafing through a book of Italian nude pin-ups while he waits in a bookshop to see his contact, and he acts with unexpected savagery in murdering the Dutch refugee whom the bookseller has blackmailed into giving away vital information. The two planted agents – a dresser who blackmails the cocaine-addicted fan-dancer with whom she works to extract information from admiring officers, and the bookseller –are more ostensibly villainous. The dresser appears to be English (she is played by Mary Clare, best known for playing cheery cockney roles) and is herself a coke addict, so we can assume she is doing it for the money. Barrett the bookseller (Stephen Murray) casts aside his courteous, otherworldly persona to reveal that ‘My mother was a German. I am a German. I do my duty as a good German must’, and begins ruthlessly exploiting the vulnerability of the young refugee he is ostensibly protecting. Mervyn Johns, this time as a church sexton, introduces the equally disturbing Went the Day Well? (1942), telling how a platoon of German paratroopers came to England as invaders but could claim possession only of the mass grave with its black cross over which he stands. ‘They wanted England, these Jerries did, and this is the only bit they got.’ We then flash back to see the Germans arriving, disguised as British troops. An inquisitive young evacuee and the Vicar’s daughter become suspicious when they notice that the men cross their sevens and an officer has ‘chokolade’ from Vienna (Wien) in his kitbag. But we have already been shown a soldier acting as if he ‘is no better than a German’ by manhandling the evacuee when he pokes his nose into one of the lorries, and the gruff, unsmiling soldiers do not fit the image of the cheerful British Tommy. Most of the men can speak English, but they reveal their ignorance by not knowing, for example, that there is a Piccadilly in Manchester as well

Germans in British War Films | 103

as London. When they cast aside their disguise, they reveal themselves as boastful and immoral, one of them telling the postmistress that he is not married but has two fine sons. The officers undergo much more radical transformations. Basil Sydney’s Major Hammond, a suave British officer, perfectly at home at the lady of the manor’s dinner table, changes into the barking bully Kommandant Ortler. David Farrar’s Lieutenant Jung is even worse, since he shoots down the elderly vicar in cold blood and degenerates from debonair politeness to slurring drunkenness, telling the village men that he is happy to spare them a bullet but their sacrifice will not save the children he plans to shoot in reprisal for an escape attempt. Wilsford (Leslie Banks), the country gentleman who organises the Home Guard, has to be more delicate because he retains the trust of the villagers while colluding with the invaders. Although it is not entirely clear in the finished film, he is actually a German agent rather than a Nazi-sympathising traitor.6 He proves to be as brutal as his fellow Germans – knifing the village policeman in the back when he tries to escape and encouraging Jung to shoot hostages to teach the villagers a lesson – but he maintains a loquacious geniality throughout. Only the vicar’s daughter, who has amorous designs on him and observes him very closely, is able to perceive his treachery. Went the Day Well? was criticised at the time for caricaturing its Germans as brutal and insensitive, though this now seems like acceptable stylisation. The Eagle Has Landed (1976), which combines the disguised German paratroopers of Went the Day Well? with a German plot to kidnap Winston Churchill borrowed from Warn That Man, a forgotten comedy-thriller from 1943, was criticised for the opposite reason, namely that it was unduly sympathetic to the Germans. Anthony Quayle plays Admiral Canaris, the head of German military intelligence, the Abwehr, as a bumbling but decent chap with an intense dislike for Hitler, and his underling Colonel Radl (Robert Duvall), despite his sinister eyepatch, is dignified and intelligent, gloomily aware that he is a pawn likely to be sacrificed in a game not of his choosing. Michael Caine’s Colonel Steiner, the man chosen to lead the mission, returns from the notoriously brutal Russian front with a sentimental regard for Polish Jews and an abhorrence of the SS. Steiner and his men are a noble band of brothers – one of them plays Bach on the village church organ, another sacrifices his life (and the success of their mission) by diving into a foaming mill-race to save a little English girl from drowning – none of whom does anything that is not fair, decent and honest. Suicidally, they release all their hostages and make a heroic last-ditch stand against a much larger and better-equipped American company. S.P. MacKenzie makes much of the changing attitudes to Germans in his comparison of Went the Day Well? and The Eagle Has Landed. But he

104 | Robert Murphy

concludes that it was not just a matter of a more benevolent opinion of the former enemy: By the late 1960s and into the 1970s, World War II had become a setting for action-adventure novels and films … . Older critics might complain, but for the younger generation presenting the Germans as the de facto heroes was merely a twist on an established form, and one they could adjust to with comparative ease. The war had ended years before they were born, and in any event Steiner and Radl were shown to be in opposition to Himmler and the SS, which for this generation was enough to establish their credentials as sympathetic characters. (MacKenzie 2003: 91)

As with all the international films packaged by Lew Grade for his Incorporated Television Company (ITC), the stars and the high-concept story are all important; here, everything is on the side of the Germans. The only significant English character in The Eagle Has Landed is a Catholic priest (an anomaly in rural England, even in Norfolk), played by Sir John Standing, a distinguished stage actor but hardly known to an international audience. The others (apart from anonymous villagers and the treacherous Jean Marsh, whom Colonel Steiner helpfully identifies as a Boer-supporting South African) are an embarrassingly silly girl played by Jenny Agutter and a lumbering hulk (Terry Plummer) who tries to stop her colluding with Donald Sutherland’s highly dubious IRA-supporting Irishman.

Cold War Heroes With the advent of the Cold War and the emergence of the Soviet Union as the new enemy – Churchill made his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in March 1946 and the Berlin Airlift took place between June 1948 and May 1949 – renewed efforts were made to distinguish good Germans from Nazis. The defeated enemy was an essential buffer between the West and the hugely expanded Soviet empire. Basil Dearden’s Frieda (1947), based on a play by Ronald Miller, investigates British attitudes towards the Germans in the immediate post-war period. A British airman escapes back to England with the help of a German nurse, expecting her to be welcomed by his family and neighbours. But with the war still on, people are suspicious of even a ‘good German’, and the local children mock her as ‘Lily the Werewolf’. The advertising campaign asked audiences to decide – ‘Could you love Frieda?’ ‘Would you take Frieda into your home?’ But the question is unfairly slanted, as Frieda is blonde, pretty, pure-hearted and played by Swedish actress Mai

Germans in British War Films | 105

Zetterling. Her looks, her humanist concern, her quiet intensity, even the way in which she throws herself into the rushing stream when the man she loves rejects her, all associate her with German romanticism, with the bright face of Germany. Nevertheless, she has to confront what has been done in her name. Her pleasant evening at the pictures is turned into a nightmare when the newsreel shows images of conditions at Belsen; and she has to challenge the heritage of Nazism in the form of her unrepentant brother. In the new world order, forgiveness was necessary with a new enemy at the door. Powell and Pressburger presented decent, honourable Germans in their two 1950s war films, but, like 20th Century-Fox with The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel (1951), they choose easy targets. Peter Finch’s courteous and dignified Captain Langsdorff in The Battle of the River Plate (1956) is a more complex, sympathetic and interesting character than the British Naval officers who track him down, and the film is structured around his honourable treatment of his prisoners on the Graf Spee.7 General Kreipe, abducted by Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents Stanley Moss and Patrick Leigh-Fermor in Ill Met by Moonlight (1957), might seem a less worthy case, given the German record of atrocities in Crete. But Kreipe was a last-minute substitute for General Müller, whose brutal reprisals had earned him the nickname ‘The Butcher of Crete’ and who was executed for war crimes in 1947. There is no evidence that the real Kreipe himself would have continued his predecessor’s policies. As played by Marius Goring, he is sly, haughty and devious, but he is also brave, dignified and honest enough to acknowledge that he has been ­outwitted by his seemingly amateurish young captors.8 Such fair-minded depictions of Germans did not go unchallenged. J. Lee Thompson’s Ice Cold in Alex (1958), which contrasted Anthony Quayle’s confident, strong, determined German spy with John Mills’ nerve-wracked, alcohol-dependent Captain Anson, was condemned by Derek Hill who could not help seeing the film ‘as part of the policy of selling us the last war as a cleanly conducted exchange of differences … [. I]t’s easy to be internationally-minded over past, beaten enemies, especially if the powers that be want to soften public hostility to re-arming them. Ice Cold in Alex is little more than part of the big white-wash’ (Tribune, 4 July 1958, p. 11). J. Lee Thompson – like Michael Powell – was a maverick figure, often at odds with established authority, and the idea that he would participate in a ‘big white-wash’ is far-fetched. Quayle’s van der Poel, with his tight shorts and boastful machismo, is viewed with less than whole-hearted sympathy until – like Kreipe – he gracefully acknowledges that he has been outwitted and ends up admiring those he had at first despised.

106 | Robert Murphy

A more concerted campaign was launched against The One That Got Away (1957), where the German officer at the centre of the film is undoubtedly the hero. British prisoner-of-war (POW) camp films – The Wooden Horse (1950), Albert R.N. (1953), The Colditz Story (1955) and Danger Within (1959) – were highly successful at the box office in the 1950s, and the director Roy Baker persuaded the Rank Organisation (which wanted to increase sales of its films in the increasingly profitable German market) to film an account of Franz von Werra’s escape from an Allied POW camp.9 Baker had to fight hard to cast a German actor rather than the Rank Organisation’s choice of Dirk Bogarde or Kenneth Moore to play von Werra, and the young actor he chose, Hardy Kruger, faced considerable press hostility over his Nazi background. A disastrous press conference and subsequent press boycott led Rank’s John Davis, ever fearful of controversy, to attempt to close down production, but the resulting film became an international success. Kruger’s von Werra, with his leather jacket, mop of blonde hair and cheeky defiance of authority, could pass as a British (or American) teenage rebel except for his pleasantly soft German accent. He is resourceful and intelligent, and his sheer persistence in pursuing every avenue of escape wins the guarded admiration of his captors and eventually pays off. Kruger, who proved to be a likeable ambassador for the new Germany and openly critical of his country’s Nazi past, represents von Werra as a resourceful rebel rather than an ideologically driven fanatic; we can like him, as we do Steiner, Langsdorff, van der Poel and even Kreipe, without endorsing the Nazi ethos.10 Willi Schlüter in The McKenzie Break (1970) is more of a problem. The McKenzie Break was based loosely on events at a POW camp in Ontario where a riot had occurred when an attempt was made to shackle prisoners (in reprisal for British POWs being shackled) and an elaborate escape plot planned to enable four submarine commanders to break out and be picked up by a U-boat in Chaleur Bay in the Gulf of St Lawrence. The action is transplanted to Scotland and the escapees become Schlüter and his crew. Unlike the submariners of Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot (1981), they have no worries about Nazi ideology, the rightness of the war and the inevitability of ultimate victory. They chant ‘Erika’, the catchy marching-song beloved of the Waffen SS, murder the less fanatical Luftwaffe officers (after singling out one of them as homosexual) and even outwit Captain Jack Connor (Brian Keith), the wily Irish maverick who is sent up by Army Intelligence HQ to find out what is going on. Schlüter harks back to Eric Portman’s Lieutenant Hirth in Powell and Pressburger’s 49th Parallel (1941), another U-boat officer who is determined to escape back to the Fatherland. But Hirth is almost as much an individualist as von Werra; Schlüter, like Michael Caine’s Colonel Steiner

Germans in British War Films | 107

(The Eagle Has Landed), is a popular leader who commands the loyalty and respect of his men. Connor unmasks Schlüter’s escape plot but his insistence on allowing it to go ahead in the hope that he can catch the U-boat detailed to pick up the escapees backfires. It is not total victory: Willi is so distracted by his rivalry with Connor that he does not get aboard the rescuing U-boat before it dives, and the bungling is made light of by Connor’s cynical humour (‘Willi, looks like we’re both in the shithouse’) but Schlüter – a likeable Nazi rather than a good German – is the winner on points. The demands of fiction often override fidelity to the facts, and the political desirability of showing good Germans had to be balanced against the charismatic attraction of a bad Nazi. Otto Kretschmer, the model for Schlüter, was much less villainous than his screen counterpart, and was noted for his humanitarian care not only for his crew (when his U-boat was eventually sunk) but for the victims of his attacks.11 In Sink the Bismarck! (1960), Admiral Lütjens – in reality one-quarter Jewish, critical of Hitler and an extremely astute naval commander – is shown as so preposterously arrogant and over-confident (‘we are faster, we are unsinkable, we are German’) that we are made to feel he richly deserves a watery grave. Films set among the Germans, such as The Night of the Generals (1967), could strike a nice balance. Peter O’Toole’s convincingly mad General Tanz, who switches from the Wehrmacht to the Waffen SS halfway through the film, is a monster who enjoys pulling down the Warsaw Ghetto, gleefully rounds up high-ranking officers implicated in the July plot to kill Hitler, and murders prostitutes on his days off. But he is counterbalanced by roguish Corporal Hartman (Tom Courtenay), dragooned reluctantly into serving as his chauffeur, and Major Grau (Omar Sharif), a military investigator whose unimpeachable integrity leads him to defy all threats and all danger in the pursuit of truth and justice.

‘We Have Ways of Making You Talk’ The belief in widespread resistance to Nazi oppression in occupied Europe was important in sustaining British morale, particularly during the early years of the war when Britain stood alone, and from 1943 onwards when the invasion of the heavily fortified coast of France threatened ­unacceptable levels of casualties. After Freedom Radio, a cycle of resistance films followed, but resistance to the Nazis came from Dutch, Czech, Scandinavian, French, Belgian and Yugoslav patriots; good Germans were no longer to be seen. Those Germans who did appear were in varying degrees unpleasant, but were

108 | Robert Murphy

rarely very formidable adversaries. Francis L. Sullivan, who specialised in playing bombastic or villainous fat men, appears as a comically ineffective propaganda minister (who looks more like Göring than Goebbels) in Pimpernel Smith (1941); Albert Lieven is plausibly charming as a German spy masquerading as a Polish count in Yellow Canary (1943); Walter Rilla is a heel-clicking braggart, fatally susceptible to glamorous women in The Adventures of Tartu (1943). Post-war resistance films, many of them based on the exploits of SOE agents working undercover in occupied Europe, are more harrowing and realistic. Against the Wind (1948), which charts the training and operations of a cell of SOE-backed Belgian resistance fighters, is interesting for the casting of the popular light-comedy actor Jack Warner (soon to find fame playing the kindly police constable George Dixon in the long-running television series Dixon of Dock Green) as Max Cronk, the oldest member of the group. It is assumed that his loyalties lie with his Belgian mother rather than his German grandfather, but this turns out not be the case. Cronk never displays any German characteristics and, apart from a brief scene where he attempts to seduce an Irish girl who appears to be his partner in treachery, never shifts from his genial bonhomie. He is trusted and well liked by the group, particularly by the radio operator, played by Simone Signoret, but, on learning of his treachery, she shoots him in cold blood. Shocking brutality also seeps into Odette (1950), despite it being made by Herbert Wilcox as a vehicle for his wife, Anna Neagle, then at the height of her fame as the star of escapist musical romances such as Spring in Park Lane (1948) and Maytime in Mayfair (1949). Marius Goring’s Abwehr officer, Colonel Henri, appears to be so silkily threatening that we share Odette’s suspicion of him, but his appreciation of luxury, Mendelssohn and beautiful women, along with his distaste for Hitler and the Gestapo, turns out to be genuine. His inability to protect Odette might be contemptible, but it is left to the torturers of Avenue Foch to display the barbarous face of Nazism. Her interrogator, a runtish little man played by Guyri Wagner (his only film performance), tells her that ‘we have ways and means of making you talk’, reporting to his superior that he has applied a red-hot poker to her spine and pulled out all her toenails. In Carve Her Name with Pride (1958), Violette Szabo dodges the over-confident and romantically inclined head of the Abwehr in Rouen, but, like Odette, finishes up at 84 Avenue Foch, the headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst.12 Her interrogator, played by Noel Willman, best known for playing evil aristocrats in Hammer horror films, is remarkably forbearing, not losing his temper when he gets only a slap in the face in return for his offer of nice clothes, good food, sunshine and romance in Paris, and, like Colonel Henri (in Odette), he is frustrated and upset when force has to be resorted to.

Germans in British War Films | 109

Not all Nazi torturers are squeamish, though. Malcolm McDowell’s Captain Von Berkow in J. Lee Thompson’s The Passage (1979) takes the sadistic Nazi into gleeful excess – preparing to chop off one of his victim’s fingers to add to his stir-fry, pouring petrol over a Basque gypsy (a stoical Christopher Lee) before setting fire to him, and raping the daughter of a fleeing Jewish scientist. He is the fantasy counterpart to Ralph Fiennes’ monstrous but horribly real Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List (1993). Goeth’s excesses can be carefully weighed against the good deeds of the increasingly good German, Oscar Schindler (Liam Neeson). Any attempt to balance Von Berkow with good Germans would be futile. As he gladly admits, everybody hates him, even his own family, and the only possible disappointment for the audience is that he is allowed the relatively comfortable death of being battered by an avalanche rather than being ripped apart by the Basque shepherd’s dogs.

Remembering the War By the 1980s, the war at last seemed to be sinking back into history. The Sea Wolves (1980), a geriatric action film with former Boer War heroes being brought back into service for one last mission, seemed to signal the end of the line. Those Second World War films that were made – Yanks (1979), Hope and Glory (1987), The Dressmaker (1988) – were exclusively concerned with the home front. Steven Spielberg, who had found that Nazis made useful villains in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), brought the war back into focus with Schindler’s List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998), re-educating younger generations about the Holocaust and the D-Day Landings. British films tended to concentrate on smaller, more obscure and intimate stories – the mysterious fate of the Hungarian Count Almásy, dying from his burns in a mine-strewn Italy at the end of the war in The English Patient (1996); the Bletchley Park code-breaking operations in Enigma (2001); the Italian occupation of Kefalonia in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001); and French collaboration in the extermination of Jews in Charlotte Gray (2001). Germans play only peripheral roles in these films (though there is a marked contrast between the amiable, fun-loving, musically gifted Italians and the brutal, treacherous, merciless Germans who take over from them in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin), but in 2008, two films were released where the central characters are German. In The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008), the normal family life of a concentration-camp commander is troubled when his eight-year-old son befriends a boy of a similar age on the other side of the barbed wire, not understanding that he is destined for extermination. The father hides

110 | Robert Murphy

behind his soldier’s duty to obey orders, cutting himself off from his wife and mother when they try to make him face up to the horrors for which he is responsible. Even the callous young thug who acts as his adjutant is somehow rendered more sympathetic when it is revealed that his father is an anti-Nazi fugitive. Implausibility may abound, but the central conceit of the film – that the natural goodness of children exposes the hypocritical evil of adults – works with a directness that avoids sentimentality. In The Reader (2008), the story unravels to show Kate Winslet’s Hanna Schmitz, a conductor on a Heidelberg tram, not only as the seducer of a teenage boy, but as a former concentration-camp guard who has colluded in mass murder. Nonetheless, our sympathies are weighted in her favour. Her honesty – she is the only one among her co-defendants willing to admit to what she did – the banality of her guilty secret (that she cannot read and write), the way in which she is made a scapegoat for collective guilt, and her stoical acceptance of the inevitability of death make it impossible to simply despise her as a monster. In both films, the emphasis is less on the Nazis as Germans than on the ease with which quite ordinary people slide into acts of unspeakable evil and cruelty. This shift signals a move from the Second World War being a forum for assessing and judging the character and nature of Germans to one which allows the opportunity to explore the nature of evil and the horrors of war generally.

Notes  1. ‘The Other Side of the Atlantic’, Documentary News Letter, September 1940, p. 4. See also James Chapman (1999: 81–88).  2. McLaine (1979: 141), quoting from Hitler and the Working Man, October 1939.  3. Louis MacNeice, Spectator, 31 January 1941.  4. See Ian Christie, ‘The Colonel Blimp File’, Sight and Sound, Winter 1978/9, p. 13.  5. The Germans had not built up an effective intelligence network in Britain before the war, and what there was had been easily dismantled by MI5 in the early days of the war. Getting agents in and out of Britain and embedding them in a society which, apart from a tiny number of IRA supporters, was overwhelmingly hostile to the German cause was a problem that was never successfully overcome.  6. Penelope Houston’s study of the shooting script shows him to have been ‘officially British’ since 1935 and expressing the hope that his ‘seven years exile’ will now be justified (1992: 27).  7. Langsdorff had been acknowledged as an admirable adversary much earlier, in the 1940 film For Freedom.  8. For an account of Kreipe, see Max Hastings’ review of Leigh-Fermor’s Words of Mercury, which can be accessed on Steve Crooks’ invaluable ‘Powell and Pressburger’

Germans in British War Films | 111

website: http://www.powell-pressburger.org/Reviews/57_IllMet/WordsOfMercury.html (accessed 12 December 2013).  9. This is based on Kendal Burt and James Leason’s well-researched book The One That Got Away (1956). 10. See Melanie Williams (2006) for the box-office success of the film – in Germany as well as Britain – and for Kruger’s relationship with the Austrian-Jewish film critic Thomas Wiseman, which began with a heated exchange that sparked the press boycott, but subsequently blossomed into friendship. 11. Operation Kiebitz, the attempt to free Kretschmer and other U-boat commanders from Bowmanville POW camp in 1943, failed. 12. The German Security Service or Sicherheitsdienst was the intelligence agency of the SS and the National Socialist Party in Nazi Germany.

References Chapman, J. 1999. ‘Why We Fight: Pastor Hall and Thunder Rock’, in A. Burton, T. O’Sullivan and P. Wells (eds), The Family Way: The Boulting Brothers and British Film Culture. Trowbridge: Flicks Books, pp. 81–88. Houston, P. 1992. Went the Day Well? London: BFI Publishing. MacKenzie, S.P. 2003. ‘Nazis into Germans: Went the Day Well? (1942) and The Eagle Has Landed (1976)’, Journal of Popular Film & Television 31 (2): 83–93. McLaine, I. 1979. Ministry of Morale. London: Allen & Unwin. Murphy, R. 2000. British Cinema and the Second World War. London: Continuum. Priestley, J.B. 1940. Postscripts. London: Heinemann. Robson, E.W. and M.M. Robson. 1943. The Shame and Disgrace of Colonel Blimp. London: The Sidneyan Society. Williams, M. 2006. ‘“The most explosive object to hit Britain since the V2!”: The British Films of Hardy Kruger and Anglo-German Relations in the 1950s’, Cinema Journal 46 (1): 85–107.

Filmography 49th Parallel. 1941, dir. Michael Powell The Adventures of Tartu. 1943, dir. Harold S. Bucquet Against the Wind. 1948, dir. Charles Crichton Albert R.N. 1953, dir. Lewis Gilbert All Quiet on the Western Front. 1930, dir. Lewis Milestone Back Room Boy. 1942, dir. Herbert Mason Band Waggon. 1940, dir. Marcel Varnel The Battle of the Marne and the Advance of the Tanks. 1917, dir. Geoffrey H. Malins The Battle of the River Plate. 1956, dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger The Battle of the Somme. 1916 (no credited director) The Bells of Rheims. 1915, dir. Maurice Elvey The Black Sheep of Whitehall. 1942, dir. Will Hay and Basil Dearden The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. 2008, dir. Mark Herbert Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. 2001, dir. John Madden Carve Her Name with Pride. 1958, dir. Lewis Gilbert

112 | Robert Murphy

Charlotte Gray. 2001, dir. Gillian Armstrong The Colditz Story. 1955, dir. Guy Hamilton Cottage to Let. 1941, dir. Anthony Asquith Danger Within. 1959, dir. Don Chaffey Das Boot. 1981, dir. Wolfgang Petersen The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel. 1951, dir. Henry Hathaway The Double-Headed Eagle. 1973, dir. Lutz Becker The Dressmaker. 1988, dir. Jim O’Brien The Eagle Has Landed. 1976, dir. John Sturges The English Patient. 1996, dir. Anthony Minghella Enigma. 2001, dir. Michael Apted For Freedom. 1940, dir. Marcel Varnel and Castleton Knight Freedom Radio. 1941, dir. Anthony Asquith Frieda. 1947, dir. Basil Dearden Front Line Kids. 1942, dir. Maclean Rogers Gert and Daisy’s Weekend. 1942, dir. Maclean Rogers The Ghost of St. Michael’s. 1941, dir. Marcel Varnel Hope and Glory. 1987, dir./p./sc. John Boorman Ice Cold in Alex. 1958, dir. J. Lee Thompson Ill Met by Moonlight. 1957, dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger In the Clutches of the Hun. 1915, dir. Joe Evans Jew Suss. 1934, dir. Lothar Mendes Journey’s End. 1929, dir. James Whale The Lady Vanishes. 1938, dir. Alfred Hitchcock Let George Do It. 1940, dir. Marcel Varnel The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. 1943, dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger Maytime in Mayfair. 1949, dir. Herbert Wilcox The McKenzie Break. 1970, dir. Lamont Johnson The Next of Kin. 1942, dir. Thorold Dickinson The Night of the Generals. 1967, dir. Anatole Litvak Night Train to Munich. 1940, dir. Carol Reed Odette. 1950, dir. Herbert Wilcox The One That Got Away. 1957, dir. Roy Baker The Passage. 1979, dir. J. Lee Thompson Pastor Hall. 1940, dir. Roy Boulting Pimpernel Smith. 1941, dir. Leslie Howard Raiders of the Lost Ark. 1981, dir. Steven Spielberg The Reader. 2008, dir. Stephen Daldry Saving Private Ryan. 1998, dir. Steven Spielberg Schindler’s List. 1993, dir. Steven Spielberg The Sea Wolves. 1980, dir. Andrew V. McLaglen Sink the Bismarck! 1960, dir. Lewis Gilbert Spare a Copper. 1940, dir. John Paddy Carstairs Spring in Park Lane. 1948, dir. Herbert Wilcox Swastika. 1974, dir. Philippe Mora Tell England. 1931, dir. Anthony Asquith Those Kids from Town. 1942, dir. Lance Comfort War’s Grim Reality. 1915, dir. David Aylott Went the Day Well? 1942, dir. Cavalcanti

Germans in British War Films | 113

The Wooden Horse. 1950, dir. Jack Lee Yanks. 1979, dir. John Schlesinger Yellow Canary. 1943, dir./p. Herbert Wilcox

Robert Murphy is Emeritus Professor in Film Studies at De Montfort University. He has written several books about British cinema, including British Cinema and the Second World War (2000), and Smash and Grab (1993), a history of the London underworld in the first half of the twentieth century. He is also the editor of Directors in British and Irish Cinema (2006), The British Cinema Book (2009) and British Cinema (Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies) (2014).

Chapter 6

Memory and Nation in British Narratives of the Second World War after 1945

( Mark Rawlinson

One of the biggest casualties of World War II … certainly as far as Europe was concerned, was that the past ceased to exist.1 Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.2

With no occupation or liberation to negotiate, the British memory of the Second World War has claims to being unique in Europe, a factor often correlated with a legacy of industrial and geopolitical decline in relation to continental and global competitors. This is too simplistic: the meaning of the war for Britain since 1945, in both international and domestic settings, has been altered by cultural transformations as well as political expedience. Furthermore, the concept of what memories count and what counts as memory has itself undergone alteration in this period, as discourses of trauma (personal and national) have supplanted those of the militarist and imperial state. Imaginative literature has registered these reconfigurations of the past, and contributed to new constellations of myths and historical specificity which characterise remembering the war seventy years on. Where is the memory of war located? It is uncontroversial to say that memory of the Second World War in Britain is to be looked for in the autobiographical recollections and habits of a decreasing segment of the population who experienced 1939–1945 directly. More problematically, from a methodological point of view, traces of the war are also manifested in public memorials and practices of remembrance, in the ‘pleasure Notes for this chapter begin on page 126.

British Narratives of the Second World War after 1945 | 115

culture of war’, in visual and literary narrative, and in various genres of popular and academic history.3 Year on year, there is less of the first kind of memory, as veterans and witnesses die out, and more of the latter, as the war is reproduced and refashioned according to the memorial desires of generations who had no direct experience of it. The last Prime Minister with service in the Second World War was James Callaghan (1976–1979), though it is significant that Margaret Thatcher’s parliamentary sponsor was Airie Neave, a former prisoner of war who escaped from Colditz (Atlee, Churchill, Eden and Macmillan – the premiers who led Britain from the war to the age of affluence – all served in the First World War) (Ramsden 2007: 266). What are the components of this memory, which is shared, or arguably divided, between embodied experience and public symbols? Demographically speaking, its autobiographical component is more likely to be a memory of separation, privation and loss, than of service, fighting and killing. But it is more difficult to say what the components of the socially produced memory of the war are. This is because, in addition to its being a recollection of six mid-century years, it is at the same time an incomplete practice of meaning-making which has, to date, lasted nearly seven decades. To imagine a wartime equivalent of today’s remembrance, as embodied in, for instance, The National Memorial Arboretum (Alrewas, Staffs, 2001), the Battle of Britain Monument (Victoria Embankment, 2005), the Bomber Command Memorial (Green Park, 2012) or the Archibald McIndoe memorial in East Grinstead (2013), we would have to posit someone remembering back from VE Day to the Anglo-Zulu War (1878–1879).4 What did Rorke’s Drift signify in 1945? The problems of inference and periodising generalisation can be further illustrated by imagining the consequences of taking Cy Endfield’s popular film Zulu, from 1964, as a public representation providing evidence of private memorial content in the post-war period. Evidently such a representation had more to do with the emotions, burdens, intentions and technical capacities of those who made and consumed them than with the 1870s, but equally striking is the loss of specificity in taking an artefact of the 1960s as evidence of practices in the 1940s. Yet the so-far seventy-year span of memorial behaviour invites just such elisions. In one signal fashion, Britain’s memories of war are different from those of the peoples and nations of continental Europe. Victorious, and unoccupied, the political and moral character of the people of Britain was tested primarily by their own governments and by the discipline of the services and industry, and less directly by the military and the ideology of another power. Throughout continental Europe, remembering the war was from the very start vexed by the prolongation of the war’s contingency. Britain’s

116 | Mark Rawlinson

war ended with victory and economic dependency on the USA; the war in France or Greece was, after 1945, in the past, but the issues of what their peoples did while its outcome was uncertain continued to determine the terrain of social and political life. In France, Henry Rousso writes, the Liberation became a ‘screen memory’ which facilitated repression of the Armistice and four years of Vichy: ‘the hierarchy of representations … has supplanted the hierarchy of facts’ (1991: 15). In Greece and Italy, the rebuilding of the state by Allied forces of liberation led to the political and military suppression of the Left, which had constituted the leadership of the resistance to the occupying German forces (in Greece from 1941, and in Italy from 1943). Ginsborg argues that the only effective epurazione in Italy was the purging of partisans and anti-Fascists who entered the state administration after the fall of Mussolini (1990: 92–93). The career of the Greek director Theodoros Angelopoulos is a voyage of counter-memory and resistance to authoritarian governance of the past. The journey back is his signature motif, and films such as The Hunters (1977), The Voyage to Cythera (1984) and The Weeping Meadow (2004) are imaginative acts of memorial and historiographical restitution, as well as testimony to institutional silence about the war years and their immediate aftermath in civil war (Mazower 2001). What is true of liberated Europe is to an extent true of Germany under the occupation: a post-war phase of pragmatism or political realism, in which forgetting was often preferred to justice in the face of the need to reconstruct governmental, commercial and social organisations. Later the Achtundsechziger, the generation of 1968, protested on the conviction that the Federal Republic was ‘a continuation of Nazism’; a similar view of mid-century history obtained in the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik), which ‘inherited’ the anti-Nazi mantle in its stand-off with the Bundesrepublik (Herf 1997: 13; Kundnani 2009: 17). Edgar Reitz’s Der Zweite Heimat (1992) is an extended dramatisation of the memory work of this generation, whose ‘fatherless’ status is represented by ‘Hermannsche’ Simon, the composer child of the matriarch Maria, who presides over Reitz’s treatment of the rise and fall of Nazism in the regions in his first series of television films – Heimat (1984) – which controversially took as its title a national symbol of nostalgia (Kundnani 2009: 11). The memory of the Second World War in Britain has by contrast not been a political embarrassment, even if economists and social historians argue that victory has in some sense been a liability (Barnett 1986; Owen 2000; Judt 2005). On occasions, the public recollection of the Second World War has appeared to be the making of a political opportunity. Margaret Thatcher’s military expedition to the Falklands (April–June 1982) is now ubiquitously presented as a calculated effort to reassert Great Britain as

British Narratives of the Second World War after 1945 | 117

an imperial state, a successful reprise of Anthony Eden’s Suez expedition (1956) that had resulted in humiliation inflicted on Britain by Nasser’s nationalism. Thatcher herself was modest in making such connections, bringing the sovereignty issue home to BBC Radio 2 listeners by telling them that ‘[i]t’s just like the Channel Islands during the last war’.5 But political opponents did spell out the significance of the Second World War in the political unconscious of the 1980s; in one particular case, the leader of the SDP (Social Democratic Party), David Owen, stung by accusations of unilateralism (nuclear disarmament), commented sardonically: ‘You do begin to wonder whether Mrs Thatcher is now claiming credit for winning the Second World War. There is this extraordinary claim that the Union Jack belongs to the Tory Party, that patriotism is somehow a unique Tory asset’.6 In fact, it was Harold Wilson, speaking to his Party conference, who is held to have established a post-war revivalist rhetoric when he invoked the ‘Spirit of Dunkirk’ in the face of the 1964 sterling crisis. However, his claim three years earlier to have ‘deprecated, in crisis after crisis, appeals to the Dunkirk spirit as an answer to our problems’ suggests both the frequency and lability of such rallying cries.7 It is Edward Heath’s three-day week, ten years later, which is now routinely viewed as having a Dunkirkian dimension: for example, it has been claimed that it was the ‘absence of any sense of crisis or Dunkirk spirit’ with which to lend enchantment to austerity that caused voters to turn from the Conservatives in the February and October elections of 1974, a speculative rationalisation which itself illustrates the relationship between memory and narrative, in particular the way narrative creates memorability (Sandbrook 2010: 600). In postwar Britain, Dunkirk has meant a number of things. It has signified the political aptitude to turn defeat into victory, which Heath on this account clearly lacked, but which Thatcher is generally viewed as mastering (Calder 1991: xv). But it also meant renunciation (another kind of surrender), and has come, internationally, to signify a British genius for suffering, as in Sidney Blumenthal’s account of Thatcher’s summoning of the Chicago economists to Britain at the end of the decade: ‘[a]t last, here was a test of monetarism in a democracy inculcated with the Dunkirk spirit of national sacrifice’ (Blumenthal 2008: 105). Alongside its commemorative and political resonance, the war has left significant traces in the elite, middle-brow and popular cultures of postwar Britain. An apparently banal example of the second is David Lean’s The Passionate Friends (1949), with a screenplay by the thriller-writer Eric Ambler, after H.G. Wells’ novel written before the First World War. The handling of these traces is worthy of attention: an international banker, back from a conference in Berlin, surprises the lovers (played by Lean’s

118 | Mark Rawlinson

future wife, Ann Todd, and Trevor Howard), and teaches them a lesson with an allegory based on the German problem. The lovers are guilty of acting out what he describes as a ‘fault’ in ‘the Teutonic mind [,] … a romantic hysteria’ which makes the couple resemble ‘a dangerous mob … which believes a big enough lie isn’t a lie at all, but the truth’. But the ratio established here between adultery (suspected) and popular Nazism is at odds with the times – the banker, played by Claude Rains, is able to travel to Berlin unhindered by the historical blockade in the winter of 1948/9, when de-Nazification policy was being expediently revised in the light of the Great Power confrontations that would turn into the Cold War. Indeed, the audience might well have been challenged by Rains’ performance as the cold but wronged husband, notably by the explicit association made between the lovers’ romantic fantasy (they are regular film-goers) and totalitarianism. There is no such suggestion about Howard’s and Celia Johnson’s escapist afternoons in the cinema in Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), a film shot late in wartime, but which imagines a pre-war world, or more precisely, a world in which the Second World War is not part of the historical record, even though the film’s dénouement alludes to both wartime sexual opportunity and the privations of embarkation. But anecdotal familiarity with manifold cultural allusions and representations is misleading. On the one hand, we have a rich qualitative appreciation of how, after 1945, the war was recalled deliberately as event, and contingently in the marks it had left on the places in which people lived, and in the military detours in their life-stories. On the other hand, we have scant quantitative knowledge of the activities of those Kansteiner has termed ‘memory makers’ and ‘memory consumers’ (Kansteiner 2002: 180; Paris 1990). Very little is known about how the production of novels, films and works of history about the Second World War has varied over time, and next to nothing is known about what people have done with these texts. In view of this lack of knowledge about their consumption, my remarks will necessarily take the form of an interpretation of what I propose to be some significant themes and episodes in the fictional ­representation of the war. Notwithstanding these sociological disqualifications, there is value in engaging with the singular responses to war of literary writers with minority readerships. This is not because these representations can in some sense be held to be transcendent (for example, if their reception has involved the attribution of a mythic or confessional authority, as is the case with canonical writing from and about the First World War). It is rather a matter of their representational self-referentiality having the potential to disrupt memorial and commemorative conventions, or at least provide additional angles of vision on familiar practices. As well as being primary

British Narratives of the Second World War after 1945 | 119

sites of the production and contestation of the symbols and narratives that make up a consciousness of history (however this is reified), they are, because of their dismantling and renewal of narrative forms, acts of historical consciousness. In particular, post-war fictional narrative which concerns itself with the memorial dimension of contemporary life, with both the shaping of our pasts and with our pasts’ determining pressures on our recognition of the present, invites us to be aware of the ways in which we live in memory. The Second World War was already historical as it happened: Hitler’s ‘Thousand Year Reich’ was a hubristic projection or anticipation of retrospective distance from the present, an apparently contagious claim on the future which infected Churchill’s speech-making: Britain’s ‘finest hour’ (House of Commons, 18 June 1940) was set to retain its memorial preeminence ‘if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years’, a purely rhetorical prospect which would colour British memory of the Second World War from Indian independence (1947) to the expiry of the lease on Hong Kong (1997) and beyond (Churchill 1974, vol. 6: 6,238). A year later, Churchill would incite the audience of his broadcast report on the war (27 April 1941) to imagine themselves as the objects of their own historical consciousness. This ordeal by fire has even in a certain sense exhilarated the manhood and the womanhood of Britain. The sublime but also terrible and sombre experiences and emotions of the battlefield which for centuries had been reserved for the soldiers and sailors, are now shared, for good or ill, by the entire population. All are proud to be under the fire of the enemy. Old men, little children, the crippled, veterans of former wars, aged women, the ordinary hard-pressed citizen or subject of the King as he likes to call himself, the sturdy workmen who swing the hammers or load the ships; skilful craftsmen; the members of every kind of A. R. P. [Air Raid Precautions] service, are proud to feel that they stand in the line together with our fighting men, when one of the greatest of causes is being fought out, as fought out it will be, to the end. This is indeed the grand, heroic period of our history and the light of glory shines on all. (Churchill 1974, vol. 6: 6,379)

The fact that the state broadcaster’s commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Victory in Europe could incorporate Adam Curtis’s critique of memorial culture, The Living Dead: Three Films about the Power of the Past (BBC2, May–June 1995), could ultimately be evidence of its invulnerability to critique. Curtis’ films share strategies with narrative fiction as well as with expository modes of documentary: in story, as Walter Benjamin claimed, ‘[i]t is left up to [the reader/audience] to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that

120 | Mark Rawlinson

information lacks’ (1973: 89). ‘On the Desperate Edge of Now’ (the first episode of Curtis’s trilogy) extends Hannah Arendt’s thesis on the Eichmann trial to portray the arraignment of Nazi war leaders at Nuremberg as a ‘history lesson’, more theoretically, as ‘the construction of the Grand Public Memory of the Second World War’.8 The Allies’ pedagogy of forgetting, designed to free people from ‘the power of history’, could never prevent the return of the repressed, whether in the eruption of individual memories which contradicted the symbols of the ‘good war’, or in the resurgence of historical rivalries at the end of the Cold War. Curtis’s own didacticism is indistinguishable from historical determinism. Curtis’s trilogy – including ‘The Attic’, about the ‘haunting’ of Margaret Thatcher by the rhetorical legacy of Churchill – posits a half-century of public memory as a conspiracy of the political and military elites. Evelyn Waugh’s trilogy of novels from the 1950s to 1960s – Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional Surrender (1961) – appears to anticipate literary fiction’s increasingly revisionist stance in the same post-war period: often, the justification for revisiting the past in fiction is the promise that some secreted content or significance will be revealed to contradict the official story. The publication of Waugh’s trilogy in one volume as The Sword of Honour (in 1965, see Waugh 1984) is itself an example of symbolic abstraction, the way heterogeneous specifics are simplified under a sign. In this case, the (historical) Stalingrad memorial which Waugh satirises at the beginning of the last volume becomes the titular symbol of apostasy, selling short the ambivalence of the novel’s many negations of the ideological, moral and psychological dimensions of ‘honour’. Waugh contests the very memory of an honourable Allied cause which Curtis locates in the victors’ performance of righteousness, but by quite different means. Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) had opened with a vision of a managerialist post-war future; the dawning of the ‘age of Hooper’ (a philistine subaltern who, significantly, ‘had no illusions about the Army’) is the protagonist’s (and author’s) justification for a flight into the past, a narration of what Brideshead signified before it was an infantry billet (or rather what it signifies in memory since it has become a billet) (Waugh 1960: 380, 17). The Sword of Honour elaborates this conservative, elegiac narrative frame to present wartime as the loss of illusions, namely Guy Crouchback’s chivalric apprehension of what could, by the time of writing (and again drawing on the work of Arendt), be called an anti-totalitarian crusade – the ‘Modern Age in arms’ (Waugh 1984: 11) – a crusade to which Guy is summoned by news of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The novel’s Cold War context (including the revival of that previously short-lived identification of Nazism and Soviet Communism for the propaganda purposes of

British Narratives of the Second World War after 1945 | 121

the West) is refracted through its comic and satiric handling of Guy’s picaresque adventures in an increasingly collectivist and bureaucratic world. Waugh’s Second World War is not the ‘People’s War’, in which conscription and planning were the heralds of welfare and reconstruction (a concept interrogated by Angus Calder in 1969 in The People’s War, and revived in 2013 in Ken Loach’s film The Spirit of ’45). Rather it is a war of careerism and public relations, of selling war and selling out tradition: ‘We want heroes of the people’, declares Ian Kilbannock, in a drunken revelation of the propagandist’s opportunistic amplification of his media, ‘to or for the people, by, with and from the people’ (Waugh 1984: 271). Memory and commemoration are significant vehicles for Waugh’s defeatist vision (which aligns him with the ‘declinists’, for whom victory means dependence on the USA, loss of empire, and the survival of sclerotic institutions). Kilbannock’s ‘heroes of the people’ are presented as caricatures of social modernisation, intended to displace images of a warrior-caste social elite: ‘Wrong Period. Last-war stuff. Went out with Rupert Brooke.’ (Waugh 1984: 271). Crouchback is ‘wrong period’, but by mediating his military experience through romantic symbols of military history, Waugh’s writing mobilises an ironised nostalgia, but a nostalgia nevertheless, which constitutes a purely literary mode of opposition to mid-century political ‘realism’. It is as if Waugh has written a version of Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell 1949), with Guy, like Winston, as a lone resister – through fealty to the past – to the official production of memory in service of the future prolongation of power. In both texts, the narrated resistance is ultimately futile, but the manner of narration is intended to exemplify values worth defending: Guy does not strive to prevent a cover-up of Ivor Claire’s dishonourable conduct during the evacuation of Crete, but Waugh’s novels, with a nod to Orwell, remind us, through our qualified sympathy for the hero, how history is written by the victors (and determined by the victors’ bureaucrats). Waugh’s trilogy abuses the post-war settlement and the view that the Second World War experienced in Britain is best represented as a progressive transformation of social conflict rather than the successful military defence of political and economic interests. It does so, in part, by presenting commemoration as an act of creative amnesia: the commemorative Sword of Stalingrad (a gift from George V to the Soviet people) is silent about the reversal of allegiances, though, in the symbolic economy of the novel, this anachronism represents a world not fit for chivalric faith. It is often alleged that the military fight the last war, but Waugh portrays political expedience as preventing war from living up to more honourable precedents. Guy Crouchback is a palpably absurd military hero, seemingly unfit to rehabilitate the warrior virtues which literary history holds

122 | Mark Rawlinson

to have been terminally deconstructed in the poetry and memoirs of the First World War. But in the final analysis, and this is in the nature of the novel as a form – a comparable example is to be found in Christopher Tietjens, the gentry subaltern at the centre of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1924–1928; see Ford 1950) – the narratorial ironies are kinder to the hero than to institutions and national narratives. Anthony Powell’s sequence of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time, initiated in 1951, represents the Second World War in three volumes written in the 1960s: military cultures and mores, as Waugh treated them, become here part of a larger scheme, in which Powell explores the professional and temperamental idiosyncrasies of his upper- and middle-class characters from the perspectives created by temporary rank, military custom and courtesies, and disaster. The last of these war novels, The Military Philosophers (1968), juxtaposes two radically different ‘memorial’ constructions of the war, controversy over the Katyń massacre and a service of ‘General Thanksgiving’ in August 1945. The way that the gracelessly ambitious Kenneth Widmerpool deals with the dilemmas created by the Nazi publication of evidence of a Soviet massacre of the Polish officer class, from his position in the Cabinet Office, reveals the dependence of strategic priorities on linguistic ruses: ‘It’s war …. harrowing, tragic, there isn’t a word for it … but … it’s no reason to undermine the fabric of our alliances’. These alliances are enacted by, amongst other things, re-describing massacre as ‘administrative inadequacy’ (Powell 1987: 111–12). In a gentler, less satirical account of the times, the consecration of victory in St Paul’s brings to the mind of Nicholas Jenkins, Powell’s Anglo-Proustian narrator, several threads of memorial practice: hypocrisy’s ‘stranglehold on the public mind’, the unintended comedy and cruelty ensuing from the competing imperatives of official secrecy and commemorative representativeness, and the process, generalised to romantic as well as military life, whereby what is no longer news becomes ‘not so much history as legend, the story true only in a symbolical sense’ (Powell 1987: 241). In John le Carré’s fiction of the 1960s, Britain’s negotiation of a role in the Cold War is figured in terms of reflexes of nostalgia for the overt, and less ambiguous, campaigns of 1939–1945. In this respect, le Carré’s work reprises Waugh’s scepticism about a national sense of the past, a public memory, only now the Second World War has itself become a burnished legend against which the present is found wanting. In The Looking-Glass War (1965), the late war is the good war in both geopolitical and personal terms, representing fulfilment for those who cannot find a role in the Cold War world. But all is not what it seems: the fantasy that Leclerc’s Department can redeem itself from redundancy by reprising wartime operations is a manoeuvre in a sophisticated, amoral civil war: it has

British Narratives of the Second World War after 1945 | 123

been scripted by the Circus, another British intelligence service, intent on disgracing a rival for ministerial resource and influence. This is a subtle variation of the devices used, in spy fiction at least, to discredit enemy agents; but here, the bait is not sex or money but memory, and in the case of young Avery, a memory of the war which is second-hand. Le Carré simultaneously exploits the reader’s familiarity with Second World War motifs (the narrative conventions associated with tales of escape, clandestine operations, and training and irregular unit formation were disseminated through memoirs and feature films from the early 1950s) to create empathy and suspense, and to create a comedy of institutional anachronism. The faked evidence of missiles in Rostock is viewed by the intended dupes as ‘a sort of Cuba situation all over again’, a threat that is pregnant with opportunity to show the Americans, as well as the rival Circus, that ‘we still have one or two teeth’. But reality is enchanted most powerfully in memory and legend – the Russian Sandal missiles deployed off Florida in 1962, and now supposedly on the West’s European frontier, are ‘the linear descendant of the wartime German V2’ (le Carré 1983: 51–53). Leclerc’s Department keeps faith with memories that in one sense are too literal, unadjusted to Cold War imperatives: it is a connection which Norman Mailer would allude to disruptively in his reporting for Life magazine on the 1969 moon landings, foregrounding Werner von Braun’s role in the development of the Saturn launch-vehicle through puns on Nazism and NASA-ism (Mailer 1970: 66). The lineages of ICBMs (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles) and space exploration suggest the metaphor of vectors of memory as a means with which to capture the different inflections of more abstract symbols of the past. It is evident that the idea of a good war is not a piety over which Curtis’s state engineers of memory have a monopoly. Spike Milligan’s septet of comic memoirs (1971–1991) is at once a critique and a bandwagon, an apparently illusionless riposte to the myths and literatures of both bellicism and disenchantment, yet an unashamed performance of nostalgia for the good war. Peace Work, the title of the seventh and last volume, suggests that the redemption of war by re-describing it as opportunity is one of the primary modes of post-war imaginative life. The reunion of Milligan’s Battery is a stimulus to the production of memory; and attendance increases as the war recedes, as if memories get stronger, not weaker, with the passage of time. ‘We have two reunions a year. No other mob has that going for them; we were unique’ (Milligan 1980: 285). This uniqueness is projected back: the nadir of Milligan’s war, ‘when the conflict caught up with me’, was his wounding and breakdown under enemy shellfire in the battle for Monte Cassino (Milligan 1980: 5). His demotion and court-martial for ‘unreliable conduct’ is represented as the

124 | Mark Rawlinson

officer class’s revenge on unsuitable material: ‘I didn’t represent the type of empty-minded soldier he wanted. I had been a morale-booster to the boys’ (already a performer, his larking is instrumental, a component of the war effort) (Milligan 1980: 284). The worst that can be said of Major Jenkins, who expelled Milligan from the community of the Battery, is that, ‘after the war, he’s never been to a reunion’ (Milligan 1980: 285). The war is hallowed in the cultivation of camaraderie, a cause above enmity which, years on, reunites one-time foes (an officer says of Milligan and an Afrika Korps veteran dining together in a London restaurant in the 1960s: ‘Your survival indicates you must both be bloody awful shots’) (Milligan 1980: 65). This generous representation of the elegiac perspective of the survivors contrasts sharply with the reunion of ‘Third Troop’ which concludes Richard Lester’s anti-war-film film, How I Won the War (1967) (Sinyard 2000: 61). Summoned by Michael Carmichael’s Lieutenant Goodbody, a militarised idiot who boasts ‘I won the war’, the reunion is attended by a sole, traumatised survivor from among the men he expended. His shame is a quietly powerful riposte: ‘there was a good reason for fighting…. I couldn’t, that’s all…. I had to leave it to chaps like you who hadn’t really got a reason’.9 The cinematic myths which Lester challenges with parodic directness are given a more ambivalent treatment in Pat Barker’s The Man Who Wasn’t There (1989), a novel about the public and private legacies of the Second World War which preceded her celebrated historical novels about the First World War and psychiatry, the Regeneration Trilogy. What is constant in the four books is the apprehension of the past as it produces the images by which we know it: in the latter case, the poems of Sassoon and Owen, in the former, the post-war feature films from which the schoolboy hero fabricates an imaginative bolt-hole from the shame provoked in him by his status as illegitimate war-baby and by his grammar school’s interpellation of an officer-class masculinity in its pupils. The class and gender co-ordinates of Barker’s single-parent family plot are refracted through competing private and public negotiations of the memory and vestiges of war – the mother’s cover story of the lost-in-action airman father, the school’s aping of militarist hierarchy and the child’s elaborate fantasy of belonging to the Resistance. Barker provides her young protagonist with a cinematic education – simultaneously a loss of illusions about the commensurability of life and artistic convention, and a recognition of authority’s reliance on useful fictions – but also, in drawing the repertoire of his fantasy life from more recent television dramatisations of the Second World War – notably Secret Army (BBC and Belgian national television, 1977–1979) and ’Allo ’Allo (BBC, 1982–1992) – alerted her first readers to the ongoing ­reproduction of national fantasy.

British Narratives of the Second World War after 1945 | 125

One area of significant cultural change, which reciprocates historiographical developments in Second World War studies, is the emergence in historical consciousness of the Holocaust both as event and as a challenge to the regimes of meaning-making in which the war was recast as public memory. The ramifications of the changing content of what is acknowledged as the past are far from straightforwardly emancipatory – for instance, potentially disruptive knowledge may be subsumed by powerful conventions. The off-stage ‘drama’ of Katyń, with which Powell’s The Military Philosophers does little to fracture the ironic authority of its narrator, resurfaces as a mere device of character motivation in Robert Harris’s thriller Enigma (1995), an influential example of the war novel which trades on its recognisable basis in historical research and its proximity to sites of historiographical controversy and/or conspiracy theories. Harris constructs a ticking-clock suspense plot (convoy threatened until code broken) and a detection plot (an anti-Soviet saboteur) inside the then still officially secret history of wartime code-breaking, weaving in ‘popular’ controversies (such as responsibility for Katyń and the selective use of intelligence from decrypted German naval signals so as not to give away the breaking of the ‘Enigma’ code). The novel bears a multiple relationship to the past – it is about history, it cites ways in which the past has been fought over for power, knowledge or entertainment, and it deploys narrative modes which are a travesty of historical method in their causal and evidential claims. Harris’s earlier novel, Fatherland (1992), is an even more intriguing and problematic case, as it imagines the total suppression of the Holocaust as an item of historical knowledge, only to forestall this Nazi conspiracy with the heroic actions of a German police detective. This dystopian future, which, unlike Orwell’s memory desert in Nineteen EightyFour, serves no pedagogic purpose, offers similar kitsch satisfactions to the Berlin of Bob Fosse’s musical Cabaret (1972), based on Christopher Isherwood’s pre-war stories in Goodbye to Berlin (1939). The Final Solution to the Jewish problem, as outlined at the Wannsee Conference (another device in Fatherland), is, as at least one newspaper review unwittingly pointed out, reduced to the solution of a puzzle. Harris’s Holocaust novel, if it can be called that, and surely it must, brought history and memory to readers’ attention through its own, fantastic, version of Holocaust denial, but it did so in ways that suggested that historical knowledge is as easy to secure as a detective-story narrative is to follow in the process of reaching its revelation of the guilty party. In his survey of post-war Europe, The New Old World, Perry Anderson quotes the French historian of modern memory, Pierre Nora, and his notion of history ‘to the second degree’, a history which, as Anderson goes on to emphasise, is ‘concerned not with causes, actions or events, but

126 | Mark Rawlinson

rather effects and traces’ (2009: 160). It is just such ‘second degree’ representations that have been considered here, though drawn from a narrower textual and cinematic corpus than in Nora’s Les Lieux des mémoires project (1989). For Anderson, these sites of memory are at once ideologically loaded and deaf to counter-memory: they are the antithesis of, to take his example, Barthes’s critical work on the symbols of French nationhood in Mythologies because they are ‘fond rituals of post-modern remembrance’ (2009: 162). With Anderson’s contrast in mind, what conclusions can be drawn about the role of English fiction in the reproduction and negotiation of the ‘effects and traces’ of the Second World War? Without a sociological understanding of the readership of the broad range of Second World War narrative, from comic books like Battle Picture Weekly (1975–1988) through genre fiction and historiographically informed middle-brow novels and works of literary re-imagination, we can only talk about the way such narratives invite readers to engage with particular episodes and themes in the national past. This chapter has concentrated on examples which foreground memorial practices to question the ways in which the past is constructed, though it does not follow that such narratives lead to a critique of historical thinking or that any such critique could be efficacious in an era in which there is, arguably, too much history, and we might be trapped rather than emancipated by historical thinking (Davies 2010). More broadly, narrative fiction’s make-believe is a potential source of imaginative perspectives on historical symbols and historical explanations, though this capacity to re-constellate received narratives may be in conflict with the dominant conventions in the marketplace of fiction, most powerfully instanced in Hollywood war films.

Notes 1. J.G. Ballard. 2012. Extreme Metaphors: Interviews 1967–2008. London: 4th Estate, p. 61. 2. K. Vonnegut. 1992 (1973). Breakfast of Champions. London: Vintage, p. 6. 3. Michael Paris, Warrior Nation (2000), coined the phrase ‘pleasure culture of war’ to indicate all those representations of war in everyday culture which reproduce bellicism rather than, in the manner of the canonical literature of the First World War, critique it. See also Wulf Kansteiner (2002). 4. See Catherine E. Anderson (2008). 5. Radio Interview for BBC Radio 2, Jimmy Young Programme, 19 May 1982, http://www.mar garetthatcher.org/document/104784 (accessed 28 December 2012). 6. The Times, 21 May 1987, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106557 (accessed 28 December 2012). 7. See Alan Sinfield (1989: 23) and The Glasgow Herald, 27 July 1961, p. 8, column 5.

British Narratives of the Second World War after 1945 | 127

8. Adam Curtis, ‘On the Desperate Edge of Now’ (broadcast 30 May 1995), 17¢50², available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xoM6-1SWl4/ (accessed 5 August 2013), from his trilogy The Living Dead. See Hannah Arendt (1963). 9. Richard Lester, dir., How I Won the War (MGM, 1967), 1h 44.00.

References Anderson, C.E. 2008. ‘Red Coats and Black Shields: Race and Masculinity in British Representations of the Anglo-Zulu War’, Critical Survey 20 (3): 6–28. Anderson, P. 2009. The New Old World. London: Verso. Arendt, H. 1963. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press. Ballard, J.G. 2012. Extreme Metaphors: Interviews 1967–2008. London: 4th Estate. Barker, P. 1989. The Man Who Wasn’t There. London: Virago. Barnett, C. 1986. Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation. London: Macmillan. Benjamin, W. 1973. ‘The Storyteller’ in Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn. London: Flamingo. Blumenthal, S. 2008. The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: The Conservative Ascent to Political Power. New York: Union Square Press. Calder, A. 1969. The People’s War. London: Cape. _______. 1991. The Myth of the Blitz. London: Jonathan Cape. Churchill, W.S. 1974. Complete Speeches 1897–1963, 8 vols, ed. R. Rhodes James. New York: Chelsea House. Davies, M. 2010. Imprisoned by History: Aspects of Historicized Life. New York: Routledge. Ford, F. M. 1950. Parade’s End. New York: Knopf. Ginsborg, P. 1990. A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1988. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Harris, R. 1992. Fatherland. New York: Random House. _______. 1995. Enigma. New York: Random House. Herf, J. 1997. Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Isherwood, C. 1939. Goodbye to Berlin. London: Hogarth Press. Judt, T. 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. Harmondsworth: The Penguin Press. Kansteiner, W. 2002. ‘Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies’, History and Theory 41 (2): 179–97. Kundnani, H. 2009. Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust. London: Hurst. Le Carré, J. 1983 (1965). The Looking-Glass War. London: Pan. Mailer, N. 1970. Of a Fire on the Moon. Boston: Little, Brown. Mazower, M. 2001. Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44. New Haven: Yale University Press. Milligan, S. 1980 (1978). Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nora, P. 1989. ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de mémoire’, Representations 26: 7–25. Orwell, G. 1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker and Warburg. Owen, G. 2000. From Empire to Europe: The Decline and Revival of British Industry since the Second World War. London: Harper Collins. Paris, M. 1990. The Novels of World War Two: An Annotated Bibliography of World War Two Fiction. London: The Library Association.

128 | Mark Rawlinson

_______. 2000. Warrior Nation. London: Reaktion. Powell, A. 1987 (1968). The Military Philosophers. London: Flamingo. Ramsden, J. 2007. Don’t Mention the War: The British and the Germans since 1890. London: Abacus. Rousso, H. 1991. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Sandbrook, D. 2010. State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain, 1970–1974. London: Allen Lane. Sinfield, A. 1989. Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain: Studies in Cultural Poetics. Oxford: Blackwell. Sinyard, N. 2000. Richard Lester. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Vonnegut, K. 1992. Breakfast of Champions. London: Vintage. Waugh, E. 1952. Men at Arms. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. ________. 1955. Officers and Gentlemen. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. ________. 1960 (1945). Brideshead Revisited. London: Chapman and Hall, rev. edn. ________. 1961. Unconditional Surrender. London: Chapman and Hall. ________. 1984 (1965). The Sword of Honour Trilogy. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Filmography ’Allo ’Allo. 1982–1992, BBC Brief Encounter. 1945, dir. David Lean Cabaret. 1972, dir. Bob Fosse Heimat. 1984, dir. Edgar Reitz How I Won the War. 1967, dir. Richard Lester The Living Dead: Three Films about the Power of the Past. 1995, dir. Adam Curtis Oi kynigoi [The Hunters]. 1977, dir. Theodoros Angelopoulos The Passionate Friends. 1949, dir. David Lean Secret Army. 1977–1979, BBC The Spirit of ’45. 2013, dir. Ken Loach Taxidi sta Kythira [The Voyage to Cythera]. 1984, dir. Theodoros Angelopoulos Trilogia: To livadi pou dakryzei [The Weeping Meadow]. 2004, dir. Theodoros Angelopoulos Zulu. 1964, dir. Cy Endfield Der Zweite Heimat. 1992, dir. Edgar Reitz

Mark Rawlinson is Reader in English at the University of Leicester. He is the author of British Writing of the Second World War (2000), a study of the literary culture of wartime Britain (1939–1945), and is finishing a sequel on narratives about the Second World War written after 1945. With Adam Piette he edited The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature (2012). An anthology of First World War Plays appeared from Methuen in 2014, and this will be followed by an anthology of Contemporary War Plays in 2016. He is currently researching a book to be called The Future of First World War Poetry.

Part III France

(

Chapter 7

A Capital Problem The Town of Vichy, the Second World War and the Politics of Identity

( Kirrily Freeman

The scene is famous. Toward the end of Casablanca, just after Rick shoots Major Strasser, Captain Renault opens a bottle of mineral water – ‘Vichy Water’ – and pours himself a glass. He then takes a second look at the bottle, tosses it into the waste-paper basket, and kicks it over. This gesture signifies Renault’s political conversion and his moral rebirth, but it is also an illustration of the extent to which the town of Vichy, symbolised by its waters, had come to stand for the collaborationist politics of the French wartime government installed there, as early as 1942, when Casablanca was released. This elision of place and politics has dogged Vichy ever since the town’s ‘occupation’ by the État Français from 1940 to 1944. Even before the end of the Second World War, the word ‘Vichy’ had come to stand for France’s wartime regime, its politics of National Revolution and collaboration with Nazi Germany, together with the consequences of these policies, such as forced labour and deportation. It conjures up images of the paramilitary milice and its war on partisans and resisters. It evokes zealous collaborationists who spewed racist venom in newspapers such as Je Suis Partout. It even suggests a whole range of experiences associated with the war years in general – defeat and occupation, hunger and privation, fear, violence, turmoil, shame and humiliation. These associations have persisted until the present day. For more than seventy years, Vichy’s name has been synonymous with one of the darkest chapters of French history. This has left the town itself deeply stigmatised. For scholars, this presents an interesting case study in the wartime and post-war articulation of memory and identity. Notes for this chapter begin on page 147.

132 | Kirrily Freeman

As every Vichyssois is quick to point out, the town did not choose to house the regime.1 The French government, exiled from Paris following the German invasion, went to Bordeaux initially, and then to ClermontFerrand, before landing in this small spa town on the doorstep of the Auvergne and the Bourbonnais. Vichy was selected for a number of reasons: it had many hotels and villas that could be requisitioned for government offices;2 it had a new Post, Telephone and Telegraph Office; it was four  hours from Paris by train, and an hour from the demarcation line between the occupied and unoccupied zones.3 It also had a small and politically docile population, in contrast to neighbouring ClermontFerrand and Lyon (Cointet 1993). Vichy was never intended, however, as a permanent capital.4 It was a temporary solution until the government could return to Paris, or better, Versailles.5 The town’s status as ‘Provisional Capital’ hints at the makeshift nature of the regime’s installation there. In requisitioned hotels, ministerial boxes remained halfunpacked for years. In early autumn 1940, the general secretary of the Ministry for the Colonies asked for an attribution of coal for his offices. The response? He would not need it since, by winter, everyone would be back in Paris (Cointet 1993: 20). This is an indication of the uncertainty that hung over the government, but also of the outlook of many of its members. Almost from the moment they arrived in Vichy, most in the government were itching to leave.6 The municipality treated the presence of the wartime government in Vichy with guarded suspicion. The town made its living from a seasonal influx of tourists and spa patients, so on one hand the arrival of large numbers of military and government officials and foreign dignitaries was nothing new. But there was a qualitative difference between these guests and the vacationing elites that made up Vichy’s usual clientele, and the town resented the fact that the presence of the government prevented ‘the season’ from taking place. The season in Vichy usually ran from May to October and, in addition to thermal cures in a number of spas, featured a whole range of ‘para-thermal’ activities: horse racing and casinos, opera and theatre, concerts, cabarets, balls, galas, regattas, golf tournaments and so on. The arrival of the État Français brought an end to many of these activities mostly because the cité thermale was now government quarters, but also in part because this new government blamed decadence – ­luxurious self-indulgence (which in the eyes of the regime also meant moral decline) – for France’s defeat. And pre-war Vichy was nothing if not decadent. Vichy prided itself, from the late nineteenth century onward, on its reputation as luxury playground for French and foreign elites, a ‘petit Paris’ where all whims could be indulged. But with the arrival of the État Français in July 1940, gambling was no longer permitted, and the Grand

The Town of Vichy and the Politics of Identity | 133

Figure 7.1 La Ville d’eau éternelle, Vichy spa publicity poster. Vichy, La Ville d’Eau Eternelle: Saison Mai–Octobre (1946). Ville de Vichy – Fonds patrimoniaux de la Médiathèque ValeryLarbaud, 10 Aff. 2.

Casino was taken over by the government. Prostitution, which had been legal, was restricted. Indeed any overt festivity, or frivolity, was frowned upon. In August 1940, a number of officials, including General Weygand, Vichy’s Minister of Defence, lobbied for the closure of the golf-club pool, popular for sunbathing, which was considered inappropriate for a country undergoing moral renewal (Loiseau 1974: 132). With the requisition of the majority of Vichy’s hotels, only two luxury establishments remained open for tourists. The town tried whatever measures it could to protect its livelihood, but with little success. In July 1941, the mayor tried to de-requisition a number of hotel rooms in an effort to resuscitate tourism and entice spa patients back to Vichy.7 These efforts failed. The rooms were just re-requisitioned, despite intervention from the

134 | Kirrily Freeman

Ministry of the Interior and pressure from the city council.8 The municipality also protested in vain against the closing of the domaine thermal, which made it ‘impossible for patients to follow their habitual cures’.9 At a conference of physicians held in the Grand Casino in 1943, Dr Mathieu de Fossey, President of the Société des Sciences Médicales de Vichy, complained about the general impact of the presence of the government on the town. Let us remember the generosity of Napoleon III, which permitted the development of Vichy as it is today. The Emperor came here only one month each year [from 1861–1866, excluding 1865] to recuperate, but he had the grace to thank the city that welcomed him from his own pocket.10 This would be an example for the current government to follow. It has made Vichy its provisional capital, at our expense. After having spoken much ill of the town that received them, the members of the Government have still not left. And what have they brought in return? The ruin of hotels and the impossibility of repairing them any time soon, the halt of the thermal season due to abusive requisitions and police measures … . Our brand new thermal establishments have been ransacked, … and at the Grand Casino, next to an inter-ministerial club for Messieurs les Fonctionnaires, you’ll find a Ministry drowning in dust … . We have also been told that things that are incontestably necessary such as a dam [on the Allier] can in no way be considered. (Société des Sciences Médicales de Vichy 1943: 40)

These were common sentiments in wartime Vichy. The town longed for the end of hostilities, the departure of the government and a return to its status as Thermal Capital, rather than Provisional Capital. Ironically, it is attitudes like the above that have fed the ‘afterlife of Vichy’ in Vichy, the stigmatisation and negative perception of the town in the post-war period.11 It is strange, given the uncomfortable relationship between Vichy and the regime it hosted, that the name of the town has come to be synonymous with the politics of the regime and the hardships of the war years. And yet this elision has persisted. I would like to suggest that a reason for this is the deliberate image of decadence, of luxury and indulgence, that Vichy has always attempted to project. It may be that one facet of Vichy’s municipal identity has contributed largely to reinforcing, rather than effacing, the other. In one of the most influential books in a generation, French historian Henry Rousso called the memory of the war years in France a syndrome – the ‘Vichy Syndrome’ (1991). This national obsession, so intense that it is, in Rousso’s words, an ‘ever-present past’, is tied to the town through its name (Conan and Rousso 1998). But how did the name of the town come to stand for the regime? For one thing, there was not an obvious term for the wartime government. It did not grow out of a particular party or political movement, like Nazism in Germany or Fascism in Italy. It did

The Town of Vichy and the Politics of Identity | 135

have a central ideology, the National Revolution, but there was considerable tension between supporters of this primarily ideological and cultural movement and the technocrats and bureaucrats that dominated key ministries within the government and key industries outside it (Paxton 1972). The regime might have been named after its leader, Philippe Pétain, but ‘régime de Pétain’ was not widely used for a number of reasons. First, Pétain was a complicated figure for the French public. He was the grandfatherly leader of the new state and its National Revolution, but he was also the Hero of Verdun, the symbol of France’s great sacrifice and tenacity in the First World War. In the early 1940s, the significance of Pétain’s role in the First World War was as important to many French as his position in the Second. And although he was the figurehead of the new regime, and his imagery was indeed mobilised widely and extensively, Pétain was not its only key figure.12 To call the new government the ‘régime de Pétain’ occluded the significant roles of François Darlan and Pierre Laval, Pétain’s two Prime Ministers.13 It also neglects the shadow of Nazi Germany that was cast over the state. The regime’s official name, État Français – which replaced République Française – did not catch on outside government circles. ‘Régime de Vichy’, on the other hand, caught on quickly for several reasons. First, despite the wishes of many, the town was the seat of the État Français from its beginning to its end. Second, the Third Republic was dissolved there, too. On 10 July 1940, 570 out of 669 parliamentarians voted full powers to Pétain in Vichy’s Grand Casino, a building that, since the late nineteenth century, had come to be an internationally recognised symbol of the town.14 This suggests another reason that the name ‘Vichy’ was so quickly taken up to designate the collaborationist wartime government, a reason anchored in Vichy’s pre-war image. ‘Vichy’ was already a brand, and this brand was easily applied to the regime. Since the mid-nineteenth century, ‘Vichy’ – both the town and its ­products – had been very carefully cultivated and marketed. The town of Vichy was the Reine des Villes d’Eau, the ‘Queen of Spas’. This image evokes the indulgent luxury of the Second Empire and the Belle Époque: Napoleon III’s cité thermale with its parks, gardens and terraces full of flowers; galas, balls, banquets, opera, theatre, concerts and cabarets.15 It evokes rich foreigners and Le Tout-Paris who came to Vichy for leisure and luxury, fashion and flânerie, to see and be seen. This Vichy, ‘né du snobisme’,16 was a cultural mirage,17 but that mirage was carefully crafted and promoted very successfully. Vichy products – bottled water, salts, lozenges and pastilles, but also therapeutic techniques and the application of waters – were also marketed judiciously, and the brand was jealously guarded (Mallat 1899 and 1919). The municipality had a role to play in the dissemination of this image of Vichy, but most of the promotion of the

136 | Kirrily Freeman

brand was done by the Compagnie Fermière de l’Établissement Thermal de Vichy – the company that held the rights to exploit the thermal domain. The Compagnie Fermière was by far the leading force in both tourism and commerce in Vichy. It owned and ran the Grand Établissement Thermal, the Grand Casino, the Opéra and a number of other establishments. It produced and sold the bottled water, pastilles, lozenges and salts made from minerals extracted from the waters at their source. Vichy products had such wide distribution and commercial success that the brand was internationally known and, as a result, had many imitators such as Vichy Catalan, a Spanish mineral water company and spa created in 1881.18 The town’s renown and the perceived misuse of the ‘Vichy’ brand caused a group of merchants and patent-holders to lobby the municipal council in June 1938 demanding legislation that would protect the name ‘Vichy’: Considering that many products of all kinds, both French and foreign, market themselves as Vichy despite not being made here, and considering that this practice is aimed at profiting from the international renown of Vichy … [we] must reserve for our [products and] residents alone, the advantages of [Vichy’s] reputation … and protect l’appellation Vichy.19

Ironically, in 1940, l’appellation Vichy was easily applied to what was perceived as the town’s newest product – the wartime regime. This branding happened easily both semantically and symbolically. In French, the word ‘régime’ also means regimen, or diet. Thus the term ‘régime de Vichy’ was already widely in use to suggest the treatment followed by Vichy spa patients, in which a twenty-one-day cure cleansed, purified and renewed.20 The new government purported to do much the same thing. The most famous and most widely distributed bottled water from Vichy, as well as Vichy pastilles, carried the label ‘Vichy-État’, suggesting, as Michèle Cointet (1993) has also noted, that the state had already long been ‘at home’ in Vichy (see Figures 7.2 and 7.3).21 It appears that the careful branding and marketing of Vichy had, fatefully, backfired. The image of decadence that Vichy projected may also explain why the town has been stigmatised since the Second World War. There are generally three charges against Vichy and its inhabitants: it did not suffer during the Occupation, it was indifferent to the suffering of others, and it profited from the presence of the regime. It is important to stress that these perceptions, widely held, did not always reflect reality. But they were rooted in the image the town of Vichy fostered of itself, as well as in its history. Memories of the First World War and the Depression years in Vichy laid the foundation for these perceptions. During the Great War, many hotels were requisitioned as hospitals, but the municipality and the Compagnie

The Town of Vichy and the Politics of Identity | 137

Figure 7.2 Eau minérale naturelle, a bottle of Vichy mineral water. Advertisement, Vichy Célestins. Guide de Vichy Edition Illustrée, 1954. Ville de Vichy – Fonds patrimoniaux de la Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud, v 10 910.2 VIC.

Fermière were determined that the season would go on.22 ‘Thermal activity’ was scaled back, but there were nevertheless a healthy number of tourists including prominent guests such as the Queen and King of Montenegro, who came to Vichy in 1916 (Débordes 1993: 42). ‘Para-thermal activities’ continued under the guise of the war effort. In 1917, one of the highlights of the season was a fundraising concert directed by Saint-Saëns at the Grand Casino.23 Similarly, the season in Vichy suffered surprisingly little during the Great Depression. The biggest drop in revenue was in 1932. Vichy lost 7 per cent of its clientele. But by 1937, these numbers were back up by 21 per cent compared with 1931 (Débordes 1993: 46–47). This relative stability amid the turmoil of the first decades of the twentieth century

138 | Kirrily Freeman

Figure 7.3 Vichy-État, Vichy spa publicity poster. Advertisement, Vichy-État. Revue de Vichy, 1950. Ville de Vichy – Fonds patrimoniaux de la Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud, v 10 910.2 VIC.

cemented perceptions of Vichy as a playground where the rich ate, drank, danced and gambled while the rest of the country suffered. Indeed, Vichy appeared set to continue in this vein in the early months of the Second World War, and even after it. In a council meeting on 21 April 1940, the municipality declared its determination that the thermal station stay open and that, as a ‘national treasure’, it should resume and continue its activity as fully as possible.24 Similarly, in the summer of 1950, with the advent of the Korean War, an editorial by Vichy’s former mayor, Louis Moinard, appeared in Vichy Revue, a publication widely diffused in France and intended for the tourist market. It is true that the current atmosphere does not lend itself to the search for moral quietude, as necessary for our health as physical treatment. And one feels a

The Town of Vichy and the Politics of Identity | 139

vague qualm in such circumstances seeking out a thermal cure or the charms of an agreeable idleness on the banks of the Allier. But this is nevertheless Vichy’s mission. Should we renounce this, or hide behind a discreet silence, or feel shame at being frivolous in a world that so deliberately chooses the path of danger? Should we neglect the benefits nature has given us?25

Vichy’s perceived lack of suffering may be key to the negative perception of the town by the rest of France. Vichy was widely considered both during and after the Second World War not as a victim of the government it had housed (which is how the town has always seen itself), but as having escaped the hardship suffered by the rest of the French population. This perception arises principally from two considerations: the standard of living in Vichy during the war and the liberation of the town. Vichy physicians reported in 1943 that the average weight of one-yearolds in the provisional capital was 10 kilograms, ‘largely superior to the national average which was 8.8 kilograms. Infant mortality is 4.75%, stillbirths 2.9%, numbers clearly inferior to national rates’ (Susini 1943: 73). General mortality in Vichy remained relatively stable at 11.6 per cent, whereas it increased in Paris by 24 per cent and in Marseilles by 57 per cent.26 Vichy’s population was, at least until 1943, healthier than most in France, and this shaped wartime and post-war perceptions. These were not helped by the fact that, in the final months of the war, Vichy was saved from destruction. The town was not bombed, and only its airport was blown up by the retreating Germans. The Swiss Ambassador, Walter Stucki, negotiated the German departure and the handover of the town to the FFI thus saving Vichy from retaliation by either side.27 Nevertheless, many in Vichy maintained that their town was a ville sinistrée – a term usually reserved for cities that had been severely damaged. This claim was based on both material damage done to the inside of hotels, to the casino and to parks and gardens (one post-war claim for reparations was over the loss of four thousand green metal chairs from the Parc des Sources), and damage done to Vichy’s reputation and future livelihood (ConstantinWeyer 1947: 178). The municipality’s claim for war damages was 76 million francs in 1949.28 Most requisitioned hotels, as well as the Compagnie Fermière, made war damages claims as well.29 On 20 June 1945, Vichy made a request for classification as a ‘ville à suppléments nationaux’ that would entitle the town to additional allocations of food, ‘considering the current state of provisioning’, and in anticipation of a busy tourist season.30 Such claims to the status of ville sinistrée were not taken well by towns that had, for example, lost large portions of their population and infrastructure to Allied bombing, Nazi atrocity, or both. A meeting of the Congrès des Maires des Villes et Communes Sinistrées à la suite d’événements de

140 | Kirrily Freeman

Guerre was held in Paris in March 1945. In the first session, the mayor of Gérardmer (a town in eastern France whose reconstruction was sponsored by Vichy) may well have had the spa town in mind when he exclaimed: ‘it is shameful that a part of the population continues to suffer while another continues to enrich itself, or at least live in indifference’.31 It is easy to see how some of Vichy’s efforts at reconstruction may have reeked of indifference to towns such as Gérardmer. For example, in early 1951, Jacques Aletti, president of the Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy, gathered journalists at his office in the Hôtel Majestic for a press conference on the future of Vichy. He declared that the 1951 season must bring the return of elegance.32 He proposed a dress code, making evening gowns and tuxedos mandatory. He also suggested that the first seven rows at the opera be kept for guests in formal attire. Lest anyone accuse the Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy of elitism, Aletti was quick to clarify: The return of etiquette is not an anti-democratic measure. It will certainly not prevent Vichy from being accessible to people of all means. On the contrary, the crowds of people who gathered in the street to admire stylish couples on their way to galas at the Carlton demonstrate the power of elegance. A season that is chic will attract a greater clientele. Tourists like to be in the presence of ­celebrities. (Revue Vichy Cannes, January 1951)

The municipality and the press dutifully took up Aletti’s initiative for several years. A striking poster proclaimed: ‘Soyez élégants!’ [Be elegant!] (Figure 7.4).33 The 1954 Guide-Poche de Vichy made similar, helpful ­suggestions to potential guests: What should one bring to Vichy? As little as possible. Do not encumber yourselves with baggage. … You will find all you need here. … Do not forget, dear readers [lectrices], that Vichy is a luxurious world bazaar. Remember also that if our resort is the Queen of Spas, she is also the Queen of Elegance. Nowhere else will you find, in such a small area, such a profusion of lovely and sumptuous things. So, Mesdames, if you intend to take part in fashionable encounters and artistic solemnities, so varied and frequent in Vichy, bring your most stylish wardrobe and your most expensive jewels.34

This was published in the same year that Abbé Pierre’s crusade for the homeless highlighted the acute housing crisis that was still a legacy of wartime destruction. While, in the early 1950s, Vichy fretted over lost Anglo-Saxon clients,35 large portions of the populations of Caen, Rennes, Lorient and Le Havre were still living in makeshift dwellings and awaiting the reconstruction of their homes.36 The perception of Vichy’s indifference to the suffering of others was certainly aggravated by the attitude of some of the town’s elites. During the

The Town of Vichy and the Politics of Identity | 141

Figure 7.4 ‘Soyez élégants !’ [Be elegant!], Vichy spa publicity poster from the early 1950s. Ville de Vichy – Fonds patrimoniaux de la Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud, EF Aff. 91.

exodus in spring 1940, as refugees from eastern France flooded into the Centre region, a Vichy police inspector protested to the municipal council that, for twenty-two consecutive days, he was forced to take his lunch in a restaurant, presumably because his office was overrun. Incensed, he submitted his bills to the city for reimbursement.37 From 11 May 1940, with the arrival of refugees from the front who appeared ‘less and less like tourists and more and more like miserable evacuees’, the mayor of Vichy installed barracks in the Concours Hippique racetrack to house these unfortunates. ‘Better to keep them hidden, to keep out of view those who carry the stain of the nation’s trials’ (Cointet 1993: 11). The refugees, not surprisingly, had some complaints about the welcome they received

142 | Kirrily Freeman

in Vichy. An August 1941 report to the Minister of the Interior detailed a long list of grievances from refugees in Vichy about their treatment by staff at the ministry’s repatriation office. The report was precipitated by a letter to Pétain from M. Robert, president of the French Red Cross in Moulins, describing the ‘regrettable attitude’ and ‘extreme insolence’ of some functionaries in this service.38 Of greatest concern to the Ministry of the Interior was the fact that many French refugees who had taken shelter in Vichy were, in fact, lining up to complain to the German authorities about the attitude of French officials, ‘a comparison that is never to the advantage of the [latter]’.39 In his memoirs of the war years, Ivan Loiseau, Director of the domaine thermal for the Compagnie Fermière, describes in the same breath the great lengths to which he went during the spring and summer of 1940 to find appropriate lodging for his prominent friends, and his unwillingness to help people of more modest means who came to him for help: Among my visitors was the young man from Bouchet … . He was in an incredible state of hunger and exhaustion … . I was obliged to tell him that I would not be able to find him a bed in all of Vichy, and I advised him to eat a little something in a restaurant and take the train to Clermont where he would have a better chance of finding a bed for the night.40 … Then I had a visit from Madame Louis Féré, the daughter-in-law of [the] president [of the Compagnie Fermière] who was accompanying [the sculptor] Maxime Real del Sarte. I put them up as I have many of my friends lately, in a little château owned by an excellent art dealer in Vernet. Maxime Real del Sarte knows my mother and older brother. He had arrived from Spain where, as everyone knows, he is closely associated with the leaders of the nationalist movement. (Loiseau 1974: 121)

There is also an apocryphal, and telling, story about Georges Baugnies, President of the Compagnie Fermière, who was briefly detained during the Liberation. Baugnies and other suspected collaborators were interned in the Concours Hippique in September 1944. The seventy-year-old had no overcoat or blanket during the two nights of his captivity, so two other prisoners lent him theirs. The day of Baugnies’ release, his chef d’hôtel arrived at the racetrack with a basket of bread, a rabbit and a roast chicken. Baugnies kept all of this for himself, giving only a pastille to each of the men who had helped him. Vichy pastilles are meant to aid digestion (Débordes 1993: 67). Georges Baugnies is certainly guilty of outrageous indifference. Much more obscure, however, is the question of the Compagnie Fermière’s wartime economic activities. Just how much Vichy profited from the Occupation is still not clear. Jean Débordes, a journalist and municipal councillor in Vichy in the 1950s, admitted:

The Town of Vichy and the Politics of Identity | 143

No light has ever been shone on the rent that the hoteliers received during the four years of the war. Even at a modest rate, this income would have been ­substantial … and it would seem that this revenue allowed them to live without working. … We will probably never know the truth of the situation. (Débordes 1991: 93)41

Although, during the war, the Season never took place the way the municipality and Vichy’s commercial interests would have liked, there were still galas, theatre, opera, fine restaurants and high fashion. Louis Vuitton had a shop in the Hôtel du Parc.42 It seemed to many that Vichy was making a good profit from the Occupation. Here, however, is where perception departs from reality. These things were, as they had always been, reserved for elites. Just because the champagne flowed in Vichy did not mean that the Vichyssois were drinking it.43 There is evidence, in fact, that most of the foodstuffs that came into Vichy were reserved for government canteens.44 Nor is it true that people in Vichy did not suffer – the Gestapo torture-chambers were in the basement of the Hôtel du Portugal. The milice tortured people in the cellar of the Petit Casino. An essay by Denyse Dorville (1946) describes one horrifying night of many at the Petit Casino in the summer of 1944. Likewise, the Vichyssois were not always insensitive to the plight of their compatriots. The municipality was involved in a number of sponsorship projects, including the reconstruction of Gérardmer, an organisation to help returned POWs and deportees and a summer camp for orphans and child evacuees.45 This division between perception and reality is due to another facet of Vichy’s municipal identity that has existed since the mid-nineteenth century. Vichy is, in fact, two cities: there is the cité thermale and the ville sédentaire. The Vichy brand revolves entirely around the former. It is also a geographical entity divorced from the ‘other’, year-round city. The Hall des Sources, Opéra, Casino, Galeries Napoléon, Hôtel du Parc and Hôtel Majestic are all clustered around Napoleon Bonaparte’s Parc des Sources and flanked by a colonnade leading into arcades of luxury boutiques. The ‘sedentary’ city encircles it, but is apart. A tourist guide published in 1954, the Guide-Poche de Vichy et de ses Environs, juxtaposed the two cities: ‘Old Vichy is generally little known. Although it is modernising year by year, it still has the character of an ancient village with narrow winding streets and irregular buildings – hallmarks of the Middle Ages’ (1954: 9). Lest visitors assume that this is a good thing the Guide-Poche continues, ‘therefore no monument is really worthy of attention. The old church of Saint Blaise offers nothing remarkable … [. A] building known as Maison du Bailliage was nicely restored and so is not completely devoid of interest’ (1954: 9). The cité thermale, on the other hand, ‘offers a striking contrast with Old

144 | Kirrily Freeman

Vichy. It [has] all the elegance and refinement of luxury, parks, magnificent gardens, sumptuous hotels, the Grand Établissement Thermal, and the waters, which are its glory and its fortune’ (1954: 9). The decadent image that Vichy projects, the image it has always fostered as a municipal identity, is based entirely on the luxurious self-indulgence promised by the cité thermale. But this Vichy had, in fact, very little to do with the lives and experiences of ordinary Vichyssois. Certainly, the sedentary town provided some of the labour for the cité thermale, but not as much as one expects. The casinos, theatres, restaurants and hotels closed in the off-season. Their staff migrated either to ski stations or to the Côte d’Azur. Georges Baugnies, Ivan Loiseau and the other executives at the Compagnie Fermière were all Parisians, and spent only the Season in Vichy (in fact, in Loiseau’s memoirs, his great joy at the Liberation was mostly due to the possibility of returning to Paris after four years’ ‘captivity’ in Vichy). The Alettis split their time between Paris, Vichy, Nice and Algeria. Furthermore, the municipality was denied any substantial role or presence in the cité thermale. The water sources are owned by the state and their exploitation granted to the Compagnie Fermière. The power and the money rested with this group and the Société des Grands Hôtels. The municipality was left, rather impotently, to manage the affairs of the rest of the city. And yet Vichy has always invested – and continues to invest – in its image as ‘Queen of Spas’. This perpetuates assumptions about the city that are often not in line with the lives and experiences of the majority of its inhabitants. Finally, Vichy’s response to its wartime past has not helped to change these perceptions. When it comes to the war years, the town is united in a stubborn silence, punctuated, occasionally, by defensive outrage. When, in the 1990s, the war crimes trials of René Bousquet, Paul Touvier and Maurice Papon brought Vichy’s name up repeatedly in the press, indignant Vichyssois went on the offensive. The mayor, Claude Malhuret, wrote to the Académie Française on 18 March 1996 to request greater precision in the use of the word ‘Vichy’, insisting that the name should be applied only to the town and not to the regime.46 In 1998, when the colourful mayor of Montpellier, Georges Frèche, made the provocative proposal of naming a street in his city ‘rue de Vichy’ to draw attention to the rise of the extreme Right in his region, the press in Vichy exploded.47 Petitions were signed, mass mailings were organised and the whole municipal council descended on Montpellier to protest.48 Other than these moments of mobilisation to protect Vichy’s name and honour, however, by far the dominant reaction to the war years in Vichy is silence. And when it comes to commemoration and memorials, the silence is deafening. A plaque honouring victims of the Gestapo was inaugurated at the Hôtel du Portugal on 27 June 1965, as part of the annual meeting of

The Town of Vichy and the Politics of Identity | 145

the Fédération Nationale des Anciens de la Résistance, held that year in Vichy. This plaque has disappeared, along with six others dedicated to the Resistance.49 There was also to be a street called boulevard des martyrs de la Résistance, but the neighbourhood for which it was proposed was redeveloped and the street no longer exists.50 Rue Marc Juge, which commemorates the assassination of a local resister, was inaugurated in 1995. It is far from the centre of town, and is only long enough to connect two roundabouts and flank a shopping-centre car park. In August 1992, the Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld inaugurated a plaque commemorating the victims of the 1942 round-ups and deportations. The plaque was placed inside the Hôtel du Parc, which was transformed into apartments after the war. After the plaque’s inauguration, it was moved into a private interior courtyard completely out of view and inaccessible to the public. In 2000, the plaque was moved outside the building to the esplanade in front of the Hôtel du Parc. It was soon vandalised, and removed.51 Furthermore, the few memorials or commemorative markers that do exist in Vichy are almost all the result of private initiative, usually by associations of former resisters like the Fédération Nationale des Anciens de la Résistance. The most significant act of commemoration of the war period in Vichy is the yearly marking of the 10 July 1940 vote in the Grand Casino. These festivities honour the eighty parliamentarians who voted against full powers to Pétain. This has now become a relatively highprofile event in Vichy’s yearly calendar, but it was very slow to develop and was not a municipal initiative. It came about through determined pressure from an external group, the Comité en l’Honneur des Quatrevingts Parlementaires du 10 Juillet 1940. Interestingly, a plaque placed in the Grand Casino by this group was also vandalised and removed.52 Commemorative neglect in Vichy even extends to the war memorial, whose eternal flame is extinguished. The near-total absence of traces of Vichy’s wartime experience is deliberate. This is made abundantly clear in discussions, still heated, over the creation of a museum of the war years in Vichy. Various proposals have been suggested periodically since the end of the war, but they have always been rejected by the mayor’s office. One, a project in the 1950s by a group of Pétain’s supporters to turn his rooms in the Hôtel du Parc into a museum celebrating the Marshal’s life, was rejected, perhaps justly, out of fear that the hotel would become a site of pilgrimage for the extreme Right. The rejection of all other plans, however (including many that appear historically balanced and pedagogically driven), smacks of a wilful refusal to address the wartime history of the town. In 1990, for example, a municipal councillor raised the question again, suggesting that a museum of resistance and collaboration might help demonstrate

146 | Kirrily Freeman

that ‘our town does not have to be the symbol of the bad conscience of the French’ (Frasnetti 1998: 48). The discussion was not pursued. The official position of the municipal authority is that Vichy ‘has no reason to explain itself’.53 What the mayor appears unwilling to consider, however, is the positive role a museum could play for Vichy. The historian Marc Ferro told local journalists: ‘the townspeople must themselves make the effort to dissociate Vichy from the regime. They could talk about it more freely. Vichy could also focus on tourism related to this period of history with a museum dedicated to collaboration and resistance.’54 Likewise Serge Klarsfeld, during a 1994 visit to Vichy, stated: ‘I think that the city could easily free itself of what it sees as negative prejudices towards it, if it took a number of measures. … It could, for example, create a [museum with a] library and documentation centre dedicated to the État Français and the Resistance. [The taboo of the war years] is a syndrome that is exaggerated in Vichy’ (Frasnetti 1998: 48–49). It is tempting to see Vichy as a microcosm of France when it comes to the memory of the war years (Haas 1999). But the ‘Vichy syndrome’ in Vichy is particular. In short, the national ‘Vichy syndrome’ involved first an over-identification with the Resistance, followed by an earnest search for and exposure of collaboration, followed again by recurring periods of judgement and introspection. There is not a lot of soul-searching in Vichy. There is certainly no question of confronting collaboration, nor much effort to come to terms with the ambiguities of the war period, even in a general sense. Even the selective remembering of Resistance has been mostly left to others and, in a number of cases, subsequently erased, as the saga of Vichy’s commemorative plaques demonstrates. The overwhelming impression is, rather, of an enforced forgetting of Vichy’s time as Provisional Capital and a resolute dedication to the memory of Vichy, Capitale Thermale. Three months after Vichy’s liberation, the mayor and municipal council published the following declaration entitled ‘Vichy is not the seat of a treasonous government, but is the Queen of Spas’: Vichy’s municipal council, in its meeting of 20 November 1944, observes that the national radio and press continue to employ the terms ‘Vichy government’ and ‘Vichy policy’ to designate the former Pétain/Laval government and the politics it advocated. We are deeply affected by the denigration of the name Vichy by associating it with a regime that has been condemned by the entire French population. We wish to protest energetically against the unwarranted disgrace inflicted on our town and its inhabitants. Vichy lived for four years under a police state in which the zeal of traitorous bureaucrats was unchecked, as was the cruelty of Darnand’s miliciens and the agents of the Gestapo. The presence of the government of the ex-État Français was imposed on Vichy … [and] Vichy became, against its will, the provisional capital of our country. But

The Town of Vichy and the Politics of Identity | 147

Vichy never let itself become intoxicated by this new title, and was able, in the midst of France’s suffering, to preserve its dignity and its honour. Vichy also [had] prisoners, deportees, heroes and martyrs. … The residents of Vichy have never failed in their duty, and therefore do not deserve the dishonour imparted to the name of their town. Because of its waters, its cures, [its] sophistication …, [its] artistic value … and its reputation … Vichy is at the forefront of international resorts. Vichy is, and will remain, the Queen of Spas. The residents of our town … no longer want [Vichy’s] name to be associated with the harmful politics conceived and carried out within its walls but against its interests. They ask that an effort be made by all those who write in the press or speak on the radio to stop this habit that prejudices the reputation of their town, but also the interests of all of France. At a time when our neighbours are re-equipping their resorts and launching their publicity campaigns … the Municipality of Vichy asks all national authorities to give their support to its campaign to definitively erase the stain left by four years of a hated regime, and to help restore to the Queen of Spas the honour she deserves.55

This declaration contains elements that continue to define Vichy’s struggles with memory and identity: in particular, the notion that Vichy bears no responsibility for the regime that it housed and that, therefore, the name of the town should not be synonymous with the politics of the État Français; and, finally, that Vichy has always been, and should always be, the Queen of Spas. It seems, however, that the more doggedly Vichy clings to its spa image, the more indelible the stain remains.

Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank the staff of the Archives Municipales de Vichy and the Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud, Vichy, for their assistance in the course of this project.

Notes  1. A particularly enthusiastic example of this type of repudiation is Alain Carteret, Régime de Vichy, Ça Suffit! (2010).  2. For a complete listing of requisitioned properties and the government offices installed in them, see Pierre Broustine et al. (1993).  3. Between 1940 and 1942, France was divided into two main zones, one under direct occupation by the German military, the other administered from Vichy by Pétain’s government. After the Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942, the entire country was occupied by the German military.

148 | Kirrily Freeman

 4. On the peregrinations of the French government in exile, the decision to make Vichy provisional capital and the installation of the government there, see Cointet (1993).  5. Pétain’s ambition to govern the État Français from royal Versailles, as opposed to Paris (home of the République Française), was symbolic and significant (Cointet 1993: 21).  6. Except, crucially, Pétain, who exclaimed: ‘Ah! Vichy, voilà une ville comme je les aime!’ [Ah! Vichy, here is a town how I like them] (Cointet 1993: 19). All translations are the author’s.  7. The mayor, Pierre-Victor Léger, was a Radical Socialist. He was elected in 1929 and forced to resign in August 1944, but was re-elected in April 1949. The move to de-requisition hotel rooms appears to have been strictly economic.  8. Registre de Délibérations, Conseil Municipal de Vichy, 1938–1941 (11 juillet 1941). Archives Municipales de Vichy.  9. Registre de Délibérations, Conseil Municipal de Vichy, 1938–1941 (n.d.). Archives Municipales de Vichy. Following these failures, the municipality requested exceptional financial aid from the state to cover the loss of tax revenue from gambling and hotel rooms, and to contribute toward the cost of offering services to an augmented population. This request was denied. Archives Départementales de l’Allier, 999 W 623. 10. Napoleon III invested heavily in Vichy – in addition to the Casino (1865), the Église Saint-Louis (1865), the train station (1862) and a large number of villas, Napoleon III is also responsible for the urban footprint of the town – Grands Boulevards, parks and even building up and landscaping the banks of the Allier river. See Alain Carteret (2009). 11. Richard Golsan uses this term to describe French struggles with memory of the war years in his book Vichy’s Afterlife: History and Counterhistory in Postwar France (2000). 12. On Pétainist imagery, see Christian Faure (1989). 13. The significance of Pétain’s and Laval’s respective roles in the mind of the French public (Darlan was assassinated in December 1942) is also demonstrated by their post-war fates. Pétain was imprisoned until his death in 1951, while Laval was executed in October 1945. 14. On the vote, see Marielle and Sagnes (n.d.). On the cultural significance of Vichy’s Grand Casino, see Isabelle Pouzadoux (1989). 15. The Belle Époque was a period that encompassed the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. 16. Christian Jamot, quoted in Jean Débordes (1993: 47). 17. This phrase is Isabelle Pouzadoux’s (1989). 18. See Natalia Piernas (2006). The Compagnie Fermière’s extensive distribution network is the main reason it was taken over by Perrier in the 1960s. See Débordes (1993). 19. Registre de Délibérations, Conseil Municipal de Vichy, 1938–1941 (27 juin 1938). Archives Municipales de Vichy. 20. See, for example, Compagnie Fermière de Vichy, Vichy: Capitale Thermale (1939). Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud, Vichy. 21. Cointet discusses this from an economic and political perspective, but I think its symbolism is equally significant. 22. On First World War requisitions, see Broustine et al. (1993). See also Constantin-Weyer, Vichy et son histoire (1947). 23. Ibid. 24. Registre de Délibérations, Conseil Municipal de Vichy, 1938–1941 (21 avril 1940). Archives Municipales de Vichy. 25. Vichy Revue, August 1950. Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud, Vichy. 26. See Susini (1943) for Vichy mortality rates. For Paris and Marseilles mortality rates, see Shannon L. Fogg (2009: 10).

The Town of Vichy and the Politics of Identity | 149

27. The FFI were the French Forces of the Interior, resistance fighters who assisted Allied and French regular forces during the Liberation. 28. Registre de Délibérations, Conseil Municipal de Vichy, 1949–1951. Archives Municipales de Vichy. 29. See Archives Départementales de l’Allier, 537 W. 30. Registre de Délibérations, Conseil Municipal de Vichy, 1945–1947 (20 juin 1945). Archives Municipales de Vichy. 31. Congrès des Maires des Villes et Communes Sinistrées à la suite d’événements de Guerre, Mars 1945. CARAN, F2 4202. Interestingly, the proceedings of this conference reveal a kind of competition between mayors of destroyed towns over who had suffered most. A comment by the mayor of Saint Malo is representative: ‘We have suffered like many others, more than many others, and we have the right to complain more than most.’ 32. ‘La Saison 1951 doit voir un renouveau de l’Élégance à Vichy.’ Revue Vichy Cannes, January 1951. Fonds Patrimoniaux, Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud, Vichy. 33. EF Aff. 91, ‘Soyez élégants!’ Fonds Patrimoniaux, Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud, Vichy. 34. Guide-Poche de Vichy et de ses environs (1954: 5). Fonds Patrimoniaux, Médiathèque ValeryLarbaud, Vichy. The gendered nature of this excerpt is also noteworthy. 35. Jacques Aletti stressed that Belgian, Swiss, Italian and French clients had been faithful to the resort, but that English and American elites, a crucial demographic in terms of revenue, made up the fifty thousand guests lost yearly since 1939. 36. On villes sinistrées and post-war reconstruction, see Danièle Voldman (1997). 37. Registre de Délibérations, Conseil Municipal de Vichy, 1938–1941 (s.d.). Archives Municipales de Vichy. 38. Rapport pour M. le Ministre Secrétaire d’Etat à l’Intérieur sur la poste de circulation de la Madeleine, 23 aout 1941. CARAN, F1a 4516. 39. CARAN, F1a 4516. 23 August 1941. 40. See Loiseau (1974: 118). 41. The Archives Départementales de l’Allier contain documents from the Moulins–Vichy Chamber of Commerce and Industry that detail the compensation paid to all Vichy hotels that were requisitioned. Archives Départementales de l’Allier, 1441 W 85. 42. See Stéphanie Bonvicini (2004). 43. Michèle Cointet (1993: 69) reproduces an order for 175 bottles of champagne for Pétain’s entourage in 1942. 44. Registre de Délibérations, Conseil Municipal de Vichy, 1945–1947. Archives Municipales de Vichy. 45. Parrainage de Gérardmer, Subvention. Registre de Délibérations, Conseil Municipal de Vichy, 1949–1951 [28 février 1950]. Archives Municipales de Vichy. The municipal council voted to give 1 million francs per year to Gérardmer to aid in reconstruction. Prisonniers de guerre, Subvention. Registre de Délibérations, Conseil Municipal de Vichy, 1945–1947 (16 avril 1945). Archives Municipales de Vichy. In this case, the municipal council contributed 100,000 francs. 46. Archives Municipales de Vichy, Dossier ‘Nom de Vichy’. 47. Frèche had just been defeated in regional elections by a coalition that included JeanMarie Le Pen’s right-wing Front National. Frèche refused to acknowledge Vichy’s protests, but later renamed the street rue de Platon. 48. See also Pascal Frasnetti (1998) and Georges Frélastre (1975). 49. Archives Municipales de Vichy, Dossier ‘Plaques et noms de rues’. It is not known whether these plaques were stolen, removed because they were vandalised, removed during restorations or municipal works, or given to the families of the victims they commemorated.

150 | Kirrily Freeman

50. Archives Municipales de Vichy, Dossier ‘Plaques et noms de rues’. 51. Archives Municipales de Vichy, Dossier ‘Plaques et noms de rues’. See also Frasnetti (1998). 52. Archives Municipales de Vichy, Dossier ‘Quatre-vingts parlementaires’. 53. Personal communication with the author, Vichy City Council, February 2012. 54. In fact the only real acknowledgement of the war years for tourists in Vichy is a walkingtour held weekly in the summer. This began as the personal initiative of a young student and his professor, though it has since been taken up by the Tourism Office. Archives Municipales de Vichy, Dossier ‘Office du Tourisme’. 55. Registre de Délibérations du Conseil Municipal, December 1941–January 1945, Archives Municipales de Vichy. Italics mine.

References Archival Sources Archives Départementales de l’Allier, Yzeure (537 W, 999 W 623, 1441 W 85) Archives Municipales, Vichy (Dossier ‘Nom de Vichy’, Dossier ‘Office du Tourisme’, Dossier ‘Plaques et noms de rues’, Dossier ‘Quatre-vingts parlementaires’) CARAN – Archives Nationales, Paris (F1a 4516, F2 4202) Fonds Patrimoniaux, Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud, Vichy (Revue Vichy Cannes, January 1951, Vichy Revue, August 1950) Registre de Délibérations, Conseil Municipal de Vichy (1938–1941, 1945–1947, 1949–1951)

Secondary Sources Bonvicini, S. 2004. Louis Vuitton: Une saga française. Paris: Fayard. Broustine, P., C. Delbergé, J. Gouat and L. Maupertuis. 1993. Vichy réquisitionnée: Utilisation de ses capacités d’hébergement, 1870–1871, 1914–1918, 1939–1945. Vichy: Centre Culturel Valery-Larbaud. Carteret, A. 2009. Vichy Cité Napoléon III. Vichy: Imprimerie Vidal. _______. 2010. Régime de Vichy, Ça Suffit! Vichy: Imprimerie Vidal. Cointet, M. 1993. Vichy capitale, 1940–1944: Vérités et légendes. Paris: Perrin. Compagnie Fermière de Vichy. 1939. Vichy: Capitale thermale. Vichy: Wallon. Conan, E. and H. Rousso. 1998. Vichy: An Ever-Present Past. Hanover: University Press of New England. Constantin-Weyer, M. 1947. Vichy et son histoire. Vichy: Szabo. Débordes, J. 1991. Pierre Coulon: La trop courte chance de Vichy. Vichy: Éditions des Cahiers Bourbonnais. _______. 1993. Vichy et la Compagnie Fermière: Un attelage à hauts risques. Vichy: Éditions des Cahiers Bourbonnais. Dorville, D. 1946. ‘4 juillet 1944: La grande nuit du Petit Casino’, in Champel, M.-J. (ed.), Nouveau mémorial de Vichy. Vichy: Éditions des Montagnes Bleues. Faure, C. 1989. Le Projet culturel de Vichy: Folklore et révolution nationale, 1940–1944. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon. Fogg, S.L. 2009. The Politics of Everyday Life in Vichy France: Foreigners, Undesirables, and Strangers. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

The Town of Vichy and the Politics of Identity | 151

Frasnetti, P. 1998. La Mémoire de la ville de Vichy de 1944 à nos jours. Unpublished Maîtrise d’Histoire contemporaine, Université Charles De Gaulle, Lille III. Frélastre, G. 1975. Les Complexes de Vichy: Ou Vichy les capitales. Vichy: Éditions France-Empire. Golsan, R. 2000. Vichy’s Afterlife: History and Counterhistory in Postwar France. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Guide-Poche de Vichy et de ses environs. 1954. Vichy: Crépin, Leblond & Cie. Haas, V. 1999. Mémoires, identités et représentations socio-spatiales d’une ville: Le Cas de Vichy. Unpublished Doctorat de Troisième Cycle, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Loiseau, I. 1974. Souvenirs et témoignages: Un témoin naturel et quotidien du Gouvernement de Vichy 1940–1945. Vichy: Éditions des Cahiers Bourbonnais. Mallat, A. 1899. De l’appellation commerciale ‘Eau Minérale de Vichy’ ou ‘Eau Minérale du Bassin de Vichy’ en jurisprudence. Vichy: Imprimerie C. Bougardel. _______. 1919. Les Sels et les pastilles de Vichy. Lons-le-Saunier: Imprimerie et Lithographie Lucien Declume. Marielle, J. and J. Sagnes. N.d. Pour la République: Le Vote des quatre-vingts à Vichy le 10 juillet 1940 (Comité en l’honneur des quatre-vingts parlementaires du 10 juillet 1940, Archives Municipales de Vichy). Paxton, R. 1972. Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944. New York: Knopf. Piernas, N. 2006. Vichy Catalan: 125 Years of History. Barcelona: Groupo Vichy Catalan S.A. Pouzadoux, I. 1989. Contribution à l’histoire culturelle d’une station thermale: Le Grand Casino de Vichy de 1870 à 1939. Unpublished Maîtrise d’Histoire, Clermont II. Rousso, H. 1991. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Société des Sciences Médicales de Vichy. 1943. Vichy après la guerre. Vichy: Centre Médical. Susini, M. 1943. ‘L’Équipement sanitaire de la Ville de Vichy’, in Société des Sciences Médicales de Vichy, Vichy après la guerre. Vichy: Centre Médical, pp. 62–74. Voldman, D. 1997. La Reconstruction des villes françaises de 1940 à 1944. Paris: L’Harmattan.

Kirrily Freeman is Associate Professor in Modern European History at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada. Her research focuses on the cultural history of Western Europe in the twentieth century. Her first book, Bronzes to Bullets (2009), tells the story of French statues and monuments that were melted down and shipped to Nazi munitions factories during the Second World War. Freeman’s current research deals with the postwar history of the French town of Vichy and how it has managed the stigma of collaboration.

Chapter 8

Tracking the Past in the Places and Spaces of Patrick Modiano’s Early Fiction

( Peter Tame

By the 1970s, de Gaulle’s résistancialisme (the myth that most of the French supported the Resistance during the Occupation) gave way to a much more nuanced, labile portrait of an occupied France in which people could actually have committed themselves to either side, Resistance or Collaboration, and whose choice, moreover, could have been determined by ‘accident’, by chance or by fate, rather than by intention, motivation or ideological commitment.1 Such literature eschewed the hagiographic tendencies of novels like Romain Gary’s Les Racines du ciel (1956), in which implicit praise of leaders of freedom-fighters like de Gaulle was readily discernible. Indeed, the very notion of freedom-fighter became problematic in fictional representations of the Second World War in the 1970s. Part of the reason for this development was that a new generation in France was now questioning previous versions of events, prior to producing their own very different versions. Born in 1945, Patrick Modiano belongs to the first generation of postwar French writers. He is currently the most widely read and the most popular of the mode rétro writers who, from the 1970s onwards, engaged in a re-evaluation of the French experience of the Occupation (1940–1944). The recent award to Modiano of the Nobel Prize for Literature demonstrates the extent of the popularity of his fiction, together with the significant reverberations that it elicits, not just in France but throughout the world.2 Modiano’s fiction partly represents an attempt to find his own identity and his place in contemporary French society by means of investigation of the lives of characters who, like his own father who was Jewish and of Italian origin, flourished during the Occupation. Alan Notes for this chapter begin on page 163.

Tracking the Past in Patrick Modiano’s Early Fiction | 153

Morris confirms the particular importance of the complex relationship between place and identity in Modiano’s work: ‘Geography also contributes to the identity of the individual’ (Morris 2000: 19). Modiano’s father, who abandoned his son from 1945 onwards, apparently frequented the milieu of the black market, without actually becoming a collaborationist (Morris 1992: 144). Yet there is sufficient doubt in his son’s mind as to the ‘place’ or situation of his father in this period of French history, let alone of others who may have compromised themselves during this period, to warrant a delving back into the murky past, a past that many French would have preferred to forget. Given the troubled atmosphere of the Occupation, during which period it was very difficult for the French to distinguish facts from rumours owing to the intense propaganda originating from both the Allies and the Axis, it must have seemed to Modiano that the novel, with its potential for creative imagination, was the most ­appropriate literary genre for this investigation. This chapter will focus on the first three novels written by Modiano. They can be considered as a trilogy even though, unlike most trilogies, this one has no clear plot: rather, it is principally oneiric and fantasmagorical, relying heavily on locations, places and spaces, many of which are imaginary. Even the characters – the majority of them are mere ciphers – are generally subordinated to the strangely shifting scenes that constitute the décor of the Occupation as Modiano presents it. This chapter will demonstrate how places and spaces, together with their interaction with fictitious and historical characters, contribute to the novelist’s re-evaluation of a problematic past and his search for identity. The first novel, La Place de l’étoile (1968), illustrates the situation and identity of Jews in France, particularly during the Occupation, in a predominantly ludic fashion. It plays on the notion of appropriation by satirising the conspiracy theory of a Jewish ‘takeover’ of France. La Ronde de nuit (1969) continues the search for identity, and explores the twin themes of commitment and betrayal. The third novel, Les Boulevards de ceinture (1972), focuses on a problematic and semi-autobiographical relationship between father and son in the same period of French history. Although these novels deal with genuinely serious issues, the general tone is overall playful – even if the satire takes on a bitter, occasionally savage, quality at times; the scenes are mostly given a surreal treatment, and comic effects take precedence over the pathetic and tragic implications of the narrative.

154 | Peter Tame

La Place de l’étoile (1968): Changing Places The title of Modiano’s first novel, La Place de l’étoile [lit. ‘The Place of the Star’], playfully puns on the well-known landmark in Paris and the place of the star that all Jews in occupied France were obliged by law to wear – over the heart. According to Hitler’s racial stereotype, the Jews infiltrated European society, adapting themselves to the culture of the nation in which they settled. Epitomising this stereotype, Modiano’s narrator, Raphaël Schlemilovitch, is the archetypal Jew, at least at the start of the narrative. However, in a novel that can boast of no clear plot and a high level of psychological ambivalence in the characters, the narrator’s identity proves to be volatile. For example, he pushes the comic incongruity of his narrative so far as to claim that he has become the lover of Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress, and ‘the Third Reich’s official Jew’ (Modiano 1968: 155).3 Exaggerating another racial stereotype where Jews are concerned, Modiano makes Schlemilovitch a caricature of the cosmopolitan and a constant traveller – in the space of one page, for example, he covers an incredible amount of ground in Europe, from Istanbul to Vienna, to Trieste, to Budapest, to Salonica (Thessaloniki), and back again to Istanbul (Modiano 1968: 164). Yet, he abandons his cosmopolitanism early in the story in order to bury himself in the French countryside (‘le terroir’), in what is clearly a satirical dig at extreme right-wing French writers like Maurice Barrès and Henry Bordeaux whose nationalistic work extols the soil (terroir) of France (Modiano 1968: 21, 53). When he arrives in Israel, the ‘promised land’ for modern Jews, Schlemilovitch finds himself persecuted – by Jews. Throughout the novel, indeed, Jews are alternately persecuted and persecutors. Descriptions intentionally blur the issue of place, with the result that the reader is genuinely confused over where and when the action occurs: is it in postwar Israel or in occupied France? With its rapid narrative movement and its surreal characters who die and then reappear, La Place de l’étoile is frequently reminiscent of Voltaire’s eighteenth-century satire of Optimism, Candide. For example, as in Candide, ‘Eldorado’ (Israel here) turns out to be a disappointment. As utopia sours into dystopia, the blackly comic effects and incidents are controlled in a way that allows the emergence of serious points about important issues such as anti-Semitism, prejudice, intolerance, persecution, torture and oppression of all kinds. In order to reinforce this effect in the episode in Israel, the guards of the camp in which the ‘decadent’ European Jews are kept have names that conflate stereotypically German names with Jewish names, like Siegfried Levy, Günther Cohen and Hermann Rappoport. So

Tracking the Past in Patrick Modiano’s Early Fiction | 155

what kind of an Israel is this exactly? It seems to the modern reader that it is an uncomfortably familiar one in which the Israelis/Jews have come to resemble their persecutors, the Nazis. As well as dystopian, Modiano’s narrative is therefore frequently diachronic and ‘diatopic’, playing on mirror-imagery and oscillating, as here, between two locations and two time-zones. La Place de l’étoile was Modiano’s first excursion into a realm of fiction that shamelessly played fast and loose with a number of taboos in postwar French society, notably the issue of anti-Semitism.4 Its predominantly ludic approach relies on an imaginative satire of a series of cultural idées reçues and, in particular, on the illusory and deceptive nature of identity and place where his Jewish characters are concerned. From his fantasy of Jews and Nazis changing places, as described above, one may conclude that, apart from entertaining the reader with his black humour and narrative necromancy, Modiano is making the central point that no one nation has a monopoly on the persecution of human beings.

La Ronde de nuit (1969): Darkness Illuminated Modiano has stated that, whereas his first novel was a search for identity, his second novel, La Ronde de nuit [Night Rounds], represents a flight from identification (Morris 1992: 149). His narrator, Swing Troubadour, continues the role performed by Schlemilovitch in La Place de l’étoile. During the Occupation, he consorts with an unsavoury band of collaborating policemen. For the first time in Modiano’s work, the figure of the freelance ‘detective’ appears – in this case, it is Swing Troubadour – who plays the role of narrator, with his mission to investigate the past. Like a number of post-war novels that demonstrate how one could have become a collaborator or a résistant by ‘chance’ rather than choice, Modiano takes this as the principal theme for La Ronde de nuit in which he explores the notions of commitment and betrayal. Like the novel’s central image, the Eiffel Tower which sweeps the dimensions of time and place with its beam of light, Modiano himself acts as a beacon in post-war fiction, lighting up the murk of the historical past and, in particular, that of the Occupation. The narrator focuses on this heuristic function in the ­following crucial passage: I was coming back from the rue Boisrobert. The metro stopped on the pont de Passy. I hoped that it would never move again and that no-one would come and tear me away from this no man’s land between the two banks … . Oh, to dissolve into the semi-darkness! My fear gave way to a sort of numbing. I ­followed

156 | Peter Tame

the gaze of the light-beam [of the Eiffel Tower]. It revolved, revolved like a ­watchman on his night-round. Wearily. Its brightness dimmed as it moved round. Soon it would be a mere pencil of light, hardly visible. And I too, after so much circling, thousands of comings and goings, I would end up losing myself in the shadows. Not having understood anything. (Modiano 1969: 111–12)5

This could be taken as a mission statement by Modiano, who has devoted so much of his time as a writer to casting light into the obscure corners of the Occupation. Like his narrator, his ‘comings and goings’, as Swing Troubadour puts it, brand him as a ‘double agent’, who shuttles back and forth from the present day to the past. Modiano’s literary ‘ronde de nuit’ (night rounds, night-watch or nightpatrol) sheds light on places of ill repute that hark back to the dark days of the Occupation. Whether it be the prison of Fresnes, which served as a gaol for résistants during that period and, subsequently, for collaborationists from the middle of 1944 onwards, or the rue Lauriston with its sinister connotations of the ‘French Gestapo’, these locations are evoked in this narrative by a modern-day Dante in his journey through the inferno of this sombre period of French history, filled as it is with so many dystopias and ‘lieux de mémoire’ (Nora 1984–1992). Modiano uses place names as triggers or catalysts to (re)present memories and make the past come alive again. Alan Morris has noted how, in Modiano’s novels, the places themselves frequently function as generators of impressions, fictions and memories since they retain a faint imprint of the people who once inhabited or frequented them (Morris 2000: 77). The majority of these people may be carnivalesque characters and authorial inventions: however, most of the places are not. They provide the realistic underpinning for his ‘topographie intérieure’, as Akane Kawakami (2007: 260) describes the inner fictional world of Patrick Modiano. They act as ‘gateways’ or access points for the narrator to enter the world of the past. They also function as leitmotivs to herald the appearance of characters, or to remind the reader of someone in particular. The primary role of Modiano’s narrator is that of police inspector, with an identity reminiscent of the notorious Pierre Bonny, a former French police officer who collaborated with the German Gestapo during the Occupation. His ‘round’ consists of visiting ‘suspects’. He recalls his routine thus: ‘I would ring the doorbell, show my police ID, and inspect the premises’. In this way, he can probe the ‘pénombre’ (semi-darkness), as he is fond of calling the milieu in Paris. The novelist appropriates occupied Paris by means of his fiction: Swing Troubadour does the same within the fictional world of the novel: ‘I was able to visit every house on the block. The town belonged to me’ (Modiano 1969: 39).

Tracking the Past in Patrick Modiano’s Early Fiction | 157

The city itself functions as a Bakhtinian ‘chronotope’, that is as a sort of space-time or place-time capsule (Bakhtin 1981). Such chronotopes – town, streets, roads and squares – abound in Modiano’s fiction. Whether they be ruined houses whose interiors are exposed to public view, or nightclubs and cabarets in which Parisians continue obstinately and apparently without pangs of conscience to drink, dance and generally enjoy themselves, all these locations are epitomised by the recurring image of the Titanic.6 Here, as so often in Modiano’s fiction, places of play and amusement metamorphose into places of death. As for Modiano’s Jewish characters, alienation and a sense of displacement haunt them. They may be found living in all sorts of places but, contrary to the racial stereotype mentioned earlier, they appear to feel at ease nowhere. ‘I belonged nowhere’, declares the double agent Swing Troubadour/Lamballe in La Ronde de nuit (1969: 137).7 And he demonstrates this by his betrayal of both sides, collaborationists and résistants, for whom he is working. His first name proves therefore to be appropriate, since not only does he ‘sing’ the Occupation in the sense of telling his version of the epic tale of the period, he also ‘swings’, in the sense that he oscillates between the two ‘camps’, Collaboration and Resistance.8 Abandoned by his shadowy companions from the past, the narrator finds himself alone in the police headquarters at 3 bis, square Cimarosa. Having ‘forced an entry’ into these premises, where the persecuted victims of the collaborationist police had been tortured and beaten, he himself has only trial, execution and death to look forward to, owing to his guilt by association with these war criminals. Moreover, his guilt at breaking and entering a bourgeois town-house, in order to take possession of it, is reminiscent of Modiano’s own obvious scruples at breaking and entering into this ‘époque trouble’ (Modiano 1969: 101), the Paris of the Occupation, and possessing it, or trying to possess it, by means of his fiction. The oneiric dénouement to the novel follows Swing Troubadour in cinematic fashion, with an inconclusive image of the anti-hero being pursued by his comrades who have realised that he has betrayed them. As he leaves 3 bis square Cimarosa for the last time in his Bentley, there is the realisation that he does not belong to this world. Swing Troubadour reflects on his adventure: ‘One last glance at the front of number 3a [3 bis]. One of those houses where you dream of resting. Unfortunately, I had broken in and entered the house. I did not belong there. It didn’t matter’ (Modiano 1969: 146). As he and his pursuers drive through the capital and out into the countryside, Paris is described in ambivalent terms, since he calls it both ‘mon terroir’ (my land) and ‘mon enfer’ (my hell). At this point, the circles of this particular ‘hell’ inspire another cyclical image that

158 | Peter Tame

recurs throughout La Ronde de nuit, that of the ‘manège’, the merry-goround, another kind of chronotope: The town is like a big merry-go-round Each turn Ages us a little… (Modiano 1969: 149)

It is uncertain whether Swing Troubadour’s comrades finally shoot and kill him or whether he manages to escape from them since the final sentence describes him, a little like Modiano in relation to his novels, as continuing to move forwards in a hypnotic ‘demi-sommeil’ (half-sleep) (Modiano 1969: 153). The past and the present merge here, as they do throughout the novel – as, indeed, do fact and fiction.

Les Boulevards de ceinture (1972): Ghosts in Limbo As in La Ronde de nuit, Modiano’s next novel, Les Boulevards de ceinture [Ring Roads], shines a fictional light on the ‘pénombre’ (semi-darkness) of the Occupation in order to present a narrator, Serge, who is curious and eager to know about his father’s life during the Occupation. The narrator, who appears to be looking back on the past from the vantage point of the present, engages in what Alan Morris calls ‘the search for a missing parent’ (1992: 154). In this sense, the story centres, like the previous novels, on the question of identity. There is continuity, moreover, in the way in which places and names of places function heuristically, revealing aspects of the past, particularly with regard to the enigmatic past lives of the characters. Serge returns to the past to find his father playing a mysterious role with a black marketeer/collaborator named Marcheret, whose Villa Mektoub serves as their headquarters. Once again, the role of fate and chance in choosing collaborationism is underlined, this time in the name of the villa – ‘Mektoub’ (in Arabic, ‘it is written’). Marcheret apparently gave it this name ‘in memory of the Legion’, hinting at his mysterious past, to which allusions are intermittently made throughout the narrative that suggest his problematical associations with colonialism, racism and French imperialism (Modiano 1972: 26). In terms of the recurrent Modianesque themes of identity, sense of belonging and appropriation, the fact that it is actually unclear whether the villa belongs to Serge’s father, to Marcheret or to someone else provides yet another disturbing example of the traumatic uncertainties of the period of territorial usurpation that was the Occupation. What troubles the narrator even more is that he cannot be sure whether his father is a collaborator, a résistant or a black-marketeer.

Tracking the Past in Patrick Modiano’s Early Fiction | 159

In this novel, the identity of the characters proves to be just as mysterious and Protean as that of places. The narrator also retains from La Ronde de nuit his suspect identity, borrowed from the real-life Jewish-Russian swindler Serge Alexandre Stavisky, whose financial scam brought down the French government in February 1934. But, in many respects, Serge represents Modiano himself, as he (re)enters his world of ghosts from the Occupation whom he describes in the following way: ‘Dead characters. But I was there, with my ghosts’ (Modiano 1972: 49). As an interloper in this sticky, murky world, Serge feels at a distinct disadvantage when he realises that he cannot recognise the names of Paris nightclubs that are frequently mentioned by the criminals with whom he and his father fraternise. His father admits to experiencing the same problem. The names appear to function as ‘passwords’ and codes for the black-marketeers, who are for that reason suspicious of the narrator and his father. In a number of exchanges, names recur like incantations, spells and mantras in order to conjure up the atmospheric backgrounds of the real and imaginary places evoked in Modiano’s novels. For example, the narrator comments in the following way on one conversation in which he timidly participates: ‘For a quarter of an hour, names of bars and night-clubs trotted out as if Paris, France, the universe were just some kind of private reserve, a gigantic open-air brothel’ (Modiano 1972: 60). What Modiano’s fiction suggests is that his proper place, the one place to which he wholeheartedly belongs, is the imaginary world of his fiction. Here, the reader discovers a world of alienation and loss in which characters and author appear as disinherited human beings, moving in and out of properties, travelling from address to address (addresses are ubiquitous in Modiano’s fiction), and generally substantiate in ludic and highly ironic fashion the stereotype of the ‘rootless’ Jew, always on the move. Serge, the narrator and main character of Les Boulevards de ceinture, declares that his father and he moved house so frequently that they confused even themselves: ‘We changed our address so often that we got confused and only realised too late the mistake we had made’ (Modiano 1972: 82). Often, when his characters do move into a property, they enter by what the narrator likes to call ‘effraction’; in other words, they break in and, as squatters, appropriate the premises that do not belong to them, as in La Ronde de nuit. Because of the problematic, not to say criminal, nature of his father’s work, the narrator-son concentrates his attention on a new type of zone that emerges in Les Boulevards de ceinture, namely the transitional space. Since criminals tend to frequent the margins of society, the narrative often focuses on marginal locations like the area around the Pont de Bercy that

160 | Peter Tame

reminds Serge of a disused port. The presence of the morgue, together with the ‘passage’ of the ‘métro aérien’ (the metro above ground), enhances the impression of transience that exudes from this wasteland or ‘non-place’ (Augé 1995). Few people linger here. It is a melancholic area, with one redeeming feature, according to Serge: the Gare de Lyon, which ‘attracts dreams’. Nearby is the Chinese quarter – ‘does it still exist today?’ the narrator wonders (Modiano 1972: 74–75). This is the type of question that recurs throughout with regard to places in the novel (see also Modiano 1972: 86). It should be clear from the foregoing that Modiano is particularly concerned with the ephemerality of places, together with the way in which they mirror the transitory, precarious aspect of human existence. In terms of his father’s relationship with ephemeral places and spaces, what concerns Serge is his father’s apparently brief and unrecorded career in the milieux of the black market and Collaboration during the Occupation. Indeed, one of the questions that torment the narrator throughout the story is to what extent his father can be said to actually belong to these milieux. An ambivalent feeling of simultaneously belonging and not-belonging is exacerbated by the anonymity and impassivity of the city of Paris that seems to exert a centrifugal force on the Jewish pair: ‘From the centre of Paris, a mysterious current carried us to the outer boulevards [ring roads]. The city deposits its flotsam and jetsam there … . It was there that we really belonged’ (Modiano 1972: 155). Given this stereotypical exclusion of outsiders, they continue to squat in various premises, sometimes by mistake and at other times by intentional breaking and entering, with the (unspoken) aim of making themselves more at home in France.9 Modiano’s parody of stereotypes persists to the end. Moreover, frequently coded innuendo includes mention of place names that were fated to become notorious: for example, at one point in the narrative, they move into a temporary flat near the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a cycle-racing stadium in Paris where, on 17 July 1942, approximately ten thousand Jews were rounded up by the French police, prior to transport by train via Drancy to Auschwitz (Modiano 1972: 94).10 At any rate, the father reminds his son of an eternal traveller, especially when the narrator alludes obliquely to the earlier episode when they both visited the disused railway line, la Petite Ceinture, and describes his father as a ‘traveller in transit waiting for a ferry-boat or a train that will never come’ (Modiano 1972: 180). Given the context, the poignancy of this allusion once again evokes the marginalisation, the displacement and, proleptically, the ultimate fate of many French Jews, indeed of many European Jews.

Tracking the Past in Patrick Modiano’s Early Fiction | 161

In the closing stages of the novel, the ever-protective Serge, who sees his role as his father’s guardian angel, defends his apparently vulnerable father against the anti-Semites in his band of black-marketeers and collaborationists, notably by strangling one of them who threatens to denounce his father to the authorities. But, finally, the son, as narrator, has to admit that all these characters, including his father, are ghosts from the past and that, instead of wrestling with them, he would do better to think of the future. Here, the novel ends, somewhat abruptly, like a bad dream, with the shady characters fading quite rapidly back into the past.

Conclusion On one level, Modiano’s trilogy of novels set in the Occupation are perhaps more ‘soties’ than novels owing to the carnivalesque, fantastic and incongruous perspective that he adopts to narrate his stories and history.11 The ludic element is ever-present in these three novels, partly to debunk or demythify and perhaps partly to exorcise the author’s uneasy kind of vicarious personal guilt, particularly with regard to the role that Modiano imagines his father played in the Occupation. In addition to this ambivalently ­playful/serious world, Modiano creates a succession of dream worlds which, as Morris has pointed out, are an integral component of his fiction.12 The cinematic quality of Modiano’s fiction is undeniable. His narrator’s claim that he is shedding light on dark corners of the past, like the searchlight on the Eiffel Tower in La Ronde de nuit, conceals a process that is not only artificial, as Dervila Cooke has pointed out (2005: 210–17, 238–40), but superficial, since the narrative constantly exploits cinematic technique, with its camera rapidly sweeping across the landscape of the past, illuminating briefly the frightened faces of the ghosts from that time. The reader, who becomes thereby a kind of spectator, catches momentary sight of these faces and places, but he or she is not given the time necessary to understand in depth who and what are involved. The overall effect created by Modiano is therefore one of superficiality, or at best subliminality, a kind of ‘flashbulb memory’ in fiction, by which the reader may be deluded into thinking he or she is gaining an understanding of the past, when in fact Modiano’s ‘flashbulb’ narrative technique deliberately does not allow this to occur.13 However, it is clear that serious points are being made about the way in which we process and come to terms with the past, especially a problematic past such as that of the Occupation. The ‘litany of street names’ and ‘topographical description’, as Cooke (2005: 290) reminds us, not to mention the constant plethora of personal names both historical and fictitious,

162 | Peter Tame

contribute to an ‘atomising’ effect which, far from adding factual precision to the novels, has the opposite result, namely that of annihilating spatial and chronological boundaries, resulting in an overall impression of timelessness, the ‘effet d’irréel’ (effect of unreality) analysed by Kawakami (2000: 54, 94ff). Modiano himself has hinted in an interview that this creation of timeless (‘intemporels’) memories is intentional (Cooke 2005: 142, 290). By so doing, he involves the reader in a way that a recounting of stories with a precise, sequential and consistent chronology of events and dates would not be able to achieve. He is, after all, not writing history but fiction. Through fiction, the author and his characters are able to repossess their past to some extent. Like criminals who return to the scenes of their crimes, the collaborationists and the victims of the period alike seem bent in Modiano’s novels, as Dominique Noguez has observed, on reoccupying retrospectively the space from which they were evicted.14 This is only made possible by the timeless atmosphere created by the narrative in the novels. Like Modiano himself, most readers will not have lived through the period that he evokes in his books, but they will more readily identify with the characters that haunt them and imagine themselves in the places that have since changed or disappeared entirely owing to the aura of timelessness that Modiano casts over his fiction. Such an atmosphere illustrates Roman Ingarden’s concept of ‘spots/places of indeterminacy’ (1973: 249), which encourage the reader to provide his/her own contribution to an understanding of the past in the text. In this respect, Modiano’s Dora Bruder (1997), which is undoubtedly one of his most powerful and accomplished novels, possesses a style and a technique that engage the modern reader more effectively than in the trilogy. In this fictional enquiry, based on a true story, the novelist focuses increasingly on the pathos and tragic aspects of the Occupation. The narrator traces the destiny of one individual, a hapless victim of the authorities, both German and French. The eponymous victim is a young Jewess who disappears in 1942, leaving few traces of her passage through this traumatic period of French history. The character of Dora Bruder herself is developed to a far greater extent than Modiano’s previous protagonists. Moreover, the novel being a quest to retrace the protagonist’s steps and retrieve her last moments, the process of characterisation occurs accumulatively, as the narrator gradually and painstakingly discovers more details about her tragically brief life. The places and spaces of the novel are also more fully detailed, creating a sequence of more or less sinister locations that mark the victim’s path to extermination in Auschwitz. In addition, the narrative shift from ‘je’ [I] to ‘nous’ [we] reflects a technique that invites readers to participate in a communal experience of relived ‘postmemory’.15

Tracking the Past in Patrick Modiano’s Early Fiction | 163

In Dora Bruder, the ludic tenor of the earlier trilogy has altogether vanished, giving way to an evocative quest for a missing person and a sympathetic attempt to reconstruct the brief life of a victim of the Holocaust more than fifty years after her death. Moreover, a sharper focus on places and spaces, whether invented or not, together with clearer distinctions with regard to the timelines involved, offer the reader a less fantasmagorical, more apparently historical and chronological perspective on life during the Occupation. The word ‘apparently’ is used here because one might argue that, far from being historical, the uncertain and unstable fantasies of the first three novels subsequently led Modiano to a paradoxically uncertain factuality and realism in Dora Bruder in which places and spaces actually become more problematic. This is demonstrated by, for example, the greater number of rhetorical questions and expressions of doubt, hypothesis and so on that appear in the narrative. Possessing many facts, figures, dates and addresses, the narrator seems notwithstanding frequently unsure of much of this statistical evidence. The overall effect, nevertheless, differs significantly from that of the first three novels, in that Dora Bruder shows convincingly and sympathetically just how transient, vulnerable and poignant human lives can be, especially in a traumatic and troubled time like the Occupation. This radical transformation of Modiano’s technique and style, from the earlier carnivalesque parodies and pastiches of his first three novels to a more serious, empathetic approach, allows him to engage all of his readers in a transformed fictional world. With its ambivalently charged and nostalgic atmosphere, the novel offers a genuinely illuminating commemoration of the Occupation. More than that, however, Dora Bruder stands as a powerful work of fiction which highlights both the violence and the complexities of the time, along with the difficulties experienced by subsequent generations in understanding this troubled period of French history.

Notes  1. The film Lacombe Lucien (1974), for which Modiano wrote the screenplay and which tells the story of a young boy who joins a collaborationist group working for the Germans in south-west France, is a perfect example of this phenomenon. It presents Lucien’s enrolment as being ‘accidental’, for it is due initially to a punctured bicycle tyre.  2. See http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2014/modiano-facts. html/ (accessed 17 October 2014).  3. Many of these racial, racist and anti-Semitic myths are exemplified in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925).

164 | Peter Tame

 4. The text was significantly altered, with a number of cuts being made by the publisher and the author, for the subsequent 1986 edition after the publication of, among others, Michael Marrus’ and Robert Paxton’s work on French responsibility in the Shoah (1995). See Jacques Lecarme (2010).  5. All English translations of the French originals are my own.  6. This ambivalent portrait of Paris may not be so far from the truth. Cf. the exhibition in Paris of photographs by André Zucca from the Occupation, entitled ‘Parisians under Occupation’ and shown from 20 March to 1 July 2008, that caused a great deal of media controversy. See: http://www.france24.com/en/20080422-paris-under-occupation-francephotography/ (accessed 21 August 2013).  7. It is possible that the pseudonym ‘Lamballe’ that Swing Troubadour adopts as a résistant is an intertextual allusion to the fictitious character Marat-Lamballe, leader of a Resistance group in Roger Vailland’s novel Drôle de jeu (1945). It may also be an attempt by Modiano’s narrators at appropriating French aristocratic status, since, historically, the Princesse de Lamballe, who was murdered in 1792, was a close friend of MarieAntoinette. These attempts take on a particularly ludic quality in the case of Jewish characters in Modiano’s novels who appear, at the same time, to be attempting and/or effecting a kind of fictional integration/naturalisation as Frenchmen.  8. Modiano very likely intended further paronomasia here, with the allusion to the notion of making the past ‘sing’, using the term in the sense of pressurising it to give up its secrets (cf. ‘chantage’ in the sense of blackmail), a term that is most appropriate for the criminal underworld as portrayed in Modiano’s fiction.  9. This is also a recurring and significant theme in Modiano’s first novel, La Place de l’étoile. 10. See Marrus and Paxton (1995: 250–52). It is difficult to establish when the protagonists moved into this particular dwelling since the narrative is consistently and notoriously vague about chronology. But it would appear to be in the early stages of the Occupation and, almost certainly, before July 1942. 11. The ‘sotie’ is an allegorical, satirical farce that has a long pedigree, stretching back to the Middle Ages. 12. See Alan Morris (1996: 78): ‘dreams are an integral part of Modiano’s universe’. 13. The concept of the ‘flashbulb memory’ effect is reflected in the title and the perspective of a collection of articles on Modiano’s fiction, edited by Anne-Yvonne Julien, Modiano ou les intermittences de la mémoire (2010). 14. Dominique Noguez, quoted by Marie-Agnès Morita-Clément (1985: 105). 15. For the term ‘postmemory’, a kind of indirect memory that we inherit or adopt from others, see Marianne Hirsch (1997: 22).

References Primary Sources Modiano, P. 1968. La Place de l’étoile. Paris: Gallimard. _______. 1969. La Ronde de nuit. Paris: Gallimard. _______. 1972. Les Boulevards de ceinture. Paris: Gallimard. _______. 1997. Dora Bruder. Paris: Gallimard.

Tracking the Past in Patrick Modiano’s Early Fiction | 165

Secondary Sources Augé, M. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, transl. J. Howe. London: Verso. Bakhtin, M. 1981. ‘Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel’, in M. Holquist, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 243–58. Cooke, D. 2005. Present Pasts: Patrick Modiano’s (Auto)Biographical Fictions. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Hirsch, M. 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ingarden, R. 1973. The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of Literature. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Julien, A.-Y. (ed.). 2010. Modiano ou les intermittences de la mémoire. Paris: Hermann. Kawakami, A. 2000. A Self-Conscious Art: Patrick Modiano’s Postmodern Fictions. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. _______. 2007. ‘Flowers of Evil, Flowers of Ruin: Walking in Paris with Baudelaire and Modiano’, in J.E. Flower (ed.), Patrick Modiano. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 257–69. Lecarme, J. 2010. ‘Quatre versions de La Place de l’étoile (1968–2008)’, in A.-Y. Julien (ed.), Modiano ou les intermittences de la mémoire Paris: Hermann, pp. 87–109. Marrus, M.R. and R.O. Paxton. 1995. Vichy France and the Jews. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Morita-Clément, M.-A. 1985. L’Image de l’Allemagne dans le roman français de 1945 à nos jours. Nanzan: Presses universitaires de Nagoya. Morris, A. 1992. Collaboration and Resistance Reviewed: Writers and the Mode Rétro in PostGaullist France. New York and Oxford: Berg. _______. 1996. Patrick Modiano. Oxford and Washington, D.C.: Berg. _______. 2000. Patrick Modiano. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Nora, P. (ed.). 1984–1992. Les Lieux de mémoire. Paris: Gallimard. Vailland, R. 1945. Drôle de jeu. Paris: Corrêa.

Filmography Lacombe Lucien. 1974, dir. Louis Malle, screenplay by Patrick Modiano.

Peter Tame is Reader in French Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. His principal research interests lie in the area of war literature, literature and politics in twentieth-century France and, more especially, the representation of ideologies (Fascism and Communism) in French fiction. He has published widely on the French writers Robert Brasillach, André Malraux and André Chamson. A monograph on places and spaces in twentiethand twenty-first-century French war fiction is due to be published in 2015.

Chapter 9

Vercors and the Second World War

( Cristina Solé Castells

Jean Bruller (1902–1991) – who adopted the pseudonym Vercors during the Second World War – began his professional career as a graphic artist and as an illustrator. However, he is today primarily remembered for Le Silence de la mer [The Silence of the Sea], a short story covertly published in Nazi-occupied France in 1942 which became the symbol of literary and intellectual French Resistance. The Second World War remained at the core of an œuvre which can only be understood if put in context with the First World War which he experienced as a teenager and, indirectly, as a refugee, with his family in Saint-Amand-Montrond, a village in the Centre region of France far from the front line. Under his father’s influence and that of French official propaganda, the adolescent Bruller exuded patriotism and Germanophobia before the First World War.1 However, after 1918 and up to the Second World War, the testimonies of people who had experienced the horrors of the First World War and official reports that were in flagrant contradiction with such testimonies provoked a dramatic change in Bruller who became a pacifist, highly influenced by his reading of Romain Rolland2 and Edmond Vermeil,3 among others, as well as the satirical journal La Baïonnette.4 At the same time, Bruller experienced an increasingly pessimistic view of humankind and the world which became more intense with the imminence of the Second World War. It was a period marked by widespread confusion in European societies, by economic and social upheaval, and the rise of German nationalism leading to Adolf Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor. The Second World War, and more specifically German atrocities, would further challenge his humanist values. Progressively, however, it also elicited more philosophical reflections and a personal evolution which has largely remained unnoticed by critics. Whilst his first writings, such as Le Silence de la mer (1942), La Marche Notes for this chapter begin on page 175.

Vercors and the Second World War | 167

à l’étoile (1943) or Le Songe (1945), deal with a series of specific events that occurred during the German Occupation and the war as a whole, the essays and fiction written after 1948 acquired a more philosophical tone, and the exclusive focus on the past or the immediate present expanded to encompass the possibilities and hopes of the future, as will be shown in this chapter.

German Psyche and Guilt Mobilised early in the conflict, Bruller entered the Resistance soon after the defeat in 1940. In 1942, he definitively abandoned drawing for writing with the publication of Le Silence de la mer, under the pseudonym Vercors. The story was to be published in the Communist review La Pensée libre, but the journal’s offices were raided by the Gestapo before it appeared. Instead, Le Silence de la mer became the first title to be published by Les Éditions de Minuit, a clandestine press founded by Vercors and his editor and journalist friend Pierre Lescure. This story is about an old man and his niece who resist the German occupiers by not speaking to the officer, Werner von Ebrennac, who is lodged in their house. It elicited both positive and negative reactions in 1942: while some people interpreted it as an endorsement of Nazi ideology, Charles de Gaulle, among others, read the story as a condemnation of the German Occupation of France and a defence of humanist principles. After the publication of Le Silence, most of Bruller’s novels and short stories became the means through which the author evoked and reflected on vivid episodes lived during the Occupation. His work as a whole constitutes a complex reflection on many historical events that took place in Europe during the Second World War and its aftermath, as well as on the evolution of thought of a large section of French society. This, together with his avowed commitment to be witness to his time, has frequently led critics to apply the adjective ‘historical’ to his fiction. For Vercors, the Second World War initially meant the breakdown of humanist values that had always guided his life and pen and which, in his view, should constitute the benchmark for individual and collective actions as well as relations between states. In an autobiographical account, La Bataille du silence (1967), he evokes the early days of the German Occupation when he was in the so-called ‘Free Zone’5 and expresses his profound regret at the constant violation of humanist values not only by German soldiers but also by French nationals. And it is worth recalling that the Gaullist myth of French Resistance was still largely unchallenged at the time. Vercors bitterly refers to the French officers who fled

168 | Cristina Solé Castells

the country with their families instead of fighting against the Germans, to the shopkeepers who gladly opened their shops to the occupiers and to those who celebrated the withdrawal of German troops in southern France while their compatriots in the north were still in the war. Vercors wrote: ‘La faillite de ces vertus dans la grande cascade nationale me semblait être ce qui dominait la débâcle’ [The failure of these virtues during the great national collapse seemed to me to be the dominant feature of the debacle] (Vercors 1967: 95). Vercors’s line of criticism is not new. Henri Barbusse, among other French writers, had described similar experiences in his novel Le Feu (1916), based on his personal experiences as a soldier in the First World War. Despite the fact that he was referring to a different war, he too, like Vercors, blamed some of his fellow countrymen for unethical behaviour such as the stratagems used to avoid conscription or the inflation triggered by shopkeepers. For Barbusse, however, being a Communist, the difference that really mattered was neither national nor racial but social: Le spectacle de ce monde nous a enfin donné, sans que nous puissions nous en défendre, la révélation de la grande réalité: une Différence qui se dessine entre les êtres, une Différence bien plus profonde … que celle des races: la division nette, tranchée, … qu’il y a parmi la foule d’un pays, entre ceux qui profitent et ceux qui peinent … ceux à qui on a demandé de tout sacrifier, tout, qui apportent jusqu’au bout leur nombre, leur force et leur martyr, et sur lesquels marchent, avancent, sourient et réussissent les autres. (Barbusse 1999: 328) [We ended up unable to avoid the revelation that the sight of this world showed a profound reality, a Difference between beings, a Difference far greater … than that of race: the clear-cut division, … that there is among the multitudes of a country, between those who profit and those who toil… those of whom really great sacrifices are demanded, who go the full length of their number, their strength and their martyrdom, and over whom the others walk, progressing, smiling and succeeding.]

Unlike Barbusse, in 1940 and for a long time after the war, Vercors believed in the moral and intellectual superiority of the French over the Germans, an old conviction shared by most French artists and intellectuals since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, and which had gained relevance after the First World War. Vercors does not spare French citizens in his indictment of collaborationist practices, including the denunciation of French Jews to the Nazis, which he condemns in November 1943 in La Marche à l’étoile,6 but his words were to be much harsher about the Germans once he had learned of the atrocities in the Nazi camps in 1944 through the first-hand account of the resister Gérard Chardonne who had just been released from Oranienburg camp, thanks to the intercession of his father, the collaborationist writer Jacques Chardonne.7 In La Bataille

Vercors and the Second World War | 169

du silence, Vercors remembers his view of the Germans in the immediate post-war years, which was also the view of many French who were horrified when the atrocities committed in the death camps were made public: ‘L’immense obéissance allemande était le drame de ce pays, et celui de l’Europe’ [The overwhelming obedience of the Germans was the nemesis of this country, and that of Europe] (1967: 183). In 1984, forty years after the events, Vercors’s anger remained intact: Depuis lors – voilà ce que ces monstres ont fait de moi – je me sens envahi par un sentiment qui me répugne: la haine. Toujours j’ai haï la haine et voici que me submerge une fureur mortelle, sans pardon, sans pitié. Ces hommes que jusque-là je détestais à froid, je les abhorre maintenant d’un sentiment brûlant. … Sainte colère. Jusqu’à la fin, elle ne m’abandonnera plus. Même à l’heure où j’écris, il arrive qu’elle me brûle encore. (Vercors 1984: 37) [Since then – this is what those monsters have made of me – I am overcome by hatred, a feeling that is repugnant to me. I have always hated hatred, but now I feel a deep-seated anger, pitiless and unforgiving. Those men whom, until then, I hated coldly I now abhor with burning intensity. … Righteous anger. It will never ever leave me. Even now, as I am writing, it still burns in me occasionally.]

He further explained that it was his deep conviction about the German psyche that led him to give a tragic end to Werner von Ebrennac, the German protagonist of his story Le Silence de la mer, who, on discovering the true intentions of Hitler after Germany occupied France in 1940, decides to commit an indirect suicide by requesting a transfer to the eastern front. After the Second World War, Vercors was still convinced that the problem of the Germans was their inability to think as individuals, to disobey and rebel against certain actions or orders of their superiors when they did not agree with them. In La Bataille du silence, the author asserts that he found these characteristics in the Germans he met. Such references to the herd mentality of German people, which echo similar clichéd perceptions during the Franco-Prussian War, were also common among writers during the inter-war period.8

From Le Silence to the Impossibility of Remaining Silent This belief in the herd mentality of the Germans made Vercors apprehensive over the future of Europe long after 1945. He was suspicious of the haste with which many intellectuals were willing to reintegrate Germany fully into the European community of nations. Such reintegration would, in his opinion, be a serious threat to Europe because he was convinced

170 | Cristina Solé Castells

that sooner or later ‘tout cela lui retombera sur la tête, un jour, sous la forme de fer et de feu, et de nouveaux massacres, et de nouvelles atrocités et de nouvelles lâchetés’ [All that would boomerang back on the continent, one day, in the form of fire and sword, new massacres, new atrocities and new acts of cowardice’] (Vercors 1948). This distrust also led him to express his vehement opposition to the extension of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to include the Federal Republic of Germany in 1953. In an article entitled ‘Alarme’ [Alarm], he strongly criticises this project as an attempt to create an euro-croupion que les États-Unis s’efforcent de construire sous la houlette de l’Allemagne. … Il ne s’agit pas de faire l’Europe, ni même d’en faire un croupion, il s’agit d’en faire une prison … . Ce sera vraiment la prison, prison dans trois ans et dans cinq ans, livrée sur l’exigence de la nouvelle Wehrmacht aux pieds des fours crématoires qui couvriront de nouveau l’Europe[.] (Vercors 1953) [… Euro-rump that the United States are trying to construct under the governorship of Germany. … This is not about making Europe, nor even making a rump of the continent: it’s making Europe a prison … . It will be a true prison, a prison in three years’ time and, in five years’ time, it will be delivered at the behest of the new Wehrmacht to the doors of the crematory ovens that will cover Europe once again.]

Thus, Vercors’s position, in line with most of his fellow French men and women, hardened substantially during and after the Second World War. As pointed out by Claude Foucart, his image of Franco-German relations was then very different from what it had been after the First World War: a radical mistrust of Germany impinged on Vercors’s thinking, as it did on an important section of French society, and strongly determined his attitude towards an entire nation that, in the words of the critic Foucart, ‘a commis le crime de ne pas refuser le crime. … Le passé pèse dans l’avenir et il ne se laisse pas effacer dans l’esprit de Vercors’ (Foucart 2008: 406) [committed the crime of not refusing crime. … The past weighs heavily on the future and it cannot be expunged in Vercors’s mind.] The preservation of memory is, for Vercors, one of the main ways to avoid another catastrophe. Hence his insistence on the need never to forget and to reject silence: the act of writing was for him an essential ‘weapon’ to fight oblivion. Thus, from the early post-war years, the writer tirelessly denounced the silence that engulfed Europe after 1945, in numerous newspaper articles and talks delivered in France and Germany. Whilst silence was a symbol of protest and rebellion in Le Silence de la mer, it became synonymous with cowardice, powerlessness and oblivion after the war. In his third volume of Cent ans d’histoire de France (1984), he

Vercors and the Second World War | 171

recalls a lecture he gave in 1948 at the University of Berlin, in which he told students: Pendant les douze années de la dictature nazie … et après que les camps se furent refermés sur trois cent mille courageux,9 pas une voix n’a pu ensuite se faire entendre contre le nazisme, contre ses crimes. Comment le pays de Dürer, de Goethe, de Kant, de Heine en est-il venu là? À ce silence épouvantable? Faut-il désespérer du peuple allemand? … L’Allemagne redeviendra le pays de profonde culture qu’elle a été jadis si vous, jeunes gens, prenez conscience de ce que fut la détestable erreur prussienne, portée à son comble par Hitler: soumettre à l’Allemagne tous ses voisins, peut-être ensuite toute l’espèce humaine, c’est oublier que l’on est ‘homme’ avant d’être ‘allemand’, ‘français’, ‘russe’ ou ‘chinois’. (Vercors 1984: 144) [During the twelve years of Nazi dictatorship … and after the camps had closed their jaws on three hundred thousand brave men and women, not one single voice was allowed to be heard against Nazism and against its crimes. How could the country of Dürer, of Goethe, of Kant, and of Heine come to this? To such horrifying silence? Must we give up hope for the German people? … Germany will again become the country of great culture that she once was if you young people are aware of that detestable Prussian vice, taken to its extreme by Hitler: the subjugation of all Germany’s neighbours and then, perhaps, of all mankind is to forget that one is ‘human’ before being ‘German’, ‘French’, ‘Russian’ or ‘Chinese’.]

But silence is also a sign of guilt for Vercors. The guilt of those who actively or passively collaborated with Nazism, and who, instead of fighting against the occupier or defending fellow citizens who were arrested or persecuted, chose to turn a blind eye to reality or even to fraternise with the enemy to safeguard their life and personal interests. Together with his rejection of silence, Vercors always maintained the belief that society should not forgive the atrocities committed by the Nazis. This, for him, was not at all a simple attitude of revenge or resentment, but a sign of commitment to an ethical principle that should be kept alive in order to avoid a possible repetition of similar events in the future. From the end of the war, he insistently repeated: ‘Pardonner c’est trahir les morts’ [Forgiving is betraying the dead] (Vercors 1944). Yet, whilst Vercors never changed his mind on the need to remain unforgiving, he increasingly focused his intellectual efforts on the search for an explanation of what had happened, of the reasons that had led people to abandon their ethical principles and, eventually, to their own dehumanisation. His novel Les Armes de la nuit (1946) is a profound reflection on this topic. Here, Vercors ponders on the reasons why a human being, whether German, French or of any other nationality, may be capable of committing heinous crimes such as those committed in the Nazi camps. The

172 | Cristina Solé Castells

responsibility of those who committed crimes, those who betrayed their country and/or their fellow citizens is undeniable for the writer, but he also reflects on the future of the prisoners, deportees and victims who will have to live under a suffocating weight of traumatic memories and guilt, whether it be guilt for the defeat of France or for surviving the camps. Les Armes de la nuit (1946) offers no solution to the anguish of moral guilt experienced by survivors of the death camps and by those who participated in this form of persecution. It is left to the novel’s sequel, La Puissance du jour, published five years later in 1951, to offer a tentative solution.

The Difficult but Progressive Rehabilitation of the Germans This shift of emphasis in Vercors’s thought is clearly reflected in one of his fictional characters, the German officer, Werner von Ebrennac, who appears for the first time in Le Silence de la mer, published in 1942, and a decade later in ‘Les Marais du silence’ (1954).10 In both stories, the main character dies. However, in ‘Les Marais du silence’, instead of repressing dissent by asking to be sent to the front line, von Ebrennac stands up to his colonel and dies as a martyr defending his ethical principles. The reappearance of this noble and civilised German, and especially the substantial change that Vercors introduces in the delineation of this character, suggest a more hopeful appraisal of the Germans by establishing a dividing line between the German nation and the Nazis. It also suggests that the process of confronting and reconciling memories of war is, however long and painful, essential for personal and collective healing, as well as for the building of a better future. The rehabilitation of the German people, like that of those French who collaborated with or accepted the Vichy regime, necessarily involves a process of construction or reconstruction of personal and/or collective identity that should start with an acknowledgement of the behaviour and actions of each individual. What emerges from a reading of Les Armes de la nuit [The Weapons of the Day] (1946 – see 1997a) and La Puissance du jour [The Power of the Day] (1951 – see 1997b) is that the harrowing awareness of the narrative ‘I’, around whom and by whom the story is told, is the starting point of a long process of rebuilding the human being, of reclaiming his or her ‘humanity’, a necessary preamble to the integration of this same individual within society. In La Puissance du jour, Vercors has one of his characters express a vision of the past conflict in which the opposition between German and French gives way to a much more holistic and

Vercors and the Second World War | 173

metaphysical approach to human nature. The author does not refer to the Germans in particular, but to humankind as a whole: Il s’agit de l’homme en tant qu’espèce! … Nos tortionnaires ont échoué … . Ils ne voulaient pas que nous fussions de la même espèce qu’eux, ils ont voulu mettre en cause cette unité. Ils n’ont pas pu. Mais d’autres essaieront! … Le monde est plein de ces hommes qui n’acceptent pas l’unité de l’espèce, qui veulent que d’autres hommes soient autre chose qu’eux. … Ils tenteront encore sous leur mépris et leurs coups, ou la force de leur argent, ou celle de la misère, du chômage, ou bien celle de la peur, de cette immense peur des hommes qu’il est si facile de manier, – et si tentant – ils essaieront encore de les faire devenir des bêtes ou des plantes… (Vercors 1997a: 118) [It’s a question of mankind as a species! … Our torturers have failed … . They didn’t want us to be of the same species as they were; they wanted to call this unity into question. They were not able to do so. But others will try the same thing! … The world is full of these men who cannot accept the unity of the species and who want other men to be different from them. … They will try again, with their contempt and their violence, or the power of their money, or of poverty, joblessness, or of fear, that great human fear that is so easy to manipulate – and so tempting – they will try again to turn them into animals or plants…]

This typology of men who intend to break the will, self-esteem and freedom of others in order to dominate them, abuse them and exploit them is found in all countries, all races and all ideologies. Faced with this threat, the rejection of such abuses together with the rebellion against such domination and exploitation by each and all are the humanitarian keys to preventing further massacres and humiliation.11 In La Puissance du jour, Vercors takes up the theme of the cold reception and misunderstanding that the deportees suffered after the war when they had to reintegrate into civilian life. In the words of another character – a priest whom the main protagonist, Pierre Cange, meets by chance – Vercors compares the self-sacrifice and suffering of those men with the agony of Jesus: Vous avez rassemblé sur vous seuls les péchés du monde, dit l’abbé. On vous a trahis et livrés, on vous a enfoncé la couronne d’épines. … Jésus assumait les maux et les péchés d’un monde malheureux, vous avez assumé ceux d’un monde atroce. Ce monde malheureux n’a pas su reconnaître aussitôt Jésus, il n’a pas su aussitôt qu’Il était sa Conscience souffrante; et ce monde atroce ne veut pas encore vous reconnaître, reconnaître en vous son ignominie. Mais le jour où les peuples auront compris QUI vous étiez, ils mordront la terre de chagrin et de remords, ils l’arroseront de leurs larmes, et ils vous élèveront des temples. (Vercors 1997a: 121) [You have taken upon yourselves alone the sins of the world, said the priest. You were betrayed and delivered; you had the crown of thorns thrust on your

174 | Cristina Solé Castells

head. … Jesus took upon himself the wickedness and the sins of an unhappy world: you took on those of an atrocious world. That unhappy world did not immediately recognise Jesus. It didn’t realise right away that He was its suffering Conscience; and this atrocious world will not recognise you yet, recognise in you its ignominy. But the day when people realise WHO you were, they will bite the dust for sorrow and remorse; they will sprinkle it with their tears, and they will raise temples to you.]

Just as Jesus suffered and died in order to triumph over sin and death, Vercors asserts, many of those innocent young people – with no distinction of nationality – who had to endure so much suffering lost their lives so that humankind could triumph definitively over war, hatred and racism; that is, over physical and moral death. The duty of the survivors, like Pierre Cange, must be to promote the rejection of, and the resistance to, tyranny, which is the essential message of the novel. Here, Vercors’s earlier pessimism gives way to admitting the possibility of a better future. This standpoint found wide resonance among former deportees and former prisoners in concentration camps during the Second World War. They found in the words of Vercors a meaning to the enormous suffering endured during the war; these words helped them to cope with the weight of their experiences and gave them hope (1997b: 7). Vercors, like his fictional characters, discovered that the real danger for those prisoners who were deported to the camps was not so much the physical suffering or the constant threat of death but the risk of losing their status as men and women and their freedom. Ultimately, the victory over Nazism was far more important than the triumph of one country against another. This victory, for Vercors, was not an end but a beginning. In later publications, he did not fail to warn that the danger was still present, that the final victory of humankind lies in inner strength and moral capacity: not in physical strength, but rather in a spiritual force ‘qui ne se trouve pas au bout de doigts habiles, mais au fond d’un coeur assez grand pour y loger les hommes’ [that cannot be found at the tips of deft fingers but in the depths of a heart big enough to accommodate humankind] (Vercors 1997b: 232). Only this inner strength will enable humankind to rebel against those who attempt to enslave him and will allow him to build a better future. This victory was, therefore, only a beginning because the struggle is an everyday duty: ‘L’homme en nous se fait ou se défait à chaque minute de notre vie. … Qui en nous tue la lutte tue la personne. Il ne reste plus que l’esclave animal’ [The man in us makes or unmakes himself at every minute of our lives. … Whoever kills the struggle in us kills the person. Only the animal slave is left] (Vercors 1951: 238, 258–59).

Vercors and the Second World War | 175

In the wider context of post-war literature in France, Vercors’s thought does not differ greatly in terms of existentialist philosophy from that of writers like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. In essays and works of fiction, the latter maintained that humankind is condemned to freedom and to the unavoidable responsibility of his own process of growth and renewal: ‘Une fois jeté dans le monde, il est responsable de tout ce qu’il fait’ [Once thrown into the world, he [any man, and, by extension, any woman] is responsible for everything he [or she] does] (Sartre 1976: 29–30). Similarly, Vercors believed that, according to our actions, we will be ‘plus hommes’ [more man-like] or ‘moins hommes’ [less man-like] (Vercors 1975: 79). Both Sartre and Vercors offer a vision that embraces personal and collective destinies since they both invite each individual to change society by changing themselves (Vercors 1975: 214). However, in strictly political and ideological terms, whilst Sartre believed that relationships between human beings – and even more, between social classes – would always be marked by rivalry and even hostility, Vercors became increasingly convinced of the need and the possibility to reconcile the human being and the citizen, the individual and society for the greater good.12 Vercors was well aware of the limitations inherent in human nature. As has been shown here with examples of his analyses of Nazism, Vercors firmly believed that humankind can never be bigger than humankind, just as a nation should not seek to extend its domination over other nations. This is why the need to remember remained central to Vercors’ thought. Nothing less than the survival of humankind is at stake, as he made clear in the prologue that he added in 1951 to the volume which contains both Les Armes de la nuit and La Puissance du jour: ‘Il s’agit de savoir si l’existence qui s’ouvre à l’humanité future sera celle de la personne humaine ou celle du singe parlant’ [The question is whether the future of mankind will be ruled by human beings or talking apes] (Vercors 1997b: 8). Translated by Peter Tame.

Notes  1. Jean Bruller’s father, Louis Bruller, was a Jewish French citizen of Hungarian origin for whom France was a symbol of freedom and enlightenment. At the age of fifteen, Louis Bruller literally walked away from his native Hungary to fulfil his dream of settling in France.  2. Romain Rolland was a French writer and lifelong pacifist. He wrote numerous articles and anti-war pamphlets arousing both social indignation and enthusiasm.

176 | Cristina Solé Castells

 3. Edmond Vermeil was a French historian and a specialist in German culture. During the 1930s, he tried in vain to warn politicians and intellectuals against Hitler. Like Jean Bruller, he became a member of the French Resistance.  4. La Baïonnette was published between 1915 and 1920 mainly for French soldiers stationed at the front. It contained disparaging comments on the German people and culture as well as caricatures of the Prussian Kaiser. Vercors criticised such caricatures for their promotion of false and stereotyped images of the Germans (and indeed of the French). See Vercors, La Bataille du silence (1967: 19–21).  5. The Free Zone was established following the armistice signed with Germany in June 1940. It remained unoccupied by the Germans and their Italian allies until November 1942.  6. This short story was dedicated to his father, who died in 1930.  7. Gérard Chardonne (1911–1962) was a novelist, like his father, Jacques Chardonne. He was a member of the French Resistance, deported to the concentration camp in Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen, and later released thanks to the intercession of his father.  8. André Gide, for example, alludes to the extreme polarisation of the German psyche in his Journal 1889–1939 (1956: 713): for him, in 1921, a German is either ‘a soul’ (Gide is referring to great German artists) or ‘a robot’ (no doubt alluding to the behaviour of German soldiers in the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War). On this subject, see Claude Foucart (2008) and Claude Digeon (1959).  9. Here, he is referring to all the people who were deported from France to German concentration camps. 10. This is a short story included in Jean Bruller’s (Vercors’) Les Pas dans le sable (1954). 11. Vercors was not the first writer to highlight these ideas. During the Second World War and its aftermath, other novelists, writers and intellectuals had formulated similar thoughts. This is the case of Romain Gary, for example, in his novel Éducation européenne (1945), published first in English as Forest of Anger (1944); André Malraux in his essay Les Voix du silence (1951); and Albert Camus in his Lettres à un ami allemand, published between 1943 and 1945 (1945). 12. The mature Vercors shared with Jean-Paul Sartre the conviction that every human being is responsible for his/her own development. However, the two writers differed in their views in many other respects: for example, in political terms, Sartre’s thought was highly influenced by Marxism, while Vercors clearly distanced himself from any ideology. Moreover, with regard to their concept of man’s relationship with society, Sartre tended to see the relationship in terms of rivalry, antagonism and class warfare. Vercors, on the other hand, believed that the individual could be reconciled with society since this was indispensable for the harmonious development of his/her personality and emotional stability. In short, Vercors always favoured humankind over ideology.

References Barbusse, H. 1999 (1916). Le Feu. Paris: Flammarion. Bruller, J. (Vercors). 1942. Le Silence de la mer. Paris: Minuit. _______. 1943. La Marche à l’étoile. Paris : Minuit. _______. 1944. ‘Manifeste du Comité National des Écrivains’, Les Lettres françaises, 9 August. _______. 1945. Le Songe. Paris: Minuit. _______. 1948. ‘L’Oubli’, Les Lettres françaises, 14 October. _______. 1953. ‘Alarme’, Les Lettres françaises, 10 June.

Vercors and the Second World War | 177

_______. 1954. Les Pas dans le sable. Paris: Albin Michel. _______. 1967. La Bataille du silence: Souvenirs de minuit. Paris: Presses de la Cité. _______. 1975. Ce que je crois. Paris: Grasset. _______. 1984. Cent ans d’histoire de France, vol III: Les Nouveaux jours. Paris: Plon. _______. 1997a (1946). ‘Les Armes de la nuit’, in Les Armes de la nuit et La Puissance du jour. Paris: Seuil. _______. 1997b (1951). ‘La Puissance du jour’, in Les Armes de la nuit et La Puissance du jour. Paris: Seuil. Camus, A. 1945. Lettres à un ami allemand. Paris : Gallimard. Cesbron, G. and G. Jacquin (eds). 1999. Vercors et son oeuvre. Paris: L’Harmattan. Digeon, C. 1959. La Crise allemande de la pensée française. Paris: PUF. Foucart, C. 2008. Visions françaises de l’ Allemagne: De Léon Bloy à Pascal Quignard. Paris: Klincksieck. Gary, R. 1944. Forest of Anger. London: The Cresset Press. _______. 1945. Education européenne. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Gide, A. 1956 (1939). Journal 1889–1939. Paris: Gallimard, col. La Pléiade. Malraux, A. 1951. Les Voix du silence. Paris: Gallimard. Sartre, J.-P. 1976 (1946). L’Existentialisme est un humanisme. Paris: Gallimard.

Cristina Solé Castells is Professor of French Literature at the University of Lleida, Spain. She has published widely on the literary memories of the two world wars, especially on Henri Barbusse, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, André Malraux and Vercors.

Part IV Germany

(

Chapter 10

Reconstructing D-Day Memory How Contemporary Politics Made Germans Victims of the War

( Harold J. Goldberg

Introduction The Allied landing in northern France on 6 June 1944 was a decisive moment in the twentieth century. Planning the invasion involved massing over five thousand ships in England, deceiving the German High Command about the time and place of the assault, and landing thousands of soldiers in the face of withering German fire. Allied forces slowly achieved their objectives, but another year of fierce German resistance prolonged the war into May of 1945. The ultimate success of D-Day determined the fates of millions of Europeans suffering under brutal German occupation. Throughout Europe, no-one doubted the importance of this battle. When the war ended, the anniversary of D-Day evoked a single memory – a solemn commemoration of the invasion of France designed to liberate Western Europe, conquer Germany and destroy the Nazi regime. As the Nazi era receded in time, a few German historians challenged the burden of memory associated with the war. These efforts finally succeeded in 2004, when the President of France invited the Chancellor of Germany to the sixtieth D-Day anniversary, signifying the appropriation of historical memory for contemporary political purposes. This chapter will explore the transformation of the D-Day ceremony from a commemoration of a decisive battle into a celebration of FrancoGerman reconciliation, German economic power, and unity in Europe. In the process of examining the changing meaning of the D-Day anniversary, this chapter will briefly examine two events that were fundamental in the reshaping of memory related to 1944: the Bitburg Cemetery Notes for this chapter begin on page 196.

182 | Harold J. Goldberg

controversy and the Historians’ Dispute in Germany. Nevertheless, my argument focuses on the importance and primacy of D-Day itself and the insistence by German politicians that the intrinsic meaning of the ceremony be redefined to eliminate the difference between victor and victim. This German demand intensified as the war receded in time and Germany gained self-confidence based on its economic dominance in Europe. In addition, this chapter will reference a problem related to wartime memory in Russia, concluding with a discussion of the use of rhetoric by both German and Russian leaders to confuse further the issue of oppressor and oppressed.

D-Day 1945–1980 For the first few years after the war, D-Day ceremonies were informal if they occurred at all. Allied governments did not sponsor elaborate commemorations, perhaps in recognition that memories of the war remained raw and grim. Veterans visited the beaches in small numbers, and a few French towns also held their own local tributes.1 On the fifth anniversary in 1949, American and French officials organised modest events. An American Flying Fortress passed over the Normandy beaches and dropped flowers. At the same time, British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery visited Normandy and promised Western help in the defence of France.2 In the Cold War atmosphere, Montgomery’s meaning was clear – he was not referring to a threat from Germany, but rather indicating that the West would protect France from the Soviet Union. The West’s wartime ally had become the enemy, while Germany was being rapidly rehabilitated. The tenth anniversary of D-Day brought the first attempt to organise a major ceremony. A French government planning committee invited President Eisenhower, but the new US President declined the offer to return to Normandy. On Eisenhower’s suggestion, the French committee asked United Nations Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. to represent the United States.3 Eisenhower used the moment to probe the possibility of improved relations with the Soviet Union by mentioning his ‘pleasant association with the outstanding Soviet soldier, Marshal Zhukov, and the victorious meeting at the Elbe of the armies of the West and of the East’. Afterwards, the President stated that he had spent the sixth of June ‘thinking over the events of ten years ago’.4 The twentieth anniversary saw the first large-scale D-Day ceremony, bringing the US generals Omar Bradley, Maxwell Taylor, Matthew Ridgeway and Ira Eaker to Normandy. All of these generals had played

Reconstructing D-Day Memory | 183

important roles in 1944. British representation also picked up, with twenty officers at the rank of major general or higher in attendance. One interesting aspect of the twentieth anniversary was the refusal by the French President de Gaulle to participate. At the time, some newspapers speculated that the French leader was unwilling to be the only head of state to attend; moreover, de Gaulle had not forgiven the Allies for not including him in the planning phase of the invasion of France (Root 1964). Neither Lyndon Johnson nor Richard Nixon visited Normandy to commemorate D-Day (on its twentieth or thirtieth anniversaries, respectively). In the early 1980s, approaching the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, politics superseded the historical event itself. German politicians increasingly asserted their independence, commensurate with their nation’s growing economic power, and simultaneously some German historians desired to diminish or remove the stigma of war memory.

The Question of Germany’s Inclusion in the Fortieth D-Day Ceremony In 1981, following a visit to Israel, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt suggested a re-evaluation of the relationship between the war and the present: ‘German foreign policy can and will no longer be overshadowed by Auschwitz’ (Wolffsohn 1993: 33–35). Schmidt’s timing was carefully chosen; he had acknowledged Germany’s post-war support for Israel and then proclaimed independence from the burden of the Holocaust. The Chancellor implicitly claimed that German responsibility for the war was based solely on Holocaust memory and that it was time that such constraints on Germany be lifted. Schmidt reduced Germany’s war history to what has been called the ‘Jewish question within the German question’ (Rabinbach 1990: 58–59). Schmidt’s successor as Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, also used a visit to Israel in 1984 to proclaim a new direction in German foreign policy and to signal that the new generation was moving beyond the burden of the Holocaust (Moses 2007: 26). Kohl used intermediaries to approach the French government about an invitation to the fortieth D-Day ceremony. Veterans’ organisations in France objected, with Raymond Triboulet, the president of the committee organising the ceremonies, commenting: ‘I am all for Franco-German reconciliation, but the sixth of June is a celebration of a victory. The Germans do not have a place in it.’ Triboulet went on to suggest that inviting the Germans to a D-Day commemoration was comparable to inviting the French to a celebration of the Battle of Trafalgar (Dobbs 1984).

184 | Harold J. Goldberg

Contemporary accounts report that Kohl was angered by his exclusion. However, Kohl pretended indifference and told an interviewer: ‘There is no reason for a Federal Chancellor to celebrate when others mark a battle in which tens of thousands of Germans met miserable deaths’ (Markham 1984). In Germany, however, conservative politicians viewed the ceremonies as an insult. Michael Stürmer, an advisor to Kohl and a participant in the subsequent Historians’ Dispute, declared: ‘these battle memories aren’t really worth celebrating’, and blamed the commemoration for dividing the western alliance (Markham 1984). Theo Sommer, another prominent German commentator, went further: ‘It is vain and almost a bit in bad taste, in the global political configuration of 1984, to celebrate the victories of the year 1944 in a way that puts one of today’s partners in the dock of the past’ (Drozdiak 1984). With Franco-German relations suffering due to Kohl’s perceived snub, French President François Mitterrand attempted to appease Germany with a conciliatory speech at the D-Day ceremony that included the following sentence: ‘the adversaries of yesterday are reconciled and are building the Europe of freedom’ (Vincour 1984). Mitterrand praised Kohl for his understanding and, in order to circumvent the emotions attached to Second World War remembrance, announced that the two leaders would visit the Verdun Memorial together later in the year (Dobbs 1984). Mitterrand and Kohl were determined to protect the close post-war relationship between France and Germany. Mitterrand was not the only speaker at the fortieth anniversary; for the first time, a US President attended a D-Day ceremony in person. In Normandy, Ronald Reagan gave two speeches on 6 June, one in the American cemetery and another in front of the monument at Pointe du Hoc. Reagan delivered a moving speech about the sacrifice of the Rangers who had scaled Pointe du Hoc and suffered tremendous losses (Reagan 1984).

The Bitburg Controversy Early in the autumn of 1984, a photo of Kohl and Mitterrand holding hands as they visited Verdun suggested that the controversy over the fortieth anniversary had been resolved. However, Kohl wanted a similar gesture from the United States. Building upon the symbolism of the Verdun visit, Kohl invited Reagan to join him at a German military cemetery. Grateful for Kohl’s support for the deployment of Pershing II missiles in Germany, Reagan accepted the invitation but set off a political storm in the United States primarily among veteran and Jewish organisations. Reagan exacerbated the situation with subsequent remarks that seemed identical to the

Reconstructing D-Day Memory | 185

arguments of conservative forces in Germany who wanted to diminish the focus on German responsibility and the Holocaust. At a press conference in March 1985, Reagan commented on his upcoming trip to Germany: I feel very strongly that this time in commemorating the end of that great war, that instead of reawakening the memories and so forth and the passions of the time, that maybe we should observe this day as the day when, 40 years ago, peace began and friendship. Because we now find ourselves allied and friends of the countries that we once fought against. And that it be almost a celebration of the end of an era and the coming into what has now been some 40 years of peace for us. And I felt that since the German people – and very few alive that remember even the war, and certainly none of them who were adults and participating in any way – and they have a feeling, and a guilt feeling that’s been imposed upon them, and I just think it’s unnecessary. I think they should be recognized for the democracy that they’ve created and the democratic principles they now espouse. (Reagan 1985a)

Reagan had made an astounding statement – he claimed that few Germans were still alive from the war years. His poor mathematics resulted in his subsequent affirmation that D-Day was not about acknowledging the battle against Germany but rather the beginning of peace since 1945. Prior to his visit to Bitburg Cemetery, Reagan made the situation worse when he responded to a reporter’s question with a controversial statement. These [SS troops] were the villains, as we know, that conducted the persecutions and all. But there are 2,000 graves there, and most of those, the average age is about 18. I think that there’s nothing wrong with visiting that cemetery where those young men are victims of Nazism also, even though they were fighting in the German uniform, drafted into service to carry out the hateful wishes of the Nazis. They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the ­concentration camps. (Reagan 1985b)5

With this assertion, Reagan had gone further than either Schmidt or Kohl, but in the process the US President made it possible for German politicians and conservative historians to assert that the war had been fought between equivalent forces and that a Nazi soldier was comparable to an Allied solder and even to a concentration camp victim. This interpretation opened the door to the distortion of certain aspects of historical memory, including the marginalisation of the widespread atrocities carried out during the war. While Reagan had drawn a distinction between SS and Wehrmacht troops, his comment could be interpreted to suggest that all actions during the war were morally indistinguishable. This implication of Reagan’s upcoming visit led to protests from Elie Wiesel as well as

186 | Harold J. Goldberg

resolutions in both houses of Congress calling on the President to cancel his plans for Bitburg. Reagan and Kohl visited Bitburg Cemetery on 5 May 1985. Reagan defended his participation in the wreath-laying ceremony with another speech that reiterated the distinction between SS and army soldiers but largely argued for an equivalency between German and Allied dead. His comments focused on the innocence of all young soldiers but did not distinguish in any historical sense between soldiers who served willingly and those who were forced to serve the Nazi regime. Further, Reagan’s speech did not recognise that many who were ‘simply soldiers in the German army’ had also carried out atrocities, especially on the Eastern Front. There are over 2,000 buried in Bitburg cemetery. Among them are 48 members of the SS – the crimes of the SS must rank among the most heinous in human history – but others buried there were simply soldiers in the German army. How many were fanatical followers of a dictator and willfully carried out his cruel orders? And how many were conscripts, forced into service during the death throes of the Nazi war machine? … There were thousands of such soldiers to whom Nazidom meant no more than a brutal end to a short life … . Our duty today is to mourn the human wreckage of totalitarianism, and today in Bitburg cemetery we commemorated the potential good in humanity that was consumed back then, 40 years ago. (Reagan 1985c)

Reagan had allowed himself to be placed in an impossible situation; once he had accepted Kohl’s invitation, he could not satisfy the Chancellor and respond to American criticism at the same time. The President’s minimal reference to the SS and focus on the other German soldiers buried in the cemetery did not end the controversy. Nevertheless, the Bitburg events mollified Kohl, who continued to argue that Germans should be invited to wartime ceremonies. Bitburg’s legacy for war and memory was clear: everyone had become a victim of the war as well as a beneficiary of the D-Day invasion.

The Historians’ Dispute (Historikerstreit) Although Reagan had pointed out a distinction between SS troops and regular German soldiers, his comments equating Wehrmacht soldiers with Holocaust victims contributed to the Historians’ Dispute (Historikerstreit) that broke out in Germany in 1986. While it is not possible to summarise all the facets of that argument, the fundamental issues centred first on whether the Nazi era should be viewed as the culmination of German history or as an aberration, and secondly, on the degree of responsibility

Reconstructing D-Day Memory | 187

of the German people. This debate within the confines of German historiography highlighted the tension over national memory as it sought to define the past in order to establish a German future. Ernst Nolte was the most famous of the conservative German historians who questioned international fascination with the Third Reich. His writings treated the Nazi era as simply another example of twentieth-century genocide. He even questioned the extent of the Holocaust by referring to the ‘so-called annihilation of the Jews’ (Nolte 1985: 36). Ironically, Nolte’s article was published on the forty-second anniversary of D-Day. Many German intellectuals, including Jürgen Habermas, criticised Nolte for discounting the uniqueness of the Holocaust, but Nolte responded that many of his critics were Jews and anti-German. Another German historian, Martin Broszat, attacked Nolte’s premise that the Holocaust was comparable to other events in the twentieth century. Broszat also argued that historians should begin to study everyday life in the Nazi period and not focus solely on the Holocaust. Historians from other countries soon entered this debate, with Saul Friedländer leading the critique of both Nolte, whom he considered an apologist for the Nazis, and Broszat, who was not in the same category as Nolte, but was criticised for trying to separate the Holocaust from all aspects of German life. Friedländer insisted that focusing only on everyday life in Nazi Germany would take attention away from the fundamental nature of the regime and its criminality. Several other historians participated in this debate that continued for many years.6 On one side were German historians and politicians who hoped to re-evaluate Germany’s place in the war and reduce the burden of responsibility that persisted in German memory, while on the other side were historians who continued to see the Holocaust as uniquely evil and insisted that the moral issues raised by it had to remain central to discussions of German history in the twentieth century. The dispute over Germany’s participation in D-Day ceremonies, combined with the Bitburg Cemetery incident, fuelled this Historians’ Dispute. Chancellor Kohl’s position implicitly supported the argument of the conservative historians, as he wanted German soldiers to be remembered as defenders of their homeland rather than of the Third Reich. Ironically, it was an American President who supported the most extreme view of German history by equating all victims of the war. At Bitburg, Reagan had defended the view that would be repeated thereafter; D-Day no longer signified good versus evil, but rather a struggle in which all Europeans had been united against a few Nazis, who by implication had been holding Germany hostage. According to this logic, Germans had been eagerly awaiting D-Day so they could be liberated like other nations. Reagan, Kohl and conservative German historians

188 | Harold J. Goldberg

supported this transformation of historical memory, but the intellectual hegemony of this position had to await the natural mortality of war ­veterans and participants.

German Presence at the Fiftieth Anniversary of D-Day President Clinton, President Mitterrand, Queen Elizabeth II and other dignitaries attended the fiftieth anniversary, and again Chancellor Kohl sought an invitation. According to a diplomat involved in the ceremony, Kohl was ‘pleading’ for inclusion. An aide to Kohl summarised the Chancellor’s opinion: ‘If I am good friends with someone with whom I fought 50 years ago, I wouldn’t want to celebrate my victory over them. How long will they be celebrating this? A hundred years? Two hundred? Or is this the end?’7 Nevertheless, veterans prohibited Kohl’s involvement, with French veterans noting ‘German insensitivity’. The president of France’s National Association for Voluntary Fighters of the Resistance was clear in addressing the conflict: ‘When the combat took place the Germans didn’t greet us with open arms. They had no pity – it was war, a merciless war. I don’t see why they should be present.’8 As in 1984, Kohl again urged a visit to a war cemetery as compensation, but this time it was the French Defence Minister François Léotard who rejected the invitation when he learned that officers of the Waffen SS were buried at the proposed site (Waxman 1994). One liberal German newspaper, Die Zeit, agreed that Germany had no place in Normandy: ‘The day of the Allied landings is not exactly a German national holiday.’9 Some British and American articles used satire to criticise Kohl’s situation: the British Independent wrote ‘Kohl to Stay in His Bunker’ while the American humorist Art Buchwald called his essay ‘An Old Axis to Grind’.10

Russia after 1991 Like Kohl, the Russian President Boris Yeltsin resented his exclusion from the fiftieth anniversary, especially since the reasons for ignoring Russia had collapsed with the end of the Cold War. Sensitivities in the western alliance led politicians to conflate German and Russian leaders; one could not be invited for fear of alienating the other. Russian officials fumed, and a retired Soviet colonel spoke for many Russians: ‘The overall success of the Allies was due to the fact that the Soviet Union helped to accelerate the defeat of Fascism. Now, the absence of our veterans at the ceremonies strikes a blow to the honour and worthiness of the alliance as a whole.’11

Reconstructing D-Day Memory | 189

The next year – 1995 – forced Russia to confront its own wartime memory as it approached the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war. President Yeltsin was clinging to power and facing a difficult re-election campaign against the Communist Party. Not wanting to enhance the popularity of its opposition, the Russian government sought to celebrate the Second World War without acknowledging Stalin and the Party. Making Marshal Zhukov, the most celebrated Soviet general, the central figure of the fiftieth anniversary parade solved the dilemma, and the general’s picture and statue went up everywhere. Stalin and the Communist Party were seldom mentioned in the days leading up to the victory parade in May.12

The Sixtieth Anniversary of D-Day By 2000, mortality rates had reduced the number of war veterans,13 and the absence of the wartime generation removed a vocal obstacle to the final transformation of the D-Day anniversary into an Allied–German effort to free Europe from that small group of Nazis who oppressed all nations, supposedly including Germany. War memory finally succumbed to current political needs when French President Jacques Chirac invited the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to the sixtieth anniversary and, for the first time, the President of Russia as well. In Normandy, President Vladimir Putin met with a few Russian resistance fighters who had fought alongside the French, and he then attended ceremonies at the Peace Memorial in Caen. In his remarks, he declared that ‘the opening of the second front in Europe made an invaluable contribution to our common victory. Together with the soldiers of the Red Army you fought to the end, defeated the aggressor and restored peace and freedom to the peoples of Europe’.14 His spokesman suggested that it was time for the West to give due credit to Russia for its part in the war and reminded the press that D-Day took place after three years of Soviet sacrifice and only one year before the end of the war. A few journalists took the comment to mean that the Russians were accusing the West of landing in France only to prevent a total Soviet victory. Despite Putin’s presence in Normandy, Chancellor Schröder was the star of the sixtieth anniversary commemoration. Born in 1944, Schröder was the first German leader too young to remember the war. At the Peace Memorial in Caen, Schröder acknowledged: ‘We Germans know we unleashed this heinous war. We recognise the responsibility our history has laid upon us.’ Schröder aligned himself with those who argued that Germany should be treated like any other country: ‘It’s not Germany of

190 | Harold J. Goldberg

those dark ages that I represent here today. My country has returned to the fold of civilised nations.’15 The German Chancellor told Reuters that he considered 6 June ‘a day of gratitude for the freedom which was won starting there’.16 Nevertheless, some opposition to Schröder’s participation continued to be expressed in the West. In a satirical editorial comment, the British newspaper The Guardian wondered whether Schröder wanted to thank the Soviet Union as well as the Western Allies for its contribution to the so-called liberation of Germany.17 A commentary in the Los Angeles Times went even further in critiquing the inclusion of Schröder. Behind Schröder’s uplifting rhetoric lies a powerful revisionism, meant to convey a troubling contemporary political message. The idea that Germany was ‘liberated’ at the end of the war marks a clear departure from the postwar consensus. Germans, after all, were not the victims of World War II – they were the aggressors. And they were certainly not ‘liberated’ in the months after D-Day, but defeated. (Davis 2004)

Schröder also faced some criticism in Germany. Conservative politicians and newspapers attacked him for not visiting the largest German cemetery in Normandy at La Cambe, even calling this act an insult to war widows. Undoubtedly aware of the controversy created by the Bitburg affair in 1985, Schröder diplomatically avoided the cemetery that included the graves of about five thousand SS soldiers, some of whom had participated in a massacre in central France.18 In interviews with German journalists, Schröder tried to take a centrist position, and he placed a wreath at a cemetery in Ranville that included war dead from several nations including Germany. Schröder’s foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, defended the Chancellor for showing sensitivity in his response to the historic invitation from France.19 Schröder’s judicious speeches and avoidance of La Cambe did not satisfy many German conservatives. Nevertheless, Chirac’s invitation to Schröder had reinforced Reagan’s view expressed at Bitburg: Germany in 2004 had the same right to remember 1944 as Allied nations did. Implicitly, Schröder’s presence created a wartime paradigm that transformed Germans from enemies of the Allies to victims of the Nazis, and gained for Germany an equivalency with other European nations that in reality reflected the politics of 2004 rather than the 1940s. Schröder encouraged this interpretation by calling D-Day ‘the liberation of Europe but also the liberation of Germany’. The German Chancellor went on to say: ‘the meaning of this invitation is that the Second World War is definitively over’.20 Schröder was correct in understanding Chirac’s invitation to celebrate the new French–German post-war order, the eurozone, and

Reconstructing D-Day Memory | 191

possibly Franco-German independence from Anglo-American foreign policy. Schröder saw the 2004 ceremony as a clean slate for Germany, a post-war rebirth, and recognition that economic power was more important than past military defeat. Schröder’s conservative critics did not understand that they had basically won the argument about German history. The D-Day events had an impact on opinions within Germany. On the eve of the sixtieth anniversary in 2004, the US Army newspaper Stars and Stripes talked to German students at the University of Heidelberg. ‘They were taught that it [D-Day] helped rid Germany of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, who forced average Germans to join the military, then invade neighbours such as France.’ A few students had not heard of D-Day, but most agreed that contemporary Germany should not be burdened by war memories: ‘Young Germans are grateful for what [US troops] did in freeing Germany. But it’s two or three generations ago and we aren’t really linked to this.’ One student reported that they had not learned any details about the Holocaust: ‘They [teachers] never told us of all the cruelties against the Jews. Just that they died, not how they died.’21 This survey suggests that the conservative position in the Historians’ Dispute had infiltrated the educational system. Several students at one of Germany’s finest universities displayed only a superficial knowledge of the Holocaust, indicating the possible spread of the Nolte–Kohl–Reagan perspective.

German Victimisation Despite Schröder’s suggestion that the war was finally over, conservative historians shifted their attention away from German actions during the war to new claims of German victimisation in the immediate aftermath of the war. With access to newly opened archives in former Communist countries, conservative historians focused on the issue of German refugees forced out of East European nations in 1945. German officials charged Czech and Polish leaders with mistreating German refugees at the time (Prauser and Rees 2004). Clearly, some German politicians wanted it both ways: they wanted the West to treat the war as a distant memory, but they also wanted to remind Europeans of the suffering of Germans at the end of the war. Schröder did not support the extreme conservative position that demanded Polish restitution of land. He marked the anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 with a conciliatory statement: ‘We Germans know full well who started the war and who were its first victims … . Property issues related to World War II are no longer a subject of

192 | Harold J. Goldberg

controversy between our two governments. Neither the German government nor any other serious political force supports any restitution claims still being voiced. This is our position, and we won’t hesitate to make this position clear before international courts, if need be.’22 Despite Schröder’s diplomatic promise, other German officials, including his successor as Chancellor, continued to raise the theme of German victimisation.

The Nazi-Soviet Pact An examination of two subsequent anniversaries related to the war, both of which evoke deep and bitter emotions in Poland, raises the issue of perpetrator and victim: the seventieth anniversary of the start of the war and the anniversary of the Katyń Forest Massacre. In 2009, both the Russian Prime Minister Putin and the German Chancellor Angela Merkel were invited to Gdańsk to mark the anniversary of the start of the war. While Germany had initiated the war with the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, the Soviet Union exacerbated the tragedy by occupying eastern Poland as stipulated in the Secret Protocol of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. In Gdańsk, Putin criticised the 1930s policy of appeasement, allowing him to reject the actions of the western powers as well as the Nazi-Soviet NonAggression Pact itself: ‘Therefore, one must admit that all the attempts to appease the Nazis undertaken between 1934 and 1939 by striking various agreements and pacts with them are inadmissible from the moral point of view and from the practical, political point of view are senseless, detrimental and dangerous. Certainly, one must admit these mistakes.’23 Thus Putin was able to diminish the role of the Nazi-Soviet Pact as a catalyst for the war by treating it as another example of the appeasement policy prevalent at the time.

Germans as Victims in 1945 Chancellor Merkel also spoke at this event, and she eloquently addressed Germany’s responsibility for the war. The German attack on Poland seventy years ago today marked the beginning of the most tragic chapter in European history. The war Germany unleashed brought immeasurable suffering to many peoples – years of oppression, humiliation, and destruction … . No country has ever suffered as much suffering in its history as Poland under German occupation … . As the Chancellor of Germany, I commemorate all Poles who were subjected to unspeakable suffering due to the crimes of the German occupiers … . The horrors of the twentieth

Reconstructing D-Day Memory | 193

century culminated in the Holocaust, the systematic persecution and murder of the European Jews … . I commemorate the six million Jews and all others who suffered a cruel death in German concentration and extermination camps … . There are no words that could even come close to describing the suffering of this war and the Holocaust … . I bow my head before the victims.

Merkel’s speech was remarkable for its candour and acceptance of German responsibility. The Chancellor then changed the subject to the present and claimed that Germany was the new leader of European unity: It is a miracle that we can also think of the happy days that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, and the unity of Europe twenty years ago. After all, Europe’s path to freedom was only made complete with the fall of the Iron Curtain … . It was thus also an issue of Germany’s special responsibility to smooth the path of Poland and the other countries of Central and Eastern Europe into the European Union and NATO, and to stand alongside them.

After her moving speech about Germany’s evil past and triumphant present, Merkel finished her talk by referring to Germans as victims of Polish crimes committed at the end of the war: ‘we today also recall the fate of the Germans who lost their home regions as a result of the war’.24 With this comment, although toned down from some of her previous remarks on the subject, Merkel was reiterating the conservative German discourse about the post-war period – the victimisation of Germans in Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1945. Shortly before going to Gdańsk, Merkel spoke on television in Germany, again accepting Germany’s responsibility for the war but reminding her domestic audience that Germans were victims: ‘Nevertheless the expulsion of well over 12 million people from the territories of the former Germany and today’s Poland is of course an injustice and that too must be said.’25 While Merkel was not fabricating this event, she was taking it out of the historical context of German occupation of Eastern Europe and invasion of the USSR followed by the Soviet counter-offensive that led to the evacuation of Germans as the war concluded. In fact, Article XIII of the Potsdam Agreement of 1945 had mandated the ‘orderly transfer of German populations: The Three Governments [USA, UK, USSR], having considered the question in all its aspects, recognise that the transfer to Germany of German populations, or elements thereof, remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, will have to be undertaken. They agree that any transfers that take place should be effected in an orderly and humane manner.’26 Despite the Potsdam demand, the transfer of approximately twelve million people did not proceed in an orderly and humane manner (Douglas 2012). When Angela Merkel became Chancellor in 2005, some in her conservative party rather surprisingly pointed out that twice as many

194 | Harold J. Goldberg

Germans were victimised by Poles compared to the number of Poles killed by the Nazis; they promised a new museum dedicated to these refugees. Relations with Poland were the worst they had been for years. The Poles were incensed at what they see as German attempts to rewrite the history of the Second World War. They were also aghast at attempts by the Prussian Trust organisation to reclaim property in modern Poland lost by Germans at the same time. Relations between Germany and Poland suffered as a result, with the Polish Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński asking Germany to remember ‘who was the perpetrator and who was the victim’ (Traynor 2004 and Landler 2006). Merkel’s attention to her nation’s victimisation led to a new boldness among German veterans. In Poznań, a memorial plaque honours the fifty British prisoners-of-war who escaped from Stalag Luft III in 1944 but were recaptured and executed by the Gestapo, and eventually made famous in the film The Great Escape (1963). Recently, Germany’s Veterans’ Association has asked for a new plaque in the same area to honour German soldiers killed by Soviet forces in 1945.27 While the Veterans’ Association is attempting to establish an equivalency between executed British prisoners and regular German soldiers, Polish authorities are not rushing to comply with the German request.

The Katyń Massacre In 2010, another wartime commemoration was held near Smolensk. Putin invited the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk to pay tribute to the victims of the Katyń Forest Massacre. First, a solemn-looking Putin knelt before a commemorative wreath, crossed himself and bowed his head. Later, at a joint press conference, Putin denounced the crimes of the Soviet regime: The truth about the past is important to Poles and Russians alike, however harsh and uncomfortable this truth might be. We will do everything possible to let the public know the truth … . It was indeed Russia’s initiative to hold this meeting between the heads of government of the two countries here in Katyń. I invited Mr. Tusk to come here today. I did this deliberately, out of deep respect for the Polish people. I did this to stress once again that we do not have any banned subjects in Russia and that we denounce all the crimes committed by the totalitarian regime.

Putin then changed the subject to Russian victimisation by providing an excuse for Stalin’s actions: It turns out that Josef Stalin had personally supervised a military operation in the 1920 Soviet-Polish War. I didn’t know anything about this. The Red Army

Reconstructing D-Day Memory | 195

was defeated at the time, and many Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner. The latest records show that 32,000 Red Army soldiers died from famine and diseases in Polish captivity. In my opinion, and I repeat, this is just my opinion, Stalin felt personally responsible for that tragedy. Perhaps, he organised this execution as an act of vengeance. Although this does not justify the crime, it may explain something about its motive. We know nothing about this, and the documents keep silent on the issue.28

Putin’s invitation to the Polish prime minister and denunciation of ‘the crimes of the totalitarian regime’ were considered steps toward improved relations with Poland, but Putin’s excuse for Stalin left many in Poland angered by the rationale for Stalin’s crime.29 Like Merkel when she enumerated Germans who were punished by Poles, Putin also listed the number of Russians killed by Poles as greater than the number of Poles killed at Katyń. At least he did not say the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was the first step toward the liberation of Russia in 1991.

Conclusion Immediately after the Second World War, Germany could not escape the legacy of the Holocaust and other war crimes. Evidence presented at the Nuremberg Trials demonstrated that the Nazi period was unique in its implementation of horrific crimes, torture, medical experiments and brutality, and in addition the trials revealed the widespread awareness of such crimes among the German population. Forty years later, some German politicians and historians questioned the burden of the past, creating an interpretive and ideological debate that insisted upon a re-evaluation of Germany’s role during the war. A post-war generation used to a militarily benign Germany became susceptible to arguments in favour of Germany’s participation in Allied gatherings. Public opinion slowly accepted a reinterpretation of the commemoration of D-Day. German, French and US politicians acted to make historical events fit a contemporary Europe that relied upon German cooperation and German economic power. Once Germany could claim the status of a nation awaiting liberation in June 1944, it was only logical that Germany would be seen as victimised by the war as was the rest of Europe. In 2004, Chancellor Schröder attended a ceremony originally intended to mark the beginning of the end of Germany’s military domination of Europe, but as Pastor Niemöller might have said, by then there was no-one left to speak out.30 While many historians view the Historians’ Dispute as the central event in a developing reinterpretation of the Nazi era, it is clear that Chancellors Schmidt and Kohl insisted on a revision of Germany’s treatment and

196 | Harold J. Goldberg

subsequent inclusion at D-Day ceremonies before that dispute took place. President Reagan made statements at Bitburg that reinforced this trend. This chapter places the D-Day ceremony at the centre of that transformation of historical memory. Allied soldiers who landed in 1944 were determined to liberate France and to conquer Germany. It is simply wrong to say that the liberation of France with the support of the majority of French people was equivalent to the destruction of the Nazi regime defended by so many up to the last day. Nazis were not outside invaders who conquered Germany in 1933, and Germans who fought to the end for that regime were not awaiting liberation by the Allies. In the long run, Germany benefited from 6 June 1944, but not voluntarily and only after another eleven months of intense combat. This issue should not be about the innocence or guilt of Germans born since the war or about the acceptance of Germany as a modern nation. The D-Day ceremony is about honouring those Allied veterans who deserve their own day, and without that core component, the celebration of D-Day is meaningless. As Jörn Rüsen argued in his article in History and Memory: ‘Stated succinctly, history is the mirror of past actuality into which the present peers in order to learn something about its future’ (1989: 39–40).

Notes  1. The Times, 10 June 1946, 7 June 1947, 5 June 1948, 7 June 1948.  2. New York Times, ‘Normandy Marks D-Day Anniversary’, 6 June 1949; Stars and Stripes, June 1949.  3. Washington Post and Times Herald, ‘Normandy Marks Tenth Year after Allied War II Landing’, 6 June 1954.  4. The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower (1996: Vol. 15, Part 5, April 1954–August 1954).  5. Reagan delivered this speech on 18 April 1985. An interesting parallel can be seen in American history after the Civil War, when, fifty years after the conflict, President Woodrow Wilson addressed the veterans at Gettysburg on 4 July 1913. Like Reagan, Wilson claimed that it was not appropriate to discuss what the battle meant or signified. Instead, he made reference to battles long past and quarrels forgotten. See Fiftieth Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg: Report of the Pennsylvania Commission (1913).  6. For further discussion of this issue, see P. Baldwin (1990), Ronald J. Berger (2012), Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan (1993) and A. Dirk Moses (2007). A recent book entitled Scorched Earth: Stalin’s Reign of Terror (2012) by Jörg Baberowski has reopened some of these issues.  7. New York Times, 2 July 1993; Los Angeles Times, 18 March 1994; Houston Chronicle Archives, 19 March 1994.  8. Quoted in ‘50 Years Later, D-day Fight Goes On’, Chicago Tribune, 12 March 1994.

Reconstructing D-Day Memory | 197

 9. Quoted in ‘D-Day+50 Years: Confusion Still Haunts the German Side’, New York Times, 5 June 1994, p. 2. 10. Independent, 8 March 1994; Washington Post, 2 June 1994. 11. Colonel Ivan Yershov, quoted in the New York Times, 7 June 1994. 12. While teaching in Moscow in the spring of 1995, I witnessed the efforts made by the Russian government to replace Stalin with Zhukov. 13. According to the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, sixteen million US Americans served in the armed forces during the Second World War. In 2000, almost six million of those veterans were alive but, in 2012, the number dropped to one million. Retrieved 10 May 2012 from the National World War II Database at http://www.nation alww2museum.org/ (accessed 5 August 2013). 14. President of Russia, 6 June 2004, Government of the Russian Federation database, http:// government.ru/ (accessed 5 August 2013). 15. New York Times, 7 June 2004. 16. Quoted in Deutsche Welle, 4 June 2004. 17. The Guardian, 4 June 2004. 18. The massacre was at Oradour-sur-Glane in June 1944. 19. Deutsche Welle, 7 June 2004. 20. Los Angeles Times, 6 June 2004. 21. Stars and Stripes, 3 June 2004. 22. ‘Displaced Persons’, Global Security.org database, http://globalsecurity.org/ (accessed 5 August 2013). 23. Spiegel Online International, 2 September 2009. 24. Bundeskanzlerin Home Page of the Federal Chancellor, http://www.bundeskanzlerin. de/Webs/BKin/EN/Homepage/homepage_node.html/ (accessed 22 May 2012); see also Salon.Com, 2 September 2009 at http://salon.com/ (accessed 5 August 2013). 25. Berliner Zeitung, quoted in Spiegel Online International, 2 September 2009. While Merkel suggested that Germans were victims of Polish actions in 1945, other German officials complained about Czech treatment of Germans. See Eagle Glassheim (2000). For a complete version of this argument, see Institute for Research on Expelled Germans (accessed 5 August 2013). 26. Foreign Relations of the United States (1945: 1,499–1,514). 27. ‘Anger as German WWII Veterans Demand Plaque to Honour Stalag Soldiers Who Killed Prisoners That Inspired The Great Escape [sic]’, Daily Mail Online, 19 April 2011. 28. Government of the Russian Federation, 7 April 2010, Government of the Russian Federation database, http://government.ru/. 29. Spiegel Online International, 8 April 2010. 30. See ‘Martin Niemöller’, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007392 (accessed 8 June 2015).

References Baberowski, J. 2012. Scorched Earth: Stalin’s Reign of Terror. Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag. Baldwin, P. (ed.). 1990. Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians’ Debate. Boston: Beacon Press. Berger, R.J. 2012. The Holocaust, Religion, and the Politics of Collective Memory. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

198 | Harold J. Goldberg

Childers, T. and J. Caplan (eds). 1993. Reevaluating the Third Reich. New York and London: Holmes & Meier. Davis, J.W. 2004. ‘Germany Was Beaten, Not Liberated’, Los Angeles Times, 6 June. Dobbs, M. 1984. ‘Normandy Braces for Another Allied Invasion’, Washington Post, 1 June, A17. Douglas, R.M. 2012. Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War. New Haven: Yale University Press. Drozdiak, W. 1984. ‘Germans Upset’, Washington Post, 6 June, A1. Fiftieth Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg: Report of the Pennsylvania Commission. 1913. Foreign Relations of the United States: Conference of Berlin (Potsdam). 1945. Vol. 2. Available at the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections, http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/ FRUS/ (accessed 5 August 2013). Glassheim, E. 2000. ‘National Mythologies and Ethnic Cleansing: The Expulsion of Czechoslovak Germans in 1945’, Central European History 33 (4): 463–86. Institute for Research on Expelled Germans. Distorted Historical Memory and Ethnic Nationalism as a Cause for Our Forgetting the Expelled Germans. Available at http://expelledgermans.org/ (accessed 5 August 2013). Landler, M. 2006. ‘Poles Riled by Berlin Exhibition’, International Herald Tribune, 30 August. Markham, J.M. 1984. ‘D-Day Ceremonies Vex West Germans’, New York Times, 7 June, A14. ‘Martin Niemöller’, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/ en/article.php?ModuleId=10007392 (accessed 8 June 2015). Moses, A.D. 2007. German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past. New York: Cambridge University Press. Nolte, E. 1985. ‘Between Myth and Revisionism?’ in H. W. Koch (ed.), Aspects of the Third Reich. New York: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 17–38. Prauser, S. and A. Rees (eds). 2004. The Expulsion of the ‘German’ Communities from Eastern Europe at the End of the Second World War. San Domenico: Badia Fiesolana. Rabinbach, A. 1990. ‘The Jewish Question in the German Question’, in P. Baldwin (ed.), Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians’ Debate. Boston: Beacon Press, pp. 45–76. Reagan, R. 1984. ‘Remarks at a Ceremony Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the Normandy Invasion’, 6 June. Available at the American Presidency Project Database, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ (accessed 8 June 2015). _______. 1985a. The President’s News Conference, 21 March. Available at the American Presidency Project Database, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ (accessed 8 June 2015). _______. 1985b. [Speech], 18 April 1985. Available at the American Presidency Project Database, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ (accessed 8 June 2015). _______. 1985c. ‘Remarks at a Joint German-American Military Ceremony at Bitburg Air Base in the Federal Republic of Germany’, 5 May. Available at Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/ (accessed 8 June 2015). Root, W. 1964. ‘De Gaulle Boycott of D-Day Rites Is Understandable’, Washington Post, 5 June, A15. Rüsen, J. 1989. ‘The Development of Narrative Competence in Historical Learning – An Ontogenetic Hypothesis Concerning Moral Consciousness’, History and Memory 1 (2). The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower. 1996. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Traynor, I. 2004. ‘For Us Germans, the War Is Finally Over’, The Guardian, 3 June. Vincour, J. 1984. ‘Mitterrand Stresses Conciliation’, New York Times, 7 June, A12. Waxman, S. 1994. ‘50 Years Later, D-Day Fight Goes On’, Chicago Tribune, 12 March.

Reconstructing D-Day Memory | 199

Wolffsohn, M. 1993. Eternal Guilt? Forty Years of German-Jewish-Israeli Relations, trans. D. Bokovoy. New York: Columbia University Press.

Harold J. Goldberg is the Underdown Distinguished Professor of History at Sewanee: The University of the South (USA). He teaches courses on Russia, Asia and the Second World War. He is the author of Documents of Soviet-American Relations 1917–1945 (4 volumes, 1993–2001), D-Day in the Pacific: The Battle of Saipan (2007) and Europe in Flames (2011). In the summer he leads student study trips to Second World War sites in England, France and Germany.

Chapter 11

Memories of World War II in German Film after 1945

( Christiane Schönfeld

‘The war will bring out only the worst in us.’ Friedhelm in Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter (2013)1

Much has been written about the German people’s struggle to come to terms with their past or ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’, from Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s book on the Germans’ collective inability to mourn – Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern (1967) – to Aleida Assmann’s numerous intriguing analyses of memory culture, physical inscriptions of traumatic memory and the inability to express them (Assmann 1999, 2006), to Reinhart Koselleck’s formulation of negative memory (‘negatives Gedächtnis’) that commemorates crimes against humanity committed by Germans as separate or secondary memory, with the aim of triggering memories of personal experience and guilt for the purposes of re-education, humanisation and democratisation (2002: 21–32). These discourses contextualise the focus of this chapter, namely representations and memories of World War II in films produced in Germany during the immediate and the prolonged aftermath of the war. These representations of war and personal war memories on film draw on the culture of collective German memory over the past seven decades. In her recent book Spectres of War: Hollywood’s Engagement with Military Conflict, Elisabeth Bronfen refers to the function of cinema in the US American context ‘as a privileged site of recollection’, where ‘traumatic traces of [a] historical past’ are renegotiated, ‘reconceiving current social and political concerns in the light of previous military conflict’ (Bronfen 2012: 4). German cinema after the end of World War II also visualised ‘the past according to the needs of the present’, as Bronfen puts it, but Notes for this chapter begin on page 214.

Memories of World War II in German Film after 1945 | 201

cinematic contemplations in Germany hinged for many years on the ability and willingness of viewers to remember the past and to look into the graves of the dead and into the grave of an era, as the renowned writer Ernst Wiechert told young Germans in his famous speech to German youth in November 1945 (Wiechert 1945: 31–32). However, as the journalist Ambros Waibel recently reminded readers of the Berlin newspaper Tageszeitung (TAZ), the majority of Germans did not wish to deal with the Nazi regime, war or the Holocaust, and chose to camouflage and cover up their past. Reiterating what Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich and others had been stating from the 1960s onwards, Ambros Waibel maintained that the processing of Germany’s history after 1945 consisted mostly of ‘waiting, stalling and delaying’ (Waibel 2013). While this became indeed a popular strategy among the surviving German population, occupying Allied military forces in Germany declared re-education as one of the primary goals of all four Allied powers at the Potsdam conference in early August 1945, and film became pivotal for the task of remembering the past and the future of the defeated German nation in the immediate post-war years. For a short period only, the recent war became an ambivalent symbol of a past no-one could forget and a (negative) memory that needed to be kept alive in order for re-education to take root. Even before World War II had officially ended, the psychological warfare branches and documentary film units of the occupying Allied military forces produced numerous documentaries for German audiences that engaged with both the past and the future in a principally didactic way, which is also true for many fiction films of that period (Fay 2008; Goldstein 2009; Kappelhoff, Gross and Ilger 2010). Fiction films screened in post-war cinemas from 1946 onwards were intended to entertain, but, as licensing documentation held at the US National Archive clearly indicates,2 they were also meant to encourage the German public to engage with the military aggression of their past, reflect on their identity and value system, and gain hope for the possibility of a better future. Occupying military forces faced numerous challenges in the context of film production during the immediate aftermath of World War II, from a film industry that was largely destroyed (by Nazi ideology as much as bombing raids) to the German people’s unwillingness to take collective responsibility for the consequences of Hitler’s reign, to countless problems related to basic needs in post-war Germany that were much more pressing than re-education and film production. Even two years after the end of World War II, Fritz Kortner, the former star actor on the stage and screen of the Weimar era, who returned to Germany after fourteen years in exile in order to support the former UFA producer Erich Pommer in the

202 | Christiane Schönfeld

cultural reconstruction of Germany, called Berlin a ‘Hungerhölle’ (Kortner 1976: 458), a hellhole of hunger, destruction and despair.3 There was no question, however, about the potential benefit of cinema during this period of grave instability and devastation. According to documents held in the US National Archive and Records Administration, a memo from the Office of War Information in London sent on 27 March 1945 recommended the use of cinema in defeated Germany, as it would serve to ‘keep … the Germans off the streets’. Furthermore, and perhaps surprisingly, the memo refers to Josef Goebbels, who had understood film as ‘a first-rate medium of political guidance and education’, and recommends the use of feature films as a way of effectively distributing serious reorientation material: ‘feature films will serve also as a form of entertainment which will have the people present when more serious information material is to be given to them’ (NARA, RG 260). The Office of the Military Government of the United States in Germany (OMGUS), estimated in May 1945 that around nine hundred cinemas in Germany were either still in working condition or could be repaired within less than six months (NARA, RG 260). Within a few weeks after the end of the war, Allied military governments initiated a reorientation and re-education process in accordance with the Joint Chiefs of Staff directive (JCS 1067) that was to encourage Germans to recognise the crimes committed during the Hitler regime and to clarify to German audiences the connection between the destruction caused by Germans during World War II and the destruction of German cities and the hardship faced by Germans during this post-war period. Film production after World War II began with documentary cinema, both Aufklärungsfilme [educational films] and educational documentaries made by the first film-production company in the Soviet zone of occupation, DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft), and US American/Bizone re-education films.4 The focus of documentary film produced in occupied zones during this early post-war period was not on the (military) conflict itself but on the atrocities that had been committed in concentration camps and on the accountability of the German people. Films such as the OMGUS Die Todesmühlen [Death Mills] (1945, dir. H. Burger/ B. Wilder) or the Soviet-licensed, forty-minute DEFA documentary Todeslager Sachsenhausen [Death Camp Sachsenhausen] (1946), produced under the direction of Richard Brandt, however, regularly encountered resistance; members of the audience would close their eyes or look away in order to avoid seeing what some considered to be mere propaganda. The short DEFA documentary about the Nuremberg trials Vergeßt es nie – schuld sind sie! [Don’t Forget – They Are the Guilty Ones!] (1946, dir. Richard Brandt) ‘stunned’ cinema audiences (reaction reports, NARA, RG

Memories of World War II in German Film after 1945 | 203

260), but the film was also taken by many Germans to confirm that guilt had now been assigned, separating the perpetrators, who appeared on the screen, from the German public. An attempt to counter the ‘process of selective remembering and forgetting’ (Cooke and Silberman 2010: 2) was a short feature produced by OMGUS’ documentary film unit named Der bleiche Reiter [The Pale Horseman] (1947), reminding cinema audiences of World War II and its consequences for the surviving population in Europe and Asia. According to the Information Control Division’s report on audience reactions for 1947, the images of the plight of millions, their ‘unbearable conditions in the ruins of their destroyed cities’ and their suffering from ‘numerous infectious diseases’ affected audiences as the representation of present suffering was correlated clearly to Germany’s military aggression of the recent past: ‘As the audience were told that all the misery and sorrows were a result of the last world war initiated by Germans, the spectators became quite aroused and excited.’ However, it was not the shock of images of current suffering but resistance to war memory that was reflected in the questionnaires that followed the screenings. A common reaction among audiences at the screening of The Pale Horseman was: ‘why dig up the past again and again and not see the wants and needs of to-day [sic]? Such anti-German propaganda films are certainly not a bridge for future good will and understanding among nations. By attending movies we wish to ease and relieve ourselves from the daily worries, sorrows and hardships’ (NARA, RG 260). Despite countless re-education efforts (such as exhibitions, debates, film screenings and publications, to name but a few) by the Allied forces as well as by German intellectuals such as the aforementioned Ernst Wiechert or the psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers (Die Schuldfrage [The Question of Guilt], 1946/47) who encouraged Germans to engage critically with the recent past in an effort to negotiate the disorientation that marked this period (Cooke and Silberman 2010: 2; Hahn 1997), public opinion and perceived Cold War requirements soon led to a change in reeducation practices. Within twenty-four months after the capitulation of Germany, German audiences were rarely reminded of their responsibility for the suffering and deaths of millions, and documentaries, along with Allied re-education programmes in all sectors, focused instead on practical issues, democracy and successful reconstruction. The memory of the war and the atrocities of the recent past were no longer useful to Allied military governments in the context of the Cold War and the ‘iron curtain’ that had descended on Germany. Silencing the memories of war became a community-sustaining mechanism, both for the individual and the state. Western and Soviet Allies aimed at control and consolidation in each zone

204 | Christiane Schönfeld

of occupation and, when the two German states were created in 1949, both Konrad Adenauer and Walter Ulbricht required stability for the two young German republics to flourish. Only one more documentary film produced prior to the establishment of the two German states explicitly reminded audiences of the recent war in the context of choices that can and ought to be made. A fifteen-minute documentary entitled Es liegt an Dir [It’s Up to You], directed by Wolfgang Kiepenheuer and produced under the supervision of Stuart Schulberg (OMGUS’ documentary film unit) in 1948 was one of the first AmericanGerman re-educational collaborations, and juxtaposed clichéd images of Germans as hard-working and peace-loving in idyllic rural landscapes with, in contrast, representations of war, reviving memory of both world wars of the recent past. The German people’s failure to reflect critically on their militarism and nationalism is as much a topic of the short film as the horrific consequences of war for society; the choice was – as the title indicates – theirs. The film’s clear-cut logic is reflected in Kiepenheuer and Schulberg’s simple but effective editing of material taken from Wilfried Basse’s Deutschland – zwischen gestern und heute [Germany – between Yesterday and Today, 1932–1934], documentary footage of the 1940s and Welt im Film newsreels (1947) which repeatedly contrasted images of war and peace, dictatorship and democracy. Children running towards a shelter during an air raid, for example, are juxtaposed with kids crossing the road in safety on their way to school, all of which makes the choice between destruction and construction, bombings and Sunday dances, ruins and green pastures all too clear. OMGUS’ peacetime propaganda effort is openly displayed in this film, which does not conclude with a declaration of collective guilt, but rather with a new chapter of a book on Germany’s history that has yet to be written. The pages of this book are still blank; they will have to be filled with the German people’s choices, made according to their common vision for the future. Audience reaction reports put together by OMGUS after the screenings of the film indicate that the majority seemed content with the message of the film and felt it to be conveyed effectively, even though 40 per cent rejected re-education films in general, and images of past military heroes were still perceived positively by many, despite the fact that documentary film-makers had unambiguously placed them in a critical context (NARA, RG 260). Cinematic representations of the war in fiction films of the immediate post-war era were kept to a minimum, in part owing to censorship by the Allied military governments who were not interested in licensing and supporting film projects that focused on controversial aspects regarding the recent war which could potentially cause tensions between the occupiers and the German population. Apart from the symbolic presence of rubble

Memories of World War II in German Film after 1945 | 205

in so-called Trümmerfilm [rubble films], the memory of the recent war was only occasionally and briefly represented on German cinema screens, usually by way of flashbacks, such as in Wolfgang Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns [Murderers among Us] (1946), Helmut Käutner’s In jenen Tagen [In Those Days/Seven Journeys] (1947) or Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s Liebe 47 [Love 47] (1948/49). Nevertheless, the war experience was the basis and context of film produced by Germans and licensed by the Allied military governments at the time. The focus, however, was on the consequences of the recent war and the crisis of the individual. ‘Rubble films’ reflect ‘a common preoccupation with issues of individual and collective guilt’ (Carter 2000: 92), as Erica Carter argues, while nevertheless providing moral guidance and hope for the future. Otto Lukas (played by Gustav Fröhlich, who also directed the film) in Wege im Zwielicht [Paths in Twilight] (1948) refuses to differentiate altogether between individual/collective guilt and innocence. He echoes an attitude shared by the majority of Germans at the time when he asks: ‘What would that achieve? … We need to start afresh. All of us! Those who don’t will never move on … !’ (see also Greffrath 1995: 201f.) Forgetting becomes a necessary survival strategy, emphasised by a number of ‘rubble films’, implying that the task of coming to terms with the horror and guilt of the past is never-ending. Those who are unable to forget the past might perish like Georg in Rolf Meyer’s Zugvögel [Birds of Passage] (1947), who – deeply traumatised by his experiences during the war – no longer believes in the possibility of love and normality. He ends his life by committing suicide. The former Wehrmacht soldiers, Mertens in Die Mörder sind unter uns and Beckmann in Liebe 47, are equally traumatised and suicidal, but they are saved by loving, nurturing women (Carter 2000: 91–112). War, devastation and death were ever-present in ‘rubble films’, even though death and destruction are rarely the focus of these films (Wilms 2008: 27). At the same time, however, destroyed German cities feature as décor for cinematic narratives that are usually based on aspects of the physical and psychological destruction caused by World War II. The focus of these films shifts from war and devastation to ‘a new humanism coming from the shared experience of living in the rubble’ (Wilms 2008: 27).5 ‘Rubble films’ are indeed ‘exercises in the management of shattered identity’ (Rentschler 2010: 419), and can be read as signifiers of the experience of war, as signs of the grief and suffering experienced or caused. Anke Pinkert rightly emphasises this aspect of ‘rubble films’, which is often overlooked: they are ‘an indispensable cultural archive including a range of mutable, affective and representational responses to historical loss and trauma’ (Pinkert 2008: 74). A number of scholars have recently distanced themselves from the cliché of the deafening silence of the early post-war era regarding the

206 | Christiane Schönfeld

Germans’ Nazi past, including the devastating war that was set in motion by its ultra-nationalist, anti-Semitic government (Moeller 2001a and 2001b; Olick 2005: 5; Hake 2008: 86f.). There is no doubt that both cultural representations and media discourses of the immediate post-war period and well into the 1950s entailed silences and avoided reminders of a past that was both reprehensible and painful. However, as Robert R. Shandley wrote in 2001, the Third Reich is always, directly or indirectly, part of the storyline of feature films produced and licensed under Allied military control, and World War II is the visible or invisible backdrop to these stories (Shandley 2001: 4). It is in this context that ‘rubble films’ provide insight into post-war German audiences’ mnemonic desires (Smith and Margalit 1997; Assmann and Frevert 1999; Meier 2010) and should be read as ‘post-traumatic depictions of an overwhelming numbness’ as Anke Pinkert suggests (2008: 74). Owing to Germany’s ambivalent attitude to its shameful past, ‘rubble films’ both acknowledged and, at the same time, concealed that past, giving clear preference to an emotive rather than a re-educational message. And while ‘rubble films’ were usually rather unpopular at the box office, they ‘played an important role in the formation of a collective attitude toward the past, one that shaped many public debates in Germany in the decades thereafter’, as Shandley put it (2001: 4). Taking up this point, Anke Pinkert focuses on the challenges faced by filmmakers in the Soviet zone of occupation at a time ‘when death in war suffused the public sphere in postwar Germany, yet no workable articulations and commemorative practices were available to stabilize this experience’ (2008: 71). She reserves particular praise for some early DEFA films such as Die Mörder sind unter uns and Gerhard Lamprecht’s Irgendwo in Berlin [Somewhere in Berlin] (1946), because they contributed to the German audiences’ ability to associate war experiences and affective responses with traumatic loss, and paved the way for further ‘transformative post-war and increasingly antifascist narratives’ (Pinkert 2008: 64). Films of the immediate post-war period all use the symbolic capacity of ‘rubble’, which represents the material destruction of German cities and towns, but also reflects the moral self-mutilation and human waste: physically and psychologically scarred and damaged individuals such as Dr Mertens (Wilhelm Borchert) in Die Mörder sind unter uns or Georg (Carl Raddatz) in Rolf Meyer’s Zugvögel (Studio 45/Berlin [West], 1947) are at the centre of narratives in ‘rubble film’, marking the crisis of masculinity and nationhood of that time. The focus, however, from 1947/48 onwards is on the ‘simple human stories’ (NARA, RG 260) promoted by the Allies especially in the Bizone. These stories centre on renewal and human decency, highlighting the educational politics of the American and British Allied forces. Films such as Käutner’s In jenen Tagen, Harald Braun’s Zwischen

Memories of World War II in German Film after 1945 | 207

Gestern und Morgen [Between Yesterday and Tomorrow] (1948) and Josef von Baky’s Und über uns der Himmel [And above Us the Sky] (1947) and Der Ruf [The Last Illusion] (1949) focus clearly on the choices facing the individual with regard to moral behaviour, representing courage and humanitarian deeds in times of crisis and the obligation of the individual towards the other, while conveniently avoiding any clear reference to the real humanitarian disaster, namely the Holocaust (Schönfeld 2013). Audiences, however, did not react as favourably to ‘rubble films’ as filmmakers and Allied military authorities had hoped, and Helmut Käutner openly criticised his fellow Germans’ resistance to films that attempted to deal with the painful memory of the recent past. Käutner, who directed numerous successful feature films during the Third Reich and his first ‘rubble film’ in 1947 (In jenen Tagen), insists in his essay ‘Demontage der Traumfabrik’ [Dismantling the Dream Factory] (1947) that contemporary film had to represent and reflect on the ‘German past, the German present and the German future’. Others, however, like Gerhard Grindel in his article entitled ‘Kurbel ohne Antrieb’ in the British-licensed Der Abend (Berlin) in 1947, lamented the creative corset put on fiction film production in the American and British sectors owing to their demand for a specific educational (and moral) message. Gustav Zimmermann of the ‘Akademisches Forum’ published a response to Käutner’s ‘Traumfabrik’ essay in the newsletter of the Landesverband Hessischer Filmtheater, in which he stated that the mere fact that they, as survivors of the war, had been living in the rubble of their formerly beautiful cities was sufficiently educational. He wrote: I am convinced that the majority of our people have recognized the horror of war via their own personal experience; the surviving generations will therefore hate war and know who is to blame for it. We therefore don’t need constant reminders of the all-too-obvious facts on cinema screens. … Films should provide joy – our young people deserve to laugh – and dreams, helping to escape the ruins of the everyday. (NARA, RG 260)

He praised films like Die Mörder sind unter uns and In jenen Tagen, but encouraged contemporary German cinema to provide entertainment and cater for the escapist desires of an audience trying to recover from the war. By 1948, the majority of Germans had accepted their share of a collective (at least political) responsibility for World War II and its horrific consequences, of which most were reminded daily by the absence of a loved one or of the security of a familiar home. But their acceptance of guilt was a deeply private and usually silent matter, and potential audiences were reluctant to spend time and money on films that reminded them of both their horrific past and the arduous present. Foreign films or

208 | Christiane Schönfeld

Nazi-produced feature films that the Allies considered sufficiently lighthearted and apolitical were re-released, and were significantly more successful in German cinemas than German feature films produced during the immediate post-war era. As scholars such as Bettina Greffrath (1995), Sabine Hake (2008), Peter Reichel (2004), Erica Carter (2000) and others have pointed out, the memory of the war in ‘rubble films’ was respectfully veiled in cinematic narratives that allowed glimpses of war, rubble and Nazi crimes, but focused first and foremost on survival and hope for the future. Images of the war are rare in these early post-war films, and usually the camera-subject distance, i.e. the field size, is quite large, thereby reducing the affective power of each shot. Even though the consequences of war and the Hitler era, such as the individual’s psychological and physical scars, might be at the centre of the narrative, the war itself is never seen close-up. The position of the camera and the camera-subject distance have a significant impact on both the narrative and the emotional involvement of the audience. When the traumatic memory of a main character is presented in long- or medium-shot flashbacks, it might still serve as a trigger for personal memory among the audience, but the impact is deliberately reduced. ‘Rubble films’ here set the tone for cinematic engagement with World War II memory, and isolated and vague representations of the war remained the cinematic convention for the ­following couple of decades. In the 1950s, the majority of West Germans were busy experiencing and enjoying the country’s economic miracle, and reminders of the horrors of the Nazi past were decidedly unwelcome. Germany had been retreating into idyllic landscapes of wealth and economic security, and, culturally, of timeless imagery. The year 1950, with the release of the hugely successful Schwarzwaldmädel [Black Forest Girl] (dir. Hans Deppe), signifies the rebirth of the ‘Heimat’ trope (Silberman 1995: 115), idyllic landscapes and cheerful ‘boy meets girl’ narratives that entice and reflect the audience’s longing for completeness and harmony, a utopia never attained (nor attainable) and seemingly lost forever. The astonishing box-office success of Deppe’s film had an impact on many of the strategic decisions being made in post-1950 German mainstream popular film. In literature, authors such as Nelly Sachs, Paul Celan, Anna Seghers, Heinrich Böll, Wolfgang Koeppen, Alfred Andersch, Günter Grass and other members of the Gruppe 47 did their best to write against the art of forgetting practised by so many Germans.6 However, the shallow collective oblivion mirrored in German visual art of the 1950s was, as David Lowenthal describes, for the most part ‘deliberate, purposeful and regulated’. Of course, the war and the horrors of the Nazi era were not truly forgotten, and therein lies

Memories of World War II in German Film after 1945 | 209

‘the art of forgetting – art as opposed to ailment, choice rather than compulsion or obligation’ (Lowenthal 1999: xi, italics in original). It was arguably the remilitarisation of West Germany, which both the USA and the German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer considered vital for a stable and capitalist Western Europe and an effective defence parameter against the Communist East, that triggered countless discussions in the public sphere and in turn impacted on the commemoration of World War II in German cinema. In the early 1950s, an increasing number of US American war films were released in West German cinemas, and in 1954, three German war films were premiered: Alfred Wiedemann’s Canaris, Helmut Käutner’s Die letzte Brücke [The Last Bridge] and the first part of Paul May’s hugely popular trilogy 08/15, the story of Private Asch, his military training and experiences during the war, which contains critical undertones but highlights the presence and the ethical possibility of the ‘clean’ Wehrmacht soldier and remains generally light-hearted. Further notable war films of the 1950s are Helmut Käutner’s adaptation of Carl Zuckmayer’s play Des Teufels General [The Devil’s General] (1955), G.W. Pabst’s and Falk Harnack’s Stauffenberg Resistance dramas Es geschah am 20. Juli [It Happened on July 20] and Der 20. Juli [The Plot to Assassinate Hitler], both released in 1955 (see Clarke 2010: 38ff.), Alfred Wiedemann’s Stern von Afrika [Star of Africa] (1957), Frank Wisbar’s Haie und kleine Fische [Sharks and Small Fish] (1958) and his Stalingrad drama Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben? [Dogs, Do You Want to Live Forever?] (1959), all reassessing the function of the German soldier (Carter 2007: 195–222; Clarke 2010: 36–55; Kapczynski 2010: 17–35) and reaffirming decency as a moral ­possibility even during World War II. Only Bernhard Wicki’s Die Brücke [The Bridge] (1959),7 based on a novel by Manfred Gregor (alias Gregor Dorfmeister), can be considered an antiwar film that unmistakably conveys war as a moral and human tragedy, as insanity, horror and injustice. It is the story of seven boys who are ordered to defend a bridge in a small German town against the approaching American troops during the final days of World War II, and who die, one by one, until only one boy, who is barely sixteen years old, is left. Both the book and the film engage with the subliminal aspect of war, but Wicki’s film focuses clearly on the disintegration of children, men and humanity during battle. The last twenty-five minutes of the film are devoted entirely to the boys’ fear and pain, their wounds, their violence and their deaths. By clarifying the structure of the sequentially unfolding film narrative, Wicki creates a radical shift from life to death, from joy and laughter to sheer horror and unbearable screams of pain. Audiences witness closeups as these boys disintegrate, as they begin to weep and wail, to whimper and to soil themselves. Wicki turns away from the light and rosy future

210 | Christiane Schönfeld

of a booming West Germany to enter the darkness of the past by telling a story of a lost generation of boys struggling for manhood while Germany was crumbling around them. Not surprisingly, this was not a topic in line with the popular culture of the 1950s – it took Manfred Gregor four years to find a publisher for his manuscript, and several directors rejected the idea of using it as a film script, until Bernhard Wicki decided to produce a powerful film narrative of human suffering and destruction, in an attempt to capture a glimpse of the essence of any war experience. Wicki emphasises the anti-war narrative, devoid of heroism, by signifying privileged moments of suffering and death by way of a pause or suspension of movement, which stands in sharp contrast to both the frantic movement of battle and the hurried retreat from the front line. His work can be seen as Trauerarbeit – work of mourning or grieving – a term introduced by Sigmund Freud in his text Trauer und Melancholie [Mourning and Melancholia] (1917) and taken up in 1967 by Margarete and Alexander Mitscherlich in their aforementioned bestselling study on the German people’s inability to mourn the heinous crimes committed in the name of National Socialism. Germany’s cinematic retreat into idyllic Heimat settings is typical of post-traumatic behaviour as defined by Freud. Grieving is first of all introspective, absorbing the individual’s ability to engage with the outside world. However excessive the traumatic experiences of the Nazi era might have been, almost one and a half decades later, Wicki’s images involved German audiences emotionally and forced them to look at and acknowledge the damage that the war caused Germany. His message was clear: war is inevitable when anti-Semitic, racist brutes are voted into office. When Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem was broadcast on German radio and television in 1961, following the earlier, equally highly mediatised Einsatzgruppenprozess in Ulm in 1958, the voices of survivors of the Holocaust telling their stories as witnesses during the trial carried the suffering of millions into German kitchens and living rooms, unravelling the forced silence kept in many homes.8 Discussions of the war and the Holocaust were called for, and questions were being asked, especially by the younger generation, leading to the ‘Phase der Vergangenheitsbewältigung’, as Norbert Frei called the 1960s and 1970s (Frei 2005: 26): this ‘phase of the struggle to come to terms with the past’ is only now drawing to a close because the generation of those actively involved in World War II is disappearing. The struggle to find a language with which to commemorate World War II in German cinema and on television screens, however, is ongoing. Despite the development of a critical and discursive memorial culture especially in public spaces, Germans clearly prefer to process this difficult chapter of their history

Memories of World War II in German Film after 1945 | 211

in the comfort and privacy of their living rooms. From 1960 onwards, documentary films became once again the private focus of millions of television viewers in their struggle to come to terms with their nation’s past. In 1960-61, a 14-part series critically documenting the twelve years of Hitler’s reign in Germany, entitled Das Dritte Reich [The Third Reich], was screened on the German public television channel ARD, causing extensive discussions often focusing on the memory of war and reflecting a growing sense of responsibility among the public for the crimes committed by Germans during the Nazi era. In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, the journalist Guido Knopp produced highly successful World War II documentaries for television such as Die Saat des Krieges – Hitlers Angriff auf Europa [The Seed of War – Hitler’s Attack on Europe] (with Harald Schott, 1989) and a six-part series on Der verdammte Krieg [The Damned War] (prod. with Harald Schott, Valerij Korsin and Anatolij Nikiforow, 1991), followed by another five parts focusing on the war at Stalingrad (in 1993). While his films would regularly attract three to four million viewers, Knopp’s documentary Hitler – Eine Bilanz (1995) and, especially, his two Hitlers Helfer films [Hitler’s Helpers] (1996) were screened at primetime and reached almost seven million viewers in Germany and Austria (Knopp 1999). Equally important, and not to be underestimated in terms of its overall impact on German public life and memory culture, was the broadcasting of imported reflection on German wartime crimes such as the screening, on public television, of the US-produced mini-series Holocaust, in West Germany in 1979. This is not to say that German feature films focusing on the war – from R.W. Fassbinder’s Die Ehe der Maria Braun [The Marriage of Maria Braun] (1979), Volker Schlöndorff’s adaptation of Günter Grass’ novel Die Blechtrommel [Tin Drum] (1979) or Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot (1981) to Bernd Eichinger and Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film about the final days of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany Der Untergang [Downfall] (2004) or Marc Rothemund’s film Sophie Scholl – The Final Days (2005) – were not successful, but they were hardly box-office hits. At the same time, however, Germans became excellent at exporting their struggle to come to terms with the Nazi past (Waibel 2013), and were increasingly rewarded for it: of the numerous nominations for Oscars and Golden Globe awards, all but three German films nominated for best foreign film Oscars between 1957 and 2007 dealt with Germany’s Nazi past, the war and the Holocaust. The depiction of Adolf Hitler in Der Untergang caused extensive public debates in the German media in 2004, reflecting Germans’ uneasiness regarding cinematic representations of the person identified with the horror and destruction of World War II and the Holocaust, especially if seen as a frail and unstable human being. These debates regarding the

212 | Christiane Schönfeld

memory and representation of Germany’s Nazi past once again gained momentum, when the three-part television mini-series Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter [lit. Our Mothers, Our Fathers/Generation War] premiered on German public television in March 2013. This time, however, numerous articles in local and national newspapers applauded the series’ ‘realistic’ representation of World War II, its willingness to engage ‘truthfully’ with the German past, proclaiming it to be a cultural representation of World War II which not only breaks with established German Gedächtniskultur, or memory culture, but offers a new language for memory discourses on Germany’s most destructive military campaigns of the twentieth century (Fuhr 2013 and Schulz 2013, for example). This was an astonishing response to a mini-series on World War II, a topic that had been presenting Germans with difficulties regarding its meaning and possible commemoration since Germany’s capitulation in May 1945. Choosing clear-cut vocabulary for a topic imbued with ambiguity, the series was advertised by the public television channel ZDF and the series’ producer, Nico Hofmann, within the context of Germans’ war memory, labelling the production as a response to the pain, guilt and silence of the past sixty-eight years and an active engagement with the collective trauma of World War II in German society and family histories up to the present day. Eckhard Fuhr, in the conservative Die Welt newspaper, emphasised the novelty in this particular representation of war, in both the script written by Stefan Kolditz and the direction of Philipp Kadelbach, which in his view dramatically challenged the memory culture regarding World War II in Germany, calling the series an ‘epochal’ event that offered a radically direct and painfully realistic view of World War II through the eyes of five young Germans. While his assessment of the ‘realism’ in the series seems exaggerated, the reaction of Fuhr and millions of German viewers indicates indeed a change in Germans’ engagement with war memory, now that the generation that lived through World War II is disappearing. The series generated huge interest with over seven million viewers and an ongoing discussion in the press, with more unfavourable reviews (Hammelehle 2013 for example) following the initial enthusiasm, which criticised the noise and superficiality of a representation of World War II that avoids clear moral judgements and casually inverses the victim–­ perpetrator dynamic. The series, which tells the stories of five friends, begins on the day prior to Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and ends in Berlin after the end of the war. Two of the five young Germans perish in the final sequences of the third and last 90-minute episode; the three survivors are all deeply affected by their war experiences and are changed forever. It is the inescapable everyday nature of evil and the finality of death that are

Memories of World War II in German Film after 1945 | 213

reiterated over and over again in the series, as well as the dramatic and destructive impact of war on individuals. The Wehrmacht officer Wilhelm’s intellectual and thoughtful younger brother, Friedhelm (played by Tom Schilling), who prefers to read rather than fight, nevertheless loses his humanity during the war, and predicts on the friends’ last evening in Berlin: ‘Der Krieg wird nur das Schlechteste in uns zum Vorschein bringen’ [The war will bring out only the worst in us]. This becomes the motto of the mini-series, and is repeated several times as the truth of Friedhelm’s prophecy is becoming all too evident (Albers 2013). This prophecy, as well as a photograph of the five friends and the promise to reunite, structure the series and provide constant reminders or allegories of the past. These structuring devices, however, are not only nostalgic measures, but symbolic and melancholic re-enactments of loss. They are historical and repetitive, just like any trauma (Caruth 1995: 7–9). While the title refers to our mothers and our fathers, the series presents individual guilt on a scale that makes it not only collective, but routine. But at the same time, the series emphasises that this past belongs to another Germany, another war and another time, and can therefore not be judged by normal standards, thereby decoupling the events of the war from the present of the surviving narrator and the viewer. This highly problematic ‘othering’ of Germany’s World War II past makes the series’ supposed realism palpable and thus enables non-threatening memory discourses, a common strategy in the context of difficult pasts (Lowenthal 1985). This recent effort to commemorate World War II illustrates that memory work within Germany regarding the country’s challenging past is ongoing and even increasing since the dawn of the new millennium; at the same time, a subtle, nostalgic longing for a pre-war, peaceful, light and unsoiled past connects virtually all German films that address the subject of World War II. Due to the excess of violence, suffering, guilt and shame, dealing with the war and Germany’s moral collapse during the Hitler era will never be over, as Nico Hofmann stated in an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Hofmann 2013). In an article in the German weekly Die Zeit, the German journalist and historian Götz Aly responded to the representation of World War II in Hofmann’s mini-series, and praised the depiction of the horror of inhumanity, destruction and moral depravation on an unprecedented scale as witnessed by hundreds of thousands. This was the burden carried by the survivors, a trauma on a massive scale. Aly maintains that the ‘freezing’ of this traumatic war memory was necessary – the Cold War becoming its political form – as, without the silence or selective forgetting, a new beginning would not have been possible (Aly and Hofmann 2013). An excess of silence in the context of war memory became essential for deeply traumatised Germans in order to rebuild and

214 | Christiane Schönfeld

safeguard the post-war community. Yet Aly criticises the fact that the boundaries between good and evil are blurred in this series, that perpetrators are also victims and vice versa, even though he also recognises both his own mother and father in the characters portrayed. In this regard, responding not only to the excess of violence and shame, but also to the excess of silence, this latest series has successfully made a passionate argument for ongoing conversations and debates about the experience, memory and representation of World War II in Germany’s public and private spheres.

Acknowledgements I gratefully acknowledge the support provided by Mary Immaculate College (University of Limerick, Ireland), which enabled me to spend most valuable research time in archives in Germany and the USA. Thanks are also due to the staff at the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland and the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin for their assistance.

Notes 1. Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter was a mini-series (3 x 90 min.), premiered on German television (ZDF) on 17, 18 and 20 March 2013. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of quotations in this chapter are mine. 2. See US National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland; especially record group 260 (Records of United States Occupation Headquarters, World War II), Records of the Information Control Division, Motion Picture Branch. Subsequent references to documents held at the National Archives in Maryland are cited as NARA and RG (record group). 3. UFA is the acronym for Universum Film AG (Aktiengesellschaft – company), the bestknown German film studio and a major force in world cinema from 1917 to 1945. Since 1945, it has continued to produce films and television programmes to the present day. 4. In 1947, the American and British zones of occupation merged together to create what became known as the Bizone. 5. See also Berger (1989), Fehrenbach (1995), Shandley (2001), Pinkert (2008), and Ó Dochartaigh and Schönfeld (2013). 6. Gruppe 47, or ‘Group 47’, was an influential literary association in post-war Germany that took its name from the year it was founded (1947). 7. For further analysis of this film, see my articles ‘Erfolg und Misserfolg von Verfilmungen’ (2012) and ‘Representing Pain in Literature and Film’ (2008).

Memories of World War II in German Film after 1945 | 215

8. This would be followed by detailed daily reports in German newspapers (and, to a lesser degree, on television) during the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials between December 1963 and May 1965.

References Albers, S. 2013. ‘Tom Schilling in Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter’, Stern, 20 March. Available at http://www.stern.de/kultur/tv/tom-schilling-in-unsere-muetter-unsere-vaeter-dasschlechteste-in-uns-1986016.html/ (accessed 15 December 2013). Aly, G. and N. Hofmann. 2013. ‘Vereiste Vergangenheit’, Die Zeit, 14 March. Available at http://www.zeit.de/2013/12/Unsere-Muetter-unsere-Vaeter-ZDF-Hofmann-Aly/ (accessed 15 December 2013) Assmann, A. 1999. ‘Trauma des Krieges und der Literatur’, in E. Bronfen, B. Erdle and S. Weigel (eds), Trauma: Zwischen Psychoanalyse und kulturellem Deutungsmuster. Bonn: Böhlau, pp. 95–116. _______. 2006. Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit : Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik. Munich: Beck. Assmann, A. and U. Frevert. 1999. Geschichtsvergessenheit - Geschichtsversessenheit: Vom Umgang mit deutschen Vergangenheiten nach 1945. Stuttgart: DVA. Berger, J. (ed.). 1989. Zwischen Gestern und Morgen – Westdeutscher Nachkriegsfilm 1946–1962. Frankfurt/Main: Deutsches Filmmuseum. Bronfen, E. 2012. Spectres of War: Hollywood’s Engagement with Military Conflict. New Brunswick: Rutgers. Carter, E. 2000. ‘Sweeping up the Past: Gender and History in the Postwar German Rubble Film’, in U. Sieglohr (ed.), Heroines without Heroes: Reconstructing Female and National Identities in European Cinema, 1945–51. London: Cassell, pp. 91–110. _______. 2007. ‘Men in Cardigans: Canaris (1954) and the 1950s West German Good Soldier’, in D. Hipkins and G. Plain (eds), War-Torn Tales: Representing Gender and World War II in Literature and Film. Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 195–222. Caruth, C. (ed.). 1995. Trauma: Explorations of Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Clarke, D. 2010. ‘German Martyrs: Images of Christianity and Resistance to National Socialism in German Cinema’, in P. Cooke and M. Silberman (eds), Screening War: Perspectives on German Suffering. Rochester, NY: Camden House, pp. 36–55. Cooke, P. and M. Silberman (eds). 2010. Screening War: Perspectives on German Suffering. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Fay, J. 2008. Theatres of Occupation: Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar Germany. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fehrenbach, H. 1995. Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Frei, N. 2005. 1945 und wir: Das Dritte Reich im Bewußtsein der Deutschen. Munich: Beck. Freud, S. 1917. ‘Trauer und Melancholie’, Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, IV (1916/17): 288-301. Fuhr, E. 2013. ‘Wie der Zweite Weltkrieg wirklich war’, Die Welt, 17 March. Available at http://www.welt.de/kultur/article114516194/Wie-der-Zweite-Weltkrieg-wirklich-war. html (accessed 15 December 2013).

216 | Christiane Schönfeld

Goldstein, C.S. 2009. Capturing the German Eye: American Visual Propaganda in Occupied Germany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Greffrath, B. 1995. Gesellschaftsbilder der Nachkriegszeit. Deutsche Spielfilme 1945–49. Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus. Grindel, G. 1947. ‘Kurbel ohne Antrieb’, Der Abend, n.p. NARA, OMGUS file. Hahn, B. J. 1997. Umerziehung durch Dokumentarfilm? Ein Instrument amerikanischer Kulturpolitik im Nachkriegsdeutschland (1945–-1953)., Münster: Lit Verlag. Hake, S. 2008. German National Cinema. London: Routledge. Hammelehle, S. 2013. ‘Der leise Landser’, Der Spiegel, 26 June. Available at http://www.spiegel. de/kultur/literatur/hermann-lenz-neue- zeit-ueber-den-zweiten-weltkrieg-a-904076.html (accessed 15 December 2013). Hofmann, N. 2013. ‘Es ist nie vorbei: Filmproduzent Nico Hofmann im Gespräch’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18 March. Available at http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/ unsere-muetter-unsere-vaeter/filmproduzent-nico-hofmann-im-gespraech-es-ist-nievorbei-12118295.html (accessed 2 April 2013). Jaspers, K. 1947. Die Schuldfrage: ein Beitrag zur deutschen Frage. Munich: Artemis. Käutner, H. 1947. ‘Demontage der Traumfabrik’, Film Echo 5: n.p. NARA, OMGUS file. Kapczynski, J. 2010. ‘Armchair Warriors: Heroic Postures in the West German War Film’, in P.  Cooke and M. Silberman (eds), Screening War: Perspectives on German Suffering. Rochester, NY: Camden House, pp. 17–35. Kappelhoff, H., B. Gross and D. Illger (eds). 2010. Demokratisierung der Wahrnehmung: Das westeuropäische Nachkriegskino. Berlin: Vorwerk 8. Knopp, G. 1999. ‘Zeitgeschichte im ZDF’, in J. Wilke (ed.), Massenmedien und Zeitgeschichte. Konstanz: UVK, pp. 309–16. Kortner, F. 1976 (1959). Aller Tage Abend: Autobiographie. Munich: dtv. Koselleck, R. 2002. ‘Formen und Traditionen des negativen Gedächtnisses’, in V. Knigge and N. Frei (eds), Verbrechen erinnern: Die Auseinandersetzungen mit Holocaust und Völkermord. Munich: Beck, pp. 21–32. Lowenthal, D. 1985. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. _______. 1999. ‘Preface’, in A. Forty and S. Küchler (eds), The Art of Forgetting. Oxford: Berg, pp. xi–xiv. Meier C. 2010. Das Gebot zu vergessen und die Unabweisbarkeit des Erinnerns: Vom öffentlichen Umgang mit schlimmer Vergangenheit. Munich: Siedler. Mitscherlich, A. and M. Mitscherlich. 1967. Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens. Munich: Piper. Moeller, R.G. 2001a. ‘Remembering the War in a Nation of Victims: West German Pasts in the 1950s’, in H. Schissler (ed.), The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968. Princeton: Princeton University Press. _______. 2001b. War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ó Dochartaigh, P. and C. Schönfeld (eds) 2013. Representing the ‘Good German’ in Literature and Culture after 1945. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Olick, J. 2005. In the House of the Hangman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pinkert, A. 2008. Memory and Film in East Germany. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Reichel, P. 2004. Erfundene Erinnerung: Weltkrieg und Judenmord in Film und Theater. Munich: Hanser. Rentschler, E. 2010. ‘The Place of Rubble in the Trümmerfilm’, in J. Hell and A. Schönle (eds), Ruins of Modernity. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, pp. 418–38.

Memories of World War II in German Film after 1945 | 217

Schmitz, H. (ed.). 2007. A Nation of Victims? Representations of German Wartime Suffering from 1945 to the Present. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Schönfeld, C. 2008. ‘Representing Pain in Literature and Film: Reflections on Die Brücke (The Bridge) by Manfred Gregor and Bernhard Wicki’, Comunicação & Cultura 5: 45–62. _______. 2012. ‘Erfolg und Misserfolg von Verfilmungen: Manfred Gregors Die Brücke und die Nahaufnahmen des Krieges in Kino und Fernsehen’, Germanistik in Ireland 7: 81–102. _______. 2013. ‘Being Human: Good Germans in Postwar German Film’, in P. Ó Dochartaigh and C. Schönfeld (eds), Representing the ‘Good German’ in Literature and Culture after 1945. Rochester, NY: Camden House, pp. 111–37. Schulz, B. 2013. ‘Die Sprache des Krieges’, in Tagesspiegel, 20 March. Available at http:// www.tagesspiegel.de/meinung/unsere-muetter-unsere-vaeter-die-sprache-des-krieges/ 7954818.html/ (accessed 15 December 2013). Shandley, R. 2001. Rubble Films: German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Silberman, M. 1995. German Cinema: Texts in Contexts. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Smith, G. and A. Margalit (eds.). 1997. Amnestie, oder, die Politik der Erinnerung in der Demokratie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Waibel, A. 2013. ‘Historische Leerstelle’, Tageszeitung (TAZ), 14 February. Available at http:// www.taz.de/Kolumne-Blicke/!110920/ (accessed 15 December 2013). Wiechert, E. 1945. Rede an die deutsche Jugend, 1945. Munich: Zinnen. Wilms, W. 2008. ‘Rubble without a Cause: The Air War in Postwar Film’, in W. Wilms and W. Rasch (eds), German Postwar Films: Life and Love in the Ruins. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 27–44.

Filmography 08/15. 1954/5, dir. Paul May Der 20. Juli [The Plot to Assassinate Hitler]. 1955, dir. Falk Harnack Die Blechtrommel [Tin Drum]. 1979, dir. Volker Schlöndorff Der bleiche Reiter [The Pale Horseman]. 1947, dir. OMGUS Documentary Film Unit (no name) Das Boot. 1981, dir. Wolfgang Petersen Die Brücke [The Bridge]. 1959, dir. Bernhard Wicki Canaris. 1954, dir. Alfred Wiedemann Deutschland – zwischen gestern und heute [Germany – between Yesterday and Today]. 1932–1934, dir. Wilfried Basse Das Dritte Reich [The Third Reich]. 1960, ARD, dir. Heinz Huber, Arthur Müller, Gerd Ruge und Waldemar Besson Die Ehe der Maria Braun [The Marriage of Maria Braun]. 1979, dir. R.W. Fassbinder Es geschah am 20. Juli [It Happened on July 20]. 1955, dir. G.W. Pabst Es liegt an Dir [It’s Up to You]. 1948, dir. Wolfgang Kiepenheuer Haie und kleine Fische [Sharks and Small Fish]. 1958, dir. Frank Wisbar Hitler – Eine Bilanz [Hitler – A Profile]. 1995, prod. Guido Knopp Hitlers Helfer [Hitler’s Helpers]. 1996/1998, dir. Guido Knopp Holocaust. 1978, NBC, dir. Marvin J. Chomsky Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben? [Dogs, Do You Want to Live Forever?]. 1959, dir. Frank Wisbar In jenen Tagen [In Those Days/Seven Journeys]. 1947, dir. Helmut Käutner

218 | Christiane Schönfeld

Irgendwo in Berlin [Somewhere in Berlin]. 1946, dir. Gerhard Lamprecht Die letzte Brücke [The Last Bridge]. 1954, dir. Helmut Käutner Liebe 47 [Love 47]. 1948/9, dir. Wolfgang Liebeneiner Die Mörder sind unter uns [Murderers among Us]. 1946, dir. Wolfgang Staudte Der Ruf [The Last Illusion]. 1949, dir. Josef von Baky Die Saat des Krieges – Hitlers Angriff auf Europa [The Seed of War – Hitler’s Attack on Europe]. 1989, dir. Guido Knopp and Harald Schott Schwarzwaldmädel [Black Forest Girl]. 1950, dir. Hans Deppe Sophie Scholl – The Final Days. 2005, dir. Marc Rothemund Stern von Afrika [Star of Africa]. 1957, dir. Alfred Wiedemann Des Teufels General [The Devil’s General]. 1955, dir. Helmut Käutner Todeslager Sachsenhausen [Death Camp Sachsenhausen]. 1946, dir. Richard Brandt Die Todesmühlen [Death Mills]. 1945, dir. Hanus Burger and Billy Wilder Und über uns der Himmel [And above Us the Sky]. 1947, dir. Josef von Baky Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter [Generation War]. 2013, ZDF, dir. Philipp Kadelbach Der Untergang [Downfall]. 2004, dir. Bernd Eichinger and Oliver Hirschbiegel Der verdammte Krieg [The Damned War]. 1991/1993, dir. Guido Knopp (with Harald Schott, Valerij Korsin and Anatolij Nikiforow) Vergeßt es nie – schuld sind sie! [Don’t Forget – They Are the Guilty Ones!]. 1946, dir. Richard Brandt Wege im Zwielicht [Paths in Twilight]. 1948, dir. Gustav Fröhlich Zugvögel [Birds of Passage]. 1947, dir. Rolf Meyer Zwischen Gestern und Morgen [Between Yesterday and Tomorrow]. 1948, dir. Harald Braun

Christiane Schönfeld is Senior Lecturer and Head of German Studies at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland. She is the author of Dialektik und Utopie: Die Prostituierte im deutschen Expressionismus (1996), has edited or co-edited five volumes, the latest one being Representing the ‘Good German’ in Literature and Culture after 1945 (with Pól Ó Dochartaigh, 2013), and published widely on German literature and film. She is one of the editors of the first critical and complete edition of the works of Ernst Toller (2015).

Chapter 12

Ilse Aichinger’s Novel The Greater Hope Poetic Narrative to Deal with Trauma

( Marko Pajević

Today, we tend to think that the German post-war period was shaped by sober rationality. In literature, a group of writers known as ‘Group 47’ dominated; their creative work was dedicated to realism, even though it was often of a magical nature.1 German post-war magic realism was magical in some fantastic features of its content but fundamentally realist in its form. Adorno’s all-too-famous – since generally misunderstood – ­declaration about ‘the barbarism of writing a poem after Auschwitz’2 formed discourse in such a way that art after World War II seemed deaestheticised.3 Aesthetics and ethics seemed incompatible. The dominant terms Trümmerliteratur [‘rubble literature’] and Kahlschlagliteratur [‘clearcutting literature’], used to describe the burgeoning German literary scene after the war and mainly connected to Group 47, are telling in the sense that they implied destruction that was then followed by a ‘clearing’ to prepare a new kind of literature. And indeed, some sobering up was indispensable and imposed itself – how else could one, especially in Germany, react to what had happened? It was a time of disillusionment. The social utopianism of National Socialism had died a death. Communism, as practised in the Federal Republic of Germany, was most unattractive when compared with neighbouring states in Western Europe; it was simply too obvious for the Germans that Socialism, as it functioned in East Germany (real existierender Sozialismus), was not the solution. Moreover, humanism had not shown itself to be effective against the devastation caused by those social experiments, with the result that it seemed discredited as well, at least to the younger generation.4 In 1958, Paul Celan reviewed contemporary German literature in this general climate of sobriety: language had become ‘more Notes for this chapter begin on page 231.

220 | Marko Pajević

sober, more factual … a “greyer” language’ (1986: 167). And he included himself in this assessment, even if it took some years after the war for his poems to fully develop this greyer tone. This tone is closely associated with the great problem that arose after National Socialism, and that has not yet found a satisfying answer, namely the question of how to connect rationality and life. This issue is mainly dealt with in aesthetics and in the arts. Horkheimer and Adorno opened this question with their Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1944, and they left little room for hope for a better situation. This extremely influential book, written during the war and against the backdrop of the destruction of civilisation in Germany, presents the pessimistic thesis that, owing to its ‘instrumental reason’, Enlightenment necessarily fails. The will to dominate nature rationalises myth but, as dominance, turns itself into myth since it represents an affirmative positivism. It thus annihilates the individuum in an ‘administered world’. Giving as example the history of antiSemitism, Horkheimer and Adorno (1991) affirm an irrational element in the dominant form of reason so that the return to barbarism is a coherent part of modernity. In his book Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), Zygmunt Bauman propounded to the English-speaking world the thesis that the Churban5 was no accident but an expression of modernity and its culture of enlightenment. Bauman states: ‘The Holocaust was born and executed in our modern rational society, at the high stage of our civilization and at the peak of human cultural achievement, and for this reason it is a problem of that society, civilization and culture’ (1989: x). Bauman goes on to deduce that it is not primarily a German problem but a problem of modernity in general. Consequently, more fundamental changes are necessary in order to prevent further catastrophes, even more so since those catastrophes would now have the power to destroy the world altogether. It is not simply a question of political structures, but a whole way of thinking. The fact that Bauman’s thesis, published forty years after the Dialectics of Enlightenment, had such a sensational impact clearly shows how slight was the impact of the ideas propounded by Adorno and Horkheimer, at least outside Germany, and how strongly these ideas were (and still are) resisted. The problem of an enlightened modernity, and thus of the rational mind itself, compromised by National Socialism and the Churban, is still open. Poetics, however, can provide ways of dealing with this past, ways that resolve the problem of the aporia of instrumental reason. Geoffrey Hartman draws our attention to the role of the arts in dealing with a traumatising past:

Ilse Aichinger’s Novel The Greater Hope | 221

The artistic mind, combined with the demands of testimony, proves to be particularly fertile when a difficult traumatic experience is to be manifested and communicated. … In order to confront trauma’s inherent volatilisation, dissociation, and its resulting porosity of transmission, a medium is necessary that is more durable than the individual memory. Art and collective memory affect each other mutually in order to achieve this goal. (Hartman 2000: 40)

Hartman believes that art and society support one another. Britta Hermann, who has analysed Ilse Aichinger’s novel The Greater Hope, gives in her conclusion an even clearer statement: ‘perhaps – contrary to what some believe – it is actually the medium of poetry that is capable of conveying the terrors of the Holocaust and of keeping its memory alive’ (2001: 78). Comprehension and a conscious dealing with the past in the sense of Freud’s Durcharbeitung [working thoroughly through] is the basis for a psychologically healthy society, as the Mitscherlichs have demonstrated in a very convincing way in their famous book Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens [The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behaviour] (1967). In the following, I want to pursue the question of what poetic forms of narration signify in the context of the Churban and the connected philosophical problems associated with it such as the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. This will be analysed in the example of Ilse Aichinger’s novel The Greater Hope, published in 1948, which is the first piece of Austrian literature dealing with the persecution of the Jews in the Third Reich. In spite of predominantly positive reviews – Walter Jens, a leading figure on the literary scene of the Federal Republic of Germany, said of the novel in 1960 that it was ‘the only answer of high quality given by our literature to the recent past’ – the novel never really had much impact and has so far occupied a marginal role in German-speaking literary history.6 Its narrative style was disturbing, and Aichinger’s poetic representation of horror was received with misgivings in a country that was explicitly devoted to sober realism after the pathos of National Socialism. Indeed, it was only because the author was granted victim status – Aichinger’s mother was Jewish – that her style was accepted at all. A writer without this legitimation of victim status would not have been in a position to publish in this way. So it was not only the topic that confronted her contemporaries with unwelcome memories; it was also her poetic style of narration. There is no doubt that Aichinger’s writing is determined by scepticism and that her unconventional poetics reinforces that attitude. These features were already evident in her remarkable Aufruf zum Mißtrauen [Appeal to Mistrust], published in 1946 (1990a: 16–17), when she was twenty-five

222 | Marko Pajević

years of age. She presented her appeal as a homeopathic remedy: the individual should question himself or herself, start by mistrusting himself or herself so that he or she does not go wrong on more important issues: ‘Der Klarheit unserer Absichten, der Tiefe unserer Gedanken, der Güte unserer Taten! Unserer eigenen Wahrhaftigkeit müssen wir mißtrauen!’ [We have to mistrust the clarity of our intentions, the profundity of our thoughts, the goodness of our deeds! We have to mistrust our own truthfulness!] So what is wrong with clarity, profundity, goodness and truthfulness, especially in a historical situation where the people have just been liberated from a mystifying ideology? Aichinger is almost certainly referring to this very problem since the people who had believed in the National Socialist ideology had evidently thought it to be clear, profound, good and truthful. That was the case even where the sharpest minds were concerned. For example, Gottfried Benn, to name but one, justifies himself in his famous ‘Answer to the Literary Emigrants’ (1933) in terms of those same qualities questioned by Aichinger (Benn 1991: 87, 91–94, 97). Aichinger’s starting point is not to mistrust others. She does not refer to the gullibility of the Austrians and the Germans who supposedly fell into the trap set by the Nazis. It is, on the contrary, the certainties that seem fatal to her. People who claim to know lead to disaster. She concludes: ‘Werden wir mißtrauisch gegen uns selbst, um vertrauenswürdiger zu sein!’ [Let’s become more mistrustful towards ourselves in order to be more trustworthy!] (1990a: 17). Aichinger’s scepticism therefore goes a lot further than most representatives of the literature of the time were prepared to go; starting not from others but from herself, she is more radical and more fundamental. This is a very conscious choice that determines all her work. As Samuel Moser put it (1990: 37): ‘Aufruf zum Mißtrauen – als das kann das ganze Werk Ilse Aichingers verstanden werden.’ [Appeal to mistrust – that is how we can understand the entire work of Ilse Aichinger.] Confronted with socially and politically undesirable or pernicious developments, Aichinger consequently defends a private approach. She has never renounced this approach, and has constantly been in the critical line of fire for it. That is the reason why Ilse Aichinger repeatedly insists that the privacy of her writing is exactly the opposite of what some suggest it to be – it is committed literature precisely because privacy, by definition, ‘concerns the individual’, as Aichinger points out (1990b: 25), and reality can never be perceived in absolute terms but only individually. In consequence, language is individualised for Aichinger who follows thereby Wilhelm von Humboldt’s concept of language as a ‘dead skeleton’ as long as it is not vivified in the context of actual speech. ‘Sprache ist privat’ [Language is private], says Aichinger (1990b: 29):

Ilse Aichinger’s Novel The Greater Hope | 223

Sprache ist, wo sie da ist, für mich das Engagement selbst, weil sie kontern muß, die bestehende Sprache kontern muß, die etablierte Sprache, weil sie fort muß aus dem Rezept der Wahrheit in die Wahrheit, weil sie das Gegenteil von Etabliertheit sein muß, aus sich selbst. [Language is for me, whenever it is present, commitment itself, since it must counter, it must counter the existing language, the established language, since it must quit the recipe of truth and enter truth itself, since it must be the contrary of establishment, by itself.]

In other words, as soon as truth has become a recipe, it is not truth any more. The same reasoning can be applied to reality: reality has to be ‘realised’ in each moment anew and reassessed continuously; it cannot be established once and for all. And that also impinges on the idea of commitment: a commitment that wants to change the system in a direct way, by means of a clear communication of goals, has already betrayed its goal, namely the human being, since it operates on another system, with words as empty shells. Aichinger’s commitment strives to be more radical in the literal meaning, it wants to start at the root, and, for her, that means in the self of the individual human being, and so in the individual’s way of thinking, that is in his or her language. From this, it follows that Aichinger’s mistrust is also a mistrust of the putatively clear communicability of reality. Mistrust is therefore a mistrust of language in language. This also explains the outstanding role of silence in Aichinger’s poetics, a silence that has nothing to do with lack of expression but is, on the contrary, more charged in meaning than speaking and must as such be part of speech. Writing is for her the best possibility to be silent, she claims.7 It is also a way of expressing elements that would otherwise be lost. Writing and consequently the reading of what is written allow one to perceive things that would be – in everyday language – harder to mediate. There is therefore a certain degree of scepticism on her part with regard to the conventional notion of communication. Writing and literature do more than communicate. We enter here the realm of the ‘ineffable’, an important topos of German post-war literature. This silence that she wants to express in her writings is her reaction to what happened in the Third Reich, and it is quite a representative way to deal with trauma. Many of the great poets of the time, in particular those who dealt most intensely with the Churban, made of this silence a constitutive element of their poetics – among them Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, Ingeborg Bachmann and Aichinger’s husband, Günter Eich. In Aichinger’s novel The Greater Hope, the child-perspective of her main character, Ellen, offers a possibility of expressing the traumatic experience that is so difficult to seize, and it does it by ludicrous, poetic and fabulating narration.

224 | Marko Pajević

The novel contains numerous autobiographical elements that do not stand up to closer examination, a fact that becomes obvious upon learning that the real models for Ellen’s friends told Aichinger that the events did not take place in exactly the way she described them. Aichinger explained: ‘Ich wollte zuerst nur einen Bericht schreiben darüber, wie es wirklich war. Das ist dabei herausgekommen, aber doch auf eine ganz andere Weise, als ich es mir vorgestellt hatte’ (Esser 1990: 50). [I wanted at first to simply write a report about how it really was. That’s what came out of that, but in a completely different way from the way I had figured.] That suggests that, in writing, a dynamism developed that allowed a subjective narrative to emerge out of the primacy of objectivity. This is certainly not to be confused with a lack of clarity or with incomprehensibility, as Sigrid Weigel points out (1987: 11–12): the persecution of the Jews in The Greater Hope is, she claims, ‘so realistisch wie in wenigen Nachkriegstexten’ [realistic as in few post-war texts]. Weigel continues by stating that the novel does not indulge ‘an der in der Nachkriegszeit üblichen Tabuisierung, Verharmlosung und Verdrängung’ [in the tabooing, trivialisation and suppression [of memories] common in the post-war era]. At this point, a criticism of the novel that deserves to be taken seriously should also be mentioned: Manfred Karnick states that, with this book, ‘die Literatur der Geschichtslosigkeit ihre geschichtliche Stunde [hatte]’ [the literature of ahistoricity had its historical moment]. (1986: 385). And Irene Heidelberger-Leonard perceives ‘Verklärungen ins Gleichnishafte’ [transfigurations into the allegorical] in Aichinger. She writes: ‘Oft scheint es, als würde das Grauen der Verfolgung nur als Versatzstück eingesetzt, um den Ausflügen ins Transzendentale erst die rechte Flughöhe zu verleihen’ [Often it seems as if the horror of persecution is simply used as a trope to accommodate glimpses of a transcendental nature] (1999: 162). In this novel, for Heidelberger-Leonard, ‘verkehrt sich der grässlichste Massenmord unserer Kulturgeschichte in einen quasi sakralen Vollzug’ [the most revolting mass murder of our cultural history is transformed into an almost religious procedure] (1999: 162). This violent criticism might seem justified when the reunion with Jan, a foreign soldier who befriends Ellen during the war, is presented at the end of the novel as eternalised magnificence that lacks any conscience of an elementary rupture in civilisation. However, the novel as a whole displays a commitment and a sense of responsibility that contrasts sharply with the infamous ‘inner emigration’ of German writers who stayed in Nazi Germany and withdrew from public life.8 Taking all this into account, it should be added that Heidelberger-Leonard’s premise that the novel was well received by the public seems largely exaggerated. Its reception was, on the contrary, problematic.

Ilse Aichinger’s Novel The Greater Hope | 225

Aichinger makes it clear that history comes to pass in a different way for individuals, and that the individual cannot understand history in the abstract but needs to attach it to personal experience in order to become aware of it. Nicole Rosenberger endorses this in her study of the novel. She concludes: Ziel eines derartigen geschichtlichen Erinnerns kann demnach nicht das Speichern der zur ‘Historie’ erstarrten Ereignisse sein, nicht deren Haltbarmachung mit Blick auf Gegenwart und Zukunft. Die Absicht ist vielmehr, durch die Reanimation der Einzelheiten, auch der ‘unbedeutenden’, eine Nähe zum Geschehn herzustellen, die sich weniger in den Dienst des Begreifens und Subsumierens als in den des Erlebens stellt. [The goal of such a historical remembrance therefore cannot be the storage of events stiffened in(to) ‘History’, or their conservation for the present and the future. The intention is rather to create a proximity to what happened by a reanimation of the details, even the ‘insignificant’ ones, that represent an enhancement of vicarious experience rather than of understanding and integration into already accepted views and ideas.] (Rosenberger 1998: 174–75)

Aichinger takes a stance against the politically correct moral tone of her time9 that believed it would do justice to the events in factual representation by creating an antithesis of morals and aesthetics. She becomes political precisely by not accepting any fixed position but by moving generally into a space of questioning. So what form does this stance take in the novel? It is structured in ten chapters describing stages in the life of the heroine, Ellen, beginning in the time before World War II, probably in 1938, and concluding shortly before its end with Ellen’s death by artillery fire while traversing a bridge. In the first chapter she is a small girl, and in the last one she is already a young woman. The action takes place in a city that is not named explicitly but can easily be identified as Vienna. The individual chapters demonstrate various forms of dealing with traumatic experience. The child’s perspective plays a major role in this. In the later chapters, Ellen cannot be considered a child any more but she maintains the functioning of the child’s perspective that is not subject to the binary logic of social functioning but follows other rules and is comparable to the perspective of a poet. Manuela Günter, who analysed the possibilities and impossibilities of autobiographical writing after the Churban, insists on the particular strengths of this ‘child-perspective’ poetic: Indem die Opfer ihrer Selbsterhaltung folgten, beförderten sie ihren Untergang. Diese bittere Erkenntnis einer Struktur, die der Rationalität gerade nicht entbehrt, erlaubt wiederum der künstliche kindliche Blick, dem die Infragestellung

226 | Marko Pajević

von Selbstverständlichkeiten sowenig schwer fällt wie die Anerkennung des Unfassbaren – alles, was möglich ist, geschieht eben nur, wenn alle sich in das scheinbar Unvermeidliche fügen. (Günter 2002: 46–47) [Following the path of self-preservation, the victims hastened their own downfall. This bitter understanding of a structure that does not lack rationality is again facilitated by the artificial child-vision which is capable of easily questioning foregone conclusions and of accepting the incomprehensible – ­everything that is possible happens only when everybody resigns themselves to the apparently unavoidable.]

Günter stresses the strength of Ellen’s childlike refusal of a rationality dedicated to self-preservation, and refers to Imre Kertész who called such behaviour ‘wonder’ and ‘happiness’, creating a dimension of hope in the texts of the survivors. Those uncalculated steps ‘irritate and disgrace’ Nazi logic, as Günter concludes (2002: 47). This becomes also obvious in the element of play in the novel. Gert Hofmann has shown its subversive strength, affirming that play is certainly powerless, but, precisely for that reason, it is beyond the reach of power and represents a possibility to be unconditionally world-­oriented. He concludes (2007: 293): ‘Das Spiel erreicht auf diese Weise freilich nicht mehr, als die absolute Machtlosigkeit der herrschenden Gewalt vor der fundamentalmenschlichen Würde seiner auf Ohnmacht gegründeten Souveränität evident werden zu lassen’ [The play thus achieves nothing more than to render evident the absolute powerlessness of the ruling power facing the fundamentally human dignity of its sovereignty based on powerlessness] (italics in the original). Despite her heroine, Ellen, being dangerously exposed, Aichinger can in this form of writing develop a unique perspective on reality that proves the powerlessness of power and thus allows for a possible liberation from that power. Selecting from among these elements to which I can only allude briefly, I want to demonstrate at least one stylistic procedure of the novel in more detail, since it elucidates Aichinger’s work in a very telling way and represents a potentially healing way of dealing with trauma. It occurs in the eighth chapter, ‘Flügeltraum’ [Wing-dream],10 where the adolescent Ellen is being interrogated by German guards (all quotations in the following are from the pages 198-211). Since Aichinger constantly plays with words, it is difficult to translate these passages; I shall therefore explain some of the features that are lost in translation. Central to this passage is the inversion of commonly accepted conditions and certainties, a transgression and questioning of the rules of the game of power. This process starts when Ellen, who has just escaped her pursuers, puts her hand from behind over the mouth of the policeman who is searching for her and seizes his collar in order to be taken away. Thus she becomes the active and seizing

Ilse Aichinger’s Novel The Greater Hope | 227

figure vis-à-vis the figure of power – this is a tendency that is to become ­increasingly stronger in the course of the interrogation. With this first transgressive step, Ellen destabilises the representative of power: Ellen ‘ließ sich ohne Frage durch das Fragwürdige führen, als ginge es nur darum, einen alten Schritt in einem neuen Tanz zu versuchen. Den Polizisten schien es, als tanzten auch sie zum erstenmal in diesen Gängen’ [let herself be taken through the questionable without asking questions, as if there were nothing more at stake than to try an old step in a new dance. It seemed to the policemen as if they too danced for the first time in these corridors.] Aichinger uses the German word Gänge for ‘corridors’; it also means ‘walks’; this typical polyvalence shows that Ellen’s behaviour contaminates the place (the corridors of the guardhouse) and the act (the taking away of the prisoner) of power. The description of the guardhouse is just as telling. Aichinger uses the terms Wachstube and Wachleute, which mean literally ‘wake-room’ and ‘wake-people’, for the guards, the latter term corresponding to the English word ‘watchmen’, but referring to policemen here. ‘Die Wachstube lag zu ebener Erde, lag wie alle Wachstuben in schwerem Halbschlaf, träumte böse Träume und war nicht zu erwecken. Die Wachstube bewachte ihren eigenen Schlaf’. [The guardhouse (Wachstube) lay on the ground floor, lay like all guardhouses in an oppressive half-sleep, dreamt evil dreams and it was impossible to awaken it. The guardhouse guarded its own sleep.] The wake of the guards (wake-people), as guardians of others and thus as agents of a limitation of life and of freedom, is exposed as sleep, in the sense of lacking consciousness of true life: waking/guarding is equated with sleeping, the guardians/wake-people sleep and must be awakened to life. ‘Arme Wachstube’ [Poor guardhouse], she writes. The young policeman, caught by Ellen at the beginning, is no longer in any condition to give his report following the rules of the guardhouse. He has been withdrawn from the unconscious functioning and is ‘awake’ now. When the colonel becomes impatient and barks: ‘Wir haben keine Zeit zu verlieren’ [We don’t have any time to lose], the policeman answers: ‘wir haben viel mehr zu verlieren’ [we have much more to lose]. Ellen is described as standing calmly among the green uniforms. In this formulation, the guards are reduced to the symbol of their function. As human beings, they do not exist yet. The fact that rainwater drops from Ellen’s hair to the dusty floor symbolises again the infiltration of power by Ellen’s difference, as well as by personalised life, represented by the water that revivifies that dried-out guardhouse. This rainfall, observed and represented by Ellen, starts right away to produce blossom. A policeman is already ‘awake’: he has started to think and to understand that the system is defective. Consequently, he himself

228 | Marko Pajević

is taken away by the other policemen. Even the colonel starts to distort idiomatic expressions, adopting Ellen’s method and thereby laying bare the ambivalence and complexity of things: he reacts to the hasty ‘Wir haben ihn gefaßt’ [We caught/grabbed him] by retorting ‘Fassen Sie sich’ [Get a grip on yourself], using the same verb with a different meaning. When Ellen stubbornly stays silent during the routine questions of name, address and so on, and answers the question ‘Geboren?’ [Born?] simply with ‘Ja’ [Yes], a man with ‘ängstliche[m] Gesicht’ [a frightened face] slaps her while another one laughs and the colonel becomes progressively irritated. Ellen observes: ‘Sie fragen falsch’ [You’re putting the question in the wrong way], and only when the colonel in the course of the interrogation gets ‘außer sich’ [out of his mind/beside himself], does his question become ‘right’: ‘Wo bist du zu Hause?’ sagte ein dicker Polizist und beugte sich zu ihr hinab. ‘Wo ich gewohnt habe’, sagte Ellen, ‘war ich noch nie zu Hause.’ ‘Wo bist du dann zu Hause?’ wiederholte der Polizist. ‘Wo Sie zu Hause sind’, sagte Ellen. ‘Aber wo sind wir zu Hause?’ schrie der Oberst außer sich. ‘Sie fragen jetzt richtig’, sagte Ellen leise. [‘Where’s your home?’ said a fat policeman and bent down towards her. ‘Where I used to live’, said Ellen, ‘I was never really at home.’ ‘So where is your home?’ repeated the policeman. ‘Where your home is’, said Ellen. ‘But where is our home?’, shouted the colonel, beside himself. ‘Now you’re asking the right question’, said Ellen quietly.]

This could be called an inverse maieutic performance by Ellen, who leads the colonel to a correct formulation of the question, resulting in an interrogation that contains an essential and not simply a functional dimension. Already before this, Ellen has woken up the police stenographer. Having been torn from his routine by Ellen’s unusual answers, he wanted to be reassured of the rules of his function but he was told to keep note of (‘aufschreiben’ – write up) everything. Ellen uses wordplay again and shows the levelling element of this act: ‘“Er schreibt es nieder”, sagte Ellen schnell, “schreiben Sie nicht, schreiben Sie nicht, man muß es wachsen lassen.”’ [‘He writes it down’, said Ellen quickly, ‘don’t write, don’t write, you have to let it grow.’] That gives the stenographer a new awareness, and he utters, startled: ‘Papier ist ein steiniger Boden’ [Paper is a stony ground]. With this achieved new consciousness, he acknowledges the function that he previously occupied as being false, saying that he had fixed everything in writing and that what was fixed has collapsed. He also now thinks language in its complexity for which nothing corresponds to

Ilse Aichinger’s Novel The Greater Hope | 229

the supposedly unequivocal signification of functional thinking. In doing so, he has become ‘awake’, liberated, and strives for the truth of being: ‘Man muß sich suchen gehen’ [One has to go and search for oneself], he whispers and consequently defects to Ellen’s ‘camp’. After this, the sten­ ographer rebels against the questions of the colonel, and is described as being ‘furchtlos’ [fearless]; the fat policeman loses his bearings, the others are prepared to follow the writer, and they are all contaminated by life and wakefulness. Only the colonel continues to resist more and more desperately, for his authority is based exclusively on rule and order. Finally, Ellen explains that another guard (‘Wachmann’/wake-man), entering with her friend Bibi in custody, is sleeping: ‘Armer Wachmann, er findet alle andern, nur sich selbst kann er nicht finden. Vermißte, lauter Vermißte! … arme Gefangene … Wir müssen ihnen helfen … wir werden sie befreien.’ [Poor guard (wake-man), he can find everyone else but cannot find himself. Missing persons, they are all missing persons! … poor prisoners … We have to help them … we will free them all.] Once more, Ellen reverses the situation: she elevates herself over the people in power who keep her imprisoned, placing herself in a position where they seem to be the prisoners whilst she is free and even able to free her guards, as she has already done in the case of some of them. Ellen is actually in the process of liberating all the policemen: ‘Die Wachstube drohte zu erwachen’ [The guardhouse (wake-room) was on the verge of waking up], Aichinger writes. But the colonel does manage to get a grip on himself and tries to call the men to order: Fragt nicht, woher ihr kommt, und fragt nicht, wohin ihr geht, denn es führt zu weit. … Gebt euch zufrieden mit Namen und Adresse, hört ihr, es ist genug. Wißt ihr nicht mehr, wieviel es bedeutet, ordnungsgemäß gemeldet zu sein? Wißt ihr nicht alle, wie wohl es tut, in Reih und Glied zu gehen? … Denkt nicht, daß einer einer ist, bedenkt, daß viele viele sind, es beruhigt. Faßt die Saboteure, wenn die Nächte hell sind, schaut nicht zuviel in den Mond! Der Mann im Mond bleibt allein, der Mann im Mond trägt Sprengstoff auf dem Rücken. Es tut mir leid, wir haben keine Macht, ihn einzuliefern. Aber wir haben Macht, ihn zu vergessen. [Don’t ask where you come from, and don’t ask where you are going to, because that leads too far. … Be content with name and address, you hear, that is enough. Have you forgotten how much it means to be registered and in order? Don’t you all know how good it feels to march in rank and file? … Don’t think that someone is someone, just bear in mind that many are many, it’s reassuring. Seize the saboteurs when the nights are bright, don’t look at the moon too much! The man in the moon stays lonely, the man in the moon carries dynamite on his back. I am sorry, we don’t have the power to take him in. But we do have the power to forget about him.]

230 | Marko Pajević

The colonel admits the powerlessness of the reality principle of power, the limitation of its reach, but he entrusts himself to this restricted life since order and sticking to orders and given rules reassures. His call to order is an explicit declaration against freedom and for repression. With this declaration, the colonel cannot really convince the men but he regains control over them. Then he accuses Ellen ‘der Sabotage des Fragens und der unerwünschten Aussagen’ [of the sabotage of the interrogation and of undesired statements]. This formulation defines the poetic programme of Ilse Aichinger and, consequently, her heroine Ellen reacts to this with a simple affirmative and acquiescent ‘Ja’ [Yes]. This brief example demonstrates one of Aichinger’s poetological principles and its effects. Such frequent paradoxical formulations lead to a subversive ‘Erweichung von Verknöcherungen’ [softening of fossilisations] (Šlibar 1993: 55). Aichinger wants to put forward a form of authenticity that can always only be achieved by countering received attitudes, by a non-acceptance of the status quo. Her writing against the languages of science and of everyday life represents resistance to the formation of systems (Šlibar 1993: 58) – which, of course, can readily be identified with automatisation and a lack of awareness, indeed a lack of reality. That is what she wants to counter in her writing. For her, the experience of trauma has rendered very obvious the fundamental importance of a conscious use of language. Her novel manifests a language awareness that facilitates an individualised and subjective memory, and that – against the general tendency of its time – in a deliberately poetic representation. It is precisely in this way that forms of expression that can do justice to what happened in the past can emerge. This work on language is a form of survival and exemplifies Aichinger’s approach to trauma. It is at the same time a criticism of contemporary civilisation.11 The commitment to the word, corresponding to Viktor Shklovskij’s ‘Resurrection of the Word’ (1914) in Russian formalism (Shklovskij 1972: 41–47), aims at consciousness and at an experience of truly lived reality, as opposed to an unconscious functioning in a social context. To a kind of knowledge that is fixed and archived, Aichinger opposes her intuitions, which are – seen from the perspective of the intensity of life and referring to the subjective perception of the world – more informative and useful, more precise, to use Aichinger’s own epithet, than factual knowledge. Her literature thus consists of a permanent subversion, permanent since for such an attitude, nothing can ever be assured, since assurance betokens system and automatisation.12 For Ilse Aichinger, ‘Schreiben kann man wie Beten eigentlich nur, anstatt sich umzubringen. Dann ist es das Leben selbst.’ [As with praying, one can really only write as an alternative to committing suicide. Then it

Ilse Aichinger’s Novel The Greater Hope | 231

is life itself.] (Aichinger 2005, vol. 5: 44) She clearly makes great demands on literature because her writing deals with the question of life and death. Her writing counters trauma and thus opens up access to an intensive mode of living. Her novel represents the consequence of the traumatic experience in an inversion of what seems self-evident. Its functioning demonstrates the way in which one may elude the mechanisms of power. In this way, it neutralises and suggests an alternative to power. This fundamental working towards a better world – or at least towards preventing the repetition of a bad one – is done through her work on language. With her poetics, Aichinger offers a way of confronting the barbarism of an administered world, together with a stance against all tendencies of annihilation of the humane. Such work can only be done poetically, that is to say by raising readers’ awareness of the functioning of language and consequently of the human mind. Poetics, therefore, point the way to a kind of reason that does not reduce and restrict life. Ilse Aichinger’s The Greater Hope illustrates this approach by demonstrating the insufficiency of instrumental reason and rational logic, presenting an argument in favour of an understanding of what actually constitutes lived experience.

Acknowledgements An earlier version of this chapter was originally published in German under the title ‘Ilse Aichingers Roman Die größere Hoffnung: Zur Bedeutung poetischer Erzählformen als Umgang mit dem Trauma’, in Marisa Siguan, Jordi Jané, Loreto Vilar und Rosa Pérez Zancas (eds), Literatura y supervivencia. Barcelona: Sociedad Goethe en España, 2009, pp. 191–204. I am most grateful to the editors of the aforementioned volume for their permission to publish this revised version in English.

Notes  1. Gruppe 47, or ‘Group 47’, was an influential literary association in post-war Germany that took its name from the year it was founded (1947).  2. For the history of the reception, background and context of Adorno’s words, see Peter Stein (1996) and Sven Kramer (1996). Concerning the consequences for poetry, see Günther Bonheim (2002).  3. Geoffrey Hartman (2000: 40): ‘The desire to de-aestheticise art that started after the war suppressed the question as to whether aesthetic satisfaction could have an ethical value

232 | Marko Pajević

when it was drawn from a work of art that has for its object the enormous cruelties of the Shoah demanded by the state. Adorno’s famous dictum repressed the problem. It stressed exclusively the moral difficulty of representing such a tremendous catastrophe or even of allowing this event to enter the mind.’ (All translations are my own.)  4. There were only a few representatives of the pre-war generation whose work continued to be guided/inspired by the spirit of humanism, above all Thomas Mann, with his novel Doktor Faustus (1947), that nevertheless carried an ironical undertone.  5. The term Churban is preferable to the unfortunate term Holocaust that Bauman uses; unfortunate, since it rather cynically signifies a sacrifice by fire. The French Shoah is not all that much better since it signifies a natural catastrophe, whereas Churban means a man-made catastrophe. This term was immediately adopted by Jewish writers. Manès Sperber tried to introduce it into the general discourse with his book Churban oder die unfassbare Gewissheit (1979), and it is increasingly used in Israel and should ideally be introduced everywhere instead of the unsuitable terms Holocaust and Shoah that have been generally imposed by film and television from the late 1970s on.  6. The novel of the Austrian writer was first published in 1948 in Amsterdam with BermannFischer, but seems to have been considered without further question as German literature. This is certainly also due to the connections between Aichinger and Group 47. Quotations are taken from the Fischer edition of 2005 (1991), edited by Richard Reichensperger as part of the eight-volume edition of Aichinger’s work.  7. ‘Es [das Schreiben] bedeutet für mich den Versuch, zu schweigen, vielleicht schreibe ich deshalb, weil ich keine bessere Möglichkeit zu schweigen sehe’ (Aichinger 1990b: 26). [It [writing] signifies for me the attempt to be silent; perhaps I write because I don’t see a better possibility for being silent.]  8. I have explored the theme of commitment in Aichinger’s literature elsewhere (Pajević 2011).  9. W.G. Sebald has demonstrated in Luftkrieg und Literatur (1999) that realistic presentation of life during and after the Second World War was not very well established in the immediate aftermath of the war, thus provoking a major destabilisation of literary historiography. Sebald, however, argued for a factual presentation of the war in literature, regretting that it hardly existed in the writing of that time (2005: 59). 10. All subsequent quotations are from the following edition: Ilse Aichinger, Die größere Hoffnung (2005). 11. As Annegret Pelz put it (2005: 23): ‘In Aichinger, on the other side, beyond the ­ideology  of  the “zero hour”, emerges criticism of civilisation in the form of work on language’. 12. As Šlibar put it (1993: 77–78): ‘In the sense of a “permanent subversion”, defining and the precise intuitions become the issue and the poetic programme. They are valid as long as refusal, opposition, and life on the fringes exist as options and are functionalised’ (italics in the original).

References Aichinger, I. 1990a. ‘Aufruf zum Mißtrauen’, in S. Moser (ed.), Ilse Aichinger: Materialien zu Leben und Werk. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, pp. 16–17. __________. 1990b. ‘Gespräche mit Heinz F. Schafroth’, in S. Moser (ed.), Ilse Aichinger: Materialien zu Leben und Werk. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, pp. 25–29.

Ilse Aichinger’s Novel The Greater Hope | 233

__________. 2005 (1991). Die größere Hoffnung. 8 vols, ed. R. Reichensperger. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Bauman, Z. 1989. Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity. Benn, G. 1991. ‘Doppelleben’ in Sämtliche Werke, Stuttgarter Ausgabe, Vol. 5. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Bonheim, G. 2002. Versuch zu zeigen, daß Adorno mit seiner Behauptung, nach Auschwitz lasse sich kein Gedicht mehr schreiben, recht hatte. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Celan, P. 1986. Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Esser, M. 1990. ‘“Die Vögel beginnen zu singen, wenn es noch finster ist” Auszug aus einem Gespräch mit Ilse Aichinger (1986)’, in S. Moser (ed.), Ilse Aichinger: Materialien zu Leben und Werk. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, pp. 47–57. Günter, M. 2002. ‘Writing Ghosts: Von den (Un-)Möglichkeiten autobiographischen Erzählens nach dem Überleben’, in M. Günter (ed.), Überleben schreiben: Zur Autobiographik der Shoah. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, pp. 21–50. Hartman, G. 2000. ‘Intellektuelle Zeugenschaft und die Shoah’, in U. Baer (ed.), ‘Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen’: Erinnerungskultur und historische Verantwortung nach der Shoah. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 35–52. Heidelberger-Leonard, I. 1999. ‘Klärung oder Verklärung? Überlegungen zu Ilse Aichingers Roman Die größere Hoffnung’, in H. Margrit Müller (ed.), Verschwiegenes Wortspiel: Kommentare zu den Werken Ilse Aichingers. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, pp. 157–68. Hermann, B. 2001. ‘Gegenworte, Sprachwiderstände: Ilse Aichingers Roman Die größere Hoffnung’, in B. Hermann and B. Thums (eds), ‘Was wir einsetzen können, ist Nüchternheit’: Zum Werk Ilse Aichingers. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, pp. 61–78. Hofmann, G. 2007. ‘Spiele der Ohnmacht: Ilse Aichingers “Die größere Hoffnung”’, in J. Sánchez de Murillo and M. Thurner (eds), Aufgang: Jahrbuch für Denken, Dichten, Musik. Stuttgart: Schlaf, Tod, Band 4 Eros, pp. 281–93. Horkheimer, M. and T.W. Adorno. 1991 (1944). Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Karnick, M. 1986. ‘Die größere Hoffnung: Über “jüdisches Schicksal” in deutscher Nachkriegsliteratur’, in S. Moses and A. Schöne (eds), Juden in der deutschen Literatur. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 366–85. Kramer, S. 1996. ‘“Wahr sind die Sätze als Impuls…”: Begriffsarbeit und sprachliche Darstellung in Adornos Reflexion auf Auschwitz’, Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 3: 501–23. Mann, T. 2005 (1947). Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn erzählt von einem Freunde. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Mitscherlich, A. and M. Mitscherlich. 2004 (1967). Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens. Munich: Piper. _______. ca 1975. The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behaviour. New York: Grove Press. Moser, S. (ed.). 1990. Ilse Aichinger: Materialien zu Leben und Werk. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Pajević, M. 2011. ‘On the Fringes: Mistrust as Commitment in the Poetics of Ilse Aichinger’, in G. Hofmann, R. MagShamhráin, M. Pajević, M. Shields (eds), German and European Poetics after the Holocaust: Crisis and Creativity. Rochester, NY: Camden House, pp. 88–106. Pelz, A. 2005. ‘Ilse Aichinger: Die größere Hoffnung (1948)’, in C. Benthien and I. Stephan (eds), Meisterwerke: Deutschsprachige Autorinnen im 20. Jahrhundert. Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, pp. 20–32. Rosenberger, N. 1998. Poetik des Ungefügten: Zur Darstellung von Krieg und Verfolgung in Ilse Aichingers Roman ‘Die größere Hoffnung’. Vienna: Braumüller.

234 | Marko Pajević

Sebald, W.G. 2005 (1999). Luftkrieg und Literatur. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Shklovskij, V. 1972. ‘The Resurrection of the Word”, Twentieth-Century Studies 7–8: 41–47. Šlibar, N. 1993. ‘“Definieren grenzt an Unterhöhlen”: Ambiguisierte Paradoxie in Ilse Aichingers Gedichten (Zdenko Škreb zugeeignet in dankbarem Gedenken)’, in K. Bartsch and G. Melzer (eds), Ilse Aichinger. Graz: Droschl, pp. 55–87. Stein, P. 1996. ‘“Darum mag falsch gewesen sein, nach Auschwitz ließe kein Gedicht mehr sich schreiben.” (Adorno). Widerruf eines Verdikts? Ein Zitat und seine Verkürzung’, Weimarer Beiträge 4: 485–508. Weigel, S. 1987. ‘Schreibarbeit und Phantasie: Ilse Aichinger’, in I. Stephan, R. Venske and S.  Weigel (eds), Frauenliteratur ohne Tradition? Neun Autorinnenporträts. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, pp. 11–37.

Marko Pajević is Senior Lecturer in German and Comparative Literatures and Cultures at Royal Holloway, University of London. His main research interest is poetics, with a speciality in Paul Celan and the elaboration of a poetic anthropology. He is the author of three monographs, Zur Poetik Paul Celans. Gedicht und Mensch – Die Arbeit am Sinn (2000), Kafka lesen. Acht Textanalysen (2009) and Poetisches Denken und die Frage nach dem Menschen. Grundzüge einer poetologischen Anthropologie (2012). He has also edited Poésie et Musicalité. Liens, croisements, mutations (2007) and coedited German and European Poetics after the Holocaust. Crisis and Creativity (2011).

Part V Italy

(

Chapter 13

Victimhood Asserted Italian Memories of the Second World War

( Richard J.B. Bosworth

In 2011, the distinguished Italian publishers Il Mulino brought out a book written by Elena Aga Rossi and Maria Teresa Giusti, both historians of international reputation. Their heavily detailed study was entitled Una guerra a parte: i militari italiani nei Balcani 1940–1945 [A Separate War: Italian Soldiers in the Balkans, 1940–1945].1 It was well researched, with a major use of archives, Italian and foreign. Yet perhaps it might have been better entitled Una guerra di parte (A Party War), since, read against its authors’ grain, it is not so much an account of the fate of Italians on the murderous Balkan fronts of the Second World War as a cosy statement of what, in our own time, has become the standard Italian national memory of that time, a version where blatant and bloody Fascist (and Italian) perpetration has been transmuted into safely patriotic victimhood. The authors make their position clear early: ‘the history of Italian soldiery in the Balkans is a tragic one’ (Aga Rossi and Giusti 2011: 14). Thereafter everything assists this stance. Despite the chronology of the title promising a study of the whole war, the book concentrates on events after the bungled attempt by King Victor Emmanuel III and his Prime Minister, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, to change sides on 8 September 1943. Before that, some Italian Fascist brutality is described; for example, the massacre of 150 men and boys of Domenikon in Thessaly (all the males of the village) on 16 to 17 February 1943, in vicious retribution for a partisan ambush that had killed nine blackshirts (Aga Rossi and Giusti 2011: 82). But, we have earlier been assured, ‘the virulence and fanaticism of the Balkan conflict reached unheard of levels. Men arrayed themselves against one another divided by ideas and religions so that they killed or could be made to kill without thinking twice’ (Aga Rossi and Giusti 2011: 63). Killing is killing Notes for this chapter begin on page 248.

238 | Richard J.B. Bosworth

is killing, is the implication. No mention is deemed necessary that the Italians were invaders (in alliance with the Nazi Germans) and that this fact may impinge on too soft a moral equivalence of two sides. In any case, once 8 September is reached, any equation is forgotten as the book becomes a catalogue of Italian suffering, when suffering there certainly was. Yet to more critical observers than Aga Rossi and Giusti, the Italians might be thought, either through their ‘consent’ to the Fascist dictatorship or, more generally, through the ambition of their nation to rise beyond its status as the least of the Great Powers, to bear considerable responsibility for the retribution now inflicted on them. Nor is another context probed or questioned as it should have been. Whether as Fascists or as nationalists, Italians carried deeply embedded stereotypes of Balkan peoples as ‘barbarous’, the brutish opponents of ‘three thousand years’ of ‘Italian’ civilisation. At the start of the millennium, Roberto Vivarelli (2000), an even more distinguished historian than is Aga Rossi and currently on the editorial board of Rivista storica italiana, ‘came out’ in a memoir describing his teenage decision to fight for Mussolini and Fascism in 1944–1945. There were two clear boundaries in this admission. First, Vivarelli claimed to have no knowledge of the Holocaust and no sympathy with what might seem this fundamental, horrendous aspect of the Nazi-Fascist cause. Second, he mourned his Fascist father, who was killed in Yugoslavia in 1942 but was, then and always (at least according to his son), a purist servant of the Patria rather than Mussolini’s willing executioner or active agent of the Italian nation state in battle with the ‘barbarians’ to its east (or the Socialists at home in Siena). As Paul Corner (2002) implied a decade ago in regard to the record of the Fascist regime at home in Italy, the big omission in such history is the question, ‘Whatever happened to dictatorship?’ The perpetrations of Mussolini’s Italy during what may be termed its ‘long Second World War’ – that is, the period from 1922 to 19452 – demand recall, all the more when some leading Italians seem so anxious to forget them. Aga Rossi and Giusti estimate that up to twenty-six thousand Italian military were killed or went missing in the Balkans (2011: 14), although, typically, they do not provide a countering tally of those who died at the hands of the Italian forces or because of Italian occupation policies. Rather, they complain that historians who have focused on Fascist massacre or a Fascist ‘new world order’ have failed to set the context of slaughter on the other side.3 These dead composed 5 per cent of Italian losses, military and civilian, in the war, and surely should be blamed on the regime since it did, after all, enter the war deliberately, with Mussolini and the King, Fascists and conservatives, for all their ideological differences, seeing it as an opportunity to grab ‘booty’ in what might be defined as a belated ‘short-war illusion’.4

Italian Memories of the Second World War | 239

In passing, it might also be underlined that Liberal Italy entered the First World War with similar free choice and with no possibility that it had ‘slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war’, as David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922, famously put it in his War Memoirs (1933: 32). Moreover, that war cost Italians 50 per cent more deaths than did the Fascist conflict. The implications may be complex and cannot be fully reviewed here. But, in any serious account of national history, it must be accepted that Italy, under its two different regimes, was a plain aggressor in both of the great twentieth-century wars.5 Official ‘memory’ has seldom acknowledged this fact. In so far as Fascism is concerned, the rough tally of those sent, through its policies, to premature death is one million, not competitive with the tolls of Nazi Germany or the USSR but still an appalling sum. About half were Italian military killed in battle, whether after 1940 or during Italy’s aggressive participation in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939, or civilians, victims of Allied bombing and the passage of troops up the peninsula from the summer of 1943 to the end of the war in April 1945. The other half-million will be tabulated below. The accepted Italian loss in the Second World War is 457,000: fewer than the French (or such allies of the Axis as Romania and Hungary) and marginally more than the UK, another nation with a much lower sacrifice in the Second World War than the First. About two thirds of the Italians were soldiers and one third civilians, a reverse of the more terrible citizen cost in the USSR or in Yugoslavia and Greece. A disputed number, perhaps 15,000, might be added of those Fascists, somehow defined, who were eliminated on local initiative and for ‘revenge’ and ‘vendetta’ during the months following the outbreak of peace. Such murders were most common in a so-called ‘triangle of death’ in Emilia Romagna where the Communist Party was strong, where Socialism had been rooted before 1922 and where a civil conflict between Fascists and anti-Fascists had retained a popular base throughout the dictatorship.6 Only a meagre number of servants of the dictatorship, by contrast, fell victim to the partial and short-lived purge that briefly promised post-war retributive action but was curbed by the so-called ‘Togliatti amnesty’ of 22 June 1946.7 In regard to overt Fascist crimes, Italy was a participant in the Holocaust, with the regime introducing anti-Semitic legislation from 1938, and hardening it thereafter initially without indulging in murder. However, between September 1943 and April 1945, in that part of the country where Mussolini had been restored by the Nazis as puppet-dictator, the Repubblica Sociale Italiana (RSI) listed Jews as enemies of the Italian people for the duration of the war.8 Scholarship estimates that, as

240 | Richard J.B. Bosworth

a result, more than 7,000 perished out of a national population of 44,500. Such notorious round-ups as those inflicted on the Jewish community in Rome do not seem to have been opposed to any marked degree by the non-Jewish populace and may have won some approval (Wildvang 2007).9 Such evidence of collaboration in genocide has rarely been examined closely, however. Historical debate has instead focused on individuals. The most controversial is Pius XII (pontiff 1939–1958), damned by John Cornwall as ‘Hitler’s Pope’ (2000) and a target of such Zionist polemicists as Daniel Goldhagen (2002), but defended by Catholic scholarship and seemingly on his way to sainthood.10 Mussolini’s own diatribes about Jews on occasion have also prompted debate, with some historians finding a visceral racism planted in his mind by 1919,11 although doubts about the deep meaning remain. The recently revealed diaries of Mussolini’s last lover, Clara Petacci, record crass outbursts against his nation’s (usually highly patriotic) Jews in the late 1930s by a Duce who did not refrain from talking about ‘killing them all’ (Petacci 2009: 299–300, 422–24). However, the dictator launched not dissimilar verbal assaults against many other people, not excluding Italians, where he averred that four million or so racial degenerates, whom he for the moment deemed descended from slaves under the empire of the Caesars but were otherwise not identified, needed liquidation (Petacci 2009: 424). Angry words were one thing (and doubtless expressed the spirit of Fascism), but serious policy was another when the ‘charismatic’ leader was at least as much a ‘shock-jock’ as bureaucrat, philosopher or strategist.12 Certainly, Fascist Italy did not plan actively to kill its Jews; there was no Italian Final Solution. Such haziness has been helpful in smoothing Italy’s historical record while the world experienced the rise and rise of the Holocaust as the key ‘meaning’ of the Second World War.13 Thus, in July 2000, the government headed by the ex-Communist Massimo D’Alema, a man committed to converting Italy after the end of the Cold War (and the institution of the hegemony of neo-liberalism) into a ‘normal country’, established 27 January as il Giorno della Memoria (Memory Day) to remember the Holocaust. Thereby Italy was accepting a pattern of commemoration that had spread across the developed countries, even if there were a few lingering equivocations since the date marked the arrival of the Red Army at Auschwitz in 1945, and discourse on the war seldom concluded that the Soviet force was engaged in pure ‘liberation’. When Roberto Benigni, in his film Life is Beautiful (Grand Prize at Cannes, 1998 and Best Foreign Film at the US Academy Awards in 1999), provided a cinematic representation of Fascist racism, his ‘camp’, seemingly situated in the East, was freed not by the Red Army but rather by comfortingly white (Italo?)-American soldiers in a tank. A historic scenario without Stalin must have been easier for

Italian Memories of the Second World War | 241

the audience in a ‘normalised country’ to applaud, given that it avoided the complication of the Italian Communist record in and after the Second World War. It may also have assisted sales and reputation in the USA. A decade later, 27 January has been reinforced as a day when the media and school lessons will re-evoke the horror of the Judeocide. The actual phrasing of the law of 2000, however, urged a recollection of Nazi and Fascist racism, and so of ‘the racial laws, of the Italian persecution of Jewish citizens and of Italians who suffered deportation, prison and death’. Equally to be recalled were ‘those who, also in the camps and, across diverse backgrounds and commitments, opposed the extermination project and, at the risk of their own lives, saved other lives and protected the persecuted’.14 These last words designated those who were defined in Israel as ‘righteous Gentiles’, while the cautious phrasing about diverse backgrounds and commitments eliminated any danger of too close a review of wartime ideological contests (or memory formation) and the possible primacy of Communism in both. Similarly, the exhortation to review the racism and the anti-Semitism of the Fascist regime had mixed results. It is true that what had once been the avowedly neo-Fascist party, the Movimento Sociale Italiano, had already, by the end of the millennium, begun to abandon its previous endorsement of every part of the dictatorship. Its very name had long evoked the Repubblica Sociale Italiana. But now its adroit leader, Gianfranco Fini, declared himself and his followers ‘post-Fascists’.15 He directly denounced the anti-Jewish legislation implemented after 1938, and twice visited Yad Vashem (in 2005 and 2010) to kneel in sorrow and apology. Fini even got around to mentioning the possibility that anti-Semitism in Italy had a context that spread beyond Fascism into society, adding that the Catholic Church was not exempt from responsibility in that regard. Here Fini deserves quite a bit of credit (even if, as shall be noted below, he did preserve some blind spots about Italian perpetration). However, it is very doubtful whether the institution of an official day of Holocaust memory has really demanded from Italians a thorough review of their racist past or of Fascist killing.16 From the 1980s, a debate began in academic circles about what had initiated anti-Semitic legislation in Italy in 1938. Until then, the usual view, and still today it remains a basic one, was that Mussolini was driven by a desire to imitate Hitler out of a mixture of fear of the dynamism of his fellow dictator’s aggression at home and abroad, and envy (Mussolini long thought of himself as the senior Fascist). As if in guidance, Renzo De Felice, the senior Italian historian of Fascism of his generation, who had begun his work in the 1960s with an investigation of the Jewish experience of the regime, had stated bluntly that Mussolini had gone racist ‘to render the Italo-German alliance iron-hard’ (1961: 79, 286). However,

242 | Richard J.B. Bosworth

careful research in Germany showed that there was no ‘smoking gun’, no specific document in the archives of the Nazi regime where Hitler or one of his aides demanded that Italy adopt the German line on the Jews (Pommerin 1979). Rome, it must therefore be concluded, adopted racism on its own account, however much there may have been implicit influence from the spirit of the times in Berlin, Warsaw, Bucharest and other European capitals. Another general motivation may have been the sense that, after the orgasmic excitement of the conquest of Ethiopia in 1935–1936, Italy was growing soft and the regime needed another frontier to conquer to make sure that all Italians stood forward as its ruthless legionaries. Mussolini himself often expressed such sentiments, if with what might be comprehended as uneasy purpose, since, in his endless chats with Clara Petacci, he mixed them with worries over his health and age as he began to approach his sixties (his mother and much respected brother died aged forty-six, his father aged fifty-six). In these conversational gambits, the dictator may have had a half-recognition that, by the end of the 1930s, some impolite young Fascists were daring to wonder if the Duce had lost his thrust.17 Nonetheless, one reaction to the absence of a direct German demand for an attack on Italy’s Jews was, and is, to ascribe the blame to Mussolini himself and thus to pursue an interpretative path that has remained central in scholarship on Nazi Germany. There, the idea became common in the 1970s and 1980s with the rise of ‘new social history’ that Hitler may have been a weak dictator, with his regime riven by institutional Darwinism and made more dynamic and ‘mad’ by such divisions and the accompanying opportunities opened for the tough-minded and ambitious. Another generation’s research and the general weakening of social history as it fell back before the thrust of a new cultural history that better fitted the assumptions of the neo-liberal age has turned attention back to Hitler, leaving the standard view of Nazism that, although the Germans may have ‘worked towards the Führer’ (in Ian Kershaw’s memorable phrase, 1993), the dictator did rule, and it was he whose anti-Semitism was visceral, ‘fundamentalist’ and impossible to challenge or divert.18 The story of memory of the Duce in Italy after 1945 is a complex one, with an undercurrent of posthumous approval and admiration that surfaced more readily than did a nostalgia for Hitler in Germany (although there, and elsewhere, indeed also in Italy, rightist extremists often expressed their extremism by evoking the Führer). Silvio Berlusconi, for one, always crafting himself as the wise and virtuous man who had saved, and continued to save, Italy from ‘Communism’, not surprisingly spoke in favour of a leader who, as he told Nicholas Farrell, a British journalist and forgiving biographer of the Fascist chief (2003), ‘never killed anyone’ and

Italian Memories of the Second World War | 243

was given to sending his regime’s opponents off to a version of ‘holiday camp’ at Lipari or Ponza.19 Berlusconi’s forays into the interpretation of history should not be taken too seriously. Here was a man who had every reason to want information always converted to ‘infotainment’, while he was doing little in office to impose a thoroughgoing neo-liberalism on Italians (but was managing to keep himself out of gaol). In the spirit of Berlusconian times, Mussolini, with Clara Petacci at his side, has become a posthumous celebrity of the concocted and frothy contemporary kind rather than the grander version once inscribed on him through the ‘cult of the Duce’ during his own rule.20 The Web pullulates with information, often of a doubtful kind, about his career, while entrepreneurs sell anything connected with him from an official car to brain slivers, originally taken by the Americans for what they deemed scientific purposes in 1945 (Bosworth 2005). After the death of Mussolini’s youngest son, Romano, who had made a less than pure Fascist career as a jazz pianist, a Centro Studi Romano Mussolini opened at the family estate at Carpena in the province of Forlì, near Bologna. Its website offers the chance to stay there at an attractive price.21 Romano’s daughter, Alessandra, meanwhile pursued her own political path, never denouncing her grandfather but not quite breaking with Fini, and eventually denouncing anti-Semitism and urging the world ‘to beg forgiveness of Israel’.22 The most remarkable example of nostalgia in recent years has been the publication of the multi-volume ‘Mussolini diaries’, distributed free of charge by the neo-liberal daily paper, Libero, in thirty parts in Spring 2011. The diaries had become the special cause of Marcello Dell’Utri, a Senator in the Berlusconian cause from Sicily and a politician pursued by even greater legal travails than those of his leader. At his prompting, the distinguished publishing house of Bompiani brought out a multi-volume edition under the arch title I diari di Mussolini: veri o presunti [The Real or Presumed Mussolini Diaries] in annual series from 1935, pricing them competitively and making them available in such places as railway-station bookshops (2010–2011). At a major world economic forum, Berlusconi publicly claimed to have read them, finding proof in their pages of how difficult it was for a serious politician to govern a bickering people like the Italians.23 However, the diaries had been forged by two women from Vercelli in the decade after the war, and the forgery had already been exposed on a number of occasions before Dell’Utri’s revival of it, as the able and independent historian Mimmo Franzinelli has demonstrated in detail in his excellent Autopsia di un falso (2011) [Autopsy of a Falsehood]. The first lesson of the diaries’ re-appearance is thus the carelessness with which Berlusconian Italy approached ‘facts’ and the willingness of

244 | Richard J.B. Bosworth

the entrepreneur and his friends to manipulate information. Anything could serve their mocking of the earnest Left’s reiteration of the view that Mussolini was an evil dictator. Such cavalier failure to admit the forgery is deplorable. Yet, Paul Ginsborg went too far when he hypothesised a future where Berlusconi had become a sort of virtual Duce II (2005).24 What the case of the fake Mussolini diaries best shows is the superficiality and meretriciousness of Berlusconian governance, in culture and history as much as in economics. It also underlines the more general failure of Italian memory of its Fascist war to pursue rigorous analysis of national responsibility for the dictatorship. In this account so far there has been only passing reference to the other half-million liquidated by the Fascist dictatorship and, in this omission, it has reflected Italian practice. But it is time to concentrate on the matter. The missing victims were ‘Africans’: perhaps 100,000 in Libya, notably during the military ‘pacification’ of the country at the end of the 1920s and in the early 1930s; perhaps 350,000 in Ethiopia during the war of 1935–1936 and the brutal but always contested occupation that continued until 1941. The numbers are vague because accurate counting was not yet thought by Italians or other European imperialists as a normal or ­necessary aspect of administration outside Europe. It must be acknowledged that Italy’s part in the history of European imperialism was belated and short-lived, suggesting why murder in Africa could readily be forgotten by national memory. Admittedly, some fine historians – Angelo del Boca (1996, 2002, 2005, 2008) and Giorgio Rochat (2005) of the older generation, and Nicola Labanca of the younger (2002, 2005) – have written devastating critiques of the Italian path to empire. In so doing, they have exposed the facts of Italian aggression and misrule and of Italians’ racist thought and practice. Nonetheless, they have not succeeded in spotlighting the Fascist and national record so that it might be automatically central in review of the past. There are a number of reasons for their limited national impact. All European countries have been reticent in analysing too closely their imperial record (as is also true in the USA and Australia), with France’s violent history in Algeria, where many post-1945 participants were closely linked to Vichy and the inglorious (or worse) French Second World War, being a key example.25 Nonetheless, those societies that went through the wrenching experience of decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s – Britain, whose imperial fantasies were partially exploded at Suez, provides a telling case – did perforce look to their history beyond Europe, also prompted by the settling of ex-imperial peoples in the metropolitan country and the resultant acknowledgement, however uneasy, that the nation’s past, present and future were necessarily multicultural. But Italy was decolonised by the

Italian Memories of the Second World War | 245

victorious powers during the peacemaking of 1945–1947 (to the expressed dismay of many of its political elite; the leading liberal, Benedetto Croce, was tasteless enough to call the Peace of Paris a Diktat (Bosworth 2000), despite the obvious negative resonance of the word). Italy thus had a passive rather than an active experience of colonial withdrawal. Moreover, its relative post-war poverty, until amended through the ‘economic miracle’ of the 1950s and 1960s, meant that only recently did it become a destination for emigrants from developing countries (and for the arrival of multicultural histories). Indeed the accustomed Italian approach to the matter even today has been to complain at the reluctance of host societies to grant Italian immigrants (who, from the 1880s to the 1960s, conducted a foreign policy of the ‘Italies’ in contrast to that of Italy) proper cultural respect but to ignore the parallel process implanting itself in Italy. The rise of racist hostility to immigrants is therefore all the more hypocritical and contemptible (another point rarely made by Italian scholarship or in the press).26 Two further matters need noting in regard to Italy’s imperial memory and forgetting. One is the fact that Fascism killed mostly in Africa, Nazism mostly in Europe and, for many Europeans, the latter could not be forgotten and the former could. When, as shall be seen below, the ‘myth of the Resistance’ and an accompanying devotion to anti-Fascism went out of date in Italy, it was thus all the easier to deny that Mussolini’s regime shared much with Nazism. But a second matter was the more troubling and remains almost completely unexplored in Italy. It is true that the Italo-Ethiopian war of 1935–36 was conducted with Fascist bravado and brutality. It was typical that Galeazzo Ciano, the regime’s dauphin, wrote to his wife, Edda Mussolini, that he found bombing undefended ‘native’ villages an orgasmic experience, a view that resounded with Fascist manhood.27 Yet, examined more closely, Ciano and the bombing carry further messages. When it came to atrocity and massacre, the Italian air force was the main agent. Yet, to be in an aircraft crew required education and ‘modernity’, and was unlikely to be a career available to what was still the majority national class of doubtfully literate peasants. Bright young men bombed with a will because they had given their consent to Fascist ideology but also because they were bright young European men, instructed by their class and their loyalty to the nation that there was nothing wrong with liquidating Africans. It is instructive of this national side of imperialism that Mussolini himself never visited Ethiopia, but the colony from 1937 acquired a royal prince, the Duke of Aosta, as its viceroy and other royals had long displayed an enthusiasm for an Italian imperial path to the sun. The African death toll of the dictatorship should thus be blamed both on Fascism and on the Italian nation and its pretensions to equal the

246 | Richard J.B. Bosworth

other European powers’ ‘greatness’. When he despatched mighty forces to conquer Addis Abeba, Mussolini was therefore ‘working towards the Italians’ rather than imposing a new course on them. So, while in the 1960s and 1970s, public discourse was given to enthusing over a national inheritance from the Resistance and avowing a national dedication to ‘anti-Fascism’, many gaps in the review of Fascist history remained.28 Typical was the blatant national manipulation in the choice of 25 April as il giorno della Resistenza, the day of commemoration of a ‘good’ Italian Second World War. Rather as De Gaulle had the effrontery to claim in 1944 that ‘Paris liberates itself, France liberates itself’, so 25 April marked neither the death of Mussolini (28 April 1945) nor the German surrender (29 April 1945). It instead evoked the rising of the populace of Milan and other northern cities and rendered the national war experience virtuous, populist and non-ideological.29 With the passage of the years and what, until the terrorist killing of Aldo Moro in May 1978, seemed the rise and rise of the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano), leftist politics did pledge themselves to the ideals of anti-Fascism, and cliché on the Right began to claim that Italian culture (and historiography) was hegemonised by parlour Marxism.30 However, it should not have been much of a surprise that, by the 1990s, with the decline and fall of the USSR and the ‘end of history’ proclaimed by the conquering neo-liberals, ‘anti-anti-Fascism’ became the more familiar interpretational stance (in its wider application to Eastern Europe, it was also endorsed internationally by such celebrity historians as Tony Judt).31 In these circumstances, it was also not surprising that the best book written by any Italian about any aspect of the war, Claudio Pavone’s Una guerra civile (1995), by abandoning the simplicities of the heroic view of the Resistance, became grist to a revisionist mill whereby the spirit of the times was expressed in the view that ‘Salò boys’, those who had volunteered to serve the RSI, were as virtuous as any other national soldiers.32 With the new ‘apolitical’ politics of the 1990s and the move to a ‘Second Republic’, many Italians wrote off 25 April as contaminated by Communist propaganda. Perhaps another day should commemorate a national war, one that could be read as eliminating any idea that Italians were perpetrators or that they, and especially the national ruling elite, gave consent to a vicious (and incompetent) Fascist dictatorship? Mussolini’s movement possessed in its origins a strand of what is termed ‘border fascism’, the Italian face of xenophobic social violence directed after the First World War against minorities in many Eastern European countries as a reverse of Woodrow Wilson’s glib enthusiasm for ‘self-determination’. In March 1921, Trieste and its province provided 18 per cent of those who had committed themselves to the fasci (an organised Partito Nazionale Fascista, or

Italian Memories of the Second World War | 247

PNF, did not come into existence until November).33 Thereafter, Trieste became a Fascist redoubt, with nationalism outweighing other features of regime ideology. Italy’s northeastern border remained a troubled one, with Slovene ‘rebels’ being prominent among the handful of political opponents of Fascism executed before 1940 and with Aldo Vidussoni, a particularly ignorant and youthful party secretary, in January 1942 raising with an astonished and appalled Ciano the idea of a final liquidation of all Slovenes (Ciano 1980: 578). The end of the war scarcely brought immediate peace to Trieste and its environs, as dispute continued over where a just border should lie between Italy and the restored Yugoslav state, now under the Communist dictatorship of Josip Broz, known as Tito. The summer months of 1945 were stained by murder and mayhem in ethnic, class and ideological conflicts on many fronts. The situation in these borderlands had not been better between 8 September 1943 and the end of the war, made still more fraught by the Nazis then taking control of what they called the Adriatisches Küstenland, with Odilo Globocnik, one of the architects of the Final Solution, born in Trieste in 1904, now transferred there. The total body count of 1943–1945 in the region may have reached ten thousand. However, from the 1950s, the focus of such horror became the so-called foibe, natural declivities in the Carso above Trieste, places that a peasant world had always used to dump what it did not want (sometimes including bodies). Between 1943 and 1945, the victims of war (and uneasy peace) were also made to ‘disappear’ there, although rule over the area varied over time, and neither side was above such brutality. Sensibly relativist historical understanding did not impose itself, however. By the 1990s, national Italian opinion took up what had never ceased to be a xenophobic local obsession with death there. Such commentators as the historians Ernesto Galli della Loggia and Giovanni Sabbatucci now cheerfully endorsed massively exaggerated tallies of those ‘Italians’ who fell victim to ‘barbarous’ Slovenes and/or Communists (Pirjevec 2009: 221–22). In November 1998 Piero Melograni, another usually well-regarded historian, reckoned ‘millions’ had been slaughtered there.34 Politicians were not behindhand in displaying their patriotic virtue over the matter, with Luciano Violante, the ex-PCI speaker of the Chamber of Deputies and ex-President of the Anti-Mafia Commission, in 1996 stating that the foibe were witness to ‘a massacre of the defenceless innocents who had been cancelled from official memory’ (Pirjevec 2009: 221). Two years later, he and Fini met in Trieste to agree that Italians could be absolved from any blame over the deaths. This historiographical compromise bore political fruits under the next Berlusconi government. In spring 2004, it was agreed that, from the

248 | Richard J.B. Bosworth

following year, a national Giorno del Ricordo would be celebrated, with its date set for 10 February, the anniversary of the signature of the Treaty of Paris in 1947 (where Italy had been formally deprived of its empire, as well as of Istria and the regions along the Adriatic that it had seized in 1919). In 2007, the ex-Communist President Giorgio Napolitano put national (or nationalist) virtue (and victimhood) at the centre of this memorial day by agreeing that the borderlands had been perverted by ‘bloody fury’ and a ‘Slav annexationist design’ in a time of ‘barbarism’ (note his cheap usage of a word that Italian nationalists had long inscribed onto their eastern neighbours) (Pirjevec 2009: 324). The circle thus was squared even if, five years later, there may be little evidence that 10 February has become a particularly loved national festa. Nonetheless, it has not been renounced. Still today, echoes of the Second World War are more muted than they have usually been since 1945. Maybe Berlusconi is not wrong in wanting the dangerous memories of Fascism and dictatorship (and national aggrandisement) to be converted into happy sales items, with the serious reflection left to academics rigorously confined within their ivory towers. After all, in our neo-liberal times, when the economy is all that ‘really’ matters, Italy is not the only country to paint over uncomfortable pasts in its national story. Yet, somewhere in the credo of the critical historian remains the conviction that it is better when truth or, rather, the truths, of democratic debate are arrayed in argument without end. But, sadly, modern Italy far too often prefers falsehood.

Notes  1. All translations into English are my own.  2. See my use of the concept in R.J.B. Bosworth, Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima (1993).  3. See D. Rodogno, Il nuovo ordine mediterraneo (2003), available in English as Fascism’s European Empire (2006). He summarises much in his ‘Fascism and War’ (2009).  4. The best background on these matters remains Count Galeazzo Ciano’s diary. See the revised English edition: G. Ciano, Diary 1937–1943 (2002). Ciano was Mussolini’s son-inlaw and his Minister of Foreign Affairs.  5. For an example of a complete refusal to see such issues, see S.M. Di Scala, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando (2010).  6. See the longstanding campaign on the subject by the journalist Giampaolo Pansa (2003, 2006, 2012, 2014).  7. M. Franzinelli, L’amnistia Togliatti (2006). For an English-language account of the purge, see R.P. Domenico, Italian Fascists on Trial 1943–1948 (1991).

Italian Memories of the Second World War | 249

 8. The Repubblica Sociale Italiana (1943–1945), otherwise known as the Republic of Salò, was the Italian Fascist puppet-government set up under the aegis of the Nazi Germans in the north of Italy.  9. For further background, see R.J.B. Bosworth, Whispering City: Rome and its Histories (2011). 10. For an example, see A. Tornielli, Pio XII: il papa degli ebrei (2001). 11. For interesting detail, see G. Fabre, Il contratto: Mussolini editore di Hitler (2004). 12. For further background, see R.J.B. Bosworth, Mussolini (2010). 13. For a major critique of the effects of this process, see P. Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (1999). 14. The text of the law can be found here: http://www.camera.it/parlam/leggi/00211l.htm (accessed 2 June 2015). 15. For background, see Ignazi (1994). 16. See Consonni (2015) on the complex relationship between memory of the Holocaust and Anti-Fascism. 17. For background, see R.J.B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy (2005: 431– 40). 18. But cf. T. Weber, Hitler’s First War (2011), for scepticism about the view that ‘Auschwitz’ already was formed in Hitler’s mind before 1919. 19. For Farrell’s account, see the Spectator, 13 September 2003. For an Italian reply on the harshness and illegality of the imprisonment system called confino, see F. Corvisieri, La villeggiatura di Mussolini (2004). 20. For background, see C.J.H. Duggan and S. Gundle (eds), The Cult of the Duce (2013). 21. See http://www.casadeiricordi.it/centro%20studi.htm/ (accessed 8 January 2014). 22. Haretz, 26 January 2010. 23. La Repubblica, 28 May 2010. 24. See P. Ginsborg, Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony (2005). 25. For devastating detail, see J. House and N. MacMaster, Paris 1961 (2006). 26. For my own review of this issue, see R.J.B. Bosworth, Italy and the Wider World (1996). 27. For further analysis of the ambiguities of Ciano’s role in the dictatorship, see R.J.B. Bosworth, Mussolini (2010: 253–54). 28. For detail of the even more limited 1950s and the widespread post-war nostalgia for Mussolini and dictatorship, see C. Baldassini, L’ombra di Mussolini (2008). 29. For my account of the chief national memorial, that to the Ardeatine caves massacre in Rome, see R.J.B. Bosworth, Whispering City (2011: 232–36). 30. ‘Parlour Marxism’ is a term that implies in this context that Marxists and Marxist ­sympathisers were everywhere, but only talked rather than acted as militants. 31. It is a key theme of T. Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (2005). 32. C. Pavone, Una guerra civile (1995). Cf. C. Mazzantini, I balilla andarono a Salò (1995), with its very different morality. 33. For background, see R.J.B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy (2005: 153–58). 34. P. Melograni, ‘Va cercato nel Carso la memoria d’Italia’, Il Mondo, 13 November 1998.

References Aga Rossi, E. and M.T. Giusti. 2011. Una guerra a parte: i militari italiani nei Balcani 1940–1945. Bologna: Il Mulino. Baldassini, C. 2008. L’ombra di Mussolini: l’Italia moderata e la memoria del fascismo (1945–1960). Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino.

250 | Richard J.B. Bosworth

Bosworth, R.J.B. 1993. Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War. London: Routledge. _______. 1996. Italy and the Wider World. London: Routledge. ______________. 2000. ‘Foreign Policy’, in G. Moliterno (ed.), Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture. London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 341-43. _______. 2005. Mussolini’s Italy: Life under the Dictatorship 1915–1945. London: Penguin. _______. 2010. Mussolini. London: Bloomsbury. _______. 2011. Whispering City: Rome and its Histories. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ciano, G. 1980. Diario 1937–1943, ed. R. De Felice. Milan: Rizzoli. _______. 2002. Diary 1937–1943, trans. R.L. Miller. London: Phoenix Press. Consonni, M. 2015. L’eclisse dell’antifascismo: resistenza, questione ebraica e cultura politica in Italia dal 1943 al 1989. Roma: Laterza. Corner, P. 2002. ‘Italian Fascism: Whatever Happened to Dictatorship?’, Journal of Modern History 74: 325–51. Cornwall, J. 2000. Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Corvisieri, F. 2004. La villeggiatura di Mussolini: il confino da Bocchini a Berlusconi. Milan: Baldini Castoldi Dalai. De Felice, R. 1961. Storia degli ebrei sotto il fascismo. Turin: Einaudi. Del Boca, A. 1996. I gas di Mussolini: il fascismo e la guerra d’Etiopia. Rome: Riuniti. _______. 2002. L’Africa nella coscienza degli italiani: miti, memorie, errori e sconfitte. Milan: Mondadori. _______. 2005. Italiani, brava gente? Vicenza: Neri Pozza. _______. 2008. Il mio Novecento. Vicenza: Neri Pozza. Di Scala, S.M. 2010. Vittorio Emanuele Orlando: Italy. London: Haus Publishing. Domenico, R.P. 1991. Italian Fascists on Trial 1943–1948. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Duggan, C.J.H. and S. Gundle (eds). 2013. The Cult of the Duce. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Fabre, G. 2004. Il contratto: Mussolini editore di Hitler. Bari: Dedalo. Farrell, N. 2003. Mussolini: A New Life. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Franzinelli, M. 2006. L’amnistia Togliatti: colpo di spugna sui crimini fascisti. Milan: Mondadori. _______. 2011. Autopsia di un falso: i diari di Mussolini e la manipolazione di storia. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Ginsborg, P. 2005. Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony. London: Verso. Goldhagen, D. 2002. A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair. New York: Knopf. House, J. and N. MacMaster. 2006. Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror and Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ignazi, P. 1994. Postfascisti? Dal Movimento Sociale Italiano ad Alleanza Nazionale. Bologna: il Mulino. Judt, T. 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. London: Penguin. Kershaw, I. 1993. ‘“Working Towards the Führer.” Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship’, Contemporary European History 2: 103-18 Labanca, N. 2002. Oltremare: storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana. Bologna: il Mulino. _______. 2005. Una guerra per l’impero: memorie dei combattenti della campagna d’Etiopia 1935–36. Bologna: il Mulino. Lloyd George, D. 1933. War Memoirs, Vol. 1. London: Odhams Press. Mazzantini, C. 1995. I balilla andarono a Salò: l’armata degli adolescenti che pagò il conto della Storia. Venice: Marsilio.

Italian Memories of the Second World War | 251

Melograni, P. 1998. ‘Va cercato nel Carso la memoria d’Italia’, Il Mondo, 13 November. Mussolini, B. 2010–2011. Diari: veri o presunti. Milan: Bompiani. Novick, P. 1999. The Holocaust in American Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Pansa, G. 2003. Il sangue dei vinti. Milan: Sperling and Kupfer. _______. 2006. La grande bugia. Milan: Sperling and Kupfer. _______. 2012. La guerra sporca dei partigiani e dei fascisti. Milan: Rizzoli. _______. 2014. Bella ciao: controstoria della Resistenza. Milan: Rizzoli. Pavone, C. 1995. Una guerra civile: saggio storica sulla moralità nella Resistenza. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Petacci, C. 2009. Mussolini segreto: diari 1932–1938 (ed. M. Suttora). Milan: Rizzoli. Pirjevec, J. 2009. Foibe: una storia d’Italia. Turin: Einaudi. Pommerin, R. 1979. ‘Le controversie di politica razziale nei rapporti dell’Asse Roma-Berlino’, Storia contemporanea 10: 925–40. Rochat, G. 2005. Le guerre italiane 1935-1943: dall’impero d’Etiopia alla disfatta. Turin: Einaudi. Rodogno, D. 2003. Il nuovo ordine mediterraneo: le politiche di occupazione dell’Italia fascista (1940–1943). Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. _______. 2006. Fascism’s European Empire: Italian Occupation during the Second World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. _______. 2009. ‘Fascism and War’, in R.J.B. Bosworth (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Fascism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 239–58. Tornielli, A. 2001. Pio XII: il papa degli ebrei. Milan: Piemme. Vivarelli, R. 2000. La fine di una stagione: memorie 1943–1945. Bologna: Il Mulino. Weber, T. 2011. Hitler’s First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wildvang, F. 2007. ‘The Enemy Next Door: Italian Collaboration in Deporting Jews during the German Occupation of Rome’, Modern Italy 12: 189–204.

Filmography La vita e bella [Life is Beautiful]. 1998, dir. Roberto Benigni

Website Italian Parliament, http://www.camera.it/parlam/leggi/00211l.htm (accessed 2 June 2015)

Richard Bosworth is Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, University of Oxford, and Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Western Australia. His most recent books are Whispering City: Rome and its Histories (2011) and Italian Venice: A History (2014).

Chapter 14

Re-picturing the Myth American Characters in Post-war Popular Italian Cinema

( Daniela Treveri Gennari

After the late nineteenth century, waves of immigration to America helped create a mythic sense of the United States by which it became synonymous with prosperity, opportunity and freedom. In the years following the Allied landing in Salerno in 1943, this myth was to grow, having a profound effect – through the medium of cinema – on Italy and Italians. The extensive literature on the American influence on Italians and on the Americanisation process takes into account the USA’s daunting presence on political, economical and social levels (Gundle 1986; Ellwood 1992; Forgacs 1993). However, little attention has been given to how the Italians reacted when offered the opportunity to depict that imagined ‘America’ for themselves. Since the end of World War II, America had started to become more visible in Italian films, initially through the characters of US soldiers, who were still present in the country. Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (1946) is the first example of how the Allied liberation of Italy from the German occupation was depicted, focusing primarily on the multifaceted interactions between Italians and American soldiers, at times unable to communicate across the language barrier. Other films would follow Rossellini’s approach, portraying the complex relations between the US military and the Italian populations: Luigi Zampa’s Un americano in vacanza (1946), Giorgio Ferroni’s Tombolo, paradiso nero (1947) and Alberto Lattuada’s Senza pietà (1948) all start unveiling the darker side of the American myth, when the US soldiers’ activities are linked to prostitution, corruption and the black market. However, this chapter intends to look beyond the representation of the Americans as soldiers by focusing on the 1950s, when the concept of masculinity was expressed in a different way and the presence of the soldiers Notes for this chapter begin on page 264.

American Characters in Post-war Italian Cinema | 253

on Italian soil replaced by a new portrayal of the American dream. The examples selected here are two of the most popular Italian films of the post-war period: Franco Rossi’s Il seduttore (1954) and Dino Risi’s Venezia, la luna e tu (1958).1 Both films deal with a new character which emerges in popular cinema in Italy in the 1950s: the female seducer as the allegorical representation of the American nation.

American Presence in Italy Despite scholarly agreement that an interest in American culture during the 1930s may have represented an ‘expression of anti-Fascism’, some have challenged taking such a simplistic or reductive approach to the post-war situation (Dunnett 2005: 110). In Ellwood’s view (1992: 62), America’s strong presence in Italy served the dual purpose of putting forward ‘a higher standard of living for the entire nation’, as a Marshall Plan propaganda booklet would tell Italians in 1949, and waging a war against the newly defined danger of Soviet totalitarianism and its perceived threat to the American way of life and liberal ideology. However, the American myth started to be shaken soon after the post-war presence of the US military in Italy at the beginning of the Cold War, when the USA came to be viewed in a new light, as an ‘economic-financial power, with imperialist aims’ (Castellina 1980: 43). As Gundle affirms (2002: 95): After 1945 the United States helped the war-torn societies of Western Europe progress from recovery to modernization, enabling them to achieve prosperity and political stability. It is not surprising, therefore, that analyses of Italy’s transition to consumerism in the post-war period have ascribed much importance to the impact of the American example and American techniques. Although the history of this relationship has been extensively assessed in terms of diplomacy, politics, and economics, very little has been said about the way mentalities were altered, new desires were created, and material dreams were generated and managed.

There was, perhaps, no better way to alter these mentalities, create new desires and generate material dreams than by the medium of cinema, one of the most popular forms of entertainment in post-war Italy. In the pre-war years, ‘it was American films, with their wide-open spaces, their automobiles, their small town folk and shop-girls, rising up the fluid social scale, which provided the greatest enchantment to people back in Mussolini’s Italy’ (Nowell-Smith 2007: 123). This fascination for the American dream was to continue after Mussolini’s death and, when American films returned to Italian screens after 1945, they achieved

254 | Daniela Treveri Gennari

pre-war levels of popularity. Despite strong competition from national film production (Treveri Gennari 2009b) and a steady decline from the end of the 1950s (Rossi 1965; Nowell-Smith 2007: 127), the post-war period still saw a strong presence of American films in Italian cinemas (a phenomenon common to other European countries but with distinct variations),2 with peaks of popularity achieving over 62.9 per cent of the total box-office intake, as for instance in 1956 (Rossi 1965: 11). This demand for the great backlog of American films was accompanied by a greater financial interest from American production companies in making films that appealed to European audiences, involved European stars and counterbalanced the decline in the American domestic market (Nowell-Smith 1998; Handyside 2004). In the case of Italy, this process was created through decentralisation of production to Cinecittà (Muscio 2000: 120) as well as through the ‘productions on behalf of’ (Bizzarri 1987: 32–33), where Italians made films which were theoretically Italian but de facto American. These films would be shown as Italian films and be part of the compulsory screening of national products (Nowell-Smith and Ricci 1998: 8–9). It was therefore not always straightforward to identify – especially from an audience point of view – the country of origin of a film. This difficulty was reinforced by the habit of dubbing, which routinely assigned a uniform Italianicity to any performer, which would mask any discrepant national origin: If British audiences flocked to American films because the actors’ accents connoted a modernity and classlessness that contrasted to the clipped accents of British actors, then Italian audiences experienced American screen characters without the barrier of subtitles as both like and unlike at the same time. (Spicer 2007: 243)3

Moreover, as White (2000: 134) states, while ‘the Italians had seen the Hollywood lifestyle in American films before the War, it was now to be found in Italy’. With its urban expansion, Rome became a cosmopolitan centre of culture and fashion, where rich and famous international stars would gather. Several of these stars would act in Italian films with the purpose of attracting national audiences: Montgomery Clift in Vittorio De Sica’s Stazione Termini (1953); Farley Granger in Luchino Visconti’s Senso (1954); Anthony Quinn and Richard Basehart in Federico Fellini’s La strada (1954); and Doris Dowling in Giuseppe De Santis’ Riso amaro (1949) (Nowell-Smith 2007: 127). American cinema – together with its stars – still played a significant role for Italians: it provided ‘wealth, beautiful clothes, domestic appliances and houses full of comfort’ to which Italians aspired, but also ‘that level of transgression, modernity and novelty the country was looking for’ (Casetti and Fanchi 2002: 160).

American Characters in Post-war Italian Cinema | 255

However, while, at times, national film production managed to wean audiences’ interest from Hollywood as much as it did in France (Kuisel 2000: 122), American films were still very popular. This foreign filmic presence in Italy had an effect on the country and on its national production: the contamination process indicated by Brunetta (1994: 145) was evident not only in what Nowell-Smith (1968: 147) defined as a form of colonial subjection of Italian cinema to American money, but also in Italian popular film production, which Roberto Campari (1996) analyses in great detail in relation to American film genres.4 The American influence was evident in some neo-realist films, where ‘Western-like Sicilian landscape’ or ‘noir thematic structure and cinematography’ gave a distinct Hollywood effect (Muscio 2000: 118–19), as well as – according to Landy (2008: 87–88) – ‘in the direct or critical treatment of images of America’. However, as neo-realist films were only a small percentage of what was shown in cinemas, the representation of Americans and American culture in popular Italian cinema is certainly a much more interesting area for investigation. To fully understand the specificities of that representation, a wider contextualisation of national identity and otherness in Italian cinema is needed.

National Identity and the Other Andrew Higson’s revisited definition of national identity highlights the permeability of national borders, and the hybrid and impure – in the sense of international – nature of modern cultural formations (Higson 2000: 67). This reference to a porousness of national identity, as well as its ‘dynamic and flexible manner’ (Papadimitriou 2011: 492), must be taken into account when analysing Italian culture, with the multiplicity of its regional identities.5 Moreover, it is worth remembering that, from its 1930s rural dimension, Italy transformed itself after the war to an industrial society, where a modern identity was slowly being shaped (see Parati 2005). In this period, American modernisation and industrialisation represented a model to emulate. In fact, not only is America – as Morley and Robins (1995: 57) state – ‘now part of a European cultural repertoire, part of a European identity’, but in the Italian case – as I have claimed before (2009a: 12) – ‘America represented an imaginative home’. The constant pressure from local identities has made it difficult to create a strong national identity in Italy. However, if one invokes Anderson’s definition of nation as ‘imagined political community’ (2006: 6), connecting people who have never met one another, it is true that cinema did provide that strong imagined community to which audiences felt they belonged. Cinema offered that

256 | Daniela Treveri Gennari

imagined community where – despite regional ­differences – the traditions, rituals and characteristic modes of discourse to which Higson refers (2000: 64) would allow Italians to share a sense of belonging. However, as Mary Wood states, the post-war period deals with a ‘very different kind of “otherness”[:] … the presence of Americans on Italian soil’, and the ‘pervasiveness of American culture’ (2003: 139). This presence was not always felt in a positive way, and Italian feeling was not confined to mere adulation of the Americans. In this context, investigating this different role of the ‘other’ in post-war Italian cinema should throw some light on whether it represented America in what Rings and Morgan-Tamosunas refer to as the ‘impetus towards decolonization’ (2003: 12). The questions which will be asked in this chapter are: Are Italian representations of America part of a cinematic reaction against the post-war American colonisation of Italian culture? What do American characters in Italian films tell us about the perception Italians had of Americans, and how did this perception change from the immediate post-war period to the end of the 1950s? Finally, how are the implicitly civilising values of an American exceptionalism ­represented and perceived in these films?

American Female Characters and Italian National Identity Scholars have extensively investigated the American portrayal of Italy and Italians in Hollywood as well as Italo-American cinema (Bertellini 1994; Casella 1998; Bondanella 2004; Gardaphe 2006). However, very little has been written on the representation of American characters in Italian films.6 The investigation of the question as to whether American characters were constructed by Italian filmmakers as the epitome of that ‘modernity and Westernisation’ (Papadimitriou 2011: 495) to which Italy was then struggling to aspire can illuminate our understanding of the extent to which Italy appears to have been defining itself in relation to the USA.7 This investigation will include a look at some of the most successful films of the 1950s, focussing on the wealthy female seducer of Italian and, more generally, European men. This new role came to replace the immediate post-war representation of Americans as male soldiers, liberators as well as invaders of Italy.8 At that time, in fact, the American was predominantly represented as a male soldier in a dual role of Italy’s liberator as well as its intruder, often in a romantic engagement with an Italian woman. McKay’s statement – ‘in Italy at this time Americans were not only transmitters of a discourse of liberation, but were literally liberators’ (1997: 38) – is illustrated in a more intricate manner in neo-realist films like Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà and

American Characters in Post-war Italian Cinema | 257

Luigi Zampa’s Vivere in pace (1946) (Campari 1996: 194). In Un americano in vacanza, Zampa’s previous film, the American character has Italian origins (he is the son of a Venetian woman) and fails to fulfil the desirable American dream. He tries to charm the Italian teacher but when she is finally persuaded, it is too late, as he has already departed. This ending suggests a more complex relationship between the two cultures; the Italian girl is not entirely seduced by the exciting prospect of an idyllic American life and, despite a common national origin, the anticipated happy ending does not take place. Sergio Leone had already perceived this transformation in the American myth: Then [in 1944] the real Americans barged into my life, in their jeeps, and turned my dreams upside down. I found them full of energy, but terribly disappointing. They were no longer the Americans of the West. They were soldiers like any others, and different only in being victorious. Materialist, possessive, eager for pleasure and worldly goods. (Leone quoted in Lambert 1976: 8)

However, the materialism, pleasure and general glamour of consumption to which Leone refers came to be increasingly associated with female characters, who displaced the figure of the soldier in the imaginary representation of America. The use of foreign female characters in Italian cinema of the period, especially in comedies, was not only limited to those analysed here. Several films in the late 1950s employed foreign women as a device for constructing heterosexual romantic relationships based on their overt sexual appeal and liberated sexual behaviours (see Mario Costa’s Arrivano i dollari, 1957; Antonio Pietrangeli’s Souvenir d’Italie, 1957; Gianni Franciolini’s Racconti d’estate, 1958; Giorgio Bianchi’s Le Olimpiadi dei mariti, 1960). Claudio Gora’s Tre straniere a Roma (1959) even uses the fascination with foreign women as a stratagem for three Italian girls who pretend to be Scandinavian in order to attract Roman men. However, the American female character seems to offer a constant promise of wealth and glamour not to be found among the portrayals of other nationalities (Crisp 2002: 38). At times, this wealth is also expressed by featuring Italian emigrants who return home after having made their fortune in America.9 Nevertheless, the films that seem to articulate more consistently and in a more complex way the image of America as wealth and glamour – as well as the vision of modernity referred to above – are comedies in which American female characters generate an ambivalence through their simultaneous representation of both glamour and its potential moral dangers. The films analysed here – Franco Rossi’s Il seduttore and Dino Risi’s Venezia, la luna e tu – not only are two of the most popular of the 1950s but also confirm the assumption that national stereotypes were used, in the specific case of America, to display problematic relationships

258 | Daniela Treveri Gennari

at a time when many Italians were in search of less rigid social conventions, in terms of class and gender roles, whereas the Catholic Church was eager to restore morality through cinema. It is debatable whether the American women in these films are the expression of a ‘corrosive power of American-style capitalism and materialism’, to which Wood refers (2005: 38), but they certainly are the manifestation of that ambivalence ‘which contained both the fascination and the anxiety caused by the rapid modernisation in progress’ that America had experienced twenty years earlier, and that Italy had just started to experience (Göktürk 1994: 47). This incongruity is displayed in the films through consistent aspects of mise-enscène and narrative that will be analysed in detail here, and also through an exposition of two cultures whose traits are often assimilated by one another and whose identities present, in some cases, that ­porousness which Higson identifies. Both principal male characters in the films selected here are played by Alberto Sordi, one of the most popular Italian actors of the time. In Rossi’s and Risi’s films – set in the urban landscapes of Rome and Venice, respectively, in the 1950s – Sordi plays the role of an Italian man who cannot resist the fascination of foreign women. Sordi’s role in relation to America had been established in Steno’s Un americano a Roma (1954),10 a film that Ellwood (1996) defined as a ‘satire of Americanization’. In this film, working-class Nando Moriconi’s obsession with America affirms not just Hollywood’s seductive power but ultimately Italians’ need to remain rooted in their own identity. Sordi had definitively created the average Italian man in which many Italians could recognise themselves, while America had become, de facto, everybody’s second culture (Ellwood 1996: 101). Starting from such a premise, Sordi’s subsequent films playfully engage with American culture and its characters in a slyly subversive manner. Il seduttore – made only a year after Un americano a Roma – was an adaptation of a play written by the Catholic playwright Diego Fabbri, who had attempted to create a spiritual cinema in post-war Italy. Alberto (Alberto Sordi), a married man, is constantly in search of women to seduce, and two of his victims are a French woman (Jacqueline) and an American woman (Alina). These female portrayals of national characters and the opposition between French and American femininity explore an entrenched attitude already expressed by the Catholic Church with regard to morality and national cinemas: French films were those most excluded from parish cinema circuits, while American films were generally more tolerated.11 However, this film seems to reflect the Catholic Church’s fear of French loose moral values by presenting the character of Jacqueline (Jacqueline Pierreux) as the embodiment of sexual power and as an allegory of national

American Characters in Post-war Italian Cinema | 259

identity. Jacqueline is not married; she lives in a hotel as a parasite at the expense of a fraudulent Italian businessman. Provocative, sensual and opportunistic, she lacks moral values, is cunning in her attempts to exploit her male victims, and is only interested in her personal life, with scant regard for others. Jacqueline is the expression of that erotic excess that Crisp finds ‘projected onto exotic characters of a swarthy disposition’ (2002: 42) in several 1930s French films. Jacqueline’s exoticism is expressed linguistically by a strong accent and a constant use of French (compared to the American Alina’s perfect command of Italian). Also, by the whiteness of her skin, she contrasts with both Alberto’s wife, Norma (Lea Padovani), and Alina (Lia Amanda), who are dark-skinned. Jacqueline is the only platinum blonde in the film, and the brightness of her many costumes as well as the glare of her make-up significantly distinguish her from Alina and Norma. While Hollywood’s cinematic projection of sexuality had typically been expressed through non-white women or ‘sensuous and dusky dark-haired sirens like Dolores Del Rio, Hedy Lamarr and Rita Hayworth’ (Berry 2004: 181–82), Jacqueline’s exoticism blends the dangerous excess of sexual power more usually ascribed to non-white women with the racial purity of non-ethnic whiteness of Hollywood films. This obviously contrasts with the Italian characters, who, while ‘officially considered white, but having a darker complexion, … in the United States have experienced on their own skin the slippery nature and ambiguity involved in assigning a colour to cultural identity’ (Parati 2005: 27). This time, the French female is the ambiguous one, the one who does not fit the parameters of national identity and visually clashes on screen with the Italian as well as the American characters. In this way, the American and the Italian females are linked not only through their visual identity but also by common family values and principles that are absent in the French character. Therefore, no distinction is made between American and Italian cultures in order to express that concept of ‘anti-colonial colony’ (see note 7, infra), while the ‘other’ seems to be associated with the French female character. In contrast with the French woman, in fact, the American Alina is a married woman, who lives in an idyllic seaside resort; she is always portrayed amongst her children and with constant reference to her absent American husband. She dresses in a very traditional and unsexual manner, she wears no make-up and her life revolves around her family, all of which provide a reason for her to refuse Alberto’s attempts at seduction. Alina’s darker complexion and darker hair – compared to Jacqueline – as well as her knowledge of Italian make her fit perfectly amongst the Italian characters. She is also sheltered from the dangers of the metropolis, unlike Jacqueline, who is emblematic of

260 | Daniela Treveri Gennari

urban culture and behaviour. The geographical opposition establishes the city of Rome not only as a backdrop but also as the representation of a modern nation, as well as ‘the site of various forces tending to undermine commonly held values, and more specifically as the site of an individualism’ (Crisp 2002: 63). The coastal resort, on the other hand, is remote, picturesque and idyllic. It is a residence of tranquillity and escapism from the corruption of the urban landscape, and home to a restored morality. Jacqueline and Alina, described by Alberto as the sexual and spiritual dimensions of love, respectively, are thus conflated with two very distinct national identities: namely French, by which morality is threatened and family values are jeopardised; and American, whereby family becomes a priority and marriage a holy sacrament to be protected. In the American relationship, in fact, though the husband is not the aforementioned liberating soldier of the immediate post-war cinema but a civilian one who neglects his wife, the wife is still devoted to him and faithful to her moral values.12 As Gundle (2002: 99) states, Hollywood glamour arrived in post-war Italy through the images of American stars in magazines and newsreels; the press coverage of Hollywood actresses’ lives, relationships and weddings was displayed for public consumption by many Italians, who avidly read their stories in illustrated weekly magazines dedicated to these popular stars. The attention given to an official Hollywood star’s wedding in Rome, for instance (as in the case of Tyrone Power and Linda Christian, discussed by Gundle 2008: 203–204), was also, thus, a political statement in the sense that it associated glamour and conservative values, success and modern fairy tale. Stars’ controversial personal choices were obviously at the centre of attention of public media.13 However, at times their life stories were used to convey a wider message. Many film stars contributed to the modernisation of Italy in the pages of the nation’s magazines, as well as furnishing images of a domestic environment and happy families, which promoted consumerism in the modern home. Moreover, they showed that the Hollywood lifestyle was compatible with the dominant ideology (Barbanti 1991: 182) and with Christian values. The character of Alina in Il seduttore represents exactly this blending of American glamour with the moral values that post-war Catholic Italy needed to restore to a country rapidly transforming itself. Images of a domestic environment could become attractive by using an American character who resists the temptation of the Italian seducer and chooses family life. Alina is an unusual American, as desirable as her national identity made her at the time but also embedded in the local culture and part of that nation-­ building process which made her almost Italian.

American Characters in Post-war Italian Cinema | 261

The American way of dealing with morality takes a different slant in Venezia, la luna e tu, where Bepi (Alberto Sordi) moves from Rome, ‘the city of sin and pleasure, of Liz Taylor, Ava Gardner, and Frank Sinatra, of elegance and night clubs’ (Gundle 2002: 114) to Venice, where, as a gondolier, he seduces two American women while exhibiting the attractiveness of his city. The role of Sordi’s wife in Il seduttore is replaced in this film by Bepi’s fiancée Nina (Marisa Allasio), ready to call off the wedding every time she suspects Bepi is being unfaithful. The American tourists, Natalie (Ingeborg Schöner) and Janet (Niki Dantine), who both fall in love with the Venetian man, present aspects of that glamour and materialism referred to above, but in a different manner to Il seduttore. Natalie and Janet are on an expensive holiday tour of Italy, they buy luxurious presents as weapons of seduction, and they do not have any financial worries when they have to change their travel plan to stay with their lover. Also, when Bepi pretends to be already married in order to rescue his relationship with Nina, Natalie promises to help him get divorced in America. However, material goods are interlinked with moral values, and issues of marriage, divorce and children get in the way of romance. Natalie suggests divorce in America, while Janet and Bepi use an invented marriage with children as a way to get rid of unwanted love. While, in Il seduttore, the American Alina is the one who is loyal to her values and does not accept an alternative even to a failing husband, in the Venetian counterpart, the Americans represent a danger to the moral values and try everything to succeed in their aims, even to the point of jeopardising family life. It is the Italian male character’s decision which prevents this from happening by ‘claiming primacy in the gender relation’ (Torriglia 2002: 107). This apparent contradiction between the two films may be due to the Catholic influence on Il seduttore, where Fabbri portrays, with great care, gender roles in relation to national identities, at a time in Italian history when the Vatican was attempting to reconcile America’s model of a free market with its role as gendarme of clerical culture in its conflict with Communism (Treveri Gennari 2009a: 35). However, this contradiction could be explained by the fact that the American myth had not yet become tarnished in Italian cinema. Alina represents, in fact, the positive side of the American dream, where modernity and conservatism are used to idealise a model of woman who sacrifices herself to her family despite an absent and abusive husband. Moreover, American capitalism, still expressed in both films through the wealthy female characters, is, indeed, associated with modernisation.14 In the films’ mise-en-scène, America is portrayed through fast modes of transport (Natalie’s Pan-Am bag against Bepi’s gondola; the American luxury Cadillac that Alberto tries to sell;15 Alina’s fast car and her husband’s plane

262 | Daniela Treveri Gennari

against Alberto’s car, bought thanks to his wife’s payments). To complicate the matter in the Venetian film, Bepi’s alter ego, Toni (Nino Manfredi), in love with Nina, represents the Italian emblem of American capitalism (and that porousness of identities): he has a fast motor-boat and lives in his own house fully equipped with domestic appliances, but still fails – as do the American tourists – to achieve a happy ending. Bepi refuses the attraction of a glamorous American life – available both in the USA through Natalie and in Venice, through Janet’s influential contacts – in order to return to his Italian fiancée. Therefore, the Italian representation of American female characters does not simply present ‘rich widows and divorcees’ as ‘the stock of American characters (providing fairy-tale endings)’ that can be found in several French films of the same time (Crisp 2002: 38). In the case of Venezia, la luna e tu, they are potentially dangerous women who fail to transform their grand tour into a romantic ending. This is not the case with the Italian characters, who are the only ones left with a happy resolution in the narrative and much more in control of their destiny than their American counterparts, perhaps reflecting the historical changes Italy was going through at the time and, therefore, a more critical approach towards the American dream. The role of the American tourists in Italy also delegates a different function to the landscape. The touristic colonisation of Italy – expressed in films like William Wyler’s Roman Holiday (1953) or Jean Negulesco’s Three Coins in the Fountain (1954) – takes on a different angle here. These post-war tourist Americans are viewed against the landscape of the city through the eyes of the native. It is Bepi (Alberto Sordi) who appropriates the landscape, guiding the tourists across Venice, constructing and deconstructing Italy’s national identity through specific landmarks (Casanova’s house, Bridge of Sighs, Palazzo Giustinian, etc.) both familiar to the tourists and symbolic for his seducing agenda. Hollywood’s imaginary reconstruction of Italy (especially through historical epics) is replaced in both films by a different representation of the national space. In Il seduttore, Rome has lost its role of ancient and imperial capital of the world, a constant source of iconography for Hollywood, transforming itself into a new Italian space, where trattorie, offices, apartments, garages and modest hotels are not the objects of a touristic gaze, but the location where real Roman life takes place. In Venezia, la luna e tu, on the other hand, while Venice is represented as the object of touristic desire, its attractions are not reconstructed by Hollywood, but by the gondolier, who has total control over the city and uses its cultural heritage to his own advantage. Despite the promise of various emancipatory narrative strands, both films show a preference for moralistic endings, where the Italian male is

American Characters in Post-war Italian Cinema | 263

reunited with his official partner and order is restored.16 However, while the successful female characters are either wives, mothers or working women, the male Italian character’s role of seducer, and thus potential agent of social disintegration, remains uncompromised. Both films, in fact, finish with Alberto and Bepi as re-offenders, attempting to find their next victim. These accounts, rather than simply offering a mechanism through which the male character is re-masculinised, also offer ways for his identity, on both a personal and a national level, to be reconstructed in relation to dissonant articulations of American identity and its various manifestations.

Conclusion Issues of ethnicity, cultural heritage and diversity, as well as the relationship between national identity and otherness, must be taken into account in any investigation of how Italians have de-pictured and re-pictured the American myth. Venezia, la luna e tu provides a positive answer to the question originally posed here as to whether Italian representations of America were part of a cinematic reaction to the post-war American colonisation of Italian culture. This film, together with others mentioned in this chapter, presents ‘modernity and Westernisation’ associated with America, though not necessarily in a positive light. In fact, the implicitly civilising values of an American exceptionalism are portrayed in an ambiguous way, almost with the intention of illustrating American culture as ‘an antonym to Italian virtues in the complex process of constructing a new national image’ (Wood 2005: 140). The female American characters are often presented as a foreign presence disrupting Italian morality and order. Moreover, they are depicted in a disadvantageous light that renders them ineffectual in colonising and corrupting their Italian audiences. The male American soldiers present in several post-war Italian films are now transformed into female ‘soldiers’ who are forced to retreat. The colonised Italy reacts to the colonial American invasion of post-war Italian identity by taking charge of its landscape, its characters and even the portrayal of its invaders, the American women. However, while Il seduttore preserves to a certain extent the role of America as guardian of moral values, and chooses to treat the American female character as ‘Italian’ herself, in Venezia, la luna e tu, an oppositional space opens up within the Italian popular mainstream for a defensive and, to a certain extent, critical construction of the American neo-imperialist other, which reflects the renewed trust of Italy in its own history and values.

264 | Daniela Treveri Gennari

Notes  1. At the box office Il seduttore made £314,074,618 (Fanchi and Mosconi 2002: 209) and Venezia, la luna e tu £651,300,000 (Chiti, Poppi and Lancia 1991: 396; Fanchi and Mosconi 2002: 209).  2. See Kuisel (2000) for the American film presence in France; Guback (1969) for the Netherlands and Denmark; Fehrenbach (1995) for Germany; and Porter and Harper (1998) for Britain.  3. See also William’s Film and Nationalism (2002: 19).  4. See also Bondanella (1984: 110). According to Muscio (2000: 125): ‘the influence seems to have become more interactive and balanced … . Italians simply stole the tricks of the super-spectacular shows, making cheap, well crafted and internationally appreciated historical costume films.’  5. See also Gundle’s concept of ‘institutionalised memory’, where ‘national identity consists of a complex, constantly shifting, set of imaginings, perceptions and representations’ (2005: 98).  6. The two most significant contributions are James Hay’s Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy (1987) and Roberto Campari’s ‘La presenza dell’America e i rapporti con il cinema americano’ (1996).  7. This comparative perspective is akin to that of the ‘anti-colonial colony’ described by Farred (2004: 215) in his characterisation of Scotland’s relation to England, for instance.  8. See, for instance, Marcello Pagliero’s Roma città libera (La notte porta consiglio) (1946), Giacomo Gentilomo’s O sole mio (1946), Silvio Laurenti Rosa’s E non dirsi addio (1948) and Carlo Borghesio’s Come persi la guerra (1947).  9. See, for instance, Roberto Bianchi Montero’s two films with Tina Pica: Arriva la zia d’America (1956), where a rich emigrant returns to her poor family of origin in Naples, and La zia d’America va a sciare (1958), where the Italian emigrant coming back from America has lost all her money and tries to find wealth in Italy. 10. Un americano a Roma took 380,370,000 lire at the box office (Fanchi and Mosconi 2002: 209). 11. I have extensively discussed elsewhere the Vatican’s relationship with America in terms of popular culture and moral values (Treveri 2009a). 12. When Alberto suggests divorce to Alina, she replies: ‘No! He has promised he will give up drinking’. 13. A well-known example here is the affair between Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman, and their refusal to hide their adulterous relationship. 14. This association of capitalism and modernisation contrasts with the situation in which the other female characters (Jacqueline and Norma in Il Seduttore and Nina in Venezia, la luna e tu) find themselves. These women either struggle financially or have to work to support themselves. 15. In Mario Monicelli’s Donatella (1955), the female protagonist (Elsa Martinelli) is allowed to use a Cadillac car belonging to a rich American lady who has given her a job as a secretary as compensation for returning her handbag. In Luigi Zampa’s La ragazza del palio (1957), the myth is inverted: the Cadillac is the prize available to the American, Diana (Diana Dors), to travel around Italy. 16. This is also the case for other films where the American female character is either in a relationship with a married man (Vittorio Sala’s Costa azzurra, 1959) or she is married herself (De Sica’s Stazione Termini).

American Characters in Post-war Italian Cinema | 265

References Anderson, B. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso. Barbanti, M. 1991. ‘La “battaglia per la moralità” tra oriente, occidente e italo-centrismo 1948–1960’, in P.P. D’Attorre (ed.), Nemici per la pelle – sogno americano e mito sovietico nell’Italia contemporanea. Milan: Franco Angeli, pp. 161–98. Berry, S. 2004. ‘Hollywood Exoticism’, in L. Fisher and M. Landy (eds), Stars: The Film Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 181–98. Bertellini, G. 1994. ‘Ethnic Unconscious in the Film Experience of the New York Italian Community, 1907–1915’, Nemla Italian Studies 18: 131–48. Bizzarri, L. 1987. Il cinema italiano: industria, mercato, pubblico. Roma: Edizioni Gulliver. Bondanella, P. 1984. ‘America and the Post-War Italian Cinema’, Rivista di Studi Italiani 2: 106–25. _______. 2004. Hollywood Italians: Dagos, Palookas, Romeos, Wise Guys, and Sopranos. New York: Continuum. Brunetta, G. (ed.). 1994. ‘Long March of US Cinema in Italy, in Hollywood in Europe’, in D. Ellwood and R. Kroes (eds), Hollywood in Europe: Experiences of a Cultural Hegemony. Amsterdam: VU University Press, pp. 139–54. Campari, R. 1996. ‘La presenza dell’America e i rapporti con il cinema americano’, in G. Brunetta (ed.), Identità italiana ed identità europea nel cinema italiano dal 1945 al miracolo economico. Turin: Edizioni della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, pp. 193–216. Casella, P. 1998. Hollywood Italian: gli italiani nell’America di celluloide / Paola Casella. Milan: Baldini & Castoldi. Casetti, F. and M. Fanchi. 2002. ‘Le funzioni sociali del cinema e dei media: dati statistici, ricerche sull’audience e storie di consumo’, in M. Fanchi and E. Mosconi (eds), Spettatori. Forme di consumo e pubblici del cinema in Italia 1930–1960. Rome: Fondazione Nazionale Scuola di Cinema, pp. 135–71. Castellina, L. 1980. ‘Fine del mito americano’, in S. Chemotti (ed.), Il mito americano – origine e crisi di un modello culturale. Padova: CLEUP, pp. 35–57. Chiti, R., R. Poppi and E. Lancia. 1991. Dizionario del Cinema Italiano. Rome: Gremese Editore. Crisp. C. 2002. Genre, Myth, and Convention in the French Cinema, 1929–1939. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dunnett, J. 2005. ‘Anti-Fascism and Literary Criticism in Postwar Italy: Revisiting the Mito Americano’, in G. Bonsaver and R. Gordon (eds), Culture, Censorship and the State in Twentieth-Century Italy. Oxford: Legenda, pp. 109–19. Ellwood, D. 1992. Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America and Post-War Reconstruction. London, Longman. _______. 1996. ‘Un americano a Roma: A 1950s’ Satire of Americanization’, Modern Italy 1: 93-102. Fanchi, M. and E. Mosconi (eds). 2002. Spettatori.Forme di consumo e pubblici del cinema in Italia 1930–1960. Rome: Fondazione Nazionale Scuola di Cinema. Farred, G. 2004. ‘Wankerdom: Trainspotting as a Rejection of the Postcolonial?’, South Atlantic Quarterly 103: 215–26. Fehrenbach, H. 1995. Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press. Forgacs, D. 1993. ‘Americanization: The Italian Case 1938–1954’, Borderlines: Studies in American Culture 1 (2): 157–69.

266 | Daniela Treveri Gennari

Gardaphe, F. 2006. From Wiseguys to Wise Men: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities. New York: Routledge. Göktürk, D. 1994. ‘How Modern Is It? Moving Images of America in Early German Cinema’, in D. Ellwood and R. Kloes (eds), Hollywood in Europe: Experiences of a Cultural Hegemony. Amsterdam: VU University Press, pp. 44–67. Guback, T. 1969. The International Film Industry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gundle, S. 1986. ‘L’americanizzazione del quotidiano: televisione e consumismo nel’Italia degli anni cinquanta’, Quaderni storici 21.62 (2): 561–94. _______. 2002. ‘Hollywood Glamour and Mass Consumption in Postwar Italy’, Journal of Cold War Studies 4: 95–118. _______. 2005. ‘Hollywood, Italy and the First World War: Italian Reactions to Film Versions of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms’, in G. Bonsaver and R. Gordon (eds), Culture, Censorship and the State in Twentieth-Century Italy. Oxford: Legenda, pp. 98–108. _______. 2008. Glamour: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Handyside, F. 2004. ‘Beyond Hollywood, into Europe: The Tourist Gaze in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Hawks, 1953) and Funny Face (Donen, 1957)’, Studies in European Cinema 1: 77–89. Hay, J. 1987. Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Higson, A. 2000. ‘The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema’, in M. Hjort and S. Mackenzie (eds), Cinema and Nation. London: Routledge, pp. 57–66. Kuisel, R. 2000. ‘The Fernandel Factor: The Rivalry between the French and American Cinema in the 1950s’, Yale French Studies 98: 119–34. Lambert, G. 1976. Les Bons, les sales, les méchants et les propres de Sergio Leone. Paris: Solar. Landy, M. 2008. Stardom Italian Style: Screen Performance and Personality in Italian Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. McKay, G. 1997. Yankee Go Home (& Take Me With U): Americanization and Popular Culture. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Morley, D. and K. Robins. 1995. Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries. New York: Routledge. Muscio, G. 2000. ‘Invasion and Counterattack: Italian and American Film Relations in the Postwar Period’, in R. Wagnleitner and R. Tayler May (eds), ‘Here, There and Everywhere’: The Foreign Politics of American Popular Culture. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, pp. 116–31. Nowell-Smith, G. 1968. ‘Italia Sotto Voce’, Sight and Sound 37: 145–47. _______. 1998. ‘The Beautiful and the Bad: Notes on some Actorial Stereotypes’, in G. NowellSmith and S. Ricci (eds), Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity: 1945–1995. London: The British Film Institute, pp. 135–41. _______. 2007. ‘The American Dream in Post-War Italy’, in P. Cooke (ed.), World Cinema’s ‘Dialogues’ with Hollywood. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 122–37. Nowell-Smith, G. and S. Ricci (eds). 1998. Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity: 1945–1995. London: The British Film Institute. Papadimitriou, L. 2011. ‘The National and the Transnational in Contemporary Greek Cinema’, New Review of Film and Television Studies 9: 493–512. Parati, G. 2005. Migration Italy: The Art of Talking Back in a Destination Culture. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Porter, V. and S. Harper. 1998. ‘Throbbing Hearts and Smart Repartee: The Reception of American Films in 1950s Britain’, Media History 4: 175–93. Rings, G. and R. Morgan-Tamosunas (eds). 2003. European Cinema Inside Out: Images of the Self and the Other in Postcolonial European Film. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter.

American Characters in Post-war Italian Cinema | 267

Rossi, U. 1965. ‘L’incidenza americana sul mercato italiano’, Cinema 60 (6): 9–12. Spicer, A. 2007. European Film Noir. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Torriglia, A.M. 2002. Broken Time, Fragmented Space: A Cultural Map for Postwar Italy. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Treveri Gennari, D. 2009a. Post-war Italian Cinema: American Intervention, Vatican Interests. New York: Routledge. _______. 2009b. ‘A Regional Charm: Italian Comedy versus Hollywood’, October 128: 51–68. White, N. 2000. Reconstructing Italian Fashion: America and the Development of the Italian Fashion Industry. New York: Berg. William, A. 2002. Film and Nationalism. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Wood, M. 2003. ‘“Clandestini”: The “Other” Hiding in the Italian Body Politic’, in G. Rings and R. Morgan-Tamosunas (eds), European Cinema Inside Out: Images of the Self and the Other in Postcolonial European Film. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, pp. 95–106. _______. 2005. Italian Cinema. Oxford: Berg.

Filmography Un americano a Roma. 1954, dir. Steno Un americano in vacanza. 1946, dir. Luigi Zampa Arriva la zia d’America. 1956, dir. Roberto Bianchi Montero Arrivano i dollari. 1957, dir. Mario Costa Come persi la guerra. 1947, dir. Carlo Borghesio Costa azzurra. 1959, dir. Vittorio Sala Donatella. 1955, dir. Mario Monicelli E non dirsi addio. 1948, dir. Silvio Laurenti Rosa Moglie e buoi…. 1956, dir. Leonardo De Mitri Le Olimpiadi dei mariti. 1960, dir. Giorgio Bianchi O sole mio. 1946, dir. Giacomo Gentilomo Paisà. 1946, dir. Roberto Rossellini Racconti d’estate. 1958, dir. Gianni Franciolini La ragazza del palio. 1957, dir. Luigi Zampa Riso amaro. 1949, dir. Giuseppe De Santis Roma città libera (La notte porta consiglio). 1946, dir. Marcello Pagliero Roman Holiday. 1953, dir. William Wyler Il seduttore. 1954, dir. Franco Rossi Senso. 1954, dir. Luchino Visconti Senza pietà. 1948, dir. Alberto Lattuada Stazione Termini. 1953, dir. Vittorio De Sica La strada. 1954, dir. Federico Fellini Souvenir d’Italie. 1957, dir. Antonio Pietrangeli Three Coins in the Fountain. 1954, dir. Jean Negulesco Tombolo, paradiso nero. 1947, dir. Giorgio Ferroni Tre straniere a Roma. 1959, dir. Claudio Gora Venezia, la luna e tu. 1958, dir. Dino Risi Vivere in pace. 1946, dir. Luigi Zampa La zia d’America va a sciare. 1958, dir. Roberto Bianchi Montero

268 | Daniela Treveri Gennari

Daniela Treveri Gennari is Reader in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University. Her research examines American ideological involvement in the Italian film industry between 1945 and 1960, tracing the tension between governmental pressures, the Vatican and the Italian and US film industries. She is the author of Post-war Italian Cinema: American Intervention, Vatican Interests (2009). Daniela is currently leading a AHRCfunded project on Italian audiences in the 1950s, in collaboration with the University of Bristol and the University of Exeter.

Chapter 15

Italian Resistance Writing in the Years of the ‘Second Republic’

( Philip Cooke

Introduction During the early 1990s, Italy went through a period of intense political turmoil (Ginsborg 1996, 2003). The parties which had organised the Resistance movement from 1943 to 1945 and emerged victorious from the Second World War to dominate Italian politics ever since disappeared from the map, or reconfigured themselves to such an extent that they appeared to lose all connection with their past. This reconfiguration applies particularly to the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano, the Italian Communist Party), which became the PDS (Partito Democratico della Sinistra, the Democratic Party of the Left) in 1991, under the leadership of Achille Occhetto. In a moment of enormous symbolic significance, Occhetto announced his intentions for change to an audience of veteran Bolognese partisans in November 1989, shortly after the collapse of the Berlin Wall (Kertzer 1996: 1–3; Cooke 2011: 146–47). At the same time, new political parties emerged and with them new political figures, most conspicuously Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia! and the federalist Northern Leagues led by Umberto Bossi. Berlusconi and Bossi found an ally in Gianfranco Fini, leader of the far Right Alleanza Nazionale, who declared in 1995 that his party was ‘post-Fascist’ (see Raffone 1998; cf. Ignazi 1994). In a famous speech made in 1996, Luciano Violante, the speaker of the Chamber of Deputies (and former leading figure of the Italian Communist Party), argued that it was time to re-consider the motives of the ragazzi di Salò, those Italians who had remained loyal to Mussolini and the RSI (Repubblica Sociale Italiana; also called Repubblica di Salò) during the period 1943–1945 (Cooke 2011: 174–75). By examining the ‘lacerations of

270 | Philip Cooke

the past’, Violante implied, it might be possible to heal the scars which had divided the nation for so long, and so take Italy forward and out of its crisis. There was a general sense that Italy’s past and, above all, the past of the Resistance period were on their way out, necessary victims of the purging process that would lead the nation from the First to the Second Republic. History had ended; an illusion had passed. Given this ‘revisionist’ context, which can only be sketched out briefly here, one might have expected a terminal decline, from the 1990s to the present, in what is broadly termed Italian Resistance culture. It is certainly true that the Italian State and the major political parties no longer identify themselves with the Resistance and with anti-Fascism to the extent that they did up to the 1980s. And it is also the case that the Resistance movement has taken what can only be termed a sound beating in some quarters, notably in the shape of the highly successful ‘anti-Resistance’ novels written by Giampaolo Pansa, the journalist and one-time author of highly praised and patiently researched historical works on the Resistance (Cooke 2011: 166–70, 177–81). Yet, perhaps paradoxically, the period from the 1990s onwards has also seen the publication of many interesting works of literature (and historiography) on this topic, to the extent that it is almost possible to speak of a revival of the Resistance trope which, however, is no longer a form of ‘civic religion’, to use a term suggestively employed by Stephen Gundle in a landmark article (2000). It is possible to determine a new cultural phase, characterised in some cases by significant innovation. This new phase, in which the ideological and cultural ­paradigms of the past are less fixed, is the subject of this chapter.

The Resistance Turns Yellow The detective story, known as the giallo (yellow) in Italian because the genre was once published in books with yellow covers, did not exploit the resources offered by the Resistance period until relatively recently. This may be because the crimes of the Mafia were more suited to the genre, or the Fascist period offered a wider range of narrative possibilities. On the other hand, it was perhaps the case that the Resistance, because of its sacrosanct status, was off limits to the writers of detective stories. This situation changed in the early 1990s, as already stated above, creating a cultural space for gialli with a Resistance setting. An additional factor in the ‘yellowing’ of Resistance narratives was the fortuitous emergence of murky, blood-drenched stories from the end of the war and the period immediately following it. These stories rose to the surface in the late summer of 1990 when the subject of the post-war killings of Fascists by

Italian Resistance Writing in the Years of the ‘Second Republic’ | 271

partisans hit the newspapers in spectacular fashion. The killings were not by any means a ‘new’ story, but were used as a means of casting doubt on the democratic credentials of the Left at the very time that the PCI was searching for a new identity. By suggesting that the history of the PCI was tainted by a bloodbath, those sections of the press who were hostile to the idea of a post-Communist party were able to question the future Democratic Party’s legitimacy. In an increasingly frenzied climate, Italian readers learnt of shallow graves, of the executions of entire families (Fascist or not), of partisans fitted up for crimes committed by others, of buses carrying Fascist prisoners vanishing into thin air, of raids on prisons holding Fascists, and of a generalised climate of rough and summary justice. The word desaperecido [lit. ‘disappeared’], which had entered the Italian lexicon from its Argentinian origins, acquired new and sinister resonances. The polemic over the so-called ‘triangle of death’ in the Communist heartlands of Bologna, Modena and Reggio Emilia (Bertani 2002; Cooke 2011: 151–54) thus provided plenty of material for the writers of detective stories. The first to emerge from the bloodbath was Carlo Lucarelli, at the time an emerging writer, who has gone on to become a significant figure in Italian culture – in addition to his many books, he has hosted a highly successful television series which looks into the many mysteries of Italian history, such as the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan in December 1969. Carlo Lucarelli’s L’estate torbida (1991), translated as The Damned Season (1997), is the second of a trilogy of detective stories, featuring police commissario De Luca. Before the narrative begins, there are two sections of what literary critics define as paratext – quotations from L’Unità, the Italian Communist Party newspaper, and a preface by Lucarelli. The two quotations are from 2 November 1945 and 31 May 1945, respectively. In the first extract, the unnamed journalist reflects that ‘less than a year has passed since we were risking our lives every day’ in the Resistance and that ‘at that time, when Communists were shooting and dying for everyone, nobody told them they mustn’t “overdo it”’. The second (from a few days after the Liberation of Italy in April 1945) invites comrades ‘to lay down our arms … we went to war and we won, now our job is not to lose the peace’. The quotations explicitly refer to the climate of violence at the end of war and to the need to put an end to the killing, but the first also suggests that this was not going to be a simple process. Readers of the book who are familiar with post-war Italian history will immediately recognise how the quotations reflect the tormented debate about the twin souls of the PCI – on the one hand, a democratic party guided by its leader, Palmiro Togliatti, and, on the other, a revolutionary party led (so it has been claimed) by Pietro Secchia. The double life (or doppiezza)

272 | Philip Cooke

of the PCI has always been an issue which has interested historians of Italian Communism, even more so when the party ceased to exist in 1991, provoking a new era of (largely hostile) historiography (Fantoni 2014). On the face of it, Lucarelli seems to be making a ‘conscious attempt to present himself as both detective and historian’ (Pieri 2007: 195), establishing where he and his book lie – firmly grounded in history, informed by a knowledge of the intricacies of the post-war situation, backed up by profound research in a newspaper library in Bologna (where Lucarelli lives), or even perhaps the Gramsci Institute, which has a complete run of L’Unità. However, a quick search of the online archive of L’Unità (http:// archivio.unita.it/, accessed 9 August 2013) reveals that, on 31 May 1945, no such text appeared in the paper and that, on 2 November 1945, the paper was not published. Lucarelli has quite simply and quite legitimately (he is, after all, a writer of fiction and not an academic historian) made it up. The false ‘quotations’ from contemporary sources underline a rather basic point about the relationship between literature and history – it is not specular, but a relationship of some sort exists nonetheless. Lucarelli creatively and playfully exploits possible intersections between the two and the potentialities created by liminal zones where the distinction between literature and history are blurred (the Italian title of the book, the ‘turbid summer’, emphasises this dimension of uncertainty). The reader learns more about the slippery characteristics of the book in Lucarelli’s short preface, which begins with the claim that he was ‘supposed to graduate from Bologna University with a thesis in contemporary history on the police during the fascist period’ (13). While researching for this work, entitled ‘The Vision of the Police in the Memories of Antifascists’, he came across an individual who had worked in the Italian police force from 1941 to 1981. He first worked for the Fascist secret police before joining the partisan police at the end of the war. He then went on to work for the Italian State police, where his job required him to ‘spy on, and to arrest some of those partisans who had been his colleagues and who were now considered dangerous subversives’ (14). Such a career path might seem unlikely, but recent pioneering academic research carried out by Jonathan Dunnage (2012) illustrates how such a parabola was perfectly plausible. Lucarelli continues by stating that this ‘encounter, and the studies I was undertaking at that moment, opened my eyes to a period that is fundamental in the history of Italy: strange, complicated and contradictory’ (14). Lucarelli subsequently provides his readers with a succinct account of the Second World War, explaining how Italy was split in two, following the armistice declaration of 8 September 1943, creating ‘enormous moral and political confusion’ (14). His policeman friend explained, however, that he was a ‘technician, a professional, not a politician’. It was

Italian Resistance Writing in the Years of the ‘Second Republic’ | 273

this statement which encouraged him to write Carte Blanche (the first book of the trilogy), to invent Commissario De Luca and lose himself ‘in his adventures’. The preface ends with the statement ‘And I never did write my thesis’ (15). All of this looks on the face of it to be perfectly plausible, and that is really what is important about this preface. Sceptics might question whether Lucarelli really did give up his history thesis to become a writer of detective stories. I have yet to find anyone amongst my colleagues at Bologna University who recalls Lucarelli pursuing such a line of study, and, sadly, the one individual who might have supervised such a piece of research is long dead. But this kind of academic detective work completely misses the point. What the preface demonstrates – as do the opening quotations – is the complex interplay of history and literature, together with the potential it offers to the writer of detective stories. The narrative proper of The Damned Season begins with the figure of De Luca standing in the middle of a path, contemplating a landmine and an ants’ nest which has formed beside it. As a former Fascist police officer, he is on the run, fearing for his life. The frantic movements of the ants and the unexploded device clearly hint at the violence of the recently ended war, but there is a further level of meaning generated in this opening. Italo Calvino’s Resistance novel, first published in 1947, is entitled Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno [The Path to the Nest of Spiders]. The book is part of the Resistance fiction canon, and the image of the individual on a path staring at a nest of insects in Lucarelli’s book suggests that the first novel of one of Italy’s greatest writers of fiction is being referenced. This intertextual reference can be interpreted in a variety of different ways. On the one hand, it could be seen as an act of homage to a past master. Equally, there might be a suggestion that what Lucarelli is doing is rather different from Calvino’s ‘neorealist’ text. Certainly, the violence in Calvino’s novel is hinted at, rather than described in the detail which we encounter in The Damned Season. More likely, though, the reference to the Calvino novel is an indication that Lucarelli is conscious that he is working in the context of a very long tradition of Resistance fiction, beginning with Elio Vittorini’s Uomini e no (1945), moving to Calvino and Cesare Pavese (1949), and thereafter to the likes of Renata Viganò (1949) and Beppe Fenoglio (1952, 1959, 1963, 1968, 1994), to name but a few (see Cooke 1997). As will be described below, one of the characteristics of Resistance writing after 1990, which is not limited to Lucarelli by any means, is a tendency to deliberately invoke the canon of Resistance fiction. Much of this recent Resistance writing is, therefore, as much about the history of Italian fiction as it is about the Resistance itself. In a way, the ‘new’ writers are placing themselves in a long line, seeking out and acknowledging the influence of their own Resistance fiction-writing ancestors.

274 | Philip Cooke

De Luca is interrupted by Brigadier Leonardi, an individual who, it transpires, is a member of the partisan police force. Despite De Luca’s claim that he is a Bolognese called Morandi, Leonardi soon recognises him as the brilliant detective he met in Milan in 1943 and recruits him, in the hope that he can help him solve a recent multiple murder case. The classic combination of the experienced detective and the naïve but keen dilettante is thus rapidly established. The book is indeed full of commonplaces taken from the detective-story repertoire – the protagonist is a washed-up, bedraggled investigator who has trouble sleeping and has problems related to alcohol. There is also plenty of lurid sex, the digging up of bodies accompanied by retching, and so on. The case the two detectives attempt to solve is loosely based around a real event which occurred near Lugo (Ravenna) when an entire noble family, the Manzoni Counts, were executed along with their dog. Historians interpret these killings either as an example of the execution of Fascist sympathisers, or as a case of peasant jacquerie (Sauro Onofri 2007: 107). In Lucarelli’s tale, a count disappears at roughly the same time as an entire peasant family (plus dog – the biggest clue that the Manzoni killings are the inspiration for the story) are beaten to death. One of the victims, Delmo Guerra, was also tortured. As the plot unravels, the motives for the killings are shown to have little to do with politics, but more with mistaken identity and, above all, greed. At the end of the story, De Luca tells his sidekick: ‘This is not a moral battle between the good guys and the bad guys … . For us, homicide is simply a physical fact, a question of legal responsibility’ (116). In this way, Lucarelli returns to the point that he has made in the preface – he is interested in telling stories which show a detective solving murder cases. Politics do not come into it. Lucarelli’s trilogy fully revealed the possibilities that the Resistance offered to writers of gialli in the 1990s. Other fictional works from the period which either exhibit the characteristics of the giallo, or else clearly belong to the genre, include Giampaolo Pansa’s Ma l’amore no (1994), Edoardo Angelino’s L’inverno dei mongoli (1995) and Alessandro Gennari’s Le ragioni del sangue (1995). In Le ragioni del sangue, the detective/­protagonist is the son of a partisan whose death at the beginning of the narrative leads to a twin search: on one level, the forty-year-old Giuseppe Marga seeks to understand his deceased father’s character so he can understand himself; on the other, he seeks to understand his father’s wartime activities so he can gain an understanding of the times in which he lived. The ‘reasons for blood’ are thus personal (the blood running from father to son) and historical (the blood shed during and after the war). The key which unlocks the mystery is a diary penned by Marga’s father, Antonio, in 1949, which he left with the great love of his life for safe keeping. Giuseppe tracks down the custodian, the refined and elegant Anna Manzi, who willingly

Italian Resistance Writing in the Years of the ‘Second Republic’ | 275

hands it to him. The narrative then shifts from the first person of the son to the third person of the father. The ‘notebook’, which occupies the greater part of the book, reveals much information about the father’s character, loves and fondness for alcohol, and so provides Giuseppe with the necessary information to unlock his own complex psychology. But it also reveals much more, particularly about Antonio’s activities as a soldier in Albania and then Greece, followed by deportation to a German prison camp and, finally, Dachau. The narrative strategy of the war diary thus allows Gennari to confront, possibly for the first time in a work of fiction, the subject of the harsh reality of the Italian military internees. By dint of good fortune, Giuseppe eventually returns to his native Emilia in early 1945 and joins a partisan formation, led by his boyhood friend, Giorgio Morandi. Morandi is an efficient leader, but he is adamant that he will not put his weapons down when the war is over. Morandi and others thus espouse the much-discussed revolutionary line which had received so much attention during the ‘triangle of death’ affair. After the war, Morandi and his partisans keep to their word, carry out numerous executions, look to Secchia as their leader and, when the circle begins to close around them, ingeniously frame two democratic partisans, one of whom is made to ‘disappear’ in a shallow grave, while the other is forced to flee to Yugoslavia where he spends many years in a labour camp for the enemies of Tito. But Morandi and his partisans are by no means the only individuals responsible for problematic actions. A depraved bunch who describe themselves as partisans, but who are in reality common delinquents, turn to robbery and sexual torture after the war. Their activities are promptly halted by Morandi’s band. But the nastiest moment in a book which is suffused with violence occurs when an RSI official is captured and turned over to the father of the partisan he has tortured by pulling out his teeth and cutting off his cheeks. The father, until then a mild man, exacts his revenge by having the soldier tied to the ground and fed to the pigs. The violence does eventually stop in post-war Italy, but Antonio lives forever in fear that it will resurface again at some point, which it does after his death: the partisan who was framed returns from years of exile in Argentina and murders Morandi with the help of an ice pick concealed in a newspaper. This grisly ending was based on a real event – the revenge killing of an RSI soldier by a partisan who had had his house burnt down. Gennari thus fully exploited the situation in which he found himself as a writer in the mid-1990s: the ‘triangle of death’ at the end of the long civil war made his giallo eminently believable to a reading public who had a familiarity with the story and an interest in ‘true crime’. More recently there has been another wave of detective-style works such as Valerio Varesi’s Il fiume delle nebbie [River of Shadows] (2003) and

276 | Philip Cooke

Le ombre di Montelupo [The Dark Valley] (2005), as well as Aldo Cazzullo’s La mia anima è ovunque tu sia (2011). The Resistance detective story is now a well-established sub-genre.

Into the Black While the predominant colour for Resistance fiction in the 1990s was the yellow of the giallo, there were also a number of cases of fiction which investigated the ‘dark side’ – the Fascism of Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic. In most cases, these authors were either former members of the RSI or at the very least Fascist sympathisers. Ugo Franzolin was a Fascist journalist and war correspondent, who was arrested on 25 April 1945 – the day he would continually claim that he died (in reality he died in September 2012). After the war, he wrote for the neo-Fascist newspaper Il secolo d’Italia and first attracted attention with a novel on El Alamein (I giorni di El Alamein, 1967), which received a favourable review by the influential journalist Indro Montanelli. In the mid-1980s, he published a novel on his experiences with the RSI, Il repubblichino (1985, reprinted 1995) and in the 1990s he published a collection of short stories, Nostra gente (1992), which deal with the difficulties experienced by former members of the RSI in the immediate post-war era. The stories, which are little more than brief fragments, have little literary merit but the fact that they were published is significant. The lives of former adherents of the RSI were beginning to acquire literary and, more importantly, political dignity, a point Franzolin makes in his epigraph: ‘Each story is self-contained. But they are linked by a climate of expectation and of hope’. Franzolin also contributed to a collection of short stories, Storie d’amore e di guerra (1998), featuring his own work, as well as that of three others – Enrico Accolla, Aldo Giorleo and Franco Grazioli – who had all been involved in the RSI (Accolla as a journalist, Giorleo as a sailor and Grazioli as a member of a parachute regiment). Further evidence of a change of climate would be provided by the republication, in 1995, of Carlo Mazzantini’s novel A cercar la bella morte (the first edition came out in 1986) and Massimo Cirioni’s Berto & Lucio (1997), a novel whose convoluted (and distastefully racist) plot focuses on the question of reconciliation between the partisans and the ragazzi di Salò.

Towards the New Resistance Novel As has been discussed above, there was plenty of creative activity inspired by the Resistance during the last decade of the twentieth century. There

Italian Resistance Writing in the Years of the ‘Second Republic’ | 277

followed a period of apparent silence which was broken by the film L’uomo che verrà (2009). Directed by Giorgio Diritti, the film depicts a peasant family caught up in the massacre at Monte Sole near Bologna in the summer of 1944. With in excess of seven hundred victims, this appalling crime was ‘the most important and consistent massacre of civilians in the Western theatre of operations during the Second World War’ (Baldissara and Pezzino 2009: 11). The film is more of a threnody for the passing of Italian peasant culture than a depiction of the massacre itself. It is permeated by nostalgia, with many scenes shot through a blue filter. The story itself is seen through the eyes of, and frequently narrated by, the young protagonist, Martina, who survives the slaughter and protects her baby brother. Despite the appalling violence, perpetrated by men, there is at least some hope that the ‘man who will come’ in the shape of the baby brother will offer some redemption. For most of the film, the language employed is the romagnolo dialect, rendered comprehensible by subtitles in Italian. On the surface, the film is a return to the past in a number of ways. It looks back to the past and to a certain type of filmmaking – one thinks, for example, of the use of dialect in neo-realist cinema (although this was never as extensive as some believe; see Forgacs 2000, for example) and of the specific case of Ermanno Olmi’s L’albero degli zoccoli (1978). But, at the same time, it is a modern film, exploring issues of gender and particularly gendered violence. The film is, therefore, a mixture of tradition and innovation – a characteristic, as will be shown below, of a number of fictional texts published over the last few years. Paola Soriga’s Dove finisce Roma (2012) was a debut novel published in the Einaudi ‘stile libero’ (free style) series, which houses experimental fiction written, in the main, by young authors. Soriga was born in Sardinia but moved to Rome as a young girl, a pattern of emigration which is replicated in the book in the story of the young protagonist Ida, who has followed her sister Agnese to the capital, arriving there in 1938 at twelve years of age. The book begins in May 1944, shortly before the liberation of Rome. In a cave, on the outskirts of Rome, Ida, now an eighteen-year-old who has been a courier or staffetta for the partisans, is in hiding from the enemy. The author uses a form of free indirect style, where irregular sentence structure is employed to convey the idea of the protagonist’s febrile thought-patterns: No-one has arrived for two days. For two days only the sound of mice and her breathing, which at times is deeper out of fear and clenched waiting teeth, and dripping water, somewhere. The lamp casts little light but it is better, however to keep looking around, the weak light and the shadows, she’s afraid. (Soriga 2012: 5)

278 | Philip Cooke

Ida remains in hiding, prey to terrors of all kinds, until a few days before the Allies arrive, and in a series of flashbacks, the omniscient third-person narrator recreates the story of her life from her childhood in Sardinia to her time as a staffetta. The characters she meets and befriends – and one with whom she falls in love – are drawn with remarkable subtlety and narrative sophistication. While the Resistance remains in the background, the book concentrates on the inner life and development of Ida from a twelve-year-old newly arrived in Rome to a woman on the cusp of adulthood. Two characters dominate her thoughts: her Jewish friend, Micol, whom she sees taken away and who never returns, and Antonio who, she desperately hopes, reciprocates her love. Ida is eventually persuaded that it is safe to leave her cave, but is unable to share the joys of the Romans in their liberated city – Micol, she knows, is dead, and Antonio announces his intention to marry another woman. The last sentences of the novel convey a sense of overwhelming pessimism and a hint that Ida has developed a death wish: At a crossroads, she does not know which way to turn. She’s learnt them, the streets of Rome, in these years, in a way that she still finds difficult to believe, but always, every now and again, she surprises herself by getting lost, and not knowing where she is. She thinks this way is the way back. Maybe even this way, maybe that just means a slightly longer route. She thinks lose yourself. She thinks that maybe there are still some Germans around. She continues walking and the sun beats down heavily on her head. (140)

The final scene recalls and revisits the famous ending of Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (1945) which shows the boys who bring comfort to Don Pietro at his moment of execution walking towards the city and the dome of San Pietro, in a sequence suffused with hope for the future. At the end of Dove finisce Roma, there is no such hope for a better Italy, nor indeed of a better life for Ida. Roma città aperta came out shortly after the war was over; Dove finisce Roma at a time of deep economic and political despair. While the Resistance itself remains in the background of Dove finisce Roma, Resistance culture is very much at the forefront of the novel in the shape of multiple references to the works of Soriga’s antecedents. The ambivalent ending not only evokes Roma città aperta, but also recalls Fenoglio’s Il partigiano Johnny (1968), while Ida’s fruitless search for love is reminiscent of the same author’s Una questione privata (1963). Numerous characters’ names are taken from Resistance films or novels: Ida’s name is probably a reference to the partigiana Ada Gobetti, while her sister is called Agnese (from Renata Viganò’s L’Agnese va a morire, 1949); her Jewish friend shares the name of the beautiful but doomed character at the centre of Giorgio Bassani’s Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1962), who is also

Italian Resistance Writing in the Years of the ‘Second Republic’ | 279

the object of the unrequited love of the novel’s narrator; her friend Rita has a brother, Fausto, and a sister, Anna, references to Carlo Cassola’s novel Fausto ed Anna (1952), as well as a mother called Renata (an obvious reference to Renata Viganò); from Roma città aperta come the name of the priest Don Pietro, as well as the characters of Manfredi and Francesco (who dies during the Allied bombing raids on San Lorenzo). Ida also meets, and is profoundly affected by, a character called Giaime who, as we learn later, is blown up while crossing enemy lines, meeting the same end as the person who undoubtedly inspired Soriga here, Giaime Pintor, author of one of the sacred texts of the Resistance, the last letter to his brother, which first circulated clandestinely before it was published in 1946. The ‘last letter’ would then be read out, particularly at schools, on the anniversary of the Liberation. In this way, Dove finisce Roma is a kind of act of love towards the texts of the past, bringing them to the attention of different generations of readers. The most recent, and possibly the most innovative Resistance novel to be published since Beppe Fenoglio’s Il partigiano Johnny is the work written by Scrittura industriale collettiva (The Collective for Industrial Writing, SIC) and entitled In territorio nemico, published in April 2013 to widespread critical and public acclaim. The circumstances of its composition are, to say the least, different, and have their origins in a ‘method’ of collective writing first presented at the Turin International Book Fair in 2007. In a brochure distributed at the fair, Gregorio Magini and Vanni Santoni, the two inventors of the method, explained that they wanted to give a ‘future to collective literature’ which, with a few important exceptions, was considered merely a literary ‘game’. The exceptions they referred to certainly included the Wu Ming collective, who had produced collaborative novels such as Asce di Guerra (Wu Ming and Ravagli 2000) and 54 (Wu Ming 2002), both of which dealt obliquely with the Resistance. Rather than a ‘literary game’, what was needed was a method which would place literary creation on the same plane as cinema, theatre and the video game. The method would be industrial (the SIC logo represents a factory) and work in such a way as to eliminate the individual, making the participation of many a ‘virtue and not a vice’. The SIC method, according to the 2007 brochure, has two fundamental characteristics – the work is organised around a series of ‘cards’ that contain information about narrative elements (such as characters, locations, situations) which the various participants fill in. All writers participate in the completion of these cards and then an ‘artistic director’ chooses and recomposes the work carried out. The SIC website (http://www.scritturacollettiva.org/) contains detailed information about the method, with examples taken from several published works. The artistic director’s role is similar to that of a film director who decides on the

280 | Philip Cooke

subject of the project, selects and assembles the ‘raw material’ produced by the authors and has control over the structure of the text, co-ordinating the work and setting deadlines. In its initial phase, the method produced a short novel and a series of short stories, such as Il principe, a tormented love-triangle which begins in an Esselunga supermarket in Padua and can be downloaded for free from the SIC website. The story involved the cooperation of two artistic directors (Magini and Santoni) and four writers. By early 2009, however, the inventors of the SIC method were looking at a much more ambitious project. In a blog posted at 2:53 on the morning of 30 January 2009, they offered some preliminary considerations on a ‘Great Open SIC Novel’ which would involve at least ‘one hundred hands’ (i.e., fifty authors), but they hoped to involve many more. The novel would be set in Italy in the period 1943–1945, but the ‘soggetto’ (which I will translate with the technical term ‘treatment’, used by documentary-makers to describe a highly detailed outline) had not as yet been defined; however, it would deal with the German Occupation. In a new development, Magini and Santoni invited potential collaborators to collect stories and testimonies and send them in (they explained that they were currently working on an ‘advanced’ SIC method). These stories would form the basis of the treatment and, once this had been established, different groups would work on the different sections of the text. In other words, according to this advanced method, the ‘one hundred hands’ would not all work on the same sections, for obvious reasons of organisation and control of material. The aim, they stated, was to create a ‘hybrid novel – an undefined narrative object – which lies somewhere in between the historical novel, historiography and a work of fiction’. They would produce, they hoped, ‘a thoroughly researched novel capable of saying something important, but which is also a joy to read’. It was not long before potential collaborators registered their interest, with comments ranging from ‘you can count on me’ to much longer reactions. Federico Flamminio, who would go on to provide testimonies for the treatment and participate in the writing process, explained that his grandfathers had fought in Africa and Sicily, and that he could see the Gustav defensive line (built by the Germans to the south of Rome) from his window. Email and the SIC method meant that the project was not restricted to people who lived in Italy. Marco Codebò, an academic exile working at Long Island University and also an accomplished creative writer, wrote in to say that ‘the project interested him a lot’. The blog also indicated a timetable – the stories and testimonies would be sent in during the period from late February to early April. Using these, the treatment would then be put together, in order to give a clear idea of the different sections of the novel, the characters and its overall geography

Italian Resistance Writing in the Years of the ‘Second Republic’ | 281

and chronology. Work on the actual writing of the text was scheduled to begin on 25 April (the official date of the Liberation of Italy and a national holiday). Things did not quite turn out as planned, with the treatment going through four iterations before it was finalised at the end of September. Version 4 of the treatment provides a fascinating and detailed insight into where the book stood, several years before it was published. The plan was to write a historical novel, with ‘fictional but verisimilar characters’. Historical truth would be respected ‘almost always’ when it came to facts and ‘always’ when it came to matters of ‘spirit’. Great care had been taken in making sure the chronology and the topography of the story were accurate. To achieve their aim, Magini and Santoni proposed to have three main narrative threads involving characters whose stories were linked, but who would only come together at the end of the book. Of these, one would be dynamic, involving an individual (Matteo Curti) who travels most of the length of the peninsular in a dramatic journey which brings him into contact with various individuals and organisations, a second (the story of Adele Curti, Matteo’s sister) would be restricted to the city of Milan, and a third would be a static element dealing with the inner life of an isolated individual (Aldo Giavazzi, Adele’s husband). There followed a synopsis and detailed descriptions of the narrative ‘blocks’ of each of the three characters: eight blocks for Matteo, six for Adele, and four for Aldo. Details were also given of the psychological development of the characters. A section on the structure of the narrative indicated how all the different sequences would relate to each other (A = Matteo, B = Adele, C = Aldo, and so A1 indicates Matteo’s first block, C2 Aldo’s second block, and so on): A B C A B A C A B A C A B A B C A B A1 B1 C1 A2 B2 A3 C2 A4 B3 A5 C3 A6 B4 A7 B5 C4 A8 B6

It is a testimony to the organisational powers of Magini and Santoni that there are only minor differences between the plan of 2009 and the published version. For example, the treatment indicates a brief period in which Matteo develops an interest in a group of freemasons. In the published version, this is merely hinted at, and the flirtation with the Brotherhood seems rather a reference to Pierre Bezukhov’s interest in freemasonry in Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) than a fully developed section of narrative. In its final version, In territorio nemico is a novel which fully matches the ambitions of its multiple creators. The three stories interlink effectively, with Matteo’s narrative providing a compelling insight into the vicissitudes of a young man who is caught up in the uncertainties following the

282 | Philip Cooke

armistice declaration of 8 September. As he makes his way northwards, he witnesses the German massacre at Caiazzo (told in graphic detail) and passes through a series of partisan groups. Initially with sympathies for the Action Party (a Left-leaning organisation led by the future prime minister Ferruccio Parri), he subsequently joins an anarchist organisation operating near Carrara, only to be separated from the organisation, following a German combing-out operation. Again the most effective pages are those which describe acts of violence. While Matteo operates as a partisan in the Italian countryside, his sister moves from being irredeemably bourgeoise to a highly effective urban partisan. Her husband, in contrast and perhaps like many Italians at the time, tries to cut himself off from history in an isolated farmhouse, only to end up prey to physical and mental entropy. As with the texts discussed earlier, there are many links between In territorio nemico and the Resistance canon. Adele’s story offers a modern, gendered rereading of Vittorini’s Uomini e no (1945), while Matteo’s moves through different partisan organisations recall the wanderings of Johnny in Fenoglio’s Il partigiano Johnny (Cooke 2000). Aldo’s story has many parallels with that of Corrado in Pavese’s La casa in collina (1949). Curiously enough, the one absence would seem to be Italo Calvino, but in a way he is there. In 1949, Calvino wrote an article in which he surveyed the last four years of ‘Italian Literature on the Resistance’. Despite the many publications, what was still lacking, he claimed, was a work which was both ‘epic’ and ‘choral’ at the same time. In the exceptional sweep of In territorio nemico, a novel involving the collaboration of more than one hundred individuals, Calvino has finally got more than he could ever have hoped for. The impact of works like In territorio nemico and Dove finisce Roma suggest that, despite the desacralisation of the Resistance and the inevitable passing of those individuals who participated in the movement, it is still alive and kicking and part of Italian cultural identity. The colours of the Resistance may have changed in this process – yellow is a new addition – but it is still there more than 70 years after the end of the conflict.

References Accolla, E., U. Franzolin, A. Giorleo and F. Grazioli. 1998. Storie d’amore e di guerra. Rome: Settimo Sigillo. Angelino, E. 1995. L’inverno dei mongoli. Turin: Einaudi. Baldissara, L. and P. Pezzino. 2009. Il massacro: guerra ai civili a Monte Sole. Bologna : il Mulino.

Italian Resistance Writing in the Years of the ‘Second Republic’ | 283

Bassani, G. 1962. Il Giardino Dei Finzi-Contini. Turin: Einaudi. Bertani, G. 2002. ‘La lente dei media. Settembre 1990: “operazione verità”. “La Repubblica nata dalla Resistenza” tra storiografia, politica e mass media’, Ricerche storiche 93: 11–50. Calvino, I. 1947. Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno. Turin: Einaudi. _______. 1949. ‘La letteratura italiana sulla Resistenza’, Movimento di liberazione in Italia 1: 40–46. Cassola, C. 1952. Fausto ed Anna. Milan: Mondadori. Cazzullo, A. 2011. La mia anima è ovunque tu sia. Milan: Mondadori. Cirioni, M. 1997. Berto & Lucio. Milan: Greco & Greco. Cooke, P. (ed.). 1997. The Italian Resistance: An Anthology. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ______. 2000. Fenoglio’s Binoculars, Johnny’s Eyes: History, Language and Narrative Technique in Fenoglio’s Il partigiano Johnny. New York: Peter Lang. ______. 2011. The Legacy of the Italian Resistance. New York: Palgrave. Dunnage, J. 2012. Mussolini’s Policemen: Behaviour, Ideology and Institutional Culture in Representation and Practice. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Fantoni, G. 2014. ‘After the Fall: Politics, the Public Use of History and the Historiography of the Italian Communist Party (1991–2011)’, Journal of Contemporary History 49 (4): 815–36. Fenoglio, B. 1952. I ventitrè giorni della città di Alba. Turin: Einaudi. ______. 1959. Primavera di bellezza. Milan: Garzanti. ______. 1963. Una questione privata. Milan: Garzanti. ______. 1968. Il partigiano Johnny. Turin: Einaudi. ______. 1994. Appunti partigiani. Turin: Einaudi. Forgacs, D. 2000. Rome Open City. London: BFI. Franzolin, U. 1967. I giorni di El Alamein. Rome: Trevi. _______. 1992. Nostra gente. Rome: Edizioni Settimo Sigillo. _______. 1995 [1985]. Il repubblichino: romanzo. Rome: Settimo Sigillo. Gennari, A. 1995. Le ragioni del sangue. Milan: Garzanti. Ginsborg, P. 1996. ‘Explaining Italy’s Crisis’, in S. Gundle, and S. Parker (eds), The New Italian Republic: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to Berlusconi. London: Routledge, pp. 19–39. _______. 2003. Italy and its Discontents 1980–2001. London: Penguin. Gundle, S. 2000. ‘The Civic Religion of the Italian Resistance’, Modern Italy 5(2): 113–32. Ignazi, P. 1994. Postfascisti? Dal movimento sociale ad Alleanza nazionale. Bologna: il Mulino. Kertzer, D. 1996. Politics and Symbols: The Italian Communist Party and the Fall of Communism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lucarelli, C. 1991. L’estate torbida. Palermo: Sellerio. All quotations in this chapter are from the English translation by Michael Reynolds (Lucarelli 1997). _______. 1997. The Damned Season, trans. M. Reynolds. New York: Europa Editions. Mazzantini, C. 1995 [1986]. A cercar la bella morte. Venice: Marsilio. Pansa, G. 1994. Ma l’amore no. Milan: Sperling & Kupfer. Pavese, C. 1949. La casa in collina. Turin: Einaudi. Pieri, G. 2007. ‘Between True Crime and Fiction: The World of Carlo Lucarelli’, in S. Gundle and L. Rinaldi (eds), Assassinations and Murder in Modern Italy: Transformations in Society and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 193–203. Raffone, P. 1998. ‘Italy’s Post-Fascists Bid for Respectability’, Le Monde diplomatique, May, http://mondediplo.com/ (accessed 10 June 2015). Sauro Onofri, N.S. 2007. Il triangolo rosso (1943–1947). Rome: Sapere 2000. Scrittura industriale collettiva (SIC). 2013. In territorio nemico. Rome: Minimum fax. Soriga, P. 2012. Dove finisce Roma. Turin: Einaudi. (All translations by author).

284 | Philip Cooke

Varesi, V. 2003. Il fiume delle nebbie. Milan: Frassinelli. _______. 2005. Le ombre di Montelupo. Milan: Frassinelli. Viganò, R. 1949. L’Agnese va a morire. Turin: Einaudi. Vittorini, E. 1945. Uomini e no: romanzo. Milan: Bompiani. Wu Ming. 2002. 54. Turin: Einaudi. Wu Ming and V. Ravagli. 2000. Asce di guerra. Milan: M. Tropea.

Filmography L’albero degli zoccoli. 1978, dir. Ermanno Olmi Roma città aperta. 1945, dir. Roberto Rossellini L’uomo che verrà. 2009, dir. Giorgio Diritti

Philip Cooke is Professor of Italian History and Culture at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. He is a former co-editor of the journal Modern Italy, published by Taylor and Francis, and the author of a number of books on the Italian Resistance and its impact on Italian history and culture, most recently The Legacy of the Italian Resistance (2011). With Ben Shepherd he co-edited the multi-author collection European Resistance in the Second World War (2013).

Part VI Poland

(

Chapter 16

The Second World War in Present-Day Polish Memory and Politics

( Andrzej Paczkowski

The Second World War is the most traumatic event that the Poles have experienced in modern times. The military defeat and the partition of the state between two totalitarian neighbours was followed by a period of endless suffering and losses: at least 7–8% of ethnic Poles and about 90% of Jews (or persons of Jewish descent) living in Poland perished,1 the country suffered extensive material damage and the Polish capital of Warsaw was razed to the ground. The war had enormous political consequences for Poland: it led to major territorial shifts (connected with migrations of millions) and the emergence of a non-sovereign and nondemocratic state, which in itself contradicted Poland’s alignment with the victors. It is not surprising, therefore, that all issues connected with the Second World War continue to play an important part in Polish social memory, with numerous events from 1939 to 1945 still being the object of polemics and even political strife. This chapter will examine the presentday state of Polish memories of the Second World War and their use in contemporary politics.

Memory A recent survey carried out by Pentor Research International (2009) indicates unambiguously that almost 50% of Polish adults (answering questions asked by sociologists) believe that the Second World War is a ‘dull’ topic and therefore of little interest.2 This finding should not come as a surprise: the number of those who lived at the time of the cataclysm is now low, and barely 7% can remember it personally (this refers to persons Notes for this chapter begin on page 299.

288 | Andrzej Paczkowski

born prior to 1936). Young respondents find their own ‘historical’ experiences, such as the fall of Communism in 1989 and Poland’s accession to the European Union in 2004, much more interesting. They perceive events that began on 1 September 1939 as distant history, although their life remains in the shadow of that major conflict. Despite the situation described above, as many as 16% declared that they are still ‘very’ interested in the topic. This means that their curiosity does not necessarily depend on personal memory since their number is greater than that of those still living who survived the war. In the ‘ranking’ of the most important events of twentieth-century Polish history,3 the Second World War does not come first but remains in the ‘top ten’, between the fall of Communism and the regaining of independence in 1918. It could be said, therefore, that, although the Second World War is not the central event of Polish collective memory of the twentieth century, it nonetheless remains an important point of reference. Actually, only upon certain specific occasions does it become central, as happened in 2009, when the seventieth anniversary of its outbreak was commemorated. State ceremonies were held to mark the occasion, and the media were full of pertinent material. I am unaware of research that would enable comparisons with other nations, but it is obvious that, although the war encompassed a large part of Europe, the old continent does not have a common narrative of the war. Even nations whose war experience bears obvious similarities (for instance, the Poles and the Czechs were both victims of the Third Reich and members of the anti-Nazi coalition) have considerably different memories of the war. In many instances, collective war memories – between, but also within, nations – clash with one another. In the case of the Poles, it is impossible to speak about a single, unified memory, even though a large consensus emerges on specific events or topics, not so much as a result of personal or family memories but because of the institutional impact exerted by the mass media, schools or the Church. This explains, for example, why 97% of the respondents – i.e., almost everyone – is of the opinion that Germany was responsible for the outbreak of the war.4 Unanimity on a similar scale occurs in responses to the question: ‘which nations suffered the most during the war?’ The Poles were mentioned by 93% of respondents, and the Jews by 92%. Common opinions also include the conviction that the Poles were committed and heroic in the fight (87%). The distance between such opinions and objectivised reality is of little significance. Obviously, the ‘entire nation’ did not fight, simply because this would have been impossible, and the actual fight was waged by a minority, soldiers and members of clandestine formations, who came to be perceived as a sui generis ‘representation of

The Second World War in Present-Day Polish Memory and Politics | 289

the nation’. Most historians agree that soldiers of all the underground armies totalled no more than 500,000–600,000 (the majority of whom were unarmed), but as many as 28% of all respondents claimed that at least one close family member took part in the Resistance, which is clearly inaccurate (since it would make the number of underground fighters several times higher than it actually was). Answers are dominated by a heroicpositive image: the overwhelming majority of respondents is convinced that the Poles often ‘helped each other’ (85%), ‘refused to cooperate with the occupier’ (75%), ‘helped the Jews to survive the war’ (81%) and ‘fought against informants and police confidants’ (74%). Negative attitudes are mentioned by a much smaller number of people, although some figures are not insignificant: according to a sizeable minority of respondents, the Poles frequently ‘informed the Gestapo’ (18%), ‘cooperated with the occupier’ (15%), ‘were indifferent towards the extermination of the Jews’ (13%) or ‘betrayed the Jews’ (11%). The answers given by the respondents were therefore not totally uncritical of the past and they also contained paradoxes that are difficult to explain: 87% of respondents, for example, believe that the Poles were fighting the occupier while ‘trying to survive at all costs’, although logically someone who wants to survive at all costs does not become engaged in combat. The prevailing opinion is that the Second World War generated attitudes of which ‘we can be proud’: this is the view shared by 73% of respondents. Most often-mentioned reasons for such pride are military actions, even though many of them resulted in defeat. The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 (cited by 34% of the respondents) was undoubtedly an act of heroism but, at the same time, it ended with a defeat of far-reaching consequences. The glorification of this campaign, carried out by the insurgents over a period of sixty-three days, probably results not only from a recognition of their personal heroism but also from the inclusion of the Uprising in the great Romantic Polish tradition that is marked by a sequence of unsuccessful insurrections (starting with the Kosciuszko Insurrection of 1794). The Warsaw Uprising and its heroic defeat became a key myth in the Polish rhetoric of independence that was to be won at all costs. The September Campaign of 1939 – the second most important event of which Poles should be proud, according to this survey – also ended in defeat, a fact that makes one wonder to what extent these answers indicate a sui generis national masochism. Since there were grounds for national pride, it had to be embodied in historical figures. Surprisingly perhaps, the top of the list did not include either the Commander-in-Chief of the September 1939 campaign (Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły) or the Commander of the Home Army (General Tadeusz Komorowski), who, in 1944, instigated the battle for Warsaw.

290 | Andrzej Paczkowski

The largest number of respondents (22%) mentioned General Władysław Sikorski, who, during the war, was a politician (Prime Minister of the émigré government) rather than a soldier. In second place (15%) comes a genuine soldier, General Władysław Anders, a commander in the legendary battle of Monte Cassino, waged in May 1944.5 The list of more than ten persons ‘of whom we may be proud’ is dominated by the military or Resistance fighters, but also contains persons who sacrificed or risked their lives for others. Naturally, in Catholic Poland, it includes St Maksymilian Kolbe, who, in Auschwitz, volunteered to die in place of a young inmate sentenced to death (and thus became a saint). The presence of Irena Sendlerowa, who organised help for 2,500 Jewish children, may be in part due to her recent death (she died shortly before the survey) and to an evident ‘political correctness’ when dealing with the Holocaust. More importantly, the emphasis on her person may be inspired by a collective need to reassert the ideal of Polish nobility of spirit and to counter the belief of many international critics and observers that the Poles were co-responsible for the Holocaust. The authors of the survey also asked the respondents to comment on events or attitudes of the time that could be perceived in negative terms. Overall, the Poles presented a rather complacent image of themselves: a relatively small number of respondents (17%) recognised that some events or attitudes could be regarded as dishonourable. The prevailing answers are not startling: ‘traitors and collaborators’, ‘informants’ and ‘Volksdeutsche’ topped the list.6 It also proved much easier to name shameful individuals rather than events: 28% of respondents were convinced of the existence of such people, although 48% answered that they knew nothing about them. Those of whom the Poles should be ashamed, according to the survey, include the hapless Commander-in-Chief of the September 1939 Campaign, although the respondents most frequently named people who, like Bolesław Bierut, were perceived to be responsible for promoting Communism in Poland. This clearly demonstrates that forty years of intensive historical politics and indoctrination conducted by the Communists governing the country until 1989 were less successful than is often claimed. Interestingly, the survey does not show that serving in the Wehrmacht was considered as morally reprehensible. It is well known that, among the two million Poles who signed the so-called ‘third national list’ (Eingedeutsche) in lands incorporated in 1939 into the Third Reich, probably more than two hundred thousand found themselves in the German army. Although the majority of the respondents demonstrate a clearly negative attitude towards cooperation with the Germans, conscription of Poles into the Wehrmacht (usually under duress) is not treated with equal abomination.

The Second World War in Present-Day Polish Memory and Politics | 291

This point draws attention to geographical and territorial differences in the Poles’ perception of the past which, unfortunately, were not taken into account in the Pentor survey cited earlier. It is true that, from the summer of 1941, all lands inhabited by the Poles found themselves under German occupation, but earlier, for almost two years after the outbreak of the war, a large part of the population lived in territories incorporated into the Soviet Union. Experiences, and memory too, must have differed. By way of example, in 1939–1940, Poles living under German rule were deported to other Polish territories, while Poles from the eastern territories were deported by the Soviet authorities to entirely alien regions with, in addition, an extremely harsh climate (Kazakhstan, the Ural Mountains, western Siberia). The geographical and territorial situation was, in fact, even more complex than that. For example, Poles in Wilno (Vilnius) had a truly unique experience, being passed from the control of one military power to another several times in less than five years: from 20 September to the end of October 1939, the city was ruled by the Soviets; then it was seized by independent Lithuania, which, in June 1940, became a Soviet republic; in June 1941, the Germans entered Wilno, and, in July 1944 – once again – the Soviet forces occupied the city. Also, Poles from Pomerania or Silesia were drafted into the Wehrmacht, while, in 1940–1941, Poles from the eastern borderlands were expected to serve in the Red Army. It would be difficult to identify a common denominator with regard to this particular aspect of the survey other than the very general feeling among respondents that Poles had been victimised. A sense of pride emerges from the answers by respondents, overshadowing any expression of shame. However, pride should not be identified with satisfaction since it is accompanied by pessimistic assessments and statements. In the case of many respondents, pride in the heroism or stamina of the Polish soldier or even in the attitude of ‘the entire nation’ is intermingled with a feeling of non-fulfilment: as many as 23% of the respondents think that Poland was not one of the victors of the Second World War, while another 31% believe that one should refer to it as an ‘incomplete’ victory. Such views are explicable in the light of the imposition by the Soviet Union of a political system unwanted by the majority of Poles after the war and the loss of its eastern borderlands. Other responses suggest that the Poles and Poland had no impact on the course of events and that the fate of the country was determined by others, namely the hostile Soviet Union and the Anglo-Saxon powers who were pursuing their own interests. The organisers of the survey did not ask direct questions about the Yalta resolutions or the attitude of France and Great Britain in September 1939, countries that declared war on Germany but did not initially launch any major attacks on the enemy. However, the feeling of

292 | Andrzej Paczkowski

being abandoned by the West must have played a part in the generally pessimistic assessments made by the respondents. The people who had experienced the war focused on different aspects of the past. Their statements suggest that the war should be described primarily as a stream of chaotic and incomprehensible events, a period of breakdown of legal and ethical order, of general disorientation and misfortune. This was a time when one could not be certain about anything, and when life or death often depended on chance. Their responses contain many examples of scorched villages, ruined homes, famine and devastating illnesses. In response to the question: ‘Which personal experience made the strongest imprint on your memory?’ the answers frequently mention hunger, poverty, shortages, bombings, air raids, compulsory deportation, fleeing the home, escapes, hiding, and concealing property. Naturally, the death of loved ones is also listed: one third of the respondents declared that they had lost a member of the family, one quarter that they had lost two relatives, and every tenth respondent three or more. Probably only 10% of the fatalities were the victims of illnesses, lack of medical care or medicines, or hunger. Most perished in battle, as a result of mass terror (including the shooting of hostages and murders committed in the course of arrests or street round-ups), or died in concentration camps and prisons (German or Soviet). The survey under discussion here is unique because, to a considerable extent, it intended to capture the individual, ‘private’ stratum of the war. The predominantly negative view of the war held by individuals who were neither soldiers nor heroes suggests that they clearly distance themselves from the grand narratives of war as described in textbooks, popular novels and war films. An extremely important element of memory relating to the war is the attitude towards other nations since, obviously, the war was a clash that embroiled nations and not merely states. As could be expected, the majority of the respondents declared that relations with those nations with which the Poles had found themselves in a state of conflict were still, as a rule, ‘very bad’ or ‘fairly bad’ seventy years after the end of the conflict. Nonetheless, a detailed analysis of these answers gives much food for thought since it reveals a fairly homogeneously negative perception of, for example, Germans (65%), Russians (59%) and Ukrainians (almost 64%).7 There is, it seems, an overall preponderance of bad reminiscences. Even more intriguing, on the other hand, is the ‘average’ number of results involving positive recollections: relations with the Germans were described as ‘very good’ or ‘fairly good’ by 11% of respondents; relations with the Russians (or Red Army soldiers) were described similarly by 10%; and relations with the Ukrainians were described similarly by 9%. Interestingly, there is no correlation between these figures and the

The Second World War in Present-Day Polish Memory and Politics | 293

potential number of victims who fell at the hands of each nationality: barely 5% of respondents reported that they were aware that a member of the family had been killed by Ukrainian nationalists; 11% knew that a relative had perished ‘as a result of Soviet repression’ or had been killed by the Red Army, while various confrontations with the Germans (the September 1939 Campaign, the Resistance and partisan movements) or German terror were mentioned as the reason for death by 78% of those respondents whose families included war victims. Nonetheless, the feeling of hostility towards the Ukrainians is almost equal to that felt for the Germans. I will not attempt to interpret the data presented here, since I believe that, in this case, the skills of a psychologist may be of greater help than those of a historian. Lastly, the survey finds that the younger generations of Poles clearly perceive the Second World War as an event of less significance to them than to their elders, a fact that indicates diminishing intergenerational transmission. Among the youngest category of respondents (under thirty years of age), as many as 39% declared that they never talked about their family wartime history, while in the older age category (aged from thirty to thirty-nine), the figure was lower at 31%. Most of the youngest generation will probably never have the opportunity to listen to the reminiscences of witnesses and are increasingly less likely to become acquainted with wartime family history. For them, the war is becoming ‘real history’, and they will have to rely on secondary sources and on ‘grand narratives’ – i.e., those told by historians and teachers, but also often by film directors or novelists – to understand the past.

Politics At first glance, politics has little in common with memory since its domain is usually contemporaneity and the future. Since, however, there is probably no contemporary society that has totally rejected its past, politicians are forced to take into account social memory. At the same time, they try to influence it, usually with the assistance of historians. They also frequently attempt to refer to arguments borrowed from the past. This practice has been applied for centuries, and nothing seems to indicate that things will change. In recent decades, references to the past have been even more frequent. ‘Retroactive justice’ meted out years after the commitment of a criminal deed (vide the case of Ivan Demianiuk) and collective calls for compensation emerge on almost every continent nowadays.8 Some years ago, the southern African Herero ethnic group demanded compensation from Germany for the cruel repression and persecution of their people

294 | Andrzej Paczkowski

when they rebelled against German colonial rule in 1904. A shadow over relations in the Far East is still cast by the Japanese occupation of China, which ended in 1945. Aboriginal populations – from the Maoris of New Zealand to the Laplanders of Norway or the Araucanians of Chile – call for a condemnation of actions aimed against them, the return of seized lands or the payment of compensation. Permanent elements of the international landscape include mutual reproaches relating to wrongs, betrayals or crimes. In other words, the fact that, in Poland, many people are resorting to arguments from the past is by no means special. On the other hand, it appears – although I am unable to produce evidence for this ­statement – that the Poles and Polish politicians reach for the past much more frequently in controversies with one another than in relations with their neighbours. Impassioned disputes about the martial law period, the past of Lech Wałęsa or the significance of the Round Table debates in 1989 break out with great frequency. The attitude to the past becomes the theme of harsh polemics, particularly visible in 2005–2007, when one side (the nationalist right wing) accused others (the liberal left wing) of ‘historical nihilism’, as opposed to ‘affirmative patriotism’ (see Ochman 2013: 21-25, for example). From a historical perspective, two essential events of the Second World War are of interest as important symbols of this intra-Polish controversy. One was the defence of an army storehouse on the Westerplatte peninsula in Gdańsk, the first Polish outpost attacked by the Germans, at dawn on 1 September 1939. Despite overwhelming odds, the small garrison held out for a week. The defence of Westerplatte became legendary early in the war, and, to this day, it remains a symbol of valour and of the will to resist oppression. The second event was the pogrom of the Jewish inhabitants of the small town of Jedwabne, which took place on 10 July 1941, shortly after the Wehrmacht had driven out the Red Army. The number of pogrom victims totalled 300–400, the majority of whom were burned alive in a barn. Although the initiative was German, the crime was perpetrated by local Poles. In 2001, upon the occasion of an anniversary of the pogrom, the President of Poland participating in the official ceremony publicly apologised for the heinous crime and asked the Jews for forgiveness, to the outrage of a large part of public opinion. Against the backdrop of those two events, one question grew increasingly acute: should historical politics and education stress heroics or tackle the ‘evil past’? Andrzej Nowak, a leading Polish historian, wrote an article: Westerplatte czy Jedwabne? [Westerplatte or Jedwabne?], responding firmly to his own rhetorical question: Westerplatte! Paweł Machcewicz, another well-known historian, entitled his polemic: I Westerplatte i Jedwabne [Both

The Second World War in Present-Day Polish Memory and Politics | 295

Westerplatte and Jedwabne].9 Those who support a predominantly positive presentation of the facts do so because, as President Lech Kaczyński said during an interview, it ‘restores patriotism and national pride’ (Kaczyński 2006: 10); in contrast, any recollection of wrongdoings in the past is considered by those same people as a threat to national cohesion. They therefore regard writing about the Jedwabne pogrom (and similar events) as an attempt to produce a guilt complex among the Poles. Others, on the contrary, who justify delving into the ‘evil past’, believe that a modern society can only move forward by admitting its past wrongdoings. These two episodes of the Second World War became part of one of the most important political controversies in contemporary Poland. This controversy exemplifies the fact that it is less the scale of the events than their ideological power that impinges on social and political memory. Obviously, the past is also an element that affects Poland’s international relations. Today, Poland borders seven states, sharing with each some sort of misunderstanding caused by past conflicts, although not all produce problems that influence present-day relations. There is no room here to go into the details of these past events nor to ponder on the way in which those issues appeared in the Communist era. Nonetheless, it has to be emphasised that, from 1945, for more than forty years, the Poles were told about friendship with the Soviet Union and encouraged to believe in the decisive role played by the Homeland of the World Proletariat in the liberation and existence of Poland, while the ethnic cleansing conducted by the Ukrainian nationalists in Volhynia in 1943–1944 was ignored. On the other hand, the Germans and Germany were the topics of exclusively negative literature (including in songs or poetry) that at times brimmed with outright hatred. As has been mentioned, this indoctrination proved to be of little avail, and today most Poles treat the evils committed by the Russians, the Ukrainians and the Germans as almost equally iniquitous. Whenever Polish foreign policy refers to the Second World War, it usually operates on a basis of preconceptions and stereotypes that, to a considerable degree, correspond to those revealed by the survey conducted in 2009. In other words, their narratives are also a mixture of heroism and martyrology. Both are firmly embedded in the actual course of events: Poland was the first country to face German (Nazi) military forces and, from 1 September 1939 to May 1945, Polish soldiers took part in battles waged on almost all fronts of the European theatre of war, first alone, then at the side of the Western Allies and, from 1943, even together with the Red Army. Upon numerous occasions, they tackled opponents far more powerful than themselves, while the Polish Resistance movement – both military and civilian – that had already emerged in the autumn of 1939, reached a scale and a differentiation of forms of activity (including

296 | Andrzej Paczkowski

‘underground’ courts of justice) not encountered elsewhere in occupied Europe. Supreme state authorities (the President and the government) continued their activities abroad uninterruptedly from the end of September 1939, and no Polish institution ever collaborated with the Third Reich, either militarily or politically. At the same time, Poland was one of those countries most affected by the war. The very fact that the front passed across Polish lands twice – eastwards first and then westwards – largely explains and exemplifies this. A large part of the nation’s territory was destroyed, and the capital city was first bombed in September 1939 and then in the autumn of 1944, in the wake of the capitulation of the Warsaw Uprising, during and after which most of the city was razed to the ground. The number of fatalities exceeded 5 million, the Germans and the Soviet authorities deported between 1.5 and 2 million people, and more than 2 million became ‘compulsory labourers’ working for the Germans or in Soviet ‘work battalions’. The Katyń massacre, which over several weeks resulted in the killing of approximately 22,000 Poles, was preceded by a ‘purge’ conducted by the Germans in lands incorporated into the Third Reich, resulting in the execution of 30,000–40,000 persons from September to December 1939. The ‘ethnic cleansing’ carried out in 1942–1943 in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia by the Ukrainian nationalists led to the killing of an additional 80,000–100,000 Poles. The lists of these (among many other) wrongs, as well as battles and the battlefields on which Polish soldiers spilled their blood are not cited in the diplomatic documents of the present-day Republic but do remain in the background of numerous activities undertaken by the state. The lack of international acknowledgement of Polish participation in the war is blatant and has led to some protest. A first, striking example was the omission to invite Polish guests to the 2004 celebrations marking the sixtieth anniversary of the landing of the Allies in Normandy, although, in 1944, Polish soldiers had taken part in numerous battles there. In 2005, when the anniversary of the end of the war was commemorated in Moscow, the representative of Poland was seated in the second row. President Putin, who mentioned French and Italian anti-Fascists, did not say a word about Poland. Thinly disguised disapproval was apparent in 2009, when it became obvious that, at the time of the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of the war, the Anglo-Saxon allies of Poland were represented at the ceremonies held on Westerplatte by politicians much lower in rank than those of her former enemies, i.e. Germany and the Soviet Union (now represented by the Russian Federation). The reason why memory of the contribution made by Poland to the struggle against the Third Reich has not become the object of a diplomatic campaign probably lies in the fact that such a campaign would have to target former and present-day allies.

The Second World War in Present-Day Polish Memory and Politics | 297

Contemporary Poland makes assorted attempts to gain recognition for its participation in the Second World War, and the motto: ‘Poland – first to fight’ is intended to make the world aware that Warsaw was the first to say ‘no!’ to Hitler. Polish politicians certainly give the impression that the Polish war effort and the number of soldiers who fell in the Second World War justify, in some sense, Poland’s current participation/engagement in allied missions and expeditions to Iraq or Afghanistan. They are simply providing proof thereby that Poland is a loyal and determined ally of democracy. The events of the Second World War, however, play a much more vital role in Polish politics, stressing the scale of the misfortune experienced by the Poles. A recently published volume about Polish losses during the Second World War (Materski and Szarota 2009), de facto a semi-official ‘white book’, is an excellent example of a tendency to focus on the victims. The impetus for such publications may be to force Germany to provide compensation for the Polish victims, but in the case of other states – Russia and Ukraine – the aims seem more limited or, at any rate, not material. In relations with these two eastern neighbours, the prime object of various endeavours and efforts is to solicit an official and formal admission of crimes committed against the Poles, the inauguration of suitable inquests and the punishment of the perpetrators, as well as making all pertinent documents available to the Polish side and guaranteeing unhampered honouring of the victims. On many occasions, Germany has admitted to the crimes committed by the Third Reich, made repeated apologies, and provided considerable funds for compensation intended for former prisoners of war or those who were deported for forced labour. True, the majority of those who have received the compensation regard it as insignificant but the German position is nonetheless generally treated with understanding. It is only when certain German groups depict themselves as victims (as in the case of German expellees from present-day Polish territory, for example)10 that current Polish-German relations come under some strain. Undoubtedly, Germany is witnessing a revision of its attitude towards the Second World War (although the negative attitude towards Nazism is not being modified), and the reaction to this process is decidedly stronger along the banks of the Vistula than along those of the Thames (not to mention the Potomac). There is no basic contemporary conflict of interests between Poland and Germany, both now members of NATO and the EU, a status that acts as an additionally alleviating factor, but the potential for conflict involving Poland and Russia remains. The majority of the Poles and certainly most Polish political élites are of the opinion that Moscow has

298 | Andrzej Paczkowski

never abandoned its imperial ambitions and that it is still trying to wield control over territories and countries, like Poland, that were under Soviet control during the Cold War. For her part, Poland attempts to support all initiatives – such as the ‘orange revolution’ in Ukraine or the anti-Russian Resistance of Georgia – that could serve to halt such perceived imperialistic tendencies. The fact that the authorities of the Russian Federation and the overwhelming majority of Russian public opinion recognise a sui generis continuum with the Soviet Union (for example, see White 2010, Nikitin 2014, and Kangaspuro, infra) allows Poland, which does not have at her disposal some instruments of the contemporary diplomatic repertoire (e.g., sufficient economic power), to resort to historical arguments. The Poles thus demonstrate that the Soviet (Stalinist) system was criminal, that the Polish state and Poles were its principal victims and that the greatest crimes took place during the Second World War. Wishing to inform the world that Poland was the ‘first to fight’, the Polish state inevitably encounters the resistance of the Russian Federation, which for years has been doing much to justify the deeds committed against Poland and the Poles between 1939 and 1945. Owing to the tension prevailing in presentday Polish-Russian relations, the recently built Nord Stream gas pipeline that bypasses Poland to link Russia directly with Germany has triggered comparisons with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (1939) and, an even earlier memory, the Rapallo Treaty (1922) in Polish public opinion.11 Much more complicated is the part played by the past in PolishUkrainian relations. Both states include strong and large social groups that perpetuate stereotypes about the Second World War. For example, the historical figure of Stepan Bandera recently sparked tensions between the two states.12 To honour his memory, a Ukrainian youth organisation was planning a Lviv–Munich bicycle trip named after him. A stretch of this ‘Stepan Bandera’ trip was to run across Poland. Bandera, who before the war was sentenced by a Polish court to life imprisonment for masterminding the assassination of the Polish minister of internal affairs, first collaborated with the Germans and then was the political leader – although not the commander – of the Ukrainian Partisan Army (UPA), which carried out the ‘ethnic purge’ in Volhynia. Today, part of Ukrainian public opinion regards Bandera as a national hero, a personification of the struggle for independence. Several Polish associations protested and threatened to disrupt the event, which led the Polish authorities to cancel visas, and the tour never took place (see Rossoliński-Liebe 2014: 510). This example from 2009 reveals that the prime factors that jeopardise PolishUkrainian relations are not current conflicts of interest but their diverging memories of the past, with Poland, in this particular case, assuming the role of the victim.

The Second World War in Present-Day Polish Memory and Politics | 299

The reason why memory and the past still have a significant role in Polish foreign policy and the Polish perception of the world lies first and foremost in the fact that many Poles believe that, in certain respects, Poland’s situation is virtually the same as in 1939: the country remains geopolitically located ‘between’ Russia and Germany, two former, but also potentially future, enemies. Heroic recollections of the Second World War help the Poles to live with this situation.

Acknowledgement This chapter is an outcome of the ‘Punishment, Memory, and Politics’ project financed by the Polish National Science Centre (Narodowe Centrum Nauki) registered as No. DEC-2013/10/M/HS3/00577.

Notes  1. In 1939, Poland had around 35 million inhabitants, including 23.5 million ethnic Poles and around 3.3 million Jews – see Materski and Szarota (2009: 40–48).  2. A large part of this chapter is based on the results of this survey conducted on 19 June– 4 July 2009 with a representative sample of 1,200 persons (Pentor Research International 2009). For a discussion on the study, see Kwiatkowski et al. (2010).  3. Public Opinion Research Centre, Spojrzenie na miniony wiek w historii Polski. Komunikat z badań, study conducted on 3–7 October 2008 on a representative sample of 1,107 persons.  4. At the same time, 80% of respondents are of the opinion that the Soviet Union is also to be blamed for the outbreak of the war, with as many as 43% claiming that Stalin’s decisions were of decisive importance; however, 89% still regard Hitler as the main instigator.  5. The battle of Monte Cassino (11–18 May 1944) was decisive in overcoming the German line of resistance by the Allied forces, making it possible to take Rome. Along the most important section (storming the monastery on top of the hill), the attack was carried out by the 2nd Polish Corps, composed of men who in 1939–1941 had been Soviet prisoners after the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939. After the outbreak of the SovietGerman war, Polish military units were created in Russia; in 1942 they were transferred to the Middle East to reinforce the British troops. Subsequently, they fought in Italy. One of the most popular songs connected with this battle (‘Red Poppies on Monte Cassino’) was frequently mentioned in this context by respondents to the above-mentioned survey.  6. Volksdeutsche refers to Polish citizens who were Germans, persons of German descent or Poles living in territories occupied by the Third Reich who had signed one of the German nationality lists.  7. It would be interesting to see how those proportions would have appeared if similar studies had been conducted immediately after the war (naturally, according to suitable standards and without the intervention of censorship). Unfortunately, this is something we shall never know.

300 | Andrzej Paczkowski

 8. Ivan Demianiuk (1920–2012) was a Ukrainian who was charged with war crimes committed in 1942–43 as a guard at Sobibór extermination camp. In a series of court hearings, his alleged war crimes were never incontrovertibly proved or disproved.  9. Nowak’s article was printed in the daily Rzeczpospolita on 1 August 2001. Machcewicz’s polemic appeared in the same newspaper on 9 August 2001. 10. In the cited survey from 2009, 40% of respondents believe that the deportations were ‘fully justified’, while 25% believe that they were ‘fairly justified’. Only 11% of respondents consider them ‘totally’ or ‘fairly’ unjust. 11. On 16 April 1922, Germany and Soviet Russia signed a diplomatic, economic and financial treaty in Rapallo (Italy). This treaty, containing a secret agreement concerning military collaboration between the two countries, was perceived in Poland as a forecast of a German-Soviet alliance aimed at toppling the resolutions of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919; later, it was recognised as a forewarning of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 that included the partition of Poland. 12. Stepan Andriyovych Bandera (1909–1959) was a Ukrainian revolutionary politician. As leader of the Ukrainian Partisan Army and a champion of Ukrainian independence, his relationship with Germany was highly ambivalent. In 1940, he collaborated with the German military; in 1941, however, pre-empting Bandera’s bid to establish an independent Ukraine, the Germans arrested him and sent him to a concentration camp. After the war, Bandera lived in Munich where, in 1959, he was assassinated by Soviet intelligence operatives.

References Cichocka, L. and A. Panecka. (eds). 2005. Polityka historyczna: Historycy-politycy-prasa. Warsaw: Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego. Forecki, P. 2010. Od Shoah do Strachu: Spory o polsko-żydowską przeszłość i pamięć w debatach publicznych. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie. Kaczyński, L. 2006. ‘Applied History: Interview’, Arcana 4–5: 10. Korzeniewski, B. 2010. Transformacja pamięci. Poznań: PTPN. Kwiatkowski, P.T., L. Nijakowski, B. Szacka and A. Szpocinski. 2010. Między codziennością a wielką historią: II wojna światowa w pamięci zbiorowej społeczeństwa polskiego. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar. Malicki, K. 2012. Pamięć przeszłości pokolenia transformacji. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar. Materski, W. and T. Szarota (eds). 2009. Polska 1939–1945: Straty osobowe i ofiary represji pod dwqma okupacjami. Warszaw: IPN. Nikitin, V. 2014. ‘Putin is exploiting the legacy of the Soviet Union to further Russia’s ends in Ukraine’, The Independent, 5 March. Ochman, E. 2013. Post-communist Poland: Contested Pasts and Future Identities. London: Routledge. Pentor Research International. 2009. Druga Wojna Światowa w pamięci społeczeństwa polskiego. Badania ilościowe. Raport (June-July). Rossoliński-Liebe, G. 2014. Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist : Fascism, Genocide, and Cult. Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag. Szacka, B. 2006. Czas przeszły, pamięć, mit. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar. Szpociński, A. and P.T. Kwiatkowski. 2006. Przeszłość jako przedmiot przekazu. Warsaw: Scholar.

The Second World War in Present-Day Polish Memory and Politics | 301

Szpociński, A. (ed.). 2009. Pamięć zbiorowa jako czynnik integracji i źródło konfliktów. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar. Traba, R. 2009. Przeszłość w teraźniejszości: Polskie spory o historię na początku XXI wieku. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie. White, S. 2010. ‘Soviet Nostalgia and Russian Politics’, Journal of Eurasian Studies 1: 1-9

Andrzej Paczkowski is Professor of Modern History and Director of Modern History Studies in the Political Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw. He has published extensively on the Second World War and is the author of The Spring will be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom (2003) and the co-author of the Black Book of Communism (2004).

Chapter 17

Wounded Memory Rhetorical Strategies Used in Public Discourse on the Katyń Massacre

( Urszula Jarecka

During the first months of World War II, approximately twenty-two thousand Polish officers went missing on Russian territory. The discovery of mass graves of Polish officers in Katyń and other locations in 1943 started a long process of shaping and re-shaping Polish collective memory.1 This chapter develops the concept of ‘wounded memory’ to investigate rhetorical perspectives on the Katyń crime as it is represented in the Polish media. Chronological analyses of media discourses indicate that there are at least three principal rhetorical strategies that have been applied in order to shape social memory. The first strategy was denial; just after the discovery of the mass graves, the crime seemed simply ‘unbelievable’. After the end of the war, the Katyń crime seemed ‘unbearable’ in the eyes of the Communist powers during the era of the Polish People’s Republic, an attitude that explains the official propaganda line: silence, which resulted in deep trauma. Since 1989, a third strategy has been introduced into public discourse and the shaping of social memory: this strategy includes descriptions of the event as ‘unforgettable’ or ‘unforgivable’.

Wounded Memory Memory of the past plays an important part in the way we apprehend social reality (Berger and Luckmann 1991; Halbwachs 1992; Searle 2010: 14–18, 38–41). Collective memories could be seen as ‘living’ entities that evolve and grow: however, they also wither and die with the passage of time. The memory of some events can be incomplete, owing to a lack of Notes for this chapter begin on page 311.

Rhetorical Strategies in Discourse on the Katyń Massacre | 303

available information as for example when important documents have been classified or destroyed. In such cases, memory remains unformed and undeveloped. However, memory becomes ‘disfigured’ when specific events are deliberately banned from discourses. The term ‘wounded memory’ is an apt description of the memory of events that are intrinsically painful and intentionally disfigured, misshapen and stifled, so as to prevent the emergence of a coherent meaning. In Polish collective memory, one such still-open wound is that of the Soviet invasion of Poland on 17 September 1939, which the Poles remember as ‘a stab in the back’, ‘Poland’s fourth partition’,2 and as the zdradziecka invasion – a word which connotes ‘treachery’ and ‘betrayal’, playing on the word radziecka which means ‘Soviet’ in Polish. During the post-war People’s Republic of Poland (which lasted until 1989), the Soviet invasion was virtually absent from official discourse. However, one of the worst open wounds in Polish collective memory is the Katyń massacre, absent from official, academic, popular and media discourse for decades owing to the Soviet invasion of Poland on 17 September 1939.

Strategies for Portraying the Katyń Massacre The forms of discourse regarding the Katyń massacre have undergone strict politicisation, which means that, inasmuch as we are talking about rhetorical strategies, we are also talking about propaganda. These strategies are adopted by a wide range of commentators, academics, politicians and journalists in search of objective reports. For Michel Foucault, ‘truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. … Each society has its régime of truth, its “general politics” of truth’ (2001: 317). This chapter deals with the truth as projected by the media: the material drawn on here is quite diverse and includes press photographs, posters, documentary films, feature films and television broadcasts. One might expect a certain emotional truth to emerge from feature films and fiction – from other types of narrative, one expects facts that may set the record straight and challenge propaganda. In the media, the truth is grasped primarily by presentation of facts and events. Here, one may call upon the concept of adaequatio, the truth as correspondence with perceived reality. Another form of truth, one that is also present in films, is manifestatio, truth as an image of ‘the essence’, a hidden or even divine reality (Stróżewski 1992: 25). In the case of narratives concerning Katyń, visual and audiovisual media seek to achieve the fullest possible conformity with the facts (adaequatio). However, in the

304 | Urszula Jarecka

interpretations of the people speaking out about the massacre, one may observe attempts to discern its meaning, to get at its essence (manifestatio) through metaphors and the use of symbols. Examining the truth about historical events as given in the media, one should bear in mind the following points: (1) The level of truth is commensurate with the reliability of its sources, which includes the credibility of witnesses, should any be involved. This is important in the case of the first strategy discussed below; (2) The truth of a message also depends on the conventions in place in each specific medium (radio, television, newspapers etc.) or genre (factual or fictional); and (3) The truth is rooted in its cultural and socio-political context and influenced by popular imagination, propaganda, official historical accounts, etc. This level of grasping the truth is important above all in the second and third of the strategies discussed later in the chapter.

Unbelievable Truth: The Truth and the Credibility of the Source The credibility of the source is paramount for any information to be taken seriously and believed. During World War II, the Germans discovered and announced the truth about the Katyń massacre. But the Third Reich was at war with the Soviet Union, and thus the source had ceased to be credible in the eyes of international opinion.3 It was, therefore, as though the victims had died twice over. Not only had the Polish officers held at Katyń been murdered, the truth about those events was also ‘murdered’ since the source of the information could not be believed (Jarecka 2008: 205). The propagandists of the Third Reich tried to play the ‘Katyń card’ by printing posters to publicly blame the Russians for the massacre. One of the posters bore the slogan: ‘How the Soviets won the war’ (Król 1999: 556–61). The poster’s graphics suggested that the hammer and sickle were like a knife and fork being wielded by a Bolshevik above the face of a Polish officer. This type of image is fairly common in German propaganda of World War II which often depicted the Russian enemy as a ‘cannibal’ and the Third Reich as the defender of Europe against the ‘red plague’. It is essential for the medium to be perceived as ideologically neutral when it conveys such information. In the case of the Katyń massacre however, this is an example of ‘grey propaganda’ (Taylor 1999: 237), close to disinformation, since the USSR is quite obviously portrayed in a very bad light. The information about the murdered Polish officers was correct, but the context was unreliable: it was merely perceived as an attempt by the Nazis to whitewash their own dirty deeds by pointing

Rhetorical Strategies in Discourse on the Katyń Massacre | 305

to somebody else’s crimes, and, in this case, to discredit Russia in the eyes of the Western alliance. At the very time the Germans were calling the world’s attention to the Katyń massacre, they themselves were mercilessly crushing the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 1943). This context made rational examination of the Katyń massacre impossible for international opinion. It was simply seen as the subject of propaganda ploys, since during World War II both German and Russian sources were treated with extreme caution.4 The fact that Western media did not, at that time, try to establish the truth behind the massacre, along with the Allies’ and the Red Cross’s refusal to launch an official investigation (demanded by Poland’s Prime Minister in Exile, General Władysław Sikorski) rendered future enquiries more problematic.5 The murder of twenty-two thousand Polish officers was both unbelievable and unacceptable and became a hot potato because of its broader political and geostrategic implications.6 What was behind this restraint on the part of official diplomatic bodies and the media (particularly the press) with regard to the German revelations? Several factors may be distinguished. First, one needs to bear in mind the constraints of communication: at the time, information did not flow as instantaneously as it does in the twenty-first century. In addition to technological considerations, political and strategic factors also blocked the discovery of the truth about the Katyń massacre and prevented it from reaching public awareness, notably through censorship (Trznadel 2000: 19; Davies 2007: 182–83). Moreover, it is certain that psychological factors also made the truth about the horrific mass murders unbelievable for many people, most evidently for the families of the victims. ‘Something happened that I had not imagined could happen’, laments Józef Czapski, a former prisoner of Starobielsk, in the documentary film Las katyński [The Katyń Forest] (1990), directed by Marcel Łoziński. This was all the more shocking since burial without a religious ceremony and without an official funeral seemed unthinkable in the civilised world. Families of the officers murdered at Katyń did not wish to accept the truth and be robbed of their hope; nor did they wish to accept that the victims had been robbed of their dignity. Some families stressed in their memoirs and letters that their loved ones had perhaps not been killed but been sent to the gulags. The nature of the families’ denials was of course different from that of the politicians: the former found their source in the belief that some values were universal and impossible to breach, whilst the latter were guided by pressing diplomatic issues and their will or need to keep their Russian ally on their side. Consequently, Polish efforts to obtain recognition of the truth by the Allies were treated as politically troublesome (Szcześniak 1989: 146–49; Davies 2007: 181–83).

306 | Urszula Jarecka

The Unbearable Truth in the International Arena The Soviet authorities wielded considerable influence in Eastern Europe even before the end of World War II. The Yalta Conference (1945) clearly indicated that the Western Allies recognised this fact. After the war, the truth about the Katyń massacre – about its barbarity, its perpetrators and its scale – became simply embarrassing for the USSR, as well as for the post-war leaders of Poland, who were influenced by the recent alignment with the former aggressor and motivated by the fear of another potential international conflict. The truth was inconvenient and even unbearable for the Allies too (since there was no longer anything to fight for, the deed had been committed some years previously, and a strategic partner could be lost). Moreover, the truth was unbearable for the victims’ families who may well have found it psychologically challenging, or even impossible, to comprehend the fate of their loved ones. Open denial by political leaders is common as a wartime technique, but one might have expected a more rational approach after the war. This was not possible in Poland since, for many years, the USSR simply did not separate propaganda and historiography. To quote Norman Davies: ‘The Western experts possessed only the vaguest idea of events in Eastern Europe. Historical training is compartmentalized, no less than historical publications. A leading American authority on World War II, for instance, had never heard of the wartime losses of any East European nation other than “the Russians”. This blinkered mindset underlies what a British historian has rightly dubbed “the frozen perspective of winners’ history” that is perpetuated by Western commentators’ (Davies 2007: 7;7 cf. Szcześniak 1989: 8–10). Propaganda obviously differs in its aims from historiography. Bias in textbooks and the press took precedence over historiography. Poland had been incorporated into the Eastern bloc and a forced silence – an iron curtain – was descending over numerous issues of importance to Poles. Limited access to information can obviously limit the emergence of the truth. This applied to the entire discourse surrounding Katyń to the point that, after so many years of blocking information, the Poles still find it hard to believe that everything has now been uncovered. The death of General Sikorski, for example, remains problematic since the circumstances of his aeroplane crash near Gibraltar are still classified by the British authorities (see note 12, infra).

Rhetorical Strategies in Discourse on the Katyń Massacre | 307

The People’s Republic of Poland Since the Polish post-war state fell under the control of Moscow, the murdered officers became ‘invisible’. Throughout the years of the People’s Republic of Poland (hereafter referred to by its Polish acronym – PRL), it was impossible to speak openly about Katyń even though World War II was an important feature of the PRL’s landscape, both materially, geographically and ideologically. In each and every city, and in almost every village, monuments were erected to the fallen (Czubryt-Borkowski and Michasiewicz 1988; Polski 2009). Such sites of memory were needed to celebrate victory over Fascism. The Chambers of National Memory that existed in schools, villages, city offices, exhibition rooms, cultural centres and galleries systematically evoked the wartime past and polarised attitudes towards the aggressor and the ‘Allies’. Indeed, there were so many sites of memory that they tended to merge with the landscape to the extent that, soon, few noticed them. Nonetheless, memory of the past in Poland was incomplete: the Katyń massacre was missing from these war memories and memorials. The PRL’s propaganda focused on the sufferings experienced at the hands of the German occupiers, passing in silence over campaigns of terror, murders and grief caused in the part of Poland that was occupied by the Soviet Union after 17 September 1939 (Dobroński 2009: 13-41; Jasiński 2009: 30-39). After World War II, newsreels reinforced the PRL’s unique and one-sided war narratives: Poland only had one enemy – Germany. Discussions were initiated about the September Campaign and the death camps, and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 was criticised (since it could not be removed from public debate). Yet the Katyń massacre, if mentioned at all, was brought up only privately, not in official discourse. The period from the end of the war to the 1990s did not allow the truth to be uncovered and rendered impossible any honest interpretation of the September Campaign and the actions of the two aggressors.

Individual Perspectives The families of the officers deported deep into Russia strove to find out what had happened to their loved ones, down to the tiniest detail. This experience was deeply emotional, even unbearable. In Las katyński, the victims’ final moments are told as follows: The last steps of those people can be recreated. Two men from the NKVD held the Polish officer by his arms, they threw a cloak over his head … stuffed his

308 | Urszula Jarecka

mouth with sawdust … and tied him up with a carefully made noose: his neck was tied to his arms behind his back so that if he struggled the noose around his neck tightened. Some of these men had their hands tied with steel wire that cut into them. In this manner they were led up to the grave, to that pit where they were shot in the back of the head… the bullet passed through the forehead. Their inert bodies then fell into the pit … .

This has been verified by forensic studies conducted many times at the various locations where these crimes were committed (Melak 1989; Jankowski and Miszczak 1990; Trznadel 2000). In the light of these details, it is all the more shocking that one of the perpetrators – Dmitri Tokariev, who appears in the 2008 documentary film by Paulina Maciejewska, Dowody zbrodni: Katyń 1940 [Evidence of an Atrocity: Katyń 1940] – ­demonstrates appalling indifference when he recalls this ghastly procedure. The individual death of a soldier can be heroic and remembered as such. Commemorative plaques and monuments provide fitting memorials for such heroism. But mass death is not heroic; slaughter does not count as heroism. The murdered Polish officers and other prisoners of war were unarmed and deprived of their status not only as POWs, but also as human beings. This is yet another aspect that makes the truth very hard to accept. For the crime is so reprehensible that, from the perspective of any normal human being, it is simply unacceptable. As Simone Weil observed: ‘The idea of a person being a thing is a logical contradiction. Yet, what is impossible in logic becomes true in life, and the contradiction lodged within the soul tears it to shreds’ (Weil 2003: 48). Man’s inhumanity to man is an unbearable truth. Even before 1940, the Soviet authorities had probably realised that Polish prisoners of war would not be likely to want to collaborate with them. In the documentary film of 2007, Defilada zwycięzców [Victors’ Parade] (dir. Grzegorz Braun and Robert Kaczmarek), the Russian historian Viktor Suvorov explains the Soviet regime’s line of reasoning: When Stalin ultimately made up his mind that we would march on Europe, he said: ‘the soldiers will be useful for us, we’ll keep them for now at a gulag. But the officers will be an obstacle, they won’t let us make Poland into a People’s Poland. They’ll stand in the way of a Polish politburo and a Polish NKVD. So we’ll have to annihilate them – them above all’. And that’s what he did: he annihilated them.

Thus, the Polish officers presented an obstacle to the Soviets and became a ‘problem to solve’; they were treated as objects that had to be destroyed.8 But the attitude of the USSR did not only concern the Polish officers and POWs. The above-mentioned documentary film also reminds us that in 1939–1941 (that is, in the period when the USSR was not officially taking

Rhetorical Strategies in Discourse on the Katyń Massacre | 309

part in the war) ‘hundreds of thousands of people from the other lands conquered by the Red Army – citizens of Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Romania – were deported, imprisoned, and often murdered’. Because the USSR classified so much information, it is difficult to establish precise figures (Davies 2007: 24–25).

Unforgettable Truth – Unforgivable Crime War is part of a heritage that is intimately national. War monuments tell us about our heroes, those who fought for our country. G.J. Ashworth and P.J. Larkham explain that this happens ‘partly because these relics and monuments have always been of major, and possibly disproportionate, importance in what can be termed “public history”; that is, the financing, organization or encouragement by government agencies at various scales of relics, monuments and locations in a declared public interest’ (Ashworth and Larkham 1994: 2). Other researchers argue that ‘such public histories are only one element in the private histories that form the heritage of individuals’ (cited in ibidem). Collective and private memories are shaped by many factors, including official commemorations, mourning, funerals, laying wreaths at special places and so on. The officers who were killed in the regions of Starobielsk, Kozielsk and Katyń have now been honoured with many monuments and plaques, along with many ceremonies which reflect a highly politicised context.9 In the early 1990s, the explosion of documentary materials about the Katyń massacre – including photography and films – made it perfectly clear that the Russians had committed this crime. The press printed photographs from renewed exhumations, and state television also reported on the progress of the reopened investigation. One of the first and most important undertakings was the aforementioned Franco-Polish documentary film Las katyński (1990). In the twenty-first century, information about the Katyń massacre reached a popular audience through various television channels and documentary films that were made and broadcast across Europe, including Poland. Telling the truth is often understood as a moral act that can be used to win tactical advantage in political ‘games’ or to provide an impulse for all sorts of actions (in court or on the battlefield, for example) which will help to anchor collective memories further. Moral rectitude in the case of the Katyń massacre translated into media messages demanding justice. Justice for the murdered initially meant recognition by the Soviets (and now the Russians) that they were responsible for the crime. For many years, Stalinist propaganda and the silence of the Western world blocked

310 | Urszula Jarecka

investigation.10 It was only in 2010 that the Russian Duma finally issued a communiqué stating that the Katyń massacre had been perpetrated by the Stalinist regime – and this was met with protests in Russia.11 Justice and atonement for the victims and their families are simply the latest forms of the politicisation and the recognition of the truth. Perceiving the truth from an ethical perspective and the subsequent demand for the rehabilitation of the murdered officers raised many questions. Why rehabilitation? What would that mean? Rhetorically, the demand for rehabilitation suggests that the Polish officers might have been improperly accused of some wrongdoing. Does it mean that they were guilty of simply being Polish officers? Clearly, the twenty-two thousand Polish soldiers that died were guilty of nothing vis-à-vis the Soviet aggressor. One possible consequence of the rehabilitation could be the legal recognition of the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939. Nevertheless, the denials of the Soviets (and, later, of the Russians) have hampered and hurt Polish national memory and disputes of this kind will no doubt continue.

Anchoring the Truth of the Katyń Massacre in Contemporary Media Discourse How can one tell the story of what happened in Katyń? Andrzej Wajda’s feature film Katyń (2007) echoes certain motifs typical of the Russian documents of World War II. For example, one of the most moving scenes in Katyń, the desecration of the red and white Polish flag by reducing it to a red flag resembling that of the Bolsheviks, was not invented by Wajda. Indeed, documentary materials presented in the 2009 film Marsz wyzwolicieli [March of the Liberators] portray an identical scene in a Soviet newsreel from either 1939 or 1945. Depicting the ‘whole truth’ of reality in photographic or film form is impossible. Nonetheless, the visualisation of certain aspects of the truth can still be attempted. The documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty went even further, saying, ‘Sometimes you have to lie. Often we must bend the facts in order to get at the spirit of the truth’ (quoted in Kołodyński 1981: 67–68). This could be seen as the postulate of pursuing manifestatio in art. The truth as an aesthetic category is subordinated to beauty and subjective experience. For example, one may recognise that the feature film Katyń is saturated with anger, thus becoming a depiction of a sort of emotional truth. Unverifiable facts and events (along with those that are hard to verify) create a space for shaping historical and national myths. ‘General Sikorski

Rhetorical Strategies in Discourse on the Katyń Massacre | 311

was killed at Gibraltar’ is a statement of fact; but the circumstances in which he died are unclear. For instance, before his death, the General sought an official, non-partisan investigation into the Katyń massacre, and this caused the USSR to sever ties with the Polish government in exile and also caused dissatisfaction among the Allies. It should be added here that, in 1943, the British government classified the documents concerning the catastrophe. Hence, a conundrum remains, and, despite one investigation after another (including the exhumation of the General), there are still doubts about whether he was in fact assassinated.12 It is only natural for viewers (and more broadly, society) to express a desire for new interpretations, especially when they suspect or presuppose that the ones that they had been given for so long were incomplete or even deceitful. Katyń will no doubt continue to trigger public imagination and new narratives will emerge. This is a clear consequence of decades of denials. This exploration of some wounded memories in Polish public discourse demonstrates the way in which memory of the past, conveyed socially, politically and, above all, culturally, is an important element in the construction of social reality and truth (Berger and Luckmann 1991; Halbwachs 1992; Searle 2010: 14–18, 38–41).

Notes  1. The town of Katyń lies in western Russia, not far from its border with Belarus. In the 1930s, Katyń was a site where the NKVD carried out mass murder, initially as part of the Stalinist purges. (The NKVD was the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, a law-enforcement agency that included members of the secret police of the Soviet Union. It executed the rule of power of the Russian Communist Party from 1934 to 1946.) In and around Katyń in April and May of 1940, the Soviets murdered nearly twenty-two thousand Polish officers and members of the Polish intelligentsia whom they had been holding as prisoners of war. Each of the Poles was shot with a pistol in the back of the head, the bodies then being thrown into mass graves and buried (see Davies 2007: 181).  2. The previous three partitions of Poland occurred in 1772, 1793 and 1795, when Russia, Prussia and Austria successively dismembered Poland, resulting in the disappearance of the entire country from the map.  3. The documentary film by the Polish director Alexander Ford, Majdanek: Cmentarzysko Europy [Majdanek – A European Cemetery] (1944), featuring the Nazi death camp, met with similar disbelief, as it was treated as a tool of the USSR’s anti-German propaganda.  4. See Ellul (1965: 9–15), Toffler and Toffler (1993: 195–99), Jarecka (2008: 199–227), Sorensen (1968: 31 ff.), and Cialdini (2002: 26–29).  5. ‘The press was calling everything into question’, recalls President Edward Raczyński in the Franco-Polish documentary film Las katyński [The Katyń Forest] (1990). Raczyński was the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Polish government in exile at the time of the massacre.

312 | Urszula Jarecka

 6. Norman Davies recalls the instructions for British soldiers: ‘the weight of public opinion was overwhelmingly pro-Soviet, and the British authorities actively encouraged the notion of Katyń being a Nazi crime. British soldiers were threatened with court martial for “loose talk” suggesting otherwise’ (Davies 2007: 182); and ‘British officers were forbidden to participate in Katyń memorial ceremonies’ (ibidem: 13–14). In Las katyński, Witold Kulerski, a former member of the National Council of the Polish Government during World War II, confirms the existence of such attitudes and quotes Churchill as having said, ‘It is not in the interest of the nations fighting the beast Hitler to cause an outcry over the matter of the murdered Polish officers. The matter must be set aside for now’. In that same film, the comments of diplomats who had served during World War II confirm that Poland was regarded as a troublesome ally. For instance, Frank Roberts, who had served at the Polish office of the British Ministry for Foreign Affairs, stated that it was clear to them who had committed the Katyń massacre, but there was no proof: ‘there is still no proof that would be reliable in court’, Roberts argued. On the crucial role that the Allies played in covering up the truth of Katyń, see also Maresch (2010) and Etkind et al. (2012).  7. Norman Davies writes: ‘My own research into Polish wartime history gave me a strong sense of the inbuilt bias. One quickly learned that the Soviet Union had invaded Poland and occupied the half of Poland in September 1939, just as Germany had invaded and occupied the other half. Yet Western historians continued to write exclusively about “the Nazi invasion of Poland”. The Soviet zone of occupation was simply not regarded as a zone of occupation. Nazi propaganda on such matters was dismissed out of hand. Soviet propaganda was not questioned’ (Davies 2007: 13).  8. Here, one may wonder if such objectification of human beings is not an attribute of all acts of mass execution, because it results in a dehumanisation that is applied by the perpetrators of atrocities as a strategy to avoid moral responsibility. Stanley Cohen writes about such techniques of denial and other psychological mechanisms used in order to pacify the conscience of the perpetrators (Cohen 2001: 88 ff.). This problem is discussed broadly in Modernity and the Holocaust by Zygmunt Bauman (1989). Bauman describes the transformation of human beings into numbers during bureaucratic procedures.  9. The Smoleńsk catastrophe of 10 April 2010, in which the ninety-six Poles aboard the presidential plane were killed (including President Lech Kaczyński himself), has cast yet another shadow over the memory of the murdered officers (to whom the delegation aboard that aeroplane was to pay homage) in that it reopened the wounded memory of the past treatment of Poles by the Soviets/Russians, and also reminded Poles of how deeply divided they remain over the years of their country’s forced subservience to Russia. 10. The first international investigation on the Katyń massacre was carried out in 1943. The Red Cross prepared a report on the exhumations, and one Polish writer, Józef Mackiewicz, who witnessed the investigation, wrote a book entitled The Katyn Wood Murders, published in 1951. The attitudes of Churchill and Roosevelt towards the Katyń crime are now well documented. See, for example, http://www.times highereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=401810/ (accessed 12 December 2013). Moreover, in 1953 the US Congress prepared a report on the ‘Hearings on Katyn Wood Crime 1951/1952’ (the full version was published in The Katyn Forest Massacre: see Committee on House Administration, United States House of Representatives 1988). It is now well known that the whole story on the massacre had been covered up at the time. On this topic, see http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2012/09/ files-show-us-covered-up-soviet-guilt-in-katyn-massacre/1/ (accessed 12 December

Rhetorical Strategies in Discourse on the Katyń Massacre | 313

2013). For more information, see http://katyncrime.pl/The,Katyn,Massacre,517.html/ (accessed 12 December 2013). 11. See http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/11/26/russian-parliament-stalin-ordered-kat yn-massacre/ for example (accessed 12 December 2013). To this day, some Russian historians claim that the Katyń massacre was the work of the Germans. This is the case of Yuriy Zhukov, for example, who denies any involvement of the Red Army and insists that it was the work of the Nazis. Zhukov publicises his views via the Komsomolska Pravda, which is recognised as a propaganda organ for Putin (see http://wiadomosci. wp.pl/kat,1356,title,Historyk-zamordowani-w-Katyniu-nie-byli-oficerami-i-generalamipolskiej-armii,wid,13267733,wiadomosc.html?ticaid=1c084/, accessed 12 December 2013). In 2010, Stalin’s grandson sued the Russian Duma for maligning the memory of his grandfather when it ascribed responsibility for the massacre to Stalin (see http://wiadomosci.onet.pl/swiat/4080080,wiadomosc-drukuj.html/, accessed 12 December 2013). 12. The documents are still classified, and will remain so until 2033: http://sunday.niedziela. pl/artykul.php?dz=z_historii&id_art=00033/ (accessed 12 December 2013). A range of feature films and documentary materials in audiovisual culture have been made on this topic; for example Anna Jadowska’s 2009 film Generał: Zamach na Gibraltarze [The General: Assassinated at Gibraltar].

References Anders, W. 1982. Zbrodnia katyńska w świetle dokumentów. London: Gryf. Ashworth, G.J. and P.J. Larkham. 1994. Building a New Heritage: Tourism, Culture and Identity in the New Europe. London: Routledge. Bauman, Z. 1989. Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity Press. Berger, P.L. and T. Luckmann. 1991. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Penguin Books. Cialdini, R. 2002. Wywieranie wpływu na ludzi: Teoria i praktyka, transl. B. Wojciszke. Gdańsk: GWP. Cohen, S. 2001. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge: Polity Press. Committee on House Administration, United States House of Representatives. 1988. The Katyn Forest Massacre: Final Report of the Select Committee to Conduct an Investigation and Study the Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre. Pursuant to H. Res. 390 and H. Res. 539 (82nd Congress, 2nd Session). Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Czubryt-Borkowski, C. and J. Michasiewicz. 1988. Przewodnik po upamiętnionych miejscach walki i męczeństwa: lata wojny 1939–1945. Warsaw: Sport i Turystyka. Davies, N. 2007. Europe at War 1939–1945: No Simple Victory. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Dobroński, A. 2009. ‘IV rozbiór Polski’, in M. Niewierowicz and B. Borucki (eds.), Polska pod sowiecką okupacją. Białystok: Media Regionalne, pp. 13-41. Ellul, J. 1965. Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. New York: Knopf. Etkind, A., R. Finnin, U. Blacker, J. Fedor, S. Lewis, M. Mälksoo and M. Mroz. 2012. Remembering Katyń. Cambridge: Polity Press. Foucault, M. 2001. ‘Truth and Power’, in M. P. Lynch, The Nature of Truth: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, pp. 317-19. Halbwachs, M. 1992. On Collective Memory, trans. and ed. L.A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

314 | Urszula Jarecka

Jankowski, S.M. and E. Miszczak. 1990. Powrót do Katynia. Rzeszów: KAW. Jarecka, U. 2008. Propaganda wizualna słusznej wojny: Media wizualne XX wieku wobec konfliktów zbrojnych. Warsaw: IFIS PAN. Jasiński, G. 2009. ‘Atak na Polskę’, in Katyń i okupacja sowiecka (II wojna światowa: wydarzenia, ludzie, bojowe szlaki, vol. 7). Warsaw: New Media Concept. Kołodyński, A. 1981. Tropami filmowej prawdy. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe. Król, E.C. 1999. Propaganda i indoktrynacja narodowego socjalizmu w Niemczech, 1919–1945: Studium organizacji, tresci, metod i technik masowego oddziaływania. Warsaw: ISP PAN-Rytm. Mackiewicz, J. 1951. The Katyn Wood Murders. London: Hollis and Carter. Maresch, E. 2010. Katyn 1940. Stroud: The History Press. Melak, S. 1989. Katyń – Synteza. S.l: s.n. Polski, A. 2009. Między Warszawš a Lwowem: Pomniki i miejsca pamięci narodowej od Ryk do Hrebennego w województwie lubelskim. Lublin Fajsławice: Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Fajsławic. Searle, J.R. 2010. Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. New York: Oxford University Press. Sorensen, T.C. 1968. The Word War: The Story of American Propaganda. New York: Harper & Row. Stróżewski, W. 1992. O wartościach. Kraków: Znak. Szcześniak, A.L. 1989. Katyń: tło historyczne, fakty, dokumenty. Warsaw: ‘Afa’. Taylor, P.M. 1999. Propaganda of the Twentieth Century: Selling Democracy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Toffler, A. and H. Toffler. 1993. War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century. London: Little, Brown & Company. Trznadel, J. 2000. The Crime of Katyń, transl. B. Zborski. Warsaw: Central Club of the Polish Army. Weil, S. 2003. Simone Weil’s The Iliad or The Poem of Force, transl. and ed. J.P. Holoka. New York: Peter Lang.

Filmography Defilada zwycięzców [Victors’ Parade]. 2007, dir. Grzegorz Braun and Robert Kaczmarek Dowody zbrodni: Katyń 1940 [Evidence of an Atrocity: Katyń 1940]. 2008, dir. Paulina Maciejewska Generał: Zamach na Gibraltarze [The General: Assassinated at Gibraltar]. 2009, dir. Anna Jadowska Katyń. 2007, dir. Andrzej Wajda Las katyński [The Katyń Forest]. 1990, dir. Marcel Łoziński Majdanek: Cmentarzysko Europy [Majdanek – A European Cemetery]. 1944, dir Alexander Ford Marsz wyzwolicieli [March of the Liberators], dir. Grzegorz Braun

Rhetorical Strategies in Discourse on the Katyń Massacre | 315

Urszula Jarecka is Associate Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw and at the National Defence University, Warsaw-Rembertów, where she teaches sociology. She has published many articles and two books on World War II, Propaganda wizualna słusznej wojny [Visual Propaganda of the Just War] (2008) and Nikczemny wojownik na słusznej wojnie [Villainous Warrior in the Just War] (2009).

Chapter 18

The Second World War in Recent Polish Counterfactual and Alternative (Hi)stories

( Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż

Counterfactual and alternative histories have their devoted fans as well as fierce opponents, but it is hard not to agree with Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, the author of The World Hitler Never Made (2005: 14), when he states that ‘arguably the most important thing to recognise about popular cultural representations of history … is their immense public reach’. The greatest value in writing such histories may well be that they challenge entrenched assumptions of so-called ‘national memory’, which is a politically sanctified and culturally instilled version of the nation’s past, popularised by various ‘institutions of memory’ such as ‘schools, courts, museums and the mass media’ (Misztal 2003: 19) and legitimised through official ceremonies and mainstream cultural productions (literature, art, film), pinpointing selected historical events as the cornerstones of national identity. National memory is a form of collective memory, defined by Maurice Halbwachs as ‘the degree to which our individual thought places itself in [the social framework]’ (1992: 38). The major epistemological drawback of collective memory is that it does not offer an understanding of the historical complexities of the past but serves the sole purpose of binding a community in the present: ‘collective memory simplifies, sees events from a single committed perspective, it is impatient with ambiguities of any kind, reduces events to mythic stereotypes’ (Novick 2000: 4). This chapter investigates alternative and counterfactual stories and historical accounts written by Polish authors: Marcin Ciszewski’s www.1939. com.pl (2008a) – a novel addressing the question of whether Poles could have won the September Campaign in 1939 – and Marcin Wolski’s Wallenrod (2009) and Piotr Zychowicz’s The Ribbentrop–Beck Pact (2012), Notes for this chapter begin on page 328.

The Second World War in Recent Polish Alternative (Hi)stories | 317

a novel and a historical study, respectively, in which both authors argue that Poland should have formed a military alliance with the Third Reich rather than with France and Britain. Considering the disastrous consequences of the decisions made by the Polish government at the time, the question of whether standing by the Third Reich would not have served Poland’s interests better is a valid one, even though it raises obvious ethical issues. Far more importantly, envisaging an alternative scenario of history could allow the interrogation of the simplistic assumption of collective victimhood that has proved the main obstacle to a critical analysis of Polish policies and national conduct during the Second World War. An imaginary alliance with the Third Reich can also hypothetically provide a perspective on Poland as an aggressor, which is essential for an in-depth assessment of the historically factual conflicts that erupted between Poles and Lithuanians, as well as Poles and Ukrainians, in the final years of the war, taking a heavy toll of lives of both soldiers and civilians.1 Such a fictitious alliance offers, moreover, the opportunity of foregrounding Poles as perpetrators, a view which could prove most useful for a comprehensive discussion of Polish complicity in the Holocaust. Alternative and counterfactual histories may effectively contribute towards developing a historical consciousness which ‘wants to bring to light traumatic, repressed, and censored memories, and again questions dangerous stereotypes which have been lurking over some historical events’ (Fortunati and Lamberti 2010: 129). If collective memory ‘­typically … is understood to express some eternal or essential truth about the group’ (Novick 2000: 4), historical consciousness offers a more distanced and critical approach to a community’s past. As Novick puts it (2000: 4): To understand something historically is to be aware of its complexity, to have sufficient detachment to see it from multiple perspectives, to accept the ambiguities, including moral ambiguities, of protagonists’ motives and behavior. … Historical consciousness focuses on the historicity of events – that they took place then and not now, that they grew out of circumstances different from those that now obtain.

Alternative and counterfactual histories may help to deconstruct national (collective) memories and offer richer, transnational or even transhistorical perspectives on the war. Yet, as will be seen, the works chosen for analysis here fail to follow this path; instead, their authors use alternative historical scenarios as a means of perpetuating an idea of the nation, defined in the nineteenth century as ‘a rich legacy of remembrances’ (Renan 1994: 17) which cannot be questioned or negated, for this is the assumed foundation of national unity in the present.

318 | Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż

Marcin Ciszewski’s www.1939.com.pl is a perfect example of the crippling effects of (collective) national memory. The plot of the novel (borrowed from the 1980 film The Final Countdown, directed by Don Taylor) is quite entertaining in itself: an excellently trained Polish battalion preparing for a NATO mission in Afghanistan suddenly and unexpectedly finds itself thrust into the September 1939 Campaign. The Polish soldiers of 2007 have an immense technological advantage over the German army of 1939, for what has travelled with them into the past is their superior military equipment, including the newest generation of tanks, transporters, helicopters, mortars, howitzers, anti-aircraft weapons, cluster bombs and machine guns. Of course, they also have the advantage of possessing historical knowledge about the overall strategy of the German army, as well as the tactics adopted in particular battles. They are thus empowered to avert the greatest military disaster in Polish history and ‘smash into smithereens the myth of German invincibility’ (Ciszewski 2008a: 164).2 This incredible scenario offers the perfect opportunity for a reinterpretation of the September 1939 Campaign from the perspective of the political and ethical nuances of contemporary military conflicts as well as their representations in literature and film. However, Ciszewski is trapped in the realm of official Polish national memory, where soldiers are stripped of all individual features and are perceived as one composite entity, obliged by honour to safeguard the country’s independence. Notably, this can be seen in his assertion of the moral superiority that the Polish soldiers, fighting in 1939, have over their counterparts from 2007. When Colonel Jerzy Grobicki is ordered to assemble men for a military mission in Afghanistan, he selects those whom he considers ‘intelligent, courageous, imaginative and talented tactically’; yet he is fully aware that they drink too much, tend to be insubordinate and generally treat the army as a means of making easy money (29). They see their mission as an opportunity for a great, albeit short, adventure that will bring swift and easy glory but, most importantly, financial gain (31). The contemporary soldier is a man who chose the army as his professional career, and he has the option of agreeing or refusing to go on a (lucrative) combat mission. Grobicki’s men do not expect to be forced to sacrifice their lives in the war against terrorism. The narrator states that ‘we believed that we would first train for a couple of weeks, then we would go to Afghanistan, where, under the tender care of the Americans, we would slip through the war without any particular worries or casualties’ (92). When these contemporary soldiers find themselves in the first hours of the Second World War, they are not exactly willing to fight, claiming that this is ‘not their war’ (143) and that the ‘Germans are now our allies’ (89). There is, of course, the choice of evading combat one way or

The Second World War in Recent Polish Alternative (Hi)stories | 319

another; nevertheless, they remain to fight in order to prove themselves worthy of their historical predecessors. Ciszewski emphasises their swift transformation into ‘real men’ (156) under the pressure of the realities of a war so fundamentally different from the circumstances they would have encountered in Afghanistan. There remains, however, a crucial difference between the soldiers of 1939, who held out as long as they could against the overwhelming forces of the German army out of a strong sense of patriotic duty, and Grobicki’s men, who engage in combat primarily because they know they have a unique advantage over the enemy. The climax of the novel is the battle of Mokra, which seems at first a surprising choice, considering that, here, no rewriting of the original event needed to take place since it was one of the very few battles won by the Polish side in the September Campaign. Yet the author’s intentions become very obvious when his narrator belittles the role of the soldiers from the present in the confrontation, emphasising the role of the Polish Volhynian Cavalry Brigade of 1939 under the command of Colonel Julian Filipowicz. He remarks: ‘it is ironical, by the way, that the newest laseraiming systems, supported by sophisticated computer technology, the immense calibre of the guns, the destructive impact of ammunition, and a lot of superior machine guns would not be of much use without the bayonet charge of a few hundred cavalrymen, supported by archaic artillery. It was an ­obvious example of the victory of the spirit over technology’ (248–49). In Ciszewski’s own words, his intention was to create an action-packed story with much fighting (2008b). The novel, however, also pays tribute to the Polish soldiers of 1939, and can be seen as a textual equivalent of the architectural monument, defined by Arthur Danto as follows: ‘We erect monuments so that we shall always remember … . Monuments make heroes and triumphs, victories and conquests, perpetually present and part of life. The memorial is a special precinct, extruded from life, a segregated enclave where we honor the dead. With monuments, we honor ourselves’ (1985: 152). Monuments are necessary to consolidate and perpetuate national memory, but they do not contribute anything to historical knowledge and our understanding of the past. Ciszewski is not interested in the psychology of combat. He provides no instances of mental breakdown, combat fatigue, acts of cowardice, or atrocities committed in the heat of battle. There are no gruesome descriptions of the wounded and the dead. There is no effort to understand the German soldiers of that time, their motivations and experience. In other words, Ciszewski not only shows war as an adventure and a challenge, but also endeavours to prove that there is glory in fighting for one’s country. War is not a computer game, and even if Polish soldiers had no choice but to fight in 1939,

320 | Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż

this does not mean that they were particularly willing or that they all fought with honour. Ciszewski’s alternative history is basically a combat narrative. In this respect, the British author and ex-soldier Andy Johnson’s Seelöwe Nord: The Germans are Coming (2010), a recent alternative historical novel about the German invasion of Britain, offers a more complex perspective on soldiers at war. In the author’s own words, his purpose in re-writing history was to ‘give [the civilian] an inkling of the horror, the adrenaline-fuelled thrill, and sometimes the complete absurdity of war’ (2010: Foreword, unnumbered page). As the writer Tomasz Łubieński aptly observes, Poland’s defensive war was never mythologised in a manner comparable to the national apotheosis of the Warsaw Uprising (2009: 16–17). The reasons for this are more complex than simply the fact that the Polish army was defeated after only thirty-five days (1 September–6 October). By the end of Ciszewski’s novel, the reader learns that the return to the past was not a coincidence, but an intricate plan concocted by Grobicki’s commanding officer. In a letter, General Lucjan Dressler explains that the soldiers are sent back to 1939 in order to avert a chain of events which was ‘the cause of all the evil lurking in [Polish society] in our contemporary times, and it is still lurking because of the Polish defeat in the September Campaign, and the result of a lost war. For was it not a lost war, since we suffered fifty years of Communist oppression, which distorted our proud national character and resulted in the return of our country to the era of the cavemen?’ (Ciszewski 2008a: 280). This particular passage from Ciszewski’s novel finds echoes in Marcin Wolski’s novel Wallenrod and Piotr Zychowicz’s study The Ribbentrop–Beck Pact, for, without understanding the reasons for which the military defeat in 1939 is considered the most disastrous of events in Polish history, it is impossible to understand why, retrospectively, an alliance with the Third Reich could seem to be a better alternative. On 5 May 1939, the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Józef Beck, delivered a speech in the Polish Parliament, in which he rejected Adolf Hitler’s ultimatum, concluding with the famous words that the honour of a nation is preferable to peace on any terms. Wolski justifies his fictitious scenario with the actual words of Marshal Józef Piłsudski:3 ‘States do not have honour, only interests. If we lose our state, honour will be as useful to us as incense to the dead’ (2009: 390). Exploiting the possibilities of fiction, Wolski does not allow Piłsudski to die in 1935, in consequence of which Beck is removed from the Foreign Ministry, and Piłsudski himself negotiates the terms of a Polish-German alliance with Adolf Hitler. According to Zychowicz, surrendering political pragmatism to ethical considerations was an unforgivable mistake:

The Second World War in Recent Polish Alternative (Hi)stories | 321

as a result of an irresponsible decision that put Poland in the first line of attack from two totalitarian giants, millions of Polish citizens were murdered, including our social elite. Our factories were destroyed; so were our cities and infrastructure. We were deprived of our independence and half our territory was amputated. … The painful consequences of that catastrophe were not only felt throughout the first ten, twenty, thirty or forty years after the Second World War – we are still feeling them today. (Zychowicz 2012: 135)

This is why Zychowicz condemns Beck’s decision to form an alliance with France and Great Britain, and explores the likely outcome of a Ribbentrop– Beck Pact that never happened. Zychowicz repudiates the argument of an immoral alliance by citing the examples of Hungary, Romania, Finland, Bulgaria, Croatia and Italy, which did not become ‘forever dishonoured’ in post-war international opinion (112), and Wolski follows the same path, creating an alternative version of the Warsaw Pact that is brought into being in 1940 and unites Poland in a common cause with all the states that actually fought alongside the Third Reich. Both Zychowicz and Wolski accept that Poland would have lost Gdańsk/ Danzig and that the Polish government would have granted permission for the building of an extra-territorial highway connecting Germany with East Prussia. Both suggest, however, the immense gains that would have come from a victorious campaign against the Soviet Union. Poland would have retained and consolidated its hold over the Vilnius and Volhynia regions (part of the Second Polish Republic in the inter-war period, belonging today to Lithuania and the Ukraine, respectively). Furthermore, as a result of the Polish troops’ liberation of Latvia and Estonia, Poland would have achieved control over most of Eastern Europe. The scenarios conjured up by both Zychowicz and Wolski are, in essence, an adaptation of Józef Piłsudski’s idea of a great Eastern European federation of nations led by Poland. Though one could easily dissect this political vision as an expression of Polish territorial expansionism, both authors pay uncritical tribute to the political greatness of the Polish national hero. The following remark by Zychowicz sums up his thoughts on this matter: If Germany, with its racist ideology and wild plans of colonisation of the East in search for Lebensraum, did not have the moral right to attack the Soviet Union – Hitler wanted to substitute one dictatorship with another – then Poland had this moral right. Vast territories that had once belonged to Poland were under Soviet rule ….. We had something to fight for in a war against the Soviets and we had every right to claim the liberation of these lands. It was part of our heritage. (55)

Though both Zychowicz and Wolski ostentatiously repudiate the ideal of honour, their narratives paradoxically create an image of a nation that

322 | Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż

would have remained unblemished by fighting side by side with Hitler’s soldiers. The alliance with the Third Reich is purported to be only a tactical and temporary solution. Zychowicz argues that his counterfactual historical study does not serve to undermine the validity of fighting against the Third Reich; his point is that Poland should have done everything to postpone a war with her historical enemy, Germany, until this enemy was weakened enough to be easily overcome. In essence, this is an adaptation of Piłsudski’s successful idea from the First World War to fight alongside the Central Powers against Russia, and to turn against Imperial Germany at the moment when it was on the verge of defeat. Thus Zychowicz envisages in his work a scenario that Polish forces fight together with the Wehrmacht when it is at its strongest. Hitler’s war with Western Europe would bring about the entry of the USA into the conflict and the invasion of Normandy. It is then that Polish authorities would have started secret negotiations with the Allies to stab Nazi Germany in the back. Poland would have regained Gdańsk/Danzig, and East Prussia would be integrated into the Polish state. Consequently, the Baltic countries, as well as Ukraine and Belarus, would willingly have joined the Polish-controlled federation of states. Wolski’s alternative fiction is determined by a similar conviction that the Polish alliance with the Third Reich would have been only a superficial alliance, as indicated by the title of the novel, Wallenrod, which is the pseudonym of the narrator who recounts her story as a Polish secret agent working as a secretary and translator for Adolf Hitler. Her pseudonym is a borrowing from Konrad Wallenrod, written by the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz and published in 1828, where the eponymous hero is a Lithuanian who becomes, by means of deceit, the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights for the sole purpose of leading them into a battle that they would lose. Wolski’s female agent is instrumental in preventing the annihilation of the leaders of the states allied with the Third Reich, including the President of Poland, which would have allowed Hitler to subjugate all of Eastern and Central Europe. Ultimately, Adolf Hitler is overthrown by a group of generals, including Count von Stauffenberg, which paves the way for a civil war in Germany. Whilst Germany is weakened by two years of internal conflict, Poland becomes an Eastern European empire. The narratives construed by Wolski and Zychowicz create a simplistic opposition between honourable Poles and brutal Nazis. Such narratives contrast with many British and American alternative histories that engage in challenging the (conventional) ‘story of demonic villains and virtuous heroes and replacing it with a graver perspective that recognises the period’s immense complexity’ and testify to the ‘normalisation’ of the

The Second World War in Recent Polish Alternative (Hi)stories | 323

Third Reich in many Western countries (Rosenfeld 2005: 393). The British director Kevin Brownlow’s controversial decision to include British neofascists and allow them to voice their opinions in a chilling depiction of England under German occupation adds another layer of meaning to the title of the alternative historical film, It Happened Here (released in 1964); the British author Len Deighton strikes at the heart of the myth of ‘our finest hour’ by his uncompromising depiction of British collaboration under German occupation in the alternative historical fiction SS-GB (1978), whilst the Welsh novelist Murray Davies’ alternative historical fiction, entitled Collaborator (2003), dissects the processes by which national heroes are invented by questioning the ethics of underground movements. Concomitantly, the normalisation of the Third Reich allows the presentation of a more universal meaning of the past, where Nazism is no longer treated as being exclusively German and the nation’s guilt becomes a mirror that reflects ‘the gray realities of human behavior’ (Rosenfeld 2005: 394), and is able to shed new light on the burning issues at the core of contemporary European and US societies. In his alternative historical novel, Making History (1996), the British author Stephen Fry sets out to prove that the complete elimination of Adolf Hitler from history would result in a reality even more deeply scarred by anti-­Semitism, racism and homophobia. In the American author Daniel Quinn’s combined alternative history and dystopia fiction, entitled After Dachau (2001), the Nazi is redefined as a ‘not-see’ (2001: 130), i.e. a person who, by deliberately forgetting about the past, does not see that the past is being repeated in the present. It is obvious that imagining a scenario where Poland stands side by side with the Third Reich must inevitably lead to the question of the Holocaust. Yet, writing about the joint attack on the Soviet Union, Zychowicz simply writes of how Poles liberate grateful nations from Soviet terror whereas ‘Germans commit horrendous crimes in the East. The Wehrmacht is followed by special SS units, Einsatzgruppen, who carry out mass extermination of Jews’ (2012: 13). Zychowicz addresses the problem of the Polish treatment of Jews openly in a separate chapter in which he criticises historians such as Jan Tomasz Gross, the author of Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (2001) and Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (2006). Defining himself as a historian from ‘the patriotic school’ (124), Zychowicz sarcastically writes: ‘Historians similar to Jan Tomasz Gross would most probably accept that we would have handed over all our Jewish citizens to the Germans. Perhaps we would have even murdered them ourselves, to save the Germans the trouble’ (124). On the contrary, he argues, Jewish citizens would have been safe in a Poland allied with the Third Reich:

324 | Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż

There could be no mass extermination of Jews without the logistical cooperation of Polish authorities. … Perhaps in the 1930s Jews were not much liked in Poland … , but to assume that we would have suddenly started to murder our citizens of Jewish origin is disgraceful. For if Poles were like that, they would not have needed any Germans. The second Polish Republic was an independent state between 1918 and 1939, and the fate of 3.5 million Jews was in the hands of the Polish authorities. No actual harm, however, was done to the Jews. (126)

Zychowicz also claims that Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Finland and Italy are examples of states where citizens of Jewish origin were saved despite the countries’ political and/or military support of the Third Reich. Overall, however, it is his firm belief in Polish righteousness that dominates his argument: Let us imagine that Poland in 1939 becomes an ally of the Third Reich. … Is it possible to imagine that an SS company suddenly crosses the PolishGerman border, travels by train to a town called Auschwitz, and begins to put up barbed wire round former Austro-Hungarian barracks? … That is absurd. These SS soldiers would be immediately gunned down by Polish soldiers from the nearest garrison, and Ribbentrop would have to work hard to find an explanation and apologise for the incident. One thing is certain – there would have been no death camps erected on Polish soil. (125–26) … Indoctrinated by the anti-Semitic propaganda of the NSDAP, German soldiers – especially the SS – could have committed acts of atrocity against the Jews [on the territory of Poland]. But in such a case, Poland would have certainly sent protests to Berlin, and the German criminals would have had to face Polish military police. (131)

Zychowicz evades the question of how extreme nationalist and openly anti-Semitic Polish organisations would have behaved in his counterfactual reality, and even though it is true that both the Camp of Great Poland (Obóz Wielkiej Polski) and the National Radical Camp (Obóz NarodowoRadykalny) were banned in the inter-war period, a Polish alliance with the Third Reich could have reactivated them. Wolski also downplays the role of such organisations in his alternative Poland, and it is interesting to note that, though he freely changes the length of life of many historical figures, he does not alter the year of Roman Dmowski’s death, in 1939. Dmowski was one of the signatories of the Versailles Treaty, and the territory of Poland in the inter-war years was to a large extent the result of his successful diplomatic efforts. Yet he was also the leader of the National Democracy party (Narodowa Demokracja), and was personally renowned for his strong anti-Semitic beliefs. It would

The Second World War in Recent Polish Alternative (Hi)stories | 325

have been a daring decision to let him live in Wallenrod, and to have to speculate on his decisions and actions. Wolski – like Zychowicz – has no interest in bringing to the foreground darker aspects of an invented Nazi-Polish pact, consistently evading the difficult, and yet so important, question of Polish anti-Semitism. By letting Dmowski die in the year when he actually died (1939), Wolski can freely assert that, with his death, the National Radical Camp loses much of its significance (2009: 92). His novel mentions the Kristallnacht, the Wannsee Conference (where the Final Solution was decided upon), Heinrich Himmler and the building of concentration camps. It also mentions atrocities committed by Ukrainians against Jews for the simple reason that ‘for centuries Ukraine has always been anti-Semitic’ (199). The most disturbing idea of the novel is, however, the rewriting of the history of Jedwabne, the infamous place where Poles (and not Germans) burnt alive their Jewish neighbours in a barn. In Wolski’s version, Jews are gathered in a barn in a village called Anatevka, an obvious allusion to Fiddler on the Roof, a Broadway musical first performed in 1964, which was followed by a film adaptation in 1971 directed by Norman Jewison. Set in Tsarist Russia, the story ends with the enforced eviction of the Jewish population. Wolski shifts the responsibility for this eviction from the Poles to place it on the shoulders of fictitious characters, whose nationality is deliberately rendered ambiguous. The point is that Wolski never unequivocally defines where Anatevka is situated in his novel.4 Such a shift of responsibility, even in a work of fiction, raises ethical questions and it could be argued that this is morally unacceptable since, even in fiction, a novelist should not include a denial of national responsibility for acts of genocide. One has to admit that the Holocaust is not a major concern in the works of Zychowicz and Wolski. Even though The Ribbentrop–Beck Pact aspires to be an informed counterfactual history, with an impressive bibliography of documentary sources, it does not adhere to the most important and basic rule that ‘counterfactual scenarios … are not mere fantasy: they are simulations based on calculations about the relative probability of plausible outcomes in a chaotic world’ (Ferguson 1999: 85). Zychowicz does not analyse the array of possible consequences of an alliance with the Third Reich, but focuses his attention on the unquestionable (in his opinion) defeat of the Soviet Union; and the most memorable scene in Wolski’s novel is when General Stanisław Maczek leads the Polish tanks into Moscow which surrenders after three days of fighting. Significantly, Wolski situates the Polish command headquarters in Katyń, which suggests that, in such an alternative scenario, the massacre of over twenty thousand Poles (officers as well as representatives of the Polish intelligentsia) would never have occurred.

326 | Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż

This fixation on the need to destroy the Soviet Union in Wolski’s Wallenrod and Zychowicz’s The Ribbentrop–Beck Pact, especially when set against the consistent emphasis on the Holocaust in British, German and American alternative and counterfactual histories, exemplifies perfectly Emmanuel Droit’s argument of the existence of ‘an iron curtain’ dividing Western and Eastern European ‘cultures of memory’ in ‘Le Goulag contre la Shoah’ [The Gulag versus the Holocaust] (2010). He defines ‘culture of memory’ as more than just a series of ‘institutional actions’: it is first and foremost ‘a social fact’ that implies a different hierarchy of significance for historical events (Droit 2010: 23). For Eastern European countries under Soviet occupation, the labour camps known as gulags testify to their own national martyrdom, clearly defining them as victims of oppression. According to Droit, ‘since the 1960s Western Europe has been gradually moving towards a transnational universalisation of the Holocaust/Shoah,’ with Auschwitz as ‘the central and universal site of memory’ (2010: 23). Western European discourses are dominated by the concept of ‘the duty to remember’, including in particular the obligation to remember the Holocaust, which became a key criterion in allowing a nation to join the European Union during the process of accession of new member-states in 2004 (Droit 2010). This political and moral obligation to remember the Holocaust is perceived by many Eastern Europeans as evidence of ‘the imperialistic intentions of Western culture to subjugate the memories of nations which had experienced over forty years of Communism’ (Droit 2010: 23). One must remember, Droit adds, that in ‘regaining independence, the former states of the Soviet bloc underwent a process of re-nationalisation of history and memory’, which highlighted their own ‘national suffering’ (ibid.). According to Droit, this divide between Western and Eastern European ‘cultures of memory’ is best seen in the significance of the cattle wagon, which, ‘for the Baltic states in particular, is associated with mass deportations of local citizens by the Soviets, whereas in Western Europe it is the primary symbol of the deportation of Jews’ (2010: 23). He also gives the examples of Latvia and Estonia, where ‘soldiers who served in the ranks of the German army … are today considered as heroes who fought heroically against the Soviet occupants’ (ibid.), and mentions Romania, Hungary and Slovakia, where politicians who supported Nazi Germany are being rehabilitated. On the contrary, there is no doubt in Western Europe that ‘the extermination of the Jewish population is considered the greatest of all the crimes of the twentieth century, and Auschwitz is defined as the absolute evil’ (Droit 2010: 24). This is not the case in Eastern Europe, as the examples mentioned above demonstrate. Zychowicz and Wolski clearly share similar views. Zychowicz, among many other examples, writes unambiguously in

The Second World War in Recent Polish Alternative (Hi)stories | 327

The Ribbentrop–Beck Pact: ‘[The Soviet Union] was a regime far more totalitarian and inclined towards genocide than the Third Reich’ (2012: 113); ‘History is written by the victors. … Until recently Communist crimes have been negated [in Western Europe], and today, when documents proving these crimes have come to light, there are attempts to relativise or justify them. … The victims of both National Socialism and Communism deserve the same kind of respect’ (120–21). In his concluding remarks, Emmanuel Droit, for his part, states that ‘Western European empathy is often limited to an intellectual act and is not an authentic co-remembering [of the crimes of Communism]’, which is a mirror image of Eastern European ‘non-­memory’ of the Holocaust (2010: 24). And Droit concludes rather pessimistically that ‘it will take the work of many generations to achieve a unification of European memory’ (2010: 24). In the afterword to The Ribbentrop–Beck Pact, Zychowicz states that his intention was to rewrite the history of the Second World War from ‘a Polish point of view’ (2012: 345), which suggests that he was interested solely in what the Polish state and Polish citizens would have gained from the counterfactual political alliance. He does not take into consideration the possibility that Poland and the Third Reich could have lost the war against the Soviet Union, which would have drastically changed the Allies’ attitude towards Poland. He also ignores the complexities of Poland’s relationships with the Ukraine and the Baltic States, assuming simplistically that they would have been willing to be controlled by Poland. Wolski’s Wallenrod, if ever translated, would be incomprehensible for a non-Polish reader, since the novel is packed with allusions to cult Polish television series, films and literature. The number of Polish politicians and military commanders who appear in the text is overwhelming, creating the impression that the author wanted, first and foremost, to show off his historical knowledge. Ciszewski, for his part, does not treat the medium of alternative history seriously enough to use it as a means of questioning conventional history, his work merely reasserting popular convictions of national heroism. In the words of Rosenfeld, ‘by reminding us that history’s course is not inevitable, that historical events are highly contingent, alternate history can help us rethink our ingrained assumptions not only about the past but also about the present’ (2005: 396). This process of rethinking is not apparent in the works of Ciszewski, Wolski and Zychowicz, who clearly had neither the will nor the imagination to challenge such ‘ingrained assumptions’ at the core of Polish (collective) national memory. In other words, they fail to take advantage of a genre that has been used successfully by other authors as ‘a method of removing distortions, reinvigorating interest in the past, and advancing genuine historical understanding’ (Rosenfeld 2005: 393).

328 | Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż

In the words of Peter Novick, collective memory, ‘once established, comes to define the eternal truth, and, along with it, an eternal identity, for the members of the group’, and this sociological process is not restricted to a single national community: Serbs’ central memory, the lost Battle of Kosovo in 1389, symbolizes the permanent Muslim intention to dominate them. The partitions of Poland in the eighteenth century gave that country an ‘essential’ identity as ‘the Christ among nations’, crucified and recrucified by foreign oppression. The annual pilgrimage of French workers to the Mur des Fédérés, site of the slaughter of the communards in 1871, was a reminder of the eternal enmity between proletariat and bourgeoisie. (Novick 2000: 4)

There is a thin line dividing national memory from a nationalistic ideology, and thus communities need to develop a historical consciousness that is critical of collective memory, for, in the words of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Historical consciousness no longer listens sanctimoniously to the voice that reaches out from the past, but, in reflecting on it, replaces it within the context where it took root in order to see the significance and relative value proper to it. This reflexive posture towards tradition is called interpretation’ (1979: 111). The problem with the texts selected for discussion in this chapter is that they do not ask the ‘what if?’ question for the purposes of historical interpretation. Their alternative scenarios are not as ground-breaking as they would seem at first glance, for all they do is assert in unambiguous terms the magnitude of the Polish military effort and the moral impeccability of the Polish nation at war. There is no point in rewriting history if there is no desire, in Gadamer’s words, ‘[to take] a reflexive position concerning all that is handed down by tradition’ (1979: 111).

Notes 1. The depiction of Poland as the innocent victim of a brutal aggression on the part of two totalitarian regimes, dominant in historical textbooks and literary and cinematic representations of the Second World War, downplays the fact that the Second Polish Republic (1918–1939) was a quasi-dictatorial regime, in an almost perpetual state of conflict with neighbouring countries over its territorial claims. Immediately after the First World War, Poland had border conflicts with Germany, Czechoslovakia, the West Ukrainian People’s Republic and Lithuania. Successively, Silesia, Eastern Galicia and the Vilnius region were taken over by the Poles, the final territorial gain being the Zaolzie region, annexed from Czechoslovakia in 1938. During the Second World War, Polish underground forces were not just fighting for independence. In the face of the imminent defeat of the Third Reich

The Second World War in Recent Polish Alternative (Hi)stories | 329

after the Normandy invasion and the continuing advance of the Red Army, the Polish Home Army and other partisan formations engaged in a conflict with Lithuanian forces in order to recapture the Vilnius region, as well as with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in an attempt to secure a hold over the Volhynia region. 2. My translation. All translations, unless otherwise stated, are my own. Repeat references to the three main works under discussion in this chapter will be cited by page number only. 3. Marshal Józef Piłsudski (1867–1935) is one the most revered figures in Polish history. He was in command of the First Brigade of the Polish Legions between 1914 and 1916. He believed that fighting on the side of the Central Powers against Imperial Russia would best serve the Polish cause of independence, but was ready to switch sides when the tide of war turned in the Allies’ favour. He was instrumental in bringing about the so-called ‘Oath Crisis’ in 1917, appealing to Polish soldiers to refuse an oath of allegiance to the German emperor. Piłsudski was arrested and imprisoned in Magdeburg, from which he returned to a reborn Polish state in 1918 and declared himself head of state, a position he held until the presidential elections in 1922. His strategic genius allowed Polish troops to score a decisive victory over enemy forces in the Polish-Soviet War at the Battle of Warsaw in 1920. He withdrew from active political life in 1923, but resumed power by overthrowing the government in the May Coup of 1926, as a result of which Poland became a quasi-dictatorial state. 4. The name Anatevka immediately evokes the Ukrainian shtetl portrayed by Sholem Aleichem’s ‘Tevje and his Daughters’ (1894), but the text also points towards either Belarus or Latvia.

References Primary Sources Ciszewski, M. 2008a. www.1939.com.pl. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo SOL. Davies, M. 2003. Collaborator. London: Macmillan. Deighton, L. 1978. SS-GB. London: Cape. Fry, S. 1996. Making History. London: Hutchinson. Johnson, A. 2010. Seelöwe Nord: The Germans are Coming. Kennoway: Spiderwize. Quinn, D. 2001. After Dachau. Hanover, NH: Zoland Books. Wolski, M. 2009. Wallenrod. Warsaw: Dimograf. Zychowicz, P. 2012. Pakt Ribbentrop-Beck, czyli jak Polacy mogli u boku Trzeciej Rzeszy pokonać Związek Sowiecki. Poznań: Dom Wydawniczy REBIS.

Secondary Sources Ciszewski, M. 2008b. ‘Jeszcze raz kampania wrzesniowa’. Interview with Robert Ziębiński, http://ksiazki.polter.pl/Wywiad-z-Marcinem-Ciszewskim-c16070 (accessed 12 December 2013). Danto, A.C. 1985. ‘The Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial’, The Nation, 31 August, p. 152. Droit, E. 2010. ‘Le Goulag contre la Shoah’, transl. K. Kończal. Gazeta Wyborcza, 21–22 August, pp. 23–24. Ferguson, N. 1999. Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. New York: Basic Books.

330 | Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż

Fortunati, V. and E. Lamberti. 2010. ‘Cultural Memory: A European Perspective’, in A. Erll and A. Nünning (eds), A Companion to Cultural Studies. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, pp. 127–37. Gadamer, H.-G. 1979. ‘The Problem of Historical Consciousness’, in P. Rabinow and W.M. Sullivan (eds), Interpretative Social Science: A Reader. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, pp. 103–60. Gross, J. T. 2001. Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. Princeton: Princeton University Press. _________. 2006. Fear: Anti-semitism in Poland after Auschwitz. New York: Random House. Halbwachs, M. 1992. On Collective Memory, trans. and ed. L.A. Coser. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Łubieński, T. 2009. 1939: Zaczęło się we wrześniu. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Nowy Świat. Misztal, B.A. 2003. Theories of Social Remembering. Maidenhead and Philadelphia: Open University Press. Novick, P. 2000. The Holocaust in American Life. New York: Mariner Books. Renan, E. 1994. ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’, in J. Hutchinson and A.D. Smith (eds), Nationalism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 17–18. Rosenfeld, G.D. 2005. The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Filmography Fiddler on the Roof. 1971, dir. Norman Jewison It Happened Here. 1964, dir. Kevin Brownlow The Final Countdown. 1980, dir. Don Taylor

Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż is Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, where she teaches courses on contemporary British and Commonwealth literature. Her main field of interest is in representations of the First World War in post-memory fiction and alternative histories of the Second World War. She is the author of The Myth of War in British and Polish Poetry, 1939–1945 (2002) and Reimagining the War Memorial, Reinterpreting the Great War: The Formats of British Commemorative Fiction (2012) and co-edited The Great War in Post-Memory Literature and Film (2014) with Martin Löschnigg.

Part VII

USSR/Russia

(

Chapter 19

History Politics and the Changing Meaning of Victory Day in Contemporary Russia

( Markku Kangaspuro

In 2005, Russia’s sixtieth commemoration of Victory Day in Europe was the first since the Eastern enlargement of the European Union and NATO. The sixty-fifth commemoration in 2010 was even more significant. It had more far-reaching consequences for Russia’s history politics – in terms of its intentional use of history in politics – than is usually understood. Although the intention of this chapter is not to focus on the history of World War II and the Soviet Union, it is important to mention that Russia has obviously many good reasons to commemorate the Great Patriotic War (which started in 1941). The Red Army carried the greatest burden in defeating Germany, and the Soviet Union suffered huge losses during the invasion by the Germans and their allies. The result was at least twentysix million dead, most of them civilians, tens of millions of wounded and traumatised people, orphans and refugees and over five million prisoners of war. Russia’s losses were the greatest among the Allies, just behind Polish and Jewish losses, in proportion. This chapter focuses on the role that the Great Patriotic War plays in Russia’s history politics, domestically but also transnationally, since its role cannot be accurately analysed uniquely in a Russian context and needs to be interpreted within a much wider geopolitical perspective. Ever since the Enlightenment, history has been understood as a totality, which not only informs about the past but also refers to the future. Many historians, like Reinhart Koselleck (2002: 126), emphasise that every representation of history is temporal. Thus, the writing of history is set in a specific time, is itself historical, and is dependent on the collective and individual experiences of the past and on the expectations of the Notes for this chapter begin on page 341.

334 | Markku Kangaspuro

future. This is, of course, why the writing of history is so prone to political disputes. In this case, Victory Day (9 May) merges competing interpretations of past experiences of the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) and two dominant conflicting interpretations of the future of Russia. On the one hand, forgetting the Stalinist ‘black history’, Russia’s future is seen to be associated with other great European powers as a continuity of the antiHitler coalition and the liberation of Europe; on the other, Russia is seen as a unique Eurasian imperial power with its own special historical and political system: in this context, Stalin is understood as a historical necessity, comparable to Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. Victory Day is a memorial battlefield in which memories of war veterans often clash with those of the wider community and those of politicians or the media. Political changes in Europe in the last twenty years have created a need to reinterpret many aspects of previous historical narratives. The disintegration of the Socialist bloc forced Russia and the former Socialist East European countries to reformulate their national identity and to redefine their loyalties in a post-Cold War context. Most Eastern European countries drew closer to NATO and the EU, insisting on their common values and denouncing the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the partition of Poland and the Winter War in Finland. Russia’s situation is more complex, as it had to rethink altogether its relationship with the USA, Western Europe and the EU’s new or aspiring member-states that had been formerly in the Soviet bloc. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the subsequent partition of Europe with Nazi Germany is rarely mentioned in Russia. The Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War only began officially in 1941, and the writing of history in Russia still conflicts dramatically with the historical narratives of its neighbours.

Russian Identity and Victory Russian patriotic identity is strongly embedded in many heroic Red Army and Soviet citizens’ narratives of the Great Patriotic War. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Great Patriotic War became more or less the only acceptable historical event that could give rise to national pride in Russia, naturally perceived by most Russians as the successor of the Soviet Union. Great Patriotic War narratives embody the nation’s sufferings during the Nazi invasion and occupation as well as the Red Army’s heroism and the huge sacrifices that it made to defeat Fascism. The power of war narratives and their role in keeping collective feelings and loyalty to the state alive can be seen in many (‘sacred’) sites of memory such as monuments to Unknown Soldiers, cemeteries, museums

History Politics and the Changing Meaning of Victory Day in Russia | 335

and other places of remembrance. In modern nations, loyalty to the state is legitimated through a universally applicable ideology, namely nationalism, as Anthony D. Smith has pointed out (1995). He also underlines the interconnection between the territory, inhabitants of this territory and history (1995: 56): There is a close correspondence, even union, between the homeland and its resources and the people, one that is mediated through history as seen through the eyes of the participants and often of neighbours … . The people and the land are united both through a shared landscape and the ecological base of a unified economy and as a result of a history of shared experiences and memories, of common joys and sufferings, which tie events to specific places – fields of battle, scenes of treaties.

This contributes to an understanding of the political power of the dominant narrative of Russia as an imperium which, in surviving wars and under the constant threat of external enemies, is based on a strong central power and state-leader (no matter what his or her title may be). In this respect, World War II should not only be understood as a war fought by an endangered Soviet Union: the history of the Great Patriotic War is also about the successive identities of the Russian state.

Time and Victory Day Contested interpretations of history are symptoms of a contest over the relevance of history, particularly for future generations. This is why Victory Day commemorations have always been prominent in the Soviet Union, as they are in contemporary Russia. The end of the Cold War triggered new and often conflicting interpretations of history. This happened particularly in Eastern European countries and, most notably, in the former Soviet Republics where nations and states were eager to distance themselves from their Socialist past and Russia’s sphere of interest. Events linked to World War II have been at the epicentre of these political debates. This is not surprising since war narratives have always been a crucial basis for national identities: war represents, on the one hand, people’s extreme sufferings and sacrifices for the nation and, on the other, the utmost collective mobilisation of the people in a heroic struggle for their country’s survival. The term ‘The Great Patriotic War’ (Velikaia otechestvennaia voyna), which refers to the 1941-45 war between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, is much more widely used than ‘World War II’ (vtoraia mirovaia voyna) in Russian. The official narrative of The Great Patriotic War, a term coined in

336 | Markku Kangaspuro

1941,1 came to dominate the Brezhnev era (1960s–1970s). Although Stalin was not officially rehabilitated, he was positively mentioned in many commemorations between 1967 and 1970 (Sandle 2002: 145–50). Actually, the role of Stalin in the final victory has been, and still is, central for many Russians. In 2010, respondents to a major survey indicated that Stalin’s role had been very (11%) or fairly (40%) positive (Levada-Tsentr 2011). Stalin’s image is, however, more nuanced in contemporary Russia: a majority of the respondents also said that they did not want to see new memorials dedicated to Stalin and did not feel that Stalinism could play any role in contemporary Russia. In fact, criticism has been mounting since 1989, and, in 2005, Russia’s interpretations of this period of history were openly and vehemently challenged by several countries formerly in the Soviet sphere of influence, in terms of the role of the Red Army and the Soviet Union in World War II and, in particular, in Eastern Europe after the defeat of Germany. What was still described by the Russians as the Liberation of Europe from Fascism was denounced as a politico-military occupation by many Eastern Europeans. The presidents of Estonia, Lithuania, Moldavia and Georgia refused the Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invitation to attend the commemoration of Victory Day in Moscow’s Red Square. The president of Latvia, Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, did accept Putin’s invitation but was criticised in her country for attending the ceremony, all of which added fuel to the dispute over history between Latvia and Russia. These debates also reached Finland where they focused on the question as to whether a country such as Finland, on the loser’s side, should commemorate a victory which caused her the loss of part of her territory and the payment of war reparations to the Soviet Union. Unlike the situation in former Soviet states, the controversy remained limited in Finland, with the result that President Tarja Halonen finally decided to travel to Moscow, where he attended the commemoration.2 Victory Day commemorations in 2010 were quite different. The new member-states of the European Union and NATO had clearly re-aligned their positions as part of an enlarged Western Europe, and Russia had adapted its politics to this reality. The motivations behind Russia’s reassessment of history were, of course, not new academic research but Russia’s urgent need to re-establish herself on the European scene. At this point in time, Russia’s leaders had come to the conclusion that a more open dialogue with the West was needed. Russia had become trapped in a vicious circle of arguments on history with her neighbours, which was jeopardising her political influence both inside and outside Russia. 2010 became an opportunity for Russia’s rulers to redirect history politics. Two declarations that President Dmitry Medvedev made in May 2010 are remarkable illustrations of this change. The first one was his interview,

History Politics and the Changing Meaning of Victory Day in Russia | 337

published in Izvestia (7 May 2010), on Stalin’s role in the Great Patriotic War, and the second concerned the symbolism of the Victory Day parade. This time, a revised interpretation of World War II was used to promote Medvedev’s foreign policy and to make Russia a more acceptable partner for the West. For the first time since Khrushchev at the Twentieth Communist Party Conference in 1956, Russia’s head of state unreservedly questioned Stalin’s role as a war hero and as the indisputable leader of the Soviet Union in the war. In his interview, Medvedev stressed that Victory Day did not celebrate Stalin’s victory, nor that of his totalitarian regime and his generals, but the victory of the people. Medvedev also commented on Stalin’s role as a state leader, explicitly denouncing his crimes: ‘So despite the fact that he worked hard, despite the fact that under his leadership the country flourished in certain respects, what was done to our own people cannot be forgiven.’ In this way, Medvedev distanced victory from the Soviet Union – a ‘totalitarian regime’ which had pursued its own interest after the war in Eastern Europe – and shifted the credit for the victory to the people and the Red Army. Medvedev made a concession to many Russians, in particular war veterans, who still admired Stalin as a war leader,3 but he clarified the state’s official attitude toward Stalin by forbidding local officials to exhibit pictures of him on the streets during the commemorations of Victory Day for the first time in Russia. Medvedev was clearly trying to reconcile a divided Russian popular opinion with foreign policy. Besides declaring Russia’s official stance towards Stalin, Medvedev also referred to the Soviet occupation of the Baltic countries and its dominant role in the former Soviet bloc after World War II: But the historians’ art and the ordinary person’s common sense lie in the ability to distinguish between the Red Army and the Soviet state’s mission during World War II and the events that followed. Yes, this can be very hard to do in real life, but it has to be done. I repeat: without the Red Army, without the colossal sacrifice the Soviet people laid on the altar of war, Europe would be a different place. There would be no prosperous, flourishing, steadily developing Europe today, that is for sure. One would have to be deaf not to heed these arguments. (Izvestia 2010)

The orchestrated essence of Russia’s revised history politics came to the fore when the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrov, clearly connected Russia’s anti-Stalinism with its reliability as an international partner in the spring session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in 2010. He declared that the United States, Europe and Russia required a qualitatively new relationship, referring to Russia’s initiative concerning new collective security arrangements while also stressing the

338 | Markku Kangaspuro

need for wider cooperation. Lavrov (2010) trumpeted to his audience that ‘New Russia’ had officially condemned Stalinism. He openly expressed the intentions behind the new history politics, alluding to the various interpretations of World War II in time and space, and describing what Russia expected of Europe in the future: ‘This is our common victory. The victory of those values that make us human. We all want the same for our children and grandchildren – peace, prosperity, mutual respect, free exchange of ideas, in an open society. In other words, we want a common future.’ And he went on to say: Russia has always acknowledged the joint effort of historians in the study of the most intricate periods of history. And today we are ready for this. New Russia has officially condemned Stalinism and has never advocated its ideology and practices. At the same time, we strongly reject any attempts to falsify history and to shift onto Russia all the faults of European politics. (Lavrov 2010)

President Medvedev expressed Russia’s new horizon even more clearly than Lavrov when discussing the ‘Commission to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests’ that he had created in 2009. Medvedev admitted in his interview in Izvestia (2010) that the motivation for establishing the Commission was to counter the ‘falsification of Russia’s war history’ by some politicians who were trying to score political points. After that, he defined the role of the Commission in the classic terms of history politics: ‘Its aim is to address the question of what future we will build, what memory we will leave our children and grandchildren, what they will know and think about the war and what lessons they will learn from it.’ Russia’s relationship with her allies in the war was also made clear during the 2010 commemorative ceremonies. For the first time, Western allies were invited to take part, which underlined both the alliance with Western powers in the past and common interests in present-day Europe. The scale of the sixty-fifth Victory Day commemoration in 2010 was unprecedented, which demonstrated its importance for the Russian state. Although there were also vigorous protests against NATO countries’ participation in the parade, the whole visual scenario associated with the prominent role of Western troops and broadcast interviews of Western participants at the Red Square parade was made to emphasise the alliance between Russia and the Western Allies. It was also a popular success since more than four million people celebrated on Moscow streets (RIA Novosti 2010a; RT 2010). Recently, both President Putin and President Medvedev have repeatedly emphasised how Russia and Europe are brought closer together by history and a common culture (mentioning Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Shostakovich etc.).4 This narrative uniting Russia with Europe

History Politics and the Changing Meaning of Victory Day in Russia | 339

contrasts sharply with those of the Soviet period and also with those heard during the 2008 Russia–Georgia war, during which Russia insisted on the major role of the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War. Whilst seemingly more inclusive, Medvedev’s position in 2010 was in fact highly ambivalent and problematic. For the domestic audience, he used traditional patriotic rhetoric about the heroism of the Soviet Union. However, for transnational audiences, foreign countries and Russian liberals, Medvedev condemned Stalin’s crimes and the totalitarian Soviet regime. In short, he distanced the state’s official condemnation of Stalin from the people’s right to admire him, hiding behind the freedom of opinion and speech. The problem with this double stance is that about 50% of Russians share this ‘unofficial’ admiration of Stalin, seen by many as a war hero and the principal moderniser of the Soviet economy, as many surveys demonstrate.5 The inclusion of the Allies in Victory Day ceremonies also triggered loud protests among nationalistic-patriotic sectors of society (RIA Novosti 2010b). These protests were not aimed at the Allies of the past per se, but at NATO, which was created after World War II.

The Challenges of History Politics Russia’s recent history politics is in direct conflict with the popular history of World War II, traditionally narrated in overtly nationalistic tones. A survey published in April 2010, just before the sixty-fifth Victory Day commemoration, reveals major conflicting interpretations of history in contemporary Russia and the challenges facing the state’s new history politics (VCIOM 2010). This survey proves once again that, for most Russians, World War II did not start in 1939, which de facto excludes the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the partition of Poland from their war memories. Actually, only 22% of respondents knew that World War II in Europe started in 1939. The majority (63%) of them mentioned the wrong date, and 58% were confident that the war had started in 1941. For some Russians, World War II still means something radically different from what it means for most Europeans. The majority of respondents (63%) were also convinced that the USSR could have won the war without the help of the Allied forces. For them, the war was a huge, one-sided sacrifice by the Soviet people. However high these figures may seem, they are slightly lower than those published ten years before, in 2001, which suggests that Russian perspectives on World War II have begun to change, perhaps because of the recent turn in the state’s history politics. A major problem remains, though: what were the causes

340 | Markku Kangaspuro

of this war which only started in 1941 for most Russians? Respondents do not identify one clear reason. The majority of respondents referred to the lack of collective measures, blaming the weakness of the League of Nations in 1933–1938 (28%) and the unwillingness of the UK and France to conclude an anti-Hitler coalition with the Soviet Union (25%). Such a coalition would have rendered the Munich Agreement (1938) and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (1939) unnecessary: instead of this, both agreements actually encouraged Hitler’s further ambitions (for 17%). The least commonly mentioned cause of the war was the signing of the Molotov– Ribbentrop Pact (14%). In fact, President Medvedev seemed in tune with the majority of the Russians in his Izvestia interview (2010): ‘I would not say that my views have changed radically in any way. My views remain unchanged when it comes to the basic facts.’ Twenty years after the collapse of the USSR, from Russia’s perspective, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was a minor episode in the long chain of events leading the USSR to the Great Patriotic War. It is also tempting to conclude that this prevailing interpretation of history and, in particular, the emphasis put on collective security treaties, explain Russia’s constant desire for multilateral security agreements. This, of course, clashes with the perspectives adopted by Russia’s neighbours. The majority of Russians (70% of the respondents) believe that the USSR played a major role in upholding freedom and independence in Europe and Asia by defeating the Fascist aggressor. Only 9% say that the victory of the Soviet Union was followed by the occupation of Eastern Europe, and 15% share both views (WCIOM 2010). Historiographical wars and history politics between Russia and its neighbours will continue for a long time. Medvedev’s nuances are hardly satisfying for the Baltic States, for example, whose fate was already decided in 1939, before being annexed by the Soviet Union the following year. Nor will the declaration of these nuances ease the historiographical war with Poland, whose fate was sealed by the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. The case of Finland is of particular interest here since it fought alongside Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1944. The Finns, however, managed to overcome this past by claiming that they had had their own aims (independence and democracy) and had been fighting a ‘separate war’. Markku Jokisipilä has described the ‘separate war’ concept as one of Finland’s most successful diplomatic manoeuvres during World War II and in the Cold War (Jokisipilä and Kinnunen 2012: 455–58). Undoubtedly, the fact that Finland was on the side of the West during the Cold War made the continuum of this interpretation possible, although it was an interpretation that the West often found difficult to understand.

History Politics and the Changing Meaning of Victory Day in Russia | 341

Conclusion The role of the Soviet Union and its people in World War II, together with its struggle against Fascism to uphold universal human values, democracy and freedom in Europe, have been an essential part of Russia’s official narrative since the 1990s.6 Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has been trying to redefine her identity in the context of her domestic and foreign policies. With the intention of providing a moderate revision of Stalin’s positive role as a war-leader and of traditional Russian interpretations of World War II, Medvedev’s speeches demonstrate the complex, intertwining dynamics of history and memories. The sixty-fifth Victory Day parade and Medvedev’s interview sent a strong message about Russia’s efforts to identify herself as the historical ally of the West, sharing present concerns for a common security and political goals.7 The link between Russia’s credibility as an international partner and the country’s official anti-Stalinist attitude is clear. But one cannot dictate the pace at which collective memory evolves, and there is no doubt that relations between Russia and its former satellite states will be difficult as long as the traditional Great Patriotic War narrative continues to form an essential part of Russians’ identity. Such a reconciliation of historical narratives will take time and will trigger further heated debate between Russia and its neighbours. For what is essentially at stake here amounts to nothing less than the future of Russia in Europe.

Notes 1. The term first appeared in Pravda on 23 June 1941, which was the first day that citizens were officially informed about the beginning of the war, in an article entitled ‘The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet people’ and subtitled ‘Our cause is a just one’. In this article, the term revives parallels with Alexander Nevsky’s victory at the battle of Lake Peipus in 1242, as well as with its origin, namely ‘The Patriotic War’ that was waged and won against Napoleon. See Pravda (1941). 2. The Winter War (1939–1940), in which South-East Finland was conquered by the Soviet Union, and the injustice of the Moscow peace treaty in 1940 (Finland lost Karelia) were the main arguments used to oppose Halonen’s attendance. 3. He admitted that veterans and people of their generation had the right to admire Stalin because of their wartime experience: ‘Everyone has the right to their own opinion. These personal assessments have nothing to do with official attitudes towards Stalin’. 4. President Medvedev underlined Russia’s and Europe’s common culture, ‘humanistic ideals and values that are shared by all Europe and are an integral part of the culture

342 | Markku Kangaspuro

of Russia and the unified Germany’ in a speech at a meeting with German political, ­parliamentary and civic leaders in Berlin on 5 June 2008 (Medvedev 2008). 5. In 2012, in a poll conducted for the Carnegie Endowment, 42% of respondents named Stalin as one of the ‘most prominent people or social and cultural figures who have had the most significant influence on world history’. In 1989, this was true for only 12% of the respondents in a similar survey. Stalin’s role in Russia’s history is equally positive for the majority of Russians, even though they now also denounce his crimes and cruelty. See Gudkov (2012). In 2010, only 32% of respondents fully or partially agreed that Stalin was a state criminal, whilst 50% disagreed. See Levada-Tsentr (2010). 6. General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev adopted this discourse as a part of his New Foreign Policy initiative. 7. In 2009, Russia had undertaken a new initiative to promote a ‘new European security ­architecture’ (which was nothing less than a new European military security agreement).

References Primary Sources Izvestia. 2010. Interview with D. Medvedev, 7 May. http://eng.kremlin.ru/news/295/ (accessed 12 February 2011). Lavrov, S. 2010. Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation. Parliamentary Assembly Session: 26 to 30 April 2010, 29 April. http://www.coe.int/t/dc/files/pa_session/ april_2010/20100429_disc_lavrov_EN.asp?/ (accessed 12 February 2012). Levada-Tsentr. 2010. ‘Soglasny ili ne soglasny s temi, kto govorit, čto I. Stalina sleduet sčitat’ gosudarstvennym prestupnikom?’, 1 February. http://www.levada.ru/archive/pamy atnye-daty/soglasny-ili-ne-soglasny-s-temi-kto-govorit-chto-i-stalina-sleduet-schitat-go/ (accessed 10 June 2013). _________. 2011. ‘Kakuju rol’ sygral I. Stalin v žizni našej strany?’, 8 September. http://www. levada.ru/archive/pamyatnye-daty/kakuyu-rol-sygral-i-stalin-v-zhizni-nashei-strany/ (accessed 29 August 2012). Medvedev, D. 2008. ‘Speech at a Meeting with German Political, Parliamentary  and  Civic Leaders’.  President of Russia, 5 June. http://archive.kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2008/06/05/ 2203_type82912type82914type84779_202153.shtml (accessed 13 June 2015) http://archive. kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2008/06/05/2203_type82912type82914type84779_202153.shtml/ (accessed 10 June 2013). _________. 2010. ‘Speech at the Military Parade to Commemorate the 65th Anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945’. President of Russia, 9 May. http://eng. kremlin.ru/transcripts/194/ (accessed 16 September 2012). Pravda. 1941. ‘The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet People’, 23 June. http://dlib.eastview.com/ sources/article.jsp?issueId=935416&pageIssue=4#anchor/ (accessed 20 February 2012). RIA Novosti. 2010a. ‘More than 4.2 million people celebrated Victory Day on Moscow streets’, 10 May. _________. 2010b. ‘Russian Communists use May Day to protest NATO role in WWII parade’, 1 May. http://en.rian.ru/russia/20100501/158832427.html/ (accessed 10 September 2012). RT. 2010. ‘Victory Day celebrations unite former allies 65 years on’, 10 May. http://rt.com/ news/victory-day-unite-allies/ (accessed 16 September 2012).

History Politics and the Changing Meaning of Victory Day in Russia | 343

VCIOM. 2010. ‘World War II. Press release 1273’. Russian Public Opinion Research Centre, 4 April. http://wciom.com/index.php?id=61&uid=235/ (accessed 18 November 2013).

Secondary Sources Gudkov, L. 2012. ‘The Archetype of the Leader: Analyzing a Totalitarian Symbol’, in T. de Waal, M. Lipman, L. Gudkov and L. Bakradze, The Stalin Puzzle: Deciphering Post-Soviet Public Opinion. Report. 1 March. Available at http://carnegieendowment.org/2013/03/01/ stalin-puzzle-deciphering-post-soviet-public-opinion/fmz8#/ (accessed 10 June 2013). Jokisipilä, M. and T. Kinnunen. 2012. ‘Shifting Images of War: Finnish Memory of World War II’, in T. Kinnunen and V. Kivimäki (eds), Finland in World War II: History, Memory, Interpretations. Leiden: Brill. Koselleck, R. 2002. The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Sandle, M. 2002. ‘A Triumph of Ideological Hairdressing? Intellectual Life in the Brezhnev Era Reconsidered’, in E. Bacon and M. Sandle (eds), Brezhnev Reconsidered. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 135–60. Smith, A.D. 1995. Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Markku Kangaspuro is Professor and Director of Research of the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki. He has a PhD in History and his expertise lies in the political history and politics of Russia. He is a member of The Finnish Centre of Excellence in Russian Studies – Choices of Russian Modernisation, funded by the Academy of Finland (2012–2017).

Chapter 20

War and Patriotism Russian War Films and the Lessons for Today

( David Gillespie

One of the most durable genres – perhaps the most durable – in Russian cinema over the decades, from the early agitki (short propaganda films made by the Bolsheviks), developed during the Civil War (1918–1920), to the ‘special effects’-dominated blockbusters of recent years, has been the war film. Indeed, the first real blockbuster of Soviet sound cinema was the 1934 film Chapaev, directed by the Vasilev Brothers, showing the life and death of a Civil War leader, and watched by millions across the country. Pravda was ecstatic: Every scene makes the audience catch its breath. Battle, victory, defeat and again victory, created on the screen, stir the passions in the darkened auditorium. Old warriors are moved by their memories. The young, holding their breath, follow the unfolding of events and applaud furiously every time the partisans of the celebrated division regain their military success. The Party has been given a new and powerful means of educating the class consciousness of the young. The young stare the enemy in the face and hate him more strongly. Hatred for the enemy, combined with a rapturous admiration for the heroic memory of the warriors who fell for the Revolution, acquires the same strength as a passionate love for the socialist motherland.1

Further biopics of Civil War leaders such as Grigorii Kotovskii and Nikolai Shchors served as heroic mirror images for the construction and consolidation of the Stalin cult, where these Civil War leaders were selfabnegating, without a personal life, devoted to the cause and inwardly fired with confidence in their cause. The Civil War film continued to be popular into the 1960s and 1970s, allowing directors such as Vladimir Motyl and Nikita Mikhalkov to experiment if not thematically, then at least stylistically, deliberately modelling their films on the ‘Spaghetti’ Notes for this chapter begin on page 354.

Russian War Films and the Lessons for Today | 345

Westerns so popular in Western Europe and the USA at the time but unavailable in the USSR. Instead of gunfights on the US–Mexico border, the Soviet filmgoer was treated to Red Army soldiers fighting the enemy in the heat and dust of Central Asia in films that did not take their subject matter that seriously, but which offered solid entertainment.2 The victory in the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) served as the justification of the Soviet State, from which it derived its very legitimacy, and therefore films of the Soviet period emphasised the motifs of heroism, self-sacrifice and patriotism (for Soviet ideology, not Russian nationhood) in their treatment of the conflict. Certain consistencies prevailed, such as the blackening of the enemy, the unity of the Red Army and the Soviet people, and the Soviet soldier’s inherent goodness and deep conviction in the rightness of his cause. Over the decades, the Soviet war film has also reflected changes in the prevailing political climate. In this regard, it follows the schemata of the Soviet historical film: films about the past are first and foremost concerned with lessons and guidance for the present. The exemplar par excellence of the Soviet historical film is Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan Groznyi [Ivan the Terrible] (1944–1945). Though inconsistent in its treatment of historical verisimilitude, the film is concerned with Ivan’s emergence as a strong Tsar expanding his country’s borders, and his suppression of internal opposition to his rule. Eisenstein’s film portrays the Tsar’s struggles not only with his external and internal enemies, but also with himself. His ultimate victory is a self-conscious analogy of the achievements of Stalin as leader of the Soviet state. But with the passage of time, and in particular the change of leader, priorities evolve. If, for instance, Mikhail Chiaureli’s triumphalist Padenie Berlina [The Fall of Berlin], released in 1949 at the height of ‘high’ Stalinist culture, attributes victory over the Nazi war machine entirely to an allpowerful, deity-like Stalin, films of the Thaw such as Mikhail Kalatozov’s Letiat zhuravli [The Cranes Are Flying] (1957) and Grigorii Chukhrai’s Ballada o soldate [Ballad of a Soldier] (1959) foregrounded the human cost of the war, and in particular the pain of loss of a loved one, in line with the restoration of a more ‘humane’ political culture after Stalin’s death.3 Whereas cinema’s emphasis may change over the decades, from basking in the glory of victory to the agonised acceptance of loss, some things remain constant. One of these is the demonisation of the enemy. In many war films, such as Mark Donskoi’s Raduga [The Rainbow] (1943), the enemy is an inhuman beast, often with his face covered or hidden from view. In Elem Klimov’s harrowing Idi i smotri [Come and See] (1985), we see the leering and sadistic faces of the Nazis as they burn alive the inhabitants of an entire village, and the visual and moral impact of the atrocities

346 | David Gillespie

on show are intensified by the fact that they are viewed through the eyes of an adolescent boy. Pain and the self-sacrifice of the Red Army soldier are to the fore in Sergei Bondarchuk’s Oni srazhalis za rodinu [They Fought for the Motherland] (1975), an adaptation of Mikhail Sholokhov’s last and unfinished novel, where the ravages wrought on the Russian landscape by artillery and bombs find their corporeal equivalent in the wounds and injuries suffered by Russian soldiers; indeed, only Russians bleed and suffer: German soldiers simply fall down and die. Another consistent theme is the inner strength of the Russian soldier, as demonstrated in Bondarchuk’s Sudba cheloveka [The Destiny of a Man] (1959), also based on a work by Sholokhov, when Andrei Sokolov, beaten and starved, nevertheless drinks the vodka offered to him by the Nazi camp commandant, and refuses to waver or show signs of intoxication. After four glasses he is still standing, and the assembled German officers no longer taunt or mock but gawp in silence as they realise they cannot defeat such a steely and powerful opponent. We will return to this scene later in this chapter. With the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the start of the Chechen conflict in 1994, Russian filmmakers in the 1990s were faced with several wars, as well as the break-up of the grand narrative of army and nation living and breathing as one. Sergei Bodrov’s Kavkazskii plennik [Prisoner of the Mountains] (1996), Alexander Rogozhkin’s Blokpost [Checkpoint] (1999) and Andrei Konchalovksii’s Dom durakov [House of Fools] (2002) all examined Russian attitudes and behaviour towards their Caucasian neighbours, revealing a racist and arrogant disregard for ‘non-Russians’.4 These films also depict the institution of the army as corrupt and inefficient, where the soldiers are cynically abandoned or exploited by a venal officer class, and are unsure of their mission, role and status. These films can be seen as a mirror of the confusion and lack of purpose in society as a whole in these years, the years of ‘robber’ capitalism, penury on a national scale and weak political leadership.5 The first post-Soviet film to return to Soviet norms in depicting war was Alexei Balabanov’s Voina [War] (2002). Balabanov had already shown how the deadly skills of professional hitmen had been nurtured and honed during the Chechen conflict in Brat [The Brother] (1997) and Brat 2 [The Brother 2] (1999), and in Voina he portrays a battle-hardened soldier, Ivan, who mercilessly slaughters dozens of Chechens as he frees hostages kept in a mountain hideout. The film justifies (even glorifies) murder, showing that Chechens have no morals or values other than self-enrichment and the abuse of power over others. Thus, the reasoning goes, they deserve to be wiped out. His English ally, John, comes to the view that the gun is more powerful than the word, and joins in the mayhem. In its treatment

Russian War Films and the Lessons for Today | 347

of the Caucasian peoples, it differs sharply from films of the previous decade alluded to above, but it also offers a dark, some would say opportunistic, reflection of official government rhetoric, when, in the aftermath of the 1999 apartment bombings, the then Prime Minister Putin promised to ‘wipe out’ all Chechen rebels, ‘even in the crap-house’ (the latter pithy phrase he apparently later regretted).6 In Voina, the Chechens are depicted as cold-blooded and debased; it is not unlike the treatment of Nazis in Soviet war films, especially those made during the Great Patriotic War itself, such as Donskoi’s Raduga (1943) and Leo Arnshtam’s Zoia (1944). As in Soviet films, the Russian soldier is brave and self-sacrificing. Unlike Soviet films, however, the Russian soldier is let down by his government: after the mission, Ivan is arrested and imprisoned for the murder of Chechen civilians. It should not be forgotten, also, that the war film in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, just like the historical film, is meant not simply to entertain or educate, but also to comment on the past and provide interpretation of the past, in the light of current-day political priorities. A case in point is Fedor Bondarchuk’s Deviataia rota [The Ninth Company] (2005), a film endorsed by the Russian President Putin, who invited Bondarchuk to his residence to watch it with him and compared it with Voina i mir [War and Peace] (1965–1967) by Sergei Bondarchuk, Fedor’s father. This was allegedly a dramatisation of the battle for Hill 3234 in Afghanistan on 7–8 January 1988, when thirty-nine Soviet paratroopers defended their position against sustained attacks by a force of between 200 and 250 mujahedin. In the end, the mujahedin withdrew, leaving six Soviet dead and twenty-eight wounded. All the Soviet soldiers involved in the battle received military honours. Bondarchuk’s film shows the recruitment and training of a group of soldiers, their introduction to combat, then their bravery, heroism and self-sacrifice under fire, as, gradually and remorselessly, their numbers are reduced. Deviataia rota self-consciously refers to Hollywood Vietnam War films such as Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986), but, whereas those films contained criticism of the logic and conduct of the Vietnam War, Bondarchuk shows his soldiers as fiercely patriotic and clearly aware of their mission.7 However, another possible source for this film is the battle for Hill 776 near the small town of Ulus-Kert fought by the 6th Company of the Russian 76th Guards Parachute Division, based in Pskov during the Chechen campaign, on 29 February–3 March 2000. The Company was virtually wiped out, with the loss of eighty-four men, including thirteen officers, and approximately four hundred Chechen fighters also fell. The defence of Hill 776 was militarily successful, however, in preventing a

348 | David Gillespie

large Chechen force from breaking out of encirclement. Consequently, Russian airborne units pursued these Chechen soldiers in the mountains, where many hundreds surrendered.8 The defence of Hill 776 then became the object of both heroic myth and bitter recriminations within the armed forces. The loss of an entire company, and an elite, airborne company at that, was a disaster for the Russian military, and rumours of negligence, poor reconnaissance, lack of preparation, and even corruption, persist. The heroism and bravery of the men of the Sixth Company, however, were commemorated in military honours for all the dead Russian soldiers and officers.9 On 3 March every year, the Russian Airborne Forces commemorate the heroism of the Sixth Company with a formal gathering in Pskov. On 1 March 2013, the Division was visited by President Putin, who explicitly emphasised the patriotic significance of the heroism of the Sixth Company for the younger generation: And when the hour came, our young people accomplished a heroic deed [podvig]; they fought the enemies just as fearlessly as their grandfathers had done in the struggle with Nazism. And, at the cost of their own lives, they proved the sacred continuity of the generations. Just let anybody after that say our young people have no sense of patriotism. The soldiers of the Sixth Company showed the whole world that Russia cannot be defeated, and that at the critical moment its brave sons will defend their Motherland to the death.10

Both fact and ‘fiction’ fall within the remit of Putin’s construction of a national identity that encompasses national pride and patriotism, where the ‘sons’ [syny] emulate the ‘achievement’ of their elders and thus safeguard the bonds between the generations and thus the unbreakable security of the Russian state. The link between patriotism and national defence is explicit in films that, through a time-travel gimmick, return modern-day youngsters to the battles of the Second World War. Andrei Maliukov’s My iz budushchego [We Are from the Future] (2008) focuses on four ne’er-do-well youngsters who make a living by visiting old battle sites and digging up and then selling old war memorabilia. They have no feelings of national pride or civic purpose, think nothing of using casual violence to protect their ‘territory’, and the skinhead among them – nicknamed ‘Cherep’ [skull] – even has a swastika tattoo on his arm. One day they take a collective dip in a lake, and, when they emerge, they find that they have been miraculously transported back to 1942 and are soon immersed in combat. After several battles and flirting with death, the boys return to the present the same way they left it, not only chastened and humbled by their experiences,

Russian War Films and the Lessons for Today | 349

but also emboldened and with a clear sense of patriotism and respect for their nation’s history, as demonstrated when, in the film’s closing scene, they square up to a gang of black-clad Russian Fascists on a street corner. ‘Cherep’ scratches off his swastika tattoo.11 My iz budushchego contains one telling scene that self-consciously refers to the vodka-drinking episode in Bondarchuk’s Sudba cheloveka. The group’s leader, nicknamed Borman (presumably a reference to Hitler’s henchman, Martin Bormann), is taken prisoner by the Nazis and, like Andrei Sokolov, is forced to drink vodka. Unlike the stoic and inwardly unbreakable Sokolov, however, Borman feels the effects of intoxication after the first glass. The youth of today, in other words, are no match for their forefathers. In this film, the Second World War serves as the last moral milestone for the youth of today, where values of comradeship and self-sacrifice are learned and inner strength gained. The sequel, My iz budushchego 2 [We Are from the Future 2], directed by Alexander Samokhvalov in 2010, reunites two of the cast from the first film, ‘Borman’ and ‘Cherep’ (now with their real surnames, Filatov and Vasilev, respectively), but sends them back to 1944 with two Ukrainian nationalists, Serhiy and Taras, who at the start of the film speak in Ukrainian (the film helpfully provides subtitles in Russian). After they do battle with Nazis and their Ukrainian Nationalist allies – the battles are much bloodier and more realistic than in the earlier film – Serhiy and Taras learn the lesson of true Slavic brotherhood. They fight shoulder-to-shoulder in the film’s closing scenes, and demonstrate their newly discovered bond with Russia by speaking Russian. The film’s message is aimed not at today’s youth, but rather at today’s Ukraine, as it flirts with the European Union and NATO, thus threatening its historical and political links with Russia. The time-travel genre is used to similar effect in another film and sequel. Tuman [The Fog], directed by Ivan Shurkhovetskii and Artem Aksenenko in 2010, sees Russian army recruits transported back to the Second World War, and when they return to the present they feel more respect and understanding for the veterans they salute at the end of the film. Indeed, as Olga Kucherenko (2011) has shown, their return to the modern day is very much ‘a rebirth’, as they have gone through a ‘conversion and purification (blood, sweat and heat of the battle)’ to be the worthy sons of those who actually fought. Tuman 2 [The Fog 2], directed by Shurkhovetskii, was released in 2012 as a four-part television film, where five from the original film go back in time to save the life of the Red Army soldier who, in 1945, placed the red flag over the Reichstag. A comparison of these films of recent years with those from the early years of the century, coinciding with Vladimir Putin’s first years as

350 | David Gillespie

President of the Russian Federation, reveals that there has been something of a qualitative shift in emphasis. In television serials such as Andrei Maliukov’s Diversant [Saboteur] (2004) and Nikolai Dostal’s Shtrafbat [Penal Battalion] (2004), the army and the role of the NKVD, in particular, are harshly criticised, though the salt-of-the-earth private soldier remains sacrosanct.12 Similarly, Mikhail Ptashuk’s V avguste 44-ogo [In August 1944] (2000) shows the pervasive, menacing influence of the NKVD in the ranks of the army during the war. More recent television films, such as Apostol [The Apostle], directed in 2008 by Nikolai Lebedev, Iurii Moroz and Gennadii Sidorov, and Alexander Barshak’s Kedr pronzaet nebo [The Cedar Pierces the Sky] (2011), contain their fair share of ‘bad’ NKVD operatives, but they provide a balance by featuring more positive and helpful counterparts. It is unclear whether all of the above-mentioned films have received State funding, but revisiting the Great Patriotic War provides a narrative for the construction of a national identity based on fearless confrontation with the enemy and sturdy defence of the Motherland. President Putin never tires of calling for the need for national ‘heroes’, and these films self-consciously reflect that desire.13 Other recent films that consciously contribute to such a ‘nation-building project’ are the two ‘sequels’ to Nikita Mikhalkov’s 1994 Utomlennye solntsem [Burnt by the Sun]. Both Predstoianie [Coram Deo] (2010) and Tsitadel [The Citadel] (2011) were lavishly supported by the State, and both declare themselves in their publicity blurb to be ‘a great film about a great war’. Mikhalkov’s picture of Russia at war is of a country fighting for its survival but blessed by God in doing so, its huge suffering and sacrifices reminiscent of the Soviet treatment of the Great Patriotic War as ‘sacred’, as in the title of the 1941 song by Vasilii Lebedev-Kumach. Mikhalkov’s sequels were generally negatively received by the critics, mainly because of Mikhalkov’s own controversial status within the Russian filmmaking community and his perceived patronage by President Putin. Elena Razlogova (2011) defined Utomlennye solntsem 2 as ‘a failed epic blockbuster’, summing up critical comments that suggested that it was ‘heavy-handed and derivative’ and that the views of veterans were ‘a pseudo-historical fraud’, but it does hold interest in strictly generic terms. Just as My iz budushchego deliberately quotes Bondarchuk’s Sudba cheloveka in the vodka-drinking scene, so too Mikhalkov cites various other Soviet war classics, most notably Idi i smotri, when villagers are herded into a church by Nazi soldiers and burned alive, and Bondarchuk’s Oni srazhalis za rodinu in the graphic depiction of the terrible wounds suffered by Russian soldiers. Whereas, in Maliukov’s film, the vodka-drinking

Russian War Films and the Lessons for Today | 351

scene is played out with an ironic wink at the audience, Mikhalkov adds no extra subtext or meaning, content to quote from others and so establish his films as part of a noble tradition. The Great Patriotic War remains a popular topic among filmmakers in twenty-first century Russia, and while the state endeavours to construct its great patriotic narrative, there are some directors who point to dark, hitherto poorly or never explored corners of the war experience. The problematic issue of collaboration with the occupying Nazi forces was hardly explored in detail in Soviet films, and those who did work for the Nazis were painted in correspondingly black colours, such as the irredeemably sadistic Portnov in Larisa Shepitko’s 1976 film Voskhozhdenie [The Ascent]. Shepitko’s film was highly unusual for Soviet cinema in that it explored quite candidly the psychology of an individual who turns from being a patriot to working with the enemy. Whereas Portnov is cynical and evil, allowing his sadistic instinct to take over, it is the partisan fighter Rybak in whom the film – and the book on which it is based, Vasil Bykov’s Sotnikov of 1970 – takes the greater interest. Although physically stronger and seemingly tougher than his comrade Sotnikov, when captured, and, even before his interrogation, Rybak agrees to join the Polizai, simply because he wants to survive. Sotnikov goes to his death in the certainty that there are things in life more important than simply survival, but Rybak shows personal weakness and even cowardice beneath the bluff exterior.14 Rybak’s moral capitulation is easy to explain in the Soviet context as the individual’s only means to survive at all costs. Dmitrii Meskhiev’s Svoi [Our Own] (2004) sees a family divided as the father works for the Germans while his son is a Red Army soldier. Although the plot resolves itself formulaically (the father joins the Red Army soldiers and kills other collaborators), the film’s title begs further questions. One of these is the family, here an obvious metaphor for the larger Soviet family, and Meskhiev’s film thus not only explores the reasons for collaboration but also suggests the scale of it in the occupied territories. Sergei Loznitsa’s V tumane [In the Fog] (2012), set in wartime Belarus and also based on a story by Vasil Bykov, accepts the fact of collaboration and explores the desperate inevitability of those forced to work for the enemy and who are then hated by their ‘friends’. Collaboration here is not, as in Shepitko’s film, a direct threat to the ideological supremacy of the Soviet state, but simply an unfortunate accident of fate. If the Red Army soldier Sotnikov is surrounded by the Christian symbolism of a martyr in his final moments of life, in Loznitsa’s film it is the peasant Sushenia who literally has to carry his burden until fate takes its relentless toll. Loznitsa’s film is a dark, nihilistic drama that eschews any ideological uplift, with no clear-cut moral

352 | David Gillespie

lessons and no real ‘hero’. There is no one truth in wartime, and life in an occupied territory depends simply on chance. Another close examination of the nature of collaboration is Vladimir Khotinenko’s Pop [Priest] (2009), which offers a critical though balanced picture of the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Nazioccupied territories south of Leningrad. The film was supported by both the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian government, and subsequently praised by Patriarch Kirill as ‘an important and truthful word on the life of the Russian Church during the difficult war years’; it received the first Patriarch’s Prize for Film in May 2010.15 Screen time is given to the arguments put forward by Church authorities that saw collaboration with the Nazis as a means of opening up churches and providing spiritual succour and support for the population, although the sentiment that ‘serving Hitler is better than serving the anti-Christ Stalin’ is left without comment. The German officer (of Russian descent) who oversees the Nazi–Church relationship is treated very sympathetically; deaths caused by German soldiers (apart from one execution) are accidental, whereas the activities of the partisans are murderous and indiscriminate. The NKVD, which occupies territory as the Germans retreat, is by far more brutal towards the Church’s representatives than were the Nazis. Other post-Soviet films have not been afraid of showing sympathy towards the enemy, or even showing the war from his point of view. Alexander Rogozhkin was not afraid to show sympathy towards the Chechens in Blokpost, and he continued to blur the erstwhile black-andwhite certainties of the Second World War in Kukushka [Cuckoo] (2002), in which a Red Army soldier and a Finnish soldier are forced to spend the winter of 1944–1945 together on the farm of a lonely Finnish widow. Their initial mistrust and hostility eventually give way to an accommodation and, finally, mutual help and appreciation, even though the Russian does not understand Finnish and the two Finns do not understand Russian, sometimes to comic effect. By turns funny and tense, Kukushka gives a human and sympathetic face to the ‘enemy’. The most subversive and iconoclastic war film in recent years, from a purely generic point of view, is Alexei German Jr’s Poslednii poezd [The Last Train] (2004). It has as its protagonist an obese German army doctor stranded at a Soviet railway station in 1944 and unable to escape. All around are dead and dying, and he, too, will surely soon join their ranks.16 Even sixty years after the War, German’s film is a bold take on the genre, showing death and disease from the point of view of ‘the enemy’, with barely a Red Army ‘hero’ in sight. German thus distances his film from the established genre in a much more startling and innovative way than Rogozhkin, because, in his film, war destroys everything, no-one survives,

Russian War Films and the Lessons for Today | 353

there is no victory, no heroism, and, most crucially of all, no meaning to war. Poslednii poezd is a nihilistic, almost existential depiction of the hopelessness of life, where the only certainty is death. The final film to be discussed here, and perhaps the one that caused most controversy on its release, is Alexander Atanesian’s Svolochi [Bastards] (2006). Apparently based on facts – in particular from the life of Vladimir Kunin, the author of the book on which it is based – the film shows a group of about a dozen criminal adolescents, including murderers, in 1943, who instead of being executed for their crimes (the death penalty was then applicable to children as young as fourteen), are trained for a Dirty Dozen-like suicide mission behind enemy lines. We are left in no doubt that these boys are all nasty, violent and occasionally remorseless criminals, but we are also reminded that they are just children. In the course of their mission, all but two are killed, and these two meet up sixty years later on the hillside of their former training-camp in Kazakhstan. The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) was quick to deny that any such operations took place, and, when MTV Russia announced Svolochi as the best film of 2007, the esteemed director Vladimir Menshov refused to present the prize at the awards ceremony, declaring: ‘I consider that this film is the direst slander on our country, let Pamela Anderson [another of the evening’s presenters] hand over the prize’.17 In general, however, the film was positively received by the public, who praised the acting in particular. Few online comments discussed the film’s historical truthfulness.18 The Soviet and post-Soviet Russian war film remains a two-faced beast. On the one hand, it has been used through the decades by various governments to legitimise their own agenda and to provide justification for their policies and experience. On the other hand, it provides inquisitive and non-conformist filmmakers with material and ideas to question those same policies, and to explore hidden areas of the national experience that the authorities would prefer not to see exposed. In particular, issues of collaboration and treason remain sensitive because they touch on national pride and patriotism, as well as on the nature of government and its ­relationship with those it governs.

Acknowledgements I am indebted to Mr Edwin Pace for his help in the writing of this chapter.

354 | David Gillespie

Notes  1. Pravda editorial ‘Chapaeva posmotrit vsia strana’ [‘The Whole Country Will Be Watching Chapaev’], 21 November 1934, p.1 (quoted in Taylor and Christie 1988: 335).  2. Alexander Dovzhenko, Shchors (1939); Alexander Faintsimmer, Kotovskii (1942); Vladimir Motyl, Beloe solntse pustyni [White Sun of the Desert] (1969); Nikita Mikhalkov, Svoi sredi chuzhikh, chuzhoi sredi svoikh [At Home among Strangers, a Stranger at Home] (1974). An example from the cinema of Soviet Uzbekistan is Ali Khamraev’s Telokhranitel [The Bodyguard] (1980), with Alexander Kaidanovskii as the seemingly indestructible hero.  3. The Thaw refers to the ‘thawing’ of the Cold War, a period in Soviet Russian history that was made possible by Stalin’s death in 1953 and was officially inaugurated by Khrushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin’s crimes, made at the Twentieth Communist Party Congress in 1956. It heralded an irreversible opening up and liberalising of Soviet Russian society.  4. Elena Stishova (2002: 101) wrote on the ‘Caucasian’ theme: ‘If Russian writers of the nineteenth century tried to humanise Caucasian-Russian relations, and saw in this their mission and a possible psychological exit from the impasse of war, then today we observe nothing of the sort. Both Bodrov and Rogozhkin include motifs of mutual cruelty and mutual mistrust between the Russian military and the local population. There can be no question of friendship. Nolens volens, you come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as peace-loving Chechens.’  5. Birgit Beumers (2000: 177) makes the pertinent point that the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya were fundamentally different because the former was instigated by a one-party state, the second by a democratically elected government: ‘The relationship between state and soldier is different, based on give and take, on trust in the state’s righteousness and the soldier’s commitment. This presumes that the soldiers believe in the political and national values harboured by the country they fight for. But in the new Russia, there were none of those: instead, political chaos reigned.’  6. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/russian/russia/2011/07/110715_putin_toilet_aforism.shtml (accessed 4 June 2015).  7. Dawn Seckler (2011: 113) writes that ‘The goal of Company 9 is to sustain the myth of the Soviet soldier within the post-Soviet culture industry’.  8. Denise Youngblood (2007: 208) makes explicit the film’s contemporary resonance: ‘The bloodied corpses of the fair-skinned and light-haired Russian boys are contrasted to those of hook-nosed swarthy Afghans swathed in black and to the aestheticized, high art Afghan landscape filmed in gauzy soft pinks and taupes. Although the setting is Soviet, in the last months of the war, no viewer could possibly miss the implicit comparison to Chechnya; indeed, according to a Russian television producer, the project was initially conceived as one about the war in Chechnya’.  9. For a detailed and informed analysis of the battle and its aftermath, see Wilmoth and Tsouras (2001). The battle is also the subject of the 2009 film Russkaia zhertva [Russian Sacrifice], directed by Elena Liapicheva and Irina Meletina and based on the diaries of one of the combatants, Lieutenant Andrei Vorobev. Another film on a similar theme is Sergei Makhovikov’s Tikhaia zastava [A Quiet Outpost] (2010), set on the Russian-Tadjik border and based on actual events in 1993. Here, too, the Russian soldiers are portrayed very sympathetically, whereas the Islamist enemy, as in Balabanov’s Voina, is demonised. For discussion of the film’s blatant attempt at ‘patriotic education’, see the review by Eva Binder (2011).

Russian War Films and the Lessons for Today | 355

10. Vladimir Putin, speech at the ‘solemn gathering’ dedicated to the memory of the airborne soldiers who had died, 1 March 2013, http://news.kremlin.ru/transcripts/17606/ print/ (accessed 18 November 2013). 11. Tatiana Smorodinskaya comments on the film’s contemporary resonance (2010: 89): ‘The new Russian masterminds do not try to restore communist ideals; rather, they strive to create a new unifying national idea, and they clearly realize the importance of the heroic past as a basis for a new patriotic doctrine.’ 12. On the NKVD, see note 1 page 311, infra. 13. At the founding congress of the Russian Military-Historical Society on 14 March 2013, President Putin said: ‘The country must have them [heroes], and people should know them. They should be guiding points on whose example today’s generations could mould themselves and their children. This is very important! Very important.’ See http:// www.kremlin.ru/transcripts/17677/ (accessed 18 November 2013). 14. In his definitive study of the Soviet and Russian ‘war prose’ genre, Frank Ellis (2011: 108) observes that Bykov’s work explores the individual psyche in extreme situations: ‘In reading Bykov, we are in the realm of critical thresholds. In many of Bykov’s stories, his characters are on a knife-edge, to use the author’s metaphor. What is the apparently infinitesimal measure of change that causes one man to become a traitor while the other remains loyal? And would these treacherous tendencies ever have been revealed had it not been for the war?’ 15. See http://patriarch.ua/news.aspx?p=2&id=1208/ and http://hramnagorke.ru/world/2374/ (accessed 18 November 2013). The film was not greeted with unanimous acclaim, however, and critics gave voice to their scepticism with regard to the ‘authenticity’ of the events in the film, especially as it was sponsored by the Orthodox Church and aimed to show the work of Orthodox priests in the occupied territories in a positive light. See Nina Tsyrkun, ‘Sviatoi i nemtsy’, http://kinoart.ru/archive/2010/04/n4-article4 (accessed 18 November 2013). 16. Denise Youngblood (2007: 229) calls it ‘not so much an antiwar movie as an “anti-war movie” movie’. 17. See http://www.kp.ru/daily/23891/66335/ and http://www.fsb.gov.ry/press/2006/ msg0102-1.html/ (accessed 18 November 2013). 18. See http://www.kinopoisk.ru/film/103414/ (accessed 18 November 2013).

References Beumers, B. 2000. ‘Myth-Making and Myth-Taking: Lost Ideals and the War in Contemporary Russian Cinema’, Canadian Slavonic Papers 42 (1–2): 171–89. Binder, E. 2011. ‘Review’. Kinokultura 34. http://www.kinokultura.com/ (accessed 18 November 2013). Bykov, Vasil (1970), ‘Sotnikov’, Novyi mir 5 (1970), 65-161. Ellis, F. 2011. The Damned and the Dead: The Eastern Front through the Eyes of Soviet and Russian Novelists. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Kucherenko, O. 2011. ‘That’ll Teach ’em to Love their Motherland: Russian Youth Revisit the Battles of World War II’, The Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies 12, http:// pipss.revues.org/3866 (accessed 18 November 2013). Razlogova, E. 2011. ‘Nikita Mikhalkov: Burnt by the Sun 2’. Kinokultura 34. http://www. kinokultura.com/ (accessed 18 November 2013).

356 | David Gillespie

Seckler, D. 2011. ‘Company 9’, in B. Beumers (ed.), Directory of World Cinema: Russia. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, pp. 112–13. Smorodinskaya, T. 2010. ‘The Fathers’ War through the Sons’ Lenses’, in H. Goscilo and Y. Hashamova (eds), Cinepaternity: Fathers and Sons in Soviet and Post-Soviet Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 89–113. Stishova, E. 2002. ‘Tranzit: Visbaden–Pittsburg–Kavkaz. Kavkazskaia tema v rossiiskom kino’, Iskusstvo kino 1: 90–101. Taylor, R. and I. Christie (eds). 1988. The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896–1939. London and New York: Routledge. Wilmoth, M.D. and P.G. Tsouras. 2001. ‘Ulus-Kert: An Airborne Company’s Last Stand’, Combined Arms Center Military Review July–August: 91–97. Youngblood, D.J. 2007. Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914–2005. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Filmography Apostol [Apostle]. 2008, dir. Nikolai Lebedev, Iurii Moroz and Gennadii Sidorov Ballada o soldate [Ballad of a Soldier]. 1959, dir. Grigorii Chukhrai Beloe solntse pustyni [White Sun of the Desert]. 1969, dir. Vladimir Motyl Blokpost [Checkpoint]. 1999, dir. Alexander Rogozhkin Brat [The Brother]. 1997, dir. Alexei Balabanov Brat 2 [The Brother 2]. 1999, dir. Alexei Balabanov Chapaev. 1934, dir. Vasilev Brothers Deviataia rota [The Ninth Company]. 2005, dir. Fedor Bondarchuk Diversant [Saboteur]. 2004, dir. Andrei Maliukov Dom durakov [House of Fools]. 2002, dir. Andrei Konchalovskii Full Metal Jacket. 1987, dir. Stanley Kubrick Idi i smotri [Come and See]. 1985, dir. Elem Klimov Ivan Groznyi [Ivan the Terrible], 2 parts. 1944–1945, dir. Sergei Eisenstein Kavkazskii plennik [Prisoner of the Mountains]. 1996, dir. Sergei Bodrov Kedr pronzaet nebo [The Cedar Pierces the Sky]. 2011, dir. Alexander Barshak Kotovskii. 1942, dir. Alexander Faintsimmer Kukushka [Cuckoo]. 2002, dir. Alexander Rogozhkin Letiat zhuravli [The Cranes Are Flying]. 1957, dir. Mikhail Kalatozov My iz budushchego [We Are from the Future]. 2008, dir. Andrei Maliukov My iz budushchego 2 [We Are from the Future 2]. 2010, dir. Alexander Samokhvalov Oni srazhalis za rodinu [They Fought for the Motherland]. 1975, dir. Sergei Bondarchuk Padenie Berlina [The Fall of Berlin]. 1949, dir. Mikhail Chiaureli Platoon. 1986, dir. Oliver Stone Pop [Priest]. 2009, dir. Vladimir Khotinenko Poslednii poezd [The Last Train]. 2004, dir. Alexei German Jr Raduga [The Rainbow]. 1943, dir. Mark Donskoi Russkaia zhertva [Russian Sacrifice]. 2009, dir. Elena Liapicheva and Irina Meletina Shchors. 1939, dir. Alexander Dovzhenko Shtrafbat [Penal Battalion]. 2004, dir. Nikolai Dostal Sudba cheloveka [The Destiny of a Man]. 1959, dir. Sergei Bondarchuk Svoi [Our Own]. 2004, dir. Dmitrii Meskhiev

Russian War Films and the Lessons for Today | 357

Svoi sredi chuzhikh, chuzhoi sredi svoikh [At Home among Strangers, a Stranger at Home]. 1974, dir. Nikita Mikhalkov Svolochi [Bastards]. 2006, dir. Alexander Atanesian Telokhranitel [The Bodyguard]. 1980, dir. Ali Khamraev Tikhaia zastava [A Quiet Outpost]. 2010, dir. Sergei Makhovikov Tuman [The Fog]. 2010, dir. Ivan Shurkhovetskii and Artem Aksenenko Tuman 2 [The Fog 2]. 2012, dir. Ivan Shurkhovetskii Utomlennye solntsem [Burnt by the Sun]. 1994, dir. Nikita Mikhalkov Utomlennye solntsem 2: Predstoianie [Burnt by the Sun 2: Coram Deo]. 2010, dir. Nikita Mikhalkov Utomlennye solntsem 2: Tsitadel [Burnt by the Sun 2: Citadel]. 2011, dir. Nikita Mikhalkov V avguste 44-ogo [In August 1944]. 2000, dir. Mikhail Ptashuk V tumane [In the Fog]. 2012, dir. Sergei Loznitsa Voina [War]. 2002, dir. Alexei Balabanov Voina i mir [War and Peace], 4 parts. 1965–1967, dir. Sergei Bondarchuk Voskhozhdenie [The Ascent]. 1976, dir. Larisa Shepitko Zoia. 1944, dir. Leo Arnshtam

David Gillespie is Professor of Russian at the University of Bath and Visiting Professor at Tomsk State University. He has published widely on post-war Russian literature and film and Russian culture in the post-Soviet era, including Early Soviet Cinema: Innovation, Ideology and Propaganda (2000; reprinted 2005) and Russian Cinema (2003).

Chapter 21

Russian Fiction at War

( Greg Carleton

In Russia, the Second World War is generally acknowledged as the most significant event of its modern history. Yet unlike other victorious allies, such as the United States, its story has not necessarily settled into the comfortable frame of the ‘good war’ and all the positive resonance offered by such an appellation. The primary reason is that the war constitutes both Russia’s greatest triumph – at the forefront of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany – and its greatest tragedy, with the staggering, unprecedented loss of millions of lives. Moreover, between these two poles lie a number of factors that further complicate its remembrance and commemoration: the pre-war purge of the Soviet military command; the Soviet Union’s non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany; their joint invasion of Poland in 1939; the attack on Finland that same year; the annexation of the Baltic States; the deportation, imprisonment and execution of thousands in those newly acquired territories; the collapse of the army following the German invasion in 1941; the horrible conditions, the incompetence of commanders and the shortages that many soldiers in the Red Army suffered; the deportation of national minorities suspected of German collaboration; the sheer number of Soviet citizens who collaborated, either through coercion, the need to survive or anti-Soviet sympathies; the mass looting and rapes Red Army soldiers inflicted on other Eastern European countries and Germany; and the fate of liberated Soviet prisoners of war, who often found themselves re-imprisoned by their own state. As a final paradox, for many the result of the war was turned on its head. While the Red Army liberated Eastern Europe from Nazi tyranny, the victory ensured not only that the tyranny of Stalin and the Communist Party would continue in the Soviet Union but also that it would ensnare the newly liberated territories as well. Notes for this chapter begin on page 370.

Russian Fiction at War | 359

Yet for much of the Soviet Union’s post-war existence, the sense of triumph reigned – at least publicly. Key to its dominance was the Party’s monopoly on the writing of history which generally erased, ignored, downplayed or denied actions listed above. Only top-ranking commanders, for the most part, were allowed to publish memoirs, and those were heavily censored. Under the same conditions, profiles of individual Soviet soldiers and civilians were limited to heroic – and often martyrological – tales that became formulaic. The role of the Party, almost always in the lead in any account of the war, was presented as uniformly benevolent as well as decisive in achieving victory. And victory itself was not that of one tyranny over another, but of one system, Socialism, over another, Fascism, which itself was understood as the worst manifestation of capitalism. Soviet literature played its part in upholding these ideological imperatives. The canon was similarly exclusionary, ensuring that here, too, triumph would reign, be it the story of a person, village or nation at war. Yet it was also fiction, particularly that produced by front-line veterans, that offered a sustained challenge to the whitewashing of the war. This challenge was not a quantitative one – the canon dominated the average bookshelf – but a qualitative one, an attempt to capture the reality of the war across the full spectrum of personal experience. Even in the strictest of times, cultural expression in the Soviet Union was never as monochromatic as stereotypes might suggest. Moreover, perhaps contrary to expectations, this challenge arose not in the post-Stalin Thaw (as was the case for cinema), but during the war itself and its immediate aftermath – no matter how vigilant the censor or dogmatic the Party line. Exemplary is Alexander Tvardovsky’s epic in verse, Vasily Tyorkin, published serially from 1942, which became wildly popular among frontline troops, since many of them could discern a compatriot in the title character. Through this simple peasant, Tvardovsky lowers the narrative horizon to what a typical soldier experienced, from the tedium of intervals between fighting to the cold, lice and friendly fire. But woven into this tapestry of the quotidian is the story of the Russian soldier summoned by history in the nation’s darkest days: The hour has struck, our turn has come. Now we are to answer For Russia, for the people. For all that is on earth. Every Ivan, every Foma, Whether dead or still alive, All of us together – that is we, The people, we are Russia. (Tvardovsky 2000: 34–35)1

360 | Greg Carleton

The war, in short, is Russia’s war – fought by its people and on its land which itself is anthropomorphised in traditional mythic terms as ‘mother’. This is not to say that Tvardovsky was ignorant of other nationalities fighting and dying in the Red Army; after all, he became a member of the Party before the German invasion and served as a war correspondent throughout. Rather, his poetic vision has no place for things specifically Soviet. There is, essentially, no mention of the Party, its leaders or its ostensible guiding role. Nor is there mention of Socialism, Communism or other ideological mainstays. To be sure, his paean to Russia parallels an official turn during the war to icons of pre-Soviet history as motivational points (in recognition of the fact that a purely ‘Soviet’ patriotism was insufficient). But Tvardovsky reaches much further by avoiding, for example, the common stock of heroic supermen that dominated war literature, journalism and propaganda. In its place, not only do we have details of soldiers’ front-line experiences but, more astonishing, an emphasis on the retreat of 1941 and the sense of both the shame and guilt they felt in abandoning so much to the horror of German occupation. Such is the war – with the Russian land and people facing absolute destruction – that its true meaning, at least when registered on a poetic plane, transcends anything the Soviet state could offer. An even more unorthodox view can be found in Viktor Nekrasov’s 1946 novel, In the Trenches of Stalingrad, set where he himself had fought.2 Its first sentence – ‘The order to retreat came totally unexpectedly’ – was a direct challenge to official history which, until Stalin’s death, painted the 1942 collapse as his cunning manoeuvre to lure the Germans into a trap. In Nekrasov’s novel, the picture is decidedly closer to the truth: chaos reigned as soldiers were once again humiliated by the German advance, and this time without the excuse of a surprise attack as in 1941. The battle for the city, which, of course, ended in a turning-point victory for the Soviet Union, is not presented through the expected triumphant lens. Instead, confusion looms. Germans are rarely seen or described; they do not, therefore, appear to be particularly odious. Conspicuously gone is the planking necessary to create the binary opposition – the anchor of Soviet propaganda and history – between bad German and good Russian/ Soviet. Absent too is the Party as a major factor, and, in the trenches, soldiers are more apt to talk about Jack London than Stalin. Nekrasov’s attention to details extends into decidedly dirty ones, whether at a personal level with the acknowledgement that soldiers soil themselves in combat or at a more political level: troops were poorly trained; cowards could be found among them; their lives could be thrown away by idiotic or sadistic commanders; their motivation in combat could be the bonds of companionship instead of some overarching patriotic mantra. Victory,

Russian Fiction at War | 361

in other words, is almost anti-climactic compared to the story of what they faced. Vasily Tyorkin and In the Trenches of Stalingrad did not operate on the margins of Soviet literature. Both were written by Party members; both received the Stalin Prize; and both went through multiple editions. Both are still read and published today for their aesthetic value and groundbreaking achievement, described best in Nekrasov’s case by his fellow writer and veteran, Grigory Baklanov (2005: 378): ‘no other book had as much influence on the rest of our war literature and on each of us as did his novel.’ The possibilities of expression carved out by writers like Tvardovsky and Nekrasov exploded during the Thaw, following Stalin’s death. While the official canon remained dominant, a more consequential literature was produced from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s by other front-line veterans such as Baklanov, Konstantin Vorobev, Bulat Okudzhava and Vasil Bykov. (The last was Belarusian but his work is commonly read by scholars and popular readers as part of Russian literature, given its closeness of theme, approach and language.) While not expressly anti-Soviet, these writers were more incisive about the people’s fate at the hands of a state run by the Communist Party, and they were less concerned with the German enemy, who was often humanised in contrast to the demonic automatons to be found in the official canon. Full light was now shed on the purges, on incompetent commanders and the responsibility that the high command, especially Stalin, bore for the failure to prepare for impending invasion. The narrative horizon revealed more dirty details, both minor (sex) and major, like the institution of penal battalions in 1942, in which hundreds of thousands of Soviets, generally innocent of the crimes of which they were accused, would die by the end of the war. This last topic motivated perhaps the most noted (and divisive) work of the period, Bykov’s The Dead Feel No Pain (1966), which framed the war in terms of the authorities’ inhuman treatment of common soldiers, not just on physical but on moral grounds – an issue that had much in common with what was emanating from dissident circles unconnected with the war.3 By the 1970s, the doors closed, for the most part, on the war’s unsettling issues. In their place, the official canon came to full maturity and, many would believe, stagnation, as Soviet-ness and fidelity to the Party served as the anchors of a collective identity based on war commemoration. Professed exceptionalism – of the Soviet people, the country, the Socialist system, and their suffering at the hands of Fascists (as the German enemy was generally known) – constituted the banner under which all were to unite, including a new generation born after the war, whose debt to those who had fought and died provided a supra-ethnic, supra-national

362 | Greg Carleton

heritage. At least, that was the official intent of this particular orthodoxy which manifested itself publicly in all forms of expression, including literature, history and cinema.4 Whatever its appeal to the populace or its usefulness to the authorities, the canon crashed with the coming of glasnost in the mid-1980s. Begun as a top-down exposé of certain Stalinist excesses, the push from below for the truth broke through all remaining barriers by the time the Soviet Union itself collapsed in 1991. Regarding the war, the cohort of front-line writerveterans who came to prominence in the Thaw took the lead, first through journalism and then through fiction, in demolishing the proscriptions that had kept their fate locked in a prison of myth. No censorship meant no limits on expression, marking a turning point in the way in which these veterans could share their own personal histories with the nation. For the most part, what they themselves experienced served as their motivating principle, which led them to pay less attention to the larger controversies of state policy (e.g., the 1939 non-aggression pact with Germany). Instead, they concentrated on what their world had been like in the trenches, at the centre of which was death: constant and inescapable. Acknowledging death in the war became a litmus test of glasnost freedoms, since the scale of Soviet losses had always been tipped according to ideological need. Under Stalin, the claim that seven million people had died was a lie, both to save his reputation as supreme leader and to hide the true extent of devastation suffered by the Soviet Union from a world divided by the Cold War. During the Thaw, the number of dead ‘grew’ to twenty million, a figure still tainted by duplicity. With glasnost, twentyseven million became the official count. Some believed – and still do, since the actual number will never be known – that this is an underestimate. Nevertheless, that number alone means that approximately one out of every seven Soviet citizens, of whom the majority were civilians, perished during the Second World War.5 Writers broke ground on this issue in two critical ways, the first being its representation. If the Soviet canon registered death in the abstract or presented it under the halo of noble sacrifice and martyrdom, then this new fiction, much of it autobiographically based, flipped the picture. The gruesome and grotesque dominate its palette, confronting readers with what everyone knows happens on a battlefield but prefers to avoid. No one dies quietly or, in that peculiar oxymoron, peacefully; and no one, of course, dies with Stalin’s name on his lips. More often, the last word is ‘mama’ – the tearful attempt to regain lost innocence. More searing, more painful to confront, however, was the second way in which writers confronted the issue of death in the war: their interpretation of the causes of so much slaughter. Where one might assume that

Russian Fiction at War | 363

German soldiers would be to blame, with these writers, as in Vladimir But’s chilling The Grass of ’43, published in 1996, they are less important than the Soviet military command and its ‘knacker mentality’.6 The novel is set during the attempt to retake Crimea by amphibious assault; the title, suggesting grass mown down by a scythe, already portends the bloody disaster that will follow. Starving, ill-equipped and untrained men are not led but ‘driven’ like stock animals by officers into fruitless, yet suicidal, frontal attacks. Those fortunate to survive find deployed at their own rear an equally deadly foe: ‘blocking detachments’ made up of Soviet soldiers with superior weaponry who are prepared to shoot anyone who retreats. But’s victims find themselves caught between a Scylla and Charybdis of death at the final link in a chain of wholesale neglect and contempt for conscripts, who were otherwise known as ‘shit’ by their superiors. Why, indeed, should they even care about the number of soldiers lost? one general asks. After all, ‘Russian women are fertile like cats; they can give birth to more’ (But 1996: 470). In his 1994 novel The Damned and the Dead, Viktor Astafev, another veteran-writer, offers perhaps the most devastating portrait of the RussianSoviet soldier at war.7 Astafev himself survived the forced crossing of the Dniepr River in 1943 which almost ended in a fiasco similar to what befell But in Crimea. Yet even if it was ultimately successful, the operation – attempted with minimal preparation, inadequate rafts and little artillery cover – left thousands of bodies floating in the river and thousands more stranded on the German side. Only additional crossings, no less bloody, allowed the scattered bridgeheads to link up and end the ghastly stalemate. In Soviet parlance, the Dniepr became known as the ‘river of heroes’, the high casualty count serving as proof of soldiers’ courage.8 In Astafev’s hands, it becomes a river of hell, and his novel turns their sacrifice into a ghastly shame, representative of the large number of Russians who, by the late 1980s, began to reconsider the overall toll of losses in the war. What Soviet officials had offered as a point of pride – no country suffered more in the struggle against Nazi Germany – could by this time be challenged as evidence of something frightfully wrong with the military system: why did so many have to die? The Damned and the Dead ends with the Dniepr crossing, but at its beginning, with recruits training in Siberia, the answer is already clear. Issued with uniforms taken from the dead, with bullet holes and bloodstains still present, they are symbolically reduced to the same status and referred to as ‘goners’, a word that camp slang usually ascribes to prisoners on their last legs. Conspicuously absent among them is any sense of duty to the state or patriotism. How could there be, when the first deaths occur there, hundreds of miles from the front, at the hands

364 | Greg Carleton

of their officers? Indeed, what unites them, besides lice, diarrhoea and hunger, is precisely the fear of their superiors.9 Astafev and But were not alone in turning what was once exclusively a conflict between Soviet and German into something darker: one of Soviet power against the people. At this primal level, the scenario of the state killing its own overshadowed the horror inflicted by Germans. Moreover, if framed in this way, the internal conflict transcended the war itself. Such is the theme of Bykov’s The Great Freeze (1993), which intersperses a lone partisan in Belarus, wandering in a blizzard, with flashbacks of the forced collectivisation of the peasants a decade before.10 Bykov focuses on both the main character, who worked for the Party and police organs then, and the continued suffering of the people during German occupation. Yet the shock for some readers of The Great Freeze comes from the fact that the invader figures little. Rather, the violence used by the Soviet state to coerce peasants in peacetime is matched by the violence that Party-controlled partisans inflict on villagers if they refuse to support them unequivocally. Such unequivocal support, however, risks bringing down German wrath. Confusion reigns, as the main character wrestles with this maelstrom: How could one now understand who was to blame? Of course, the war was to blame. All around were cruelty, hatred and animosity that tore apart human souls. They [the partisans] would shoot, destroy, rampage – just so that there was more blood, both theirs and ours. But did all that start with the war; wasn’t there before the war something similar? Our people began fighting each other a long time ago and did it with some success. (Bykov 1993: 40–41)

In this blurring of lines and of time, only one certainty remains: blood was shed, and continues to be shed. It is, Bykov underscores, the blood of innocent people who have committed no crime against either the Soviet or the German state. Yet to both authorities, they are just a commodity, and the only language known to these authorities is violence. Delving into and dramatising these once-taboo subjects inevitably leads writers like Astafev, But and Bykov to the heart of Russia’s predicament in remembering the war: it cannot be separated from the legacy of Soviet power itself, manifest not only in the collectivisation campaign of the 1930s (which resulted in the deaths of millions) but also, in the same decade and beyond, in the Great Terror which consumed millions more, to be followed in turn by the Soviet Union’s own conduct and policies during the Second World War itself. This predicament has driven many – and not just in fiction – to construct Russian identity during the Second World War in a unique way: unique, at least, among the Allies. To be Russian is to be of the people, an entity that can be defined in the traditional binary opposition inherent in

Russian Fiction at War | 365

any foreign conflict (us versus the enemy) but that should be defined in opposition to an internal authority as well. The separation of the Russian people from the Soviet state – what Tvardovsky probed in less divisive terms in Vasily Tyorkin during the war – changed radically in the 1990s, as writers took images that had been implanted before the war to their logical end. It would seem that only this distinction between the Russian people and the Soviet state gives a shared sense of experience to what so many endured, whether as civilians in occupied territories beset by Germans and partisans, or as the starving citizens of Leningrad; as prisoners in the camps of either side, or as common soldiers in the trenches. All suffer ‘there’, wherever that might be, because of circumstances they do not control. Instead, that power to control belongs to a nebulous, protean wrath wielding either a swastika or a hammer and sickle. Revisionist fiction focused more on the effect of Soviet rather than German power for a number of reasons. The official canon, with its sometimes cartoonish portrayal of the enemy, may have more or less exhausted all potentials in the ‘us versus foreign enemy’ paradigm. Also, the very nature of the glasnost-inspired search for the truth would naturally underscore what had previously been ignored or censored. But there is yet another reason, as these writers made clear both in fiction and in other commentaries: the exertion of Soviet power was qualitatively distinct. To be sure, both Soviet and German power converged in these two decades to make this the bloodiest period of Russian history (which holds true for Ukrainian, Belarusian, Polish and Jewish history as well).11 Yet Soviet leaders, from this interior perspective, were guilty of an additional crime: the unprecedented betrayal of a citizenry by its government at many levels, including, • betrayal of trust in the soldiers to fight, as manifest, for example, by the ‘blocking detachments’; • betrayal of them as human beings, reduced instead, in But’s words, to raw ‘human material’ to be employed as desired and treated as such; • betrayal, in a further reduction, of female soldiers, who served in the hundreds of thousands, to sexual creatures preyed on by a predatory officer class, as captured in Astafev’s work Overtone (1996a); • betrayal after the war in the callous treatment of veterans, particularly the disabled;12 • betrayal at a patriotic level, when the Party stole the laurels of victory, insisting that its leadership, more than the blood and sweat of soldiers, ensured the defeat of Germany; and • betrayal of all who believed their sacrifice would result in a freer, more humane society. ‘All our hopes’, observed the writer and veteran

366 | Greg Carleton

Viacheslav Kondratev on the forty-fifth anniversary of VE Day, ‘that something would change [after the war] were destroyed’ (1990b: 9). The accumulated weight of these revelations and the success of a number of writers in transferring them to fiction has carved out a profound hollowness in post-Soviet memories of the war. Their ‘de-heroicised’ version has challenged and sometimes upset readers, including veterans, for whom victory in 1945 constitutes Russia’s greatest moment, even if this means that it is framed through a traditional Soviet lens. Some of that resistance is understandable, given that writers have pushed the limits a long way in their efforts to overturn the Soviet canon. It would have been unthinkable before glasnost to present collaborators, who fought on the German side, in a relatively sympathetic manner, as did Georgy Vladimov in his 1995 novel, The General and His Army (while not a veteran, he lived through the war as a child). It would have been equally impossible to reframe the 1940s as a time when the Soviet Union was at war with itself, the subject not just of Bykov’s The Great Freeze but also of Astafev’s So Wanting to Live (1996b). Revisionist thinking could also place the destructive tyrannies of the Nazi and Soviet regimes in the same camp – an equation of the two warring sides that was spurred by the posthumous publication in the Soviet Union of Vasily Grossman’s acclaimed, yet long-suppressed novel, Life and Fate, in 1988. Updating the legacy of the war to the mid-1990s, Baklanov could ask the following question in his novel And Then Come the Vultures (1996): what was to be the final reckoning of Russian sacrifice? For most veterans in post-Soviet society, it became one of crushing poverty: their life savings – and life’s work – wiped out by savage inflation and the collapse of social institutions. What victory had been won if Russia, seen from the perspective of the 1990s, wallowed in decay whereas the ‘defeated’ nations like Germany and Japan enjoyed prosperity? If the vultures of 1945 – marodery is a term which literally denotes corpse-robbers – were the self-serving staff officers who served in the rear and later made careers on the bones of millions, then the collapse of the Soviet Union gave rise to a new breed of vultures, feasting off the remnants of a nation that the war generation had first defended then rebuilt. While the demise of the Soviet Union brought a long-desired end to political repression, the nouveaux riches and corrupt government officials who rushed into the vacuum, Baklanov made clear, could hardly now pretend to a higher ethical standard.13 From so many angles, these writers fought to ensure that the Second World War could not serve the purposes of a national hagiography, whether in a broader ‘Soviet’ or more narrowly ‘Russian’ redaction. How could it, when their verdict sounded eerily reminiscent of the way in which the legacy of the First World War had come to be understood?

Russian Fiction at War | 367

For those who fought, as represented by But in The Grass of ’43, it was a ‘harvest of corpses’, their ‘Golgotha’. To Kondratev, who committed suicide out of despair in 1993, his generation was ‘a lost generation’ (1990b: 117), ‘the flower of the nation [that had] perished’ in the war (1991: 7). Baklanov, who lost his brother, uncle and cousin, went further, employing the phrase ‘the whole of our people perishing’ (2005: 745). No one, however, has gone as far as Viktor Astafev in shattering comfortable myths about the Second World War. Although in The Damned and the Dead the Soviets do succeed in crossing the Dniepr and, by extension, that operation does actually play its part in bringing down Hitler’s Germany a year and a half later, Astafev insists nevertheless on asking: Where is there victory in the slaughter of millions? Where is heroism in the ruin of countries and peoples? Presenting the conflict as being between two opponents, with a winner and loser, is a mistake, for it assumes a right and a wrong side, and suggests a legitimate purpose to wanton destruction. Instead, the war dragged everyone down into a pit of barbarism. His novel, remarkably, frees Germans from the role of villains, and closes with words of compassion for their fate on Soviet soil. There is, Astafev would seem to suggest, no good versus evil played out here but just a reign of evil that has released a tide of blood that covers everybody. So devastating is the war that it cannot be understood in terms of conflicting ideologies or geo-political interests. It is divine damnation for a world in thrall to soulless modernity that has rejected God and profaned His earth. For Russia, the primary villains in this desecration are the Bolsheviks, but each country has its own counterparts who condemn their own to death. ‘In the entire history of humanity,’ Astafev writes, ‘only one comrade did not send others to die in his place. He Himself ascended the cross.’ Yet unlike in works by Fyodor Dostoevsky or Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose pastoral nationalism runs close to Astafev’s, there is no Christ here, no sense of redemption or resurrection. The carnage is permanent and absolute.14 In two subsequent autobiographical war novels, the aforementioned So Wanting to Live and The Jolly Soldier (1999), which jump back and forth between the war and the 1990s, Astafev draws the curtain on hope. While Astafev does not regret the collapse of the Soviet power, Russia still continues to distance itself from its idyllic roots and, despite the return of the Orthodox Church, moves increasingly further from God. As with Communism before, the post-Soviet obsession with materialism has eviscerated Russians’ sense of ethics and made people more ‘evil’ and ‘savage’ by upholding a societal system where the strong abuse the weak (1996b: 185). Moreover, the disastrous Chechen conflict of the mid-1990s (now more commonly known as the First Chechen War), which unfolded while he was writing, demonstrated once more how leaders send the innocent

368 | Greg Carleton

to be killed. Fifty years after Hitler and Stalin, death still stalks Russia, laments the narrator, a Second World War veteran, in The Jolly Soldier (1999: 38), Astafev’s last novel before his own death in 2002. War, he suggests, is Russia’s permanent affliction. Few in this group of writer-veterans would follow Astafev to such depths of cynicism, but all shared another key tenet: belief in their fiction as an optimal vehicle to convey an experiential truth of the war. This approach, which Viktor Nekrasov first established in In the Trenches of Stalingrad, synthesises two elements. First, the narrative’s referential plane is limited, as much as possible, to what the author personally saw or did, and to what happened to him and his close comrades; this is why much of this literature can be read as quasi-autobiographical. Second, since the narrative is nevertheless a fiction, it can play to the writer’s strength in crafting scenarios or situations to test characters’ integrity or moral fibre in the most extreme of circumstances; this is why much of it can be read also as a struggle for the survival of truth in an environment calculated to destroy it. The idea of Russian literature having a special mission to inform and challenge readers was already a developed postulate in the nineteenth century, but here it gained an added impetus because of another feature of Soviet power: the open use of fabrication and hyperbole to justify morally unacceptable practices such as the lies and omissions that shaped Stalinist depictions of the war or that sentenced so many to penal battalions or summary execution (paralleling the falsehoods that condemned millions during the Great Terror). Indeed, what motivated many veterans to write was their collective abhorrence of the official histories that were forced on the population. In them, as Baklanov declared (2005: 831), ‘there was not one word of truth’, or, as captured more evocatively by the poet Iurij Belash (cited in Lazarev 2000: 118): ‘I was in the war that was. / Not the one composed after. / That war I was never in.’ Many revisionist writers thus felt an obligation to convey their experiences to readers, no matter how bitter the truth of those experiences might be and regardless of the fact that this truth was presented in fiction. It should be noted that this impulse is inherent in the very word ‘truth’ (pravda), which in Russian expresses this concept less as an empirical truth than as one inseparable from a sense of morality and justice. This underscores why Russian writers and readers, particularly with regard to the Soviet period, have generally not questioned the assignment of a truth quotient to what is, ultimately, a fictionalised tale. Since the place in which the truth of the war is normally expressed was so compromised – namely the non-fiction of history and memoir – only literature (and, to an extent, cinema) could capture its essential meaning for the millions who died or

Russian Fiction at War | 369

survived, and only literature could pass that on to subsequent generations. The achievement of this, Kondratev observed, in itself comprised another kind of war: ‘It’s in that word “truth” [pravda] where the spirit of our work lay. We believed that every word of truth able to break through to the reader knocked a stone, even if it was just a small one, out of a system based on lies.’15 The alignment of revisionist fiction with truth and morality also reconnects to the construction of a national identity distinct from the Soviet state. If, as noted above, what binds the authentic Russian people [narod] together is their victimisation by the latter, then so too does their role as vessels of, or witnesses to, the truth – a proposition that, if accepted, resurrects the literal meaning of martyrdom in its sense of ‘witnessing’. At a minimum, Baklanov asserted, the truth of what happened on the front lines – that is, the suffering – was the ‘people’s truth’ [narodnaia pravda], for it is ‘they who sat in the trenches’ (2005: 203). All of the writers named here are no longer alive, and, as evidenced by their final writings, in the cases of Astafev and Bykov for example, or in their final acts, like Kondratev’s suicide, time did not close their wounds.16 Their war never ended – and not just in the sense of trauma experienced, but in their struggle to express what was the greatest and worst event in their lives and for their country as well. With that generation’s passing, fiction about the war has come to something of a standstill, as if in Russia today no one could produce anything comparable without having been in those trenches. That sense is conveyed by the publication in 2008 of The Tank Commander or the White Tiger by Ilia Boiashov, born in 1961.17 A finalist for the Premiya Bolshaya Kniga (‘Big Book Prize’), this short novel eschews the controversies of the war, preferring instead a serio-comic fabulist approach that pits the tank commander, an indestructible protagonist reminiscent of a warrior from Russian medieval epics, against a phantom German adversary (the ‘White Tiger’ tank of the title) in a Moby-Dick-like chase. This change in narrative direction, however, does not mean that the issues that writer-veterans originally raised have ebbed. So searing was their de-heroicised portrait – one bolstered by the work of new historians able to write non-fiction free of censorship – that the revisionism of the 1990s has led to a backlash in the twenty-first century, led by three centres of authority: the political establishment of the Russian Federation, the Russian Orthodox Church and the Academy of Sciences. Together, they seek to place the war back on its triumphant pedestal, though shorn of some of the Soviet excesses and absurdities. In the absence of a Stalin-like proscription, the legacy of the Second World War in Russia is likely to remain Janus-faced; that is to say, with one

370 | Greg Carleton

visage locked on the nation’s indispensable role in ridding the world of its greatest villain while the other is turned inward to the staggering cost of that deliverance, so much of it self-inflicted. Here, in this paradox, one might find cause to award victory to these writers, for it is precisely those challengers of the Soviet canon who now enjoy continued life in posthumous publication whereas most of those who upheld that canon lie in the dustbin of Russian literature.18

Notes  1. All translations in this article are mine. The English versions are given where available for readers who would like to explore further the novels discussed in this chapter.  2. Viktor Nekrasov, V okopakh Stalingrada in Znamia 8–10 (1946). It was originally published as Stalingrad but subsequently prefaced with V okopakh [In the Trenches] and has now come to be known by this extended title. References here are to its reprint in a collection of Nekrasov’s work, I zhiv ostalsia (1991). Its English translation by David Floyd is Frontline Stalingrad (1962).  3. Vasil Bykov, Mertvym ne bol’no [The Dead Feel No Pain] was first published in the journal Novyi mir 1–2 (1966). It has been translated from the Belarusian into English by Joseph P. Mozur as The Dead Feel No Pain – a Belarusian Novel of the Second World War by Vasil’ Bykau (London, 2010).  4. On the collapse of Soviet myths of the war, see Nina Tumarkin (1994).  5. The number of Soviet citizens who died during the war is one of the most contentious questions for Russian historians. Accuracy is compounded by many factors, including absent or shoddy record-keeping, the loss of many citizens, especially at the beginning, in hastily raised people’s militias, the massive dislocation of populations, administrative interference, and disagreement as to the pre-invasion population of the Soviet Union, including recently acquired territories. For a summary of these problems from a revisionist historian who believes the real total to be over forty million, see Boris Sokolov (1996). There is also disagreement as to the number of combatants lost and as to how many of those were Russian. An official history, sponsored by the Defence Ministry and the Academy of Sciences, claims that, of the nearly twelve million Soviet soldiers who died, almost two thirds of them (7,922,500) were ‘citizens of Russia’ (Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina 1999: 286). The calculation of one in seven deaths comes from dividing an estimated pre-invasion population of 190 million by 27 million.  6. Vladimir But, Trava sorok tret’ego goda [The Grass of ’43] (1996). A shortened version was first published in Druzhba narodov 4 (1995) under the title Orel-reshka [Heads-Tails].  7. Viktor Astafev, Proklyaty i ubity [The Damned and the Dead]. The first half was published in the journal Novyi mir 10, 11, 12 (1992); the second half appeared in issues 10, 11, 12 (1994). Unfortunately, like most of Astafev’s writings on the war, it has not been translated into English.  8. See, for example, N.I. Lutsev (ed.), Dniepr-reka geroev [Dniepr – River of Heroes] (1988).  9. On the conditions faced by, and the experiences of, the common soldier in the Soviet army, see Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (2006). 10. Vasil Bykov, Stuzha [The Great Freeze] (1993).

Russian Fiction at War | 371

11. On the destruction suffered by so many in Central and Eastern Europe during the 1930s and 1940s, see Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (2010). 12. See, for example, Viacheslav Kondratev (1990a). 13. On Baklanov’s intentions behind the novel, see his comments in Mify i fakty. 50-letie pobedy [Myths and Facts: The Fiftieth Anniversary of Victory] (1995: 115). 14. For an alternative reading that argues for redemption, see Frank Ellis (2011: 230). 15. Kondratev, Interview with Irina Rishina (1992: 3). 16. For Bykov, an anthology of some of his last writings has been published as Bednyie liudi. Povesti i rasskazy. [Poor People. Novellas and Stories] (2002). See, in particular, Boloto [The Swamp], ‘Korotkaia pesnia’ [A Short Song] and ‘Narodnye mstiteli’ [The People’s Avengers]. 17. Ilia Boiashov, Tankist, ili bely tigr [The Tank Commander or the White Tiger] (2008). 18. Noted exceptions would be the work of Boris Vasilev, Vladimir Bogomolov and Iurii Bondarev. The fiction covered in this chapter is necessarily selective due to constraints of space. For broader surveys in English of Russian literature on this war, see Don Piper (1984), Deming Brown (1985), Arnold McMillin (1986) and Frank Ellis (2011). In Russian, for a more traditionalist survey, see Boris Leonov (2010); for a more revisionist survey, see Lazarev (2000).

References Primary Sources Astafev, V. 1992–1994. Proklyaty i ubity [The Damned and the Dead]. Published in Novyi mir (1992: issues 10, 11, 12; 1994: issues 10, 11, 12). ________. 1996a. Oberton [Overtone]. Published in Novyi mir 8: 3-51. ________. 1996b. Tak khochetsia zhitʹ povesti i rasskazy [So Wanting to Live]. Moscow: Knizhnaia palata. ________. 1999. Veselyĭ Soldat [The Jolly Soldier]. Saint-Petersburg: Limbus Press. Baklanov, G. 1996. I togda prixodiat marodery [And Then Come the Vultures]. Moscow: Knizhnaia palata. Boiashov, I. 2008. Tankist, ili bely tigr [The Tank Commander or the White Tiger]. Moscow: Limbus Press. But, V. 1996. Trava sorok tret’ego goda [The Grass of ’43]. Moscow: Vagrius. Bykov, V. 1966. Mertvym ne bol’no [The Dead Feel No Pain]. Published in Novyi mir 1: 3-66; 2: 5-59. ________. 1993. Stuzha [The Great Freeze]. Published in Znamia 11: 7–76. _______. 2002. Bednyie liudi. Povesti i rasskazy. [Poor People. Novellas and Stories]. Moscow: Vagrius. Grossman, V. 1988. Zhizn’ i sudba [Life and Fate]. Moscow: Knizhnaia palata. Lutsev, N.I. (ed.). 1988. Dniepr-reka geroev [Dniepr – River of Heroes]. Kiev: Izdatelstvo politicheskoi literatury Ukrainy. Nekrasov, V. 1991 (1946). V okopakh Stalingrada [In the Trenches of Stalingrad] in I zhiv ostalsia. Moscow: Kniga. Tvardovsky, A. 2000 (1942–1945). Vasily Tyorkin. Moscow: Raritet. Vladimov, G. 2005 (1995). General i ego armiia [The General and His Army]. Moscow: Vagrius.

372 | Greg Carleton

Secondary Sources Baklanov, G. 1995. ‘Comments’ in S. Iushenkov and V. Oskotskii (eds), Mify i fakty: 50-letie pobedy [Myths and Facts: The Fiftieth Anniversary of Victory]. Moscow: Nezavisimoe izdatelstvo PIK, p. 115. _______. 2005. Dorogi prishedshikh s voiny [The Roads of Those Who Came Back from the War]. Moscow: Pushkinskaia biblioteka. Brown, D. 1985. ‘World War II in Soviet Literature’, in S.J. Linz (ed.), The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union. Totowa: Rowman and Allanheld, pp. 243–51. Ellis, F. 2011. The Damned and the Dead: The Eastern Front through the Eyes of Soviet and Russian Novelists. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Kondratev, V. 1990a. ‘Ne tol’ko o svoem pokolenii’, Kommunist 7: 113–24. _______. 1990b. ‘Paradoks frontovoi nostalgii’, Literaturnaia Gazeta, 9 May, p. 9. _______. 1991. ‘Oplacheno krov’iu’, Rodina 6 (7): 7. Lazarev, L. 2000. Pamiat’ trudnoi godiny: Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina v russkoi literature [Memory of a Difficult Time: The Great Patriotic War in Russian Literature]. Moscow: Druzhba narodov. Leonov, B. 2010. Russkaia literature o Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine [Russian Literature on the Great Patriotic War]. Moscow: Literaturnyi institute im. A.M. Gorkogo. McMillin, A. 1986. ‘The Second World War in Official and Unofficial Russian Prose’, in I. Higgins (ed.), The Second World War in Literature. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, pp. 19–31. Merridale, C. 2006. Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945. New York: Metropolitan Books. Piper, D. 1984. ‘Soviet Union’, in H. Klein (ed.), The Second World War in Fiction. London: MacMillan Press, pp. 131–72. Rishina, I. 1992. ‘Sashka segodnia u Belogo doma?’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 26 February, p. 3. Snyder, T. 2010. Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books. Sokolov, B. 1996. ‘The Cost of War: Human Losses for the USSR and Germany, 1939–1945’, The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 9 (1): 152–93. Tumarkin, N. 1994. The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia. New York: Basic Books. Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina (1941–1945). 1999. [Great Patriotic War], vol. 4. Moscow: Nauka.

Greg Carleton is Professor of Russian Studies at Tufts University, USA. He has published widely on contemporary Russian literature and culture. He is currently working on a book-length study on war and Russian identity.

Afterword

Memories of War From the Sacred to the Secular

( Jay Winter

There is now an abundant literature on the Second World War as a contested field of remembrance, both between different countries and regions and within them. One way of sketching out some of these different approaches to the war is to speak of three memory regimes framing and filtering different narratives of the 1939–1945 conflict: one located primarily in Europe, west of a line connecting Trieste and Stettin; another east of that line, ranging from Poland to the Baltic states, the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia; and a third in the non-European world. One of the key distinguishing features of these three memory regimes is the presence or absence of discussions of ‘martyrs’ and ‘martyrdom’ and their correlates. These terms have been used time and again in different theatres of the Second World War, increasing in frequency and significance as one moves further east. In Western Europe, the term ‘martyr’ has faded from use rapidly and irreversibly in the twentieth century; in Eastern Europe, it is still alive and well, informing a host of national and religious movements; and in the Middle East and beyond, the term is not only present but at times radioactive. Islamic radicalism is incomprehensible without it, and so are other political movements in middle Asia and the Far East. Framing the Second World War in sacred terms was also common in Western Europe both during and immediately after 1945, but over time, this terminology has faded away, in part because the force of religious institutions and religious practice has faded away too. By the 1960s, the organised churches had lost their hold over substantial parts of the Western European population. Following sexual abuse scandals and other difficulties, the haemorrhage of the faithful has continued. Despite the Notes for this chapter begin on page 376.

374 | Jay Winter

efforts of evangelical groups, church life is no longer at the centre of civil society, that vast space between the family and the state. This is a fundamental change in the character of associational life and in the rhetoric such groups use to describe war and its aftermath. From the 1970s on, the language of human rights has superseded the language of religious practice as a touchstone of comments on war, though the Catholic Church has a long tradition of championing Thomist notions of natural rights. The view of the Roman Catholic Church that abortion is anathema has undercut this Catholic advocacy of rights, which does not extend to the defence of the rights of women to determine their own reproductive choices. In contrast, the exponential growth of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) includes not only religious but secular groupings that help communities and individuals trapped in the cauldron of war in a host of ways. This secularisation of aid for civilians caught up in military violence today has had an effect too on secularising narratives of past wars in general and the Second World War in particular. The Eastern European landscape is entirely different. There, the churches were the foci of active opposition to the Communist system in the post-1945 period, and it was (and is) the churches that led the way into the post-Communist world. The Russian Orthodox Church beatified over one thousand saints in the early 1990s, framing with gold leaf KGB1 mugshots of priests, nuns and the faithful and turning them into instant martyrs.2 Pope John Paul II is on his way to sainthood, and his presence in Catholic discourse in Poland is massive. The Second World War in Asia is also framed in terms of martyrs and martyrdom. Chinese Communist soldiers who gave their lives for the cause are termed martyrs, as are others who suffered under Japanese occupation. In sum, the language of martyrdom flourishes either in places where a revolutionary tradition is alive and well, or in places where the Christian and Muslim rhetoric of martyrdom and sacrifice is still active as a set of powerful signifiers for understanding the past. A second set of issues related to the Holocaust also separates these three memory regimes. It took perhaps twenty-five years for the Holocaust to enter centrally into the narrative of the Second World War. Even Primo Levi’s classic work If This Is a Man, published in 1947, disappeared without a trace at the time. Ten years later, it was published in a new edition, by the same publisher who had rejected it a decade earlier, but with a preface by the distinguished writer Italo Calvino. Since then it has become a world bestseller under different titles. The appearance of the Holocaust as a matter of profound moral concern paralleled a Jewish debate as to the nature of martyrdom within Jewish tradition. In the midst of the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, a remarkable group of people around Emanuel

Afterword | 375

Ringelblum worked feverishly to create the Oneg Shabbat archive, a huge archive of Jewish life in the midst of death. Among the writings placed in milk cartons and discovered after the war was a text by the polymath Shmuel Huberband suggesting that the long-standing Jewish tradition of martyrdom, to die affirming God, Al Kiddush Hashem, was in need of revision. His suggestion, manifest in the Oneg Shabbat project, was to affirm God by living faith, be-Kiddush HaChayim, and not only or necessarily by dying for it. This argument bypassed the impossible question as to how countless children could be termed martyrs, since no one gave them a choice. Huberband found a way out of martyrdom which has echoed long after he was murdered in Treblinka in 1943 (Kassow 2007). The place of the Holocaust in these three memory regimes is fundamentally different. In Western Europe, it is now an integral part of the history and memory of the Second World War. In Eastern Europe, it is at the margin, and further east, it is either absent or just barely present. After all, the Nanjing massacre of 1937 contains all the horror Asian commentators need to create a moral narrative, and the dropping of the two atomic bombs to end the war in Asia triggered a separate set of literary, filmic and philosophical debates that have lasted to this day. It is essential to realise, though, that memory regimes change over time, and in particular through their negotiation or adaptation of sacred language. Martyrdom is both a trope and a practice framed by religious traditions and revolutionary movements. It is part of a grammar of sacrifice tending to elevate to the level of the sacred the act of dying for the state or for the church or for the two combined. Hence, when the language of martyrdom fades away, narratives more grey than black and white are very likely to emerge. This move away from the sacred towards secular history is particularly evident in this collection of essays. Authors contest the claims of one side or another to be the sole occupants of the moral high ground of war and civil war. When Paul Preston published a book on The Spanish Holocaust (2012), he not only confirmed a view that the Nationalists were monstrous in their behaviour during and after the Civil War, but that they committed crimes against humanity. Whether this is true is not my concern; it is that such a claim has now led to challenges that neither side has the right to claim moral superiority in the sorry spectacle of the Spanish Civil War. In the view of Pablo Sánchez León in this volume, Republicans were both victims and perpetrators, something no one using the word ‘Holocaust’ could ever have claimed applied to the Jews of Europe under Hitler. If the victims of atrocities are not all on one side, then the narrative of the conflict in which they suffered turns more secular than sacred. What matters now is evidence and argument, not ideological conviction. The

376 | Jay Winter

proof is in the archives, a welcome development in any historiographical framework. Very different histories of myths about the war in different countries are presented in the essays in this book. Various authors show how some myths are revived in film and fiction; others are treated sardonically or quixotically and thereby exposed to the test of evidence or art. And, once more, a geographical pattern in the different longevity of myths is evident. The further east we go in Europe, the stronger is the resistance to challenges and revision of myths about the Second World War. Exploding the myth of the unity of Britain under Churchill, in the work of Daniel Travers and Paul Ward, or the myth of pure Italian victimhood, in Richard Bosworth’s chapter, enables us to move from sacred to secular narratives in these two settings. However, a different picture emerges when we compare the role of the sacred in Polish narratives of the war discussed by Polish scholars in this collection of essays. For Andrzej Paczkowski, Polish memory is primarily composed of a series of heroic recollections deepening the old view of Polish martyrdom, Christ among the nations, trapped geographically between two implacable enemies. Marzena SokołowskaParyż shows that counterfactual histories cannot break down older myths of Polish heroism and sacrifice, a theme taken up by Urszula Jarecka in her discussion of the Katyń massacre and cover-up. There is one conclusion which seems unavoidable in the light of these essays. As long as the sacred register dominates war narratives in one part of Europe, to the east, and not in another, to the west, there will never be such a thing as a ‘European’ memory of the Second World War. And that divide appears stronger still in Asian narratives, historical, literary or filmic, of the Second World War. These are not the subject of this book, but it is evident that Asian narratives need to be subjected to the same careful and rigorous study as is found in this volume. Only when we have such scholarship will it be possible to take the full measure of the cultural afterlife of the 1939–1945 conflict. That work remains still to be done.

Notes 1. The KGB, the Committee for State Security, was first established in 1917, and functioned as the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991. 2. I owe this reference to Zuzanna Bogumil of the Maria Grzegorzewska Academy of Special Education in Warsaw.

Afterword | 377

References Kassow, S.D. 2007. Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive. Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press. Levi, P. 1947. Se questo è un uomo [If this is a man]. Turin: De Silva. Preston, P. 2012. The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain. London: HarperCollins.

Jay Winter is Professor of History at Yale University, in the USA. He is a specialist of the First World War and its impact on the twentieth century. His other interests include remembrance of war in the twentieth century, such as memorial and mourning sites, European population decline, the causes and institutions of war, British popular culture in the era of the Great War and the Armenian genocide of 1915. Jay Winter is the author or co-author of a dozen books, including Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (1998) and Dreams of Peace and Freedom (2009).

Index

(

Adenauer, Konrad, 204, 209 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, 219–20 Afghanistan, 297, 318–19, 346–47, 354n5 Aga Rossi, Elena, 237–38 Against the Wind, 108 aggressor, 33, 189–90, 239, 306–7, 310, 317, 340 Aichinger, Ilse, 14, 219, 221–27, 229 Aldecoa, Josefina, 61–62 Allied military authority, 201–8 alternative history. See counterfactual history Álvarez Tardío, Manuel, 24–25, 27–32 Aly, Götz, 213–14 Ambler, Eric, 117 American dream, 253, 257, 261–62 americanization, 258 Anarchism, anarchist, 13, 24–26, 28, 31, 33–34, 40, 48–49, 51–52, 57, 282 Anderson, Benedict, 2, 255 Angelino, Edoardo, 274 anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic, 83, 98, 154–55, 161, 206, 210, 220, 239, 241–43, 323–25 anti-war, xii-xiii, 97, 124, 175n2, 210, 355n16 Archibald McIndoe memorial, 115

Arendt, Hanna, 120 armistice, 114, 116, 176n5, 272, 282 art, artist, 1, 3–4, 8–11, 44, 49, 96, 208–9, 220–21, 231n3, 279–80, 310, 316, 354n8 Asia, 203, 340, 345, 373–76 Assmann, Aleida, 200 Astafev, Viktor, 363–69 Augé, Marc, 160 Auschwitz, 160, 162, 183, 219, 240, 290, 323–24, 326 Axis, xiv, 5, 96, 153, 188, 239 Bachmann, Ingeborg, 223 Badoglio, Pietro, 237 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 157 Baklanov, Grigory, 361, 366–69, 371n13 Balkans, 237–38 Barbusse, Henri, 168 Barker, Pat, 124 Barrès, Maurice, 154 Bassani, Giorgio, 278 Battle of Britain, 77, 84, 115 Bauman, Zygmunt, 220, 232n5, 312n8 Beck, Józef, 316, 320–21, 325–27 Belgium, xii Benigni, Roberto, 240 Benjamin, Walter, 119 Benn, Gottfried, 222

380 | Index

Berlin, 104, 117–18, 125, 171, 193, 201–2, 206–7, 212–13, 242, 269, 324, 345 Berlusconi, Silvio, 14, 242–44, 247–48, 269 betrayal, xii, xiv, 16, 49, 52, 70, 153, 155, 157, 171–73, 223, 289, 294, 303, 365 Bitburg Cemetery, 14, 181–82, 184–87, 190, 196 Blitz and ‘Blitz spirit’, 77, 82, 84, 90, 99 Bloch, Marc, 7, 32 Boiashov, Ilya, 369 Bolshevism, Bolshevik, xv, 304, 310, 344, 367 Bomber Command Memorial, 115 Bonny, Pierre, 156 Bordeaux, Henri, 154 Bossi, Umberto, 269 Braun, Eva, 154 Braun, Grzegorz, 308 Briand, Aristide, xiii Brief Encounter, 118 Britain, xiv, 77–126, 244, 291, 317, 320–21, 376 Britishness, 77, 80, 85–86, 89 Brownlow, Kevin, 323 Bruller, Jean. See Vercors Budapest, xi, 154 But, Vladimir, 363–65, 367 Butler, Judith, 63 Bykov, Vasil, 351, 355n14, 361, 364, 366, 370n3 Caine, Michael, 103, 106 Calder, Angus, 77, 81–82, 117, 121 Callaghan, James, 115 Calvino, Italo, 273, 282, 374 Capitalism, xiv, 23, 209, 258, 261, 262, 346, 359 Carve Her Name With Pride, 108 Caso, Ángeles, 61 Cassola, Carlo, 279 Catholic, 30, 41, 46, 49, 52, 54, 57, 104, 240–41, 258, 260–61, 290, 374 Cazzullo, Aldo, 276 Celan, Paul, 208, 219, 223 Chacón, Dulce, 61

Chamberlain, Neville, 78–79, 97 Channel Islands, 85, 87–89, 117 Chechnya, Chechen, 346–48, 352, 354n5, 354n8, 367 China, Chinese, 160, 171, 294, 374 Chirac, Jacques, 189, 190 Christ, 49, 52, 55, 173–74, 328, 367, 376 Churban, 220–21, 223, 225, 232n5 Churchill, Winston, 13, 77–85, 87, 89–90, 100, 103–4, 115, 119–20, 312n6, 312n10, 376 Ciano, Galeazzo, 245, 247, 248n4 Cirioni, Massimo, 276 Ciszewski, Marcin, 316, 318–20, 327 civil war, xiv, xv, 1, 5, 13, 16, 23–25, 28, 31–33, 36, 40–41, 43, 48, 50, 52, 57, 60–61, 65–68, 71, 116, 122, 239, 275, 322, 344, 375 Codebò, Marco, 280 Cold War, xiii, 1, 15–16, 97, 104, 118, 120, 122–23, 182, 188, 203, 213, 240, 253, 298, 334–35, 340, 354n3, 362 Colditz, 80, 106, 115 collaboration, xi, xiii, xv, 14, 16, 71n3, 109, 131, 145–46, 152, 157, 160, 204, 240, 282, 300n11, 323, 351–53, 358 collaborationism, collaborationist, 13, 131, 135, 153, 156–58, 161–62, 163n1, 168 collective memory, 7, 15–16, 62, 64–65, 89, 221, 288, 302–3, 316–17, 328, 341 Commonwealth, 119 Communist, Communism, 15, 25–27, 31–32, 120, 167–68, 189, 191, 209, 219, 239–42, 246–48, 261, 326–27, 337, 354n3, 355n11, 358, 360–61, 367, 374 Compagnie fermière de l’Établissement Thermal de Vichy, 136, 139, 142, 144, 148n18 Conde, Carmen, 13, 40–49, 54, 57 conquest, xii, xiv, 56, 99, 242, 319 conservative, conservatism, 25, 27, 29–30, 35, 51, 53, 79–80, 87, 89, 117, 120, 184–85, 187, 190–91, 193, 212, 225, 238, 260–61 consumption, consumerism, 80, 118, 253, 257, 260

Index | 381

Corner, Paul, 238 counterfactual history, 15, 316–17, 320, 322, 324–27, 376 counter-memory, 60, 116, 126 Coward, Noel, 96 Croce, Benedetto, 5, 245 cultural heritage, 3, 262–63 Curtis, Adam, 119–20, 123 Czapski, Józef, 305 D’Alema, Massimo, 240 Davies, Murray, 323 D-Day, 14, 81, 90, 109, 181–91, 195–96 De Felice, Renzo, 241 de Gaulle, Charles, 152, 167, 183, 246 death camps. See extermination camps defeat, xiii-xv, 3, 25–26, 30, 44–45, 47–48, 65, 77–79, 81–83, 88, 96, 104, 117, 121, 131–32, 167, 172, 188–91, 195, 201–2, 287, 289, 320, 322, 325, 328n1, 333–34, 336, 340, 346, 348, 365–66 dehumanisation, 171, 312n8 Deighton, Len, 323 Del Boca, Angelo, 244 democracy, democratic, 2–3, 24, 26, 29–32, 35, 40, 60, 79, 89, 117, 140, 185, 200, 203–4, 248, 269, 271, 275, 287, 297, 324, 340–41, 354n5 Der Untergang, 211 Diritti, Giorgio, 277 Dmowski, Roman, 324–25 documentary film, 13–14, 24, 28, 33–34, 36, 65, 119, 201–4, 211, 280, 303, 308–10, 311n3, 313n12 Duce, 240, 242–44 Dunkirk, 77, 79, 81–82, 117 Dunnage, Jonathan, 272 dystopia, 46, 125, 154–56, 323 Eden, Anthony, 115, 117 education, 40, 42, 48, 124, 191, 202, 207, 245, 294, 354n9 Eich, Günter, 223 Eichmann, Adolf, 120, 210

Einsatzgruppen, 210, 323 Einstein, Albert, xiii Eisenhower, Dwight David, 182 empire, 2, 71n3, 79, 85, 104, 119, 121, 135, 240, 244, 248, 322 Enlightenment, 3, 175n1, 220, 333 État Français, 131–32, 135, 146–47, 148n5 Ethiopia, xiv, 242, 244–45 ethnic cleansing, 295–96 ethnic, ethnicity, xv, 80, 83–86, 247, 259, 263, 287, 293, 295–96, 298 European Network Remembrance and Solidarity, xi European Union, 2–3, 10–11, 193, 288, 326, 333, 336, 349 exotic, exoticism, 259 extermination camps, 169, 172, 193, 202, 300n8, 307, 311n3, 324 extermination, 27, 36n1, 53, 66, 89, 109, 162, 193, 241, 289, 323–24, 326 Fabbri, Diego, 258, 261 Faber, Sebastiaan, 28, 60 Falklands, 81, 116 family, 2–4, 13, 40, 42, 51, 53, 56, 62–63, 65, 68–71, 84, 104, 109, 124, 166, 212, 243, 259–61, 274, 277, 288–89, 292–93, 351, 374 Fascist, Fascism, xv, 14, 23, 27, 56, 68, 79, 84, 116, 134, 165, 188, 206, 237–48, 253, 269–74, 276, 296, 307, 323, 334, 336, 340–41, 349 fear, xiv, 2, 8, 9, 11, 49, 61, 96, 101, 106, 131, 145, 155, 173, 188, 209, 229, 241, 258, 273, 275, 277, 306, 323, 348, 350, 364 Fenoglio, Beppe, 273, 278–79, 282 Fernández Cubas, Cristina, 13, 60–71 fiction, 7–9, 11, 13–16, 34, 68, 82, 107, 118–20, 122–24, 126, 152–53, 155–59, 161–63, 164n7, 167, 172, 174–75, 272–77, 280–81, 303–4, 320, 322–23, 325, 348, 358–59, 362, 364–66, 368–69, 371n18, 376 Final Solution, 67, 125, 240, 247, 325 Fini, Gianfranco, 241, 243, 247, 269

382 | Index

First World War, Great War, xi-xiv, 1, 91n13, 97–98, 115, 117–18, 122, 124, 126n3, 135–36, 166, 168, 170, 176n8, 239, 246, 322, 328n1, 366 Folkhart, Jessica, 63, 65 Ford, Ford Madox, 122 France, xiv, 3, 5, 12, 40, 49, 78–79, 81, 83, 97–98, 101, 107, 116, 130–175, 181–84, 188–91, 196, 244, 246, 255, 291, 317, 321, 340 Franco, Francisco, 23, 25–26, 28, 30–33, 35, 40, 44, 47–48, 50, 53, 57, 60, 62, 68 Francoist. See Franco, Francisco Franzinelli, Mimmo, 243 Franzolin, Ugo, 276 Frèche, Georges, 144, 149n47 Freedom Radio, 99, 107 Frei, Norbert, 210 Freud, Sigmund, xiii, 3–4, 66, 210, 221 Frieda, 104 Fry, Stephen, 323 Führer, 242 Furedi, Frank, xii Galli della Loggia, Ernesto, 247 García-Alix, Carlos, 13, 24, 33–36 gender, 12–13, 47, 61, 69, 78, 83, 124, 149n34, 258, 261, 277, 282 generation, xii, 14, 28, 32, 61–62, 71, 80, 86, 90, 97, 104, 109, 115–16, 134, 152, 163, 183, 189, 191, 195, 207, 210, 212, 219, 232n4, 241, 244, 279, 293, 327, 335, 341n3, 348, 355n13, 361, 366–67, 369 Gennari, Alessandro, 274–75 Gérardmer, 140, 143, 149n45 Germany, xiv, 5–6, 12, 14–15, 68, 84, 88, 97–100, 105–6, 116, 131, 134–35, 169–71, 180–231, 239, 242, 288, 291, 293, 295–99, 300n11, 307, 312n7, 321–22, 326, 328n1, 333–36, 340, 358, 362–63, 365–67 Gestapo, 99, 108, 143–44, 146, 156, 167, 194, 289 glamour, 15, 257, 260, 261 Glasnost, 362, 365–66

Globocnik, Odilo, 247 Gobetti, Ada, 278 Goldhagen, Daniel, 240 grand narrative, 292–93, 346 Grandes, Almudena, 61 Grass, Günter, 208, 211 Great Patriotic War, 5, 15, 333–35, 337, 339–41, 341n1, 345, 347, 350–51 Gross, Jan Tomasz, 323 Grossman, Vasily, 366 Gruppe 47, Group 47, 208, 214n6, 219, 231n1 guilt, xiii-xv, 27, 29, 69, 71, 79, 81, 110, 118, 125, 142, 157, 161, 167, 171–72, 185, 196, 200, 202, 203–5, 212–13, 295, 310, 323, 365 Gundle, Stephen, 253, 260–61, 264n5, 270 Halbwachs, Maurice, 7, 66, 302, 311, 316 Halonen, Tarja, 336, 341n2 Harris, Robert, 125 hatred, 6, 11, 15, 36n1, 169, 174, 295, 344, 364 Heath, Edward, 117 Heimat, 116, 208, 210 hero, heroism, 15, 67, 83, 97, 103–4, 106, 109, 119, 121, 122, 124–25, 135, 147, 157, 204, 210, 225–26, 230, 246, 288–89, 291–92, 294–95, 298–99, 308–9, 319, 321–23, 326–27, 334–35, 337, 339, 344–45, 347–48, 350, 352–53, 353n11, 353n13, 359, 360, 363, 366–67, 369, 376 Himmler, Heinrich, 104, 325 Hirsch, Marianne, 62, 164n15 Historians’ Debate or Historikerstreit, 6, 14, 182, 186–87, 191, 195 historical consciousness, 119, 125, 317, 328 Hitchcock, Alfred, 98 Hitler, Adolf, xii-xiv, 98–101, 103, 107–8, 119, 154, 166, 169, 171, 176n3, 191, 201–2, 208–9, 211, 213, 240–42, 297, 299n4, 312n6, 316, 320–23, 334, 340, 349, 352, 367–68, 375

Index | 383

Hollywood, 97–98, 126, 200, 254–56, 258–60, 262, 347 Holocaust, 8, 27, 53, 64, 66, 67, 68, 71, 88, 89, 109, 125, 163, 183, 185–87, 191, 193, 195, 201, 207, 210, 211, 220, 221, 238–241, 290, 317, 323, 325–27, 374–75 Hong Kong, 119 Huberband, Shmuel, 375 Humanism, humanist, 1, 3, 14, 31, 105, 166–67, 205, 219, 232n4, 341n4 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 222 humiliation, xii, 117, 131, 173, 192 Hungary, 175n1, 193, 239, 321, 324, 326 Huyssen, Andreas, 64 Ice Cold in Alex, 105 identity, xii, 3, 9–12, 14–15, 24, 33, 58n1, 60, 64, 77, 79–80, 82–3, 85–86, 89–90, 101, 131, 134, 143–44, 147, 152–56, 158–59, 172, 201, 205, 255–56, 258–60, 262–63, 264n5, 271, 274, 282, 316, 328, 334, 341, 348, 350, 361, 364, 369 Ill Met by Moonlight, 105 imagination, 34, 82, 84, 89, 126, 153, 304, 311, 327 immigration, 80, 252 Imperialism, imperialist, xiv, 158, 244–45, 253, 263, 298, 326 Information Control Division, 203, 214n2 Ingarden, Roman, 162 intelligence services, 33–34, 103, 106, 110n5, 111n12, 123, 125, 300n12 internment, 83, 87, 98 Ireland, xii, 91n17 Isle of Man, 85, 87 Italianicity, 254 Italy, xiv, 12, 14–15, 43, 109, 116, 134, 236–282, 299n5, 300n11, 321, 324 Ivan the Terrible, 334, 345 Japan, Japanese, 87, 294, 366, 374 Jaspers, Karl, 203 Jedwabne, 294–95, 323, 325

Jew, Jewish, xi, xiv-xv, 66–67, 71n3, 88, 98, 103, 107, 109, 125, 152–55, 157, 159–60, 162, 164n7, 168, 175n1, 183–84, 187, 191, 193, 221, 224, 232n5, 239, 240–42, 278, 287–90, 294, 299n1, 323–26, 333, 365, 374–75 Johnson, Andy, 320 Johnson, Lyndon, 183 Judeocide, 241 Justice, injustice, xiv, 107, 116, 193, 209, 225, 230, 271, 293, 296, 309–10, 368 Katyń, 15, 122, 125, 192, 194–95, 296, 302–13, 325, 376 Käutner, Helmut, 205–7, 209 Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), xiii Klarsfeld, Serge, 145–46 Knopp, Guido, 211 Kohl, Helmut, 183–88, 191, 195 Kondratev, Viacheslav, 366–67, 369 Koselleck, Reinhart, 200, 333 Kozielsk, 309 La bataille du silence, 167, 169 La puissance du jour, 171–72, 175 Labanca, Nicola, 244 landscape, 88, 90, 161, 204, 208, 255, 258, 260, 262–63, 294, 307, 335, 346, 374 Langemarck memorial, xii Lavrov, Sergey, 337–38 law, xiii, 3, 25, 154, 241, 249n14, 294, 311n1 le Carré, John, 122–23 Le Silence de la mer, 166–67, 169–70, 172 League of Nations Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, xiii League of Nations, 340 Lean, David, 117–18 Les armes de la nuit, 171–72, 175 Lester, Richard, 124 Levi, Primo, 17n7, 374 Liberation, 114, 116, 139, 142, 144, 146, 149n27, 190, 195–96, 226, 240, 252, 256, 271, 277, 279, 281, 295, 321, 334, 336 Lloyd George, David, 239

384 | Index

Loach, Ken, 121 Lodge, Henry Cabot Jr., 182 London, 81, 84, 88, 99, 103, 124, 202 Łoziński, Marcel, 305 Lucarelli, Carlo, 271–74 Machado, Antonio, 53 Mackiewicz, Józef, 312n10 Magini, Gregorio, 279–81 Malhuret, Claude, 144 Manfredi, Nino, 262 Mangini, Shirley, 61–62 Marshall Plan, 253 Mártinez Lázaro, Emilio, 61 martyr, 145, 147, 168, 172, 295, 326, 351, 359, 362, 369, 373 massacre, 15, 25, 122, 170, 173, 190, 192, 194, 237–38, 245, 247, 277, 282, 296, 302–11, 325, 375–76 Mazzantini, Carlo, 276 Medvedev, Dmitry, 336–341, 341n4 Melograni, Piero, 247 Merkel, Angela, 192–95, 197n25 Mientras los hombres mueren, 42, 45 Milice, 131, 143 militarism, xv, 84, 204 Milligan, ‘Spike’, 123–24 Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarete, 200–1, 210, 221 Mitterrand, François, 184, 188 modernisation, 60, 121, 253, 255, 258, 260–61 Modiano, Patrick, 152–64 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, 5, 120, 298, 334, 339–40 Monnet, Jean, 9 Monte Cassino, 123, 290, 299n5 Montgomery, Field Marshal Bernard, 182 morality, 258, 260–61, 263, 368–69 Moro, Aldo, 246 Morris, Alan, 153, 155–56, 158, 161 Moscow, 296–97, 307, 325, 336, 338 mourning, 69–71, 210, 309 Mujeres Libres, 48, 50 Munich Agreement, 340

museum(s), 13, 80, 83–88, 145–45, 194, 197n13, 316, 334 Mussolini diaries, 243–44 Mussolini, Benito, xiv, 116, 238–46, 248n4, 249n28, 253, 269, 276 myth, xii, xiv, 9–13, 32, 60, 63, 77, 80–85, 90, 91n10, 100, 114, 118, 123–24, 126, 152, 161, 167, 220, 245, 252–53, 257, 261, 263, 264n15, 289, 310, 316, 318, 320, 323, 348, 354n7, 360, 362, 367, 370n4, 376 Nanjing massacre, 375 Napoleon III, 134–35, 148n10 national identity, 2, 15, 77, 78–80, 83, 85–86, 89–90, 255–56, 259–63, 316, 334–35, 348, 350, 369 National Memorial Arboretum, 115 National Revolution, 131, 135 National Socialism, Nazi, Nazism, xii, 13–14, 16, 71n3, 87–89, 98–101, 103–110, 111n12, 116, 118, 120, 122–23, 125, 131, 134–35, 139, 145, 155, 166–68, 171–72, 174–75, 181, 185–87, 189–92, 194–96, 201, 206, 208, 210–12, 219–22, 224, 226, 238–39, 241–42, 245–47, 288, 295, 297, 304, 312nn6–7, 313n11, 322–23, 325–27, 334–35, 340, 345–52, 358, 363, 366 Nationalism, nationalist, xiii-xv, 2–4, 6, 10–11, 40, 49, 51, 53, 57, 62, 117, 142, 154, 166, 204, 206, 238, 247–48, 293–96, 324, 328, 335, 339, 349, 367, 375 nation-building, 260, 350 nation-state, 1–2, 4, 9 NATO, 170, 193, 297, 318, 324, 333–34, 336, 338–39, 349 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, 192. See also Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact Neave, Airie, 115 neighbour, 3, 9, 15, 66, 87–88, 104, 132, 145, 147, 171, 191, 219, 248, 287, 294, 297, 323, 325, 328n1, 334–36, 340–41, 346 Nekrasov, Viktor, 360–61, 368, 370n2 nihilism, 294, 351, 353

Index | 385

Nixon, Richard, 183 NKVD, 15, 307–8, 311n1, 350, 352, 355 Nora, Pierre, 67, 97, 125–26, 156 Northern Ireland, 2, 6, 85–86 nostalgia, 116, 121–23, 242–43, 277 Occhetto, Achille, 269 occupation, 14–15, 83, 88, 96, 109, 114, 116, 131, 136, 142–43, 147n3, 152–53, 155–63, 167, 181, 192–93, 202, 204–6, 238, 244, 252, 280, 291, 294, 312n7, 323, 326, 334, 336–37, 340, 360, 364, 374 Odette, 108 Olmi, Ermanno, 277 OMGUS (Office of the Military Government, United States), 202–204 Orwell, George, 121, 125 otherness, 9, 35, 255–56, 263 Owen, David, 117 pacifism, pacifist, xii-xiv, 166, 175n2 Pansa, Giampaolo, 248n6, 270, 274 Paris, xiii, 49, 108, 132, 139–40, 144, 154, 156–57, 159–60, 245–46, 248 Parri, Ferruccio, 282 Partito Comunista Italiano, 246–47, 269, 271–72 Pastor Hall, 98 patriotism, 6, 79–80, 117, 166, 294–95, 345, 348–49, 353, 360, 363 Pavese, Cesare, 273, 282 Paxton, Robert, 135, 164n4 PCI. See Partito Comunista Italiano Penal Battalions, 361, 368 People’s War, 13, 77–81, 87, 89–90, 91n9, 121 perpetrator, xi, 14, 24, 33, 60, 192, 194, 203, 212, 214, 246, 297, 306, 308, 312n8, 317, 375 Petacci, Clara, 240, 242–43 Pétain, Philippe, 135, 142, 145–46, 147n3, 148nn5–6, 148n13, 149n43 Peter the Great, 334 Piłsudski, Joseph, 320–22 Pintor, Giaime, 279

Pius XII, 240 poetics, 16, 220, 221, 223, 231 poetry, 16, 40–41, 44, 47–49, 53, 58n2, 122, 221, 295 Poland, 12, 15, 192–95, 287–328, 334, 339–40, 358, 373–74 Pommer, Erich, 201 Powell, Anthony, 122, 125 Preston, Paul, 23–36, 51, 375 pride, 29, 87, 132, 289, 291, 295, 334, 348, 353, 363 propaganda, 40, 49, 78–80, 84, 90, 98–99, 108, 120–21, 153, 166, 202–4, 246, 253, 302–7, 309, 311n3, 312n7, 313n11, 324, 344, 360 purge, 239, 296, 298, 311n1, 358, 361 Putin, Vladimir, 189, 192, 194–95, 296, 313n11, 336, 338, 347–50, 355n10, 355n13 Quayle, Anthony, 103, 105 Quinn, Daniel, 323 racism, racist, 83, 131, 158, 174, 210, 240–42, 244–45, 276, 321, 323, 346 Reagan, Ronald, 184–87, 190–91, 196, 196n5 reconciliation, xi, 14, 52–53, 172, 175, 181, 183–84, 261, 276, 337, 341 Red Army, 189, 194–95, 240, 291–95, 309, 313n11, 329n1, 333–34, 336–37, 345–46, 349, 351–52, 358, 360 re-education, 200–204, 206 rehabilitation, 40, 172, 310 Reitz, Edgar, 116 religion, religious, 4, 9, 41, 80–81, 224, 237, 270, 305, 373–75 Remarque, Erich Maria, xii, 97 remembrance, 14, 61, 63–64, 68–69, 71, 80–82, 90, 114–15, 126, 184, 225, 317, 335, 358, 373 Repubblica Sociale Italiana, 239, 241, 246, 249n8, 269, 275–76 Republic, Republican, 23–35, 41, 49, 57, 60, 65, 116, 135, 170, 204, 219, 221, 246, 269–70, 276, 291, 296, 302–3, 307, 321, 324, 335, 375

386 | Index

resistance, xv, 4, 15, 47, 61, 99–100, 107–8, 116, 121, 124, 145–46, 149n27, 152, 155–58, 164n7, 166–67, 174, 176n3, 176n7, 181, 188–89, 202–3, 207, 209, 230, 245–46, 269–74, 278–79, 282, 289–90, 293, 295, 298, 366, 376 Résistancialisme, 152 responsibility, xii, xv, 24–25, 27, 31, 34–35, 66, 91n12, 125, 147, 164n4, 172, 175, 183, 185–87, 189, 192–93, 201, 203, 207, 211, 224, 238, 241, 244, 274, 312n8, 313, 325, 361 revolution, revolutionary, xiv, 23, 25–29, 31, 34, 99, 131, 135, 271, 275, 298, 300n12, 344, 374–75 Rey Reguillo, Fernando del, 24–25, 27–33, 35 Reynolds, David, xii Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 324 Ringelblum, Emanuel, 375 Risi, Dino, 253, 257–58 Rochat, Giorgio, 244 Romania, 5, 239, 309, 321, 324, 326 romanticism, romantism, 3, 105, 108, 118, 121–22, 256–57, 262, 289, 322 Romeu Alfaro, Fernanda, 61–62 Rossellini, Roberto, 252, 256, 264n13, 278 Rossi, Franco, 253, 257–58 Rothberg, Michael, 13, 63–69, 71n3 Rousso, Henry, 6, 10, 83, 116, 134 RSI. See Repubblica Sociale Italiana rubble film, 205–208 rubble literature, 219 Russia, Russian, xi, xiv, 5, 12, 15–16, 103, 123, 159, 171, 182, 188–89, 192, 194–95, 230, 292, 295–99, 302, 304–11, 311n2, 312n9, 313n11, 322, 325, 329n3, 332–70, 373–74 Russian Civil War, xiv Sabbatucci, Giovanni, 247 Sachs, Nelly, 208, 223 sacrifice, xi-xii, xiv, 40, 53–54, 56, 103, 117, 135, 168, 173, 184, 189, 232n5, 239, 261, 290, 318, 334–35, 337, 339,

345–47, 349–50, 362–63, 365–66, 374–76 Salò, 246, 249n8, 269, 276 Sánchez Saornil, Lucía, 13, 40, 41, 48–52, 57 Sandoval, Felipe, 13, 33–35 Santoni, Vanni, 279–81 Schindler’s List, 109 Schmidt, Helmut, 183, 185, 195 Schröder, Gerhard, 189–192, 195 Scotland, 85–86, 106, 264n7 Sebald, W.G., 232n9 Secchia, Pietro, 271, 275 Shoah, 164n4, 231n3, 232n5, 326 Sikorski, Władysław, 290, 305–6, 310 silence, 8, 13, 40, 45, 48, 56, 61–62, 67, 70, 116, 139, 144, 166–67, 169, 170–72, 205–6, 210, 212–14, 223, 277, 302, 306–7, 309, 346 Smith, Anthony D., 3–4, 335 social class, 12, 40, 48, 79, 81, 83, 122, 124, 175, 176n12, 245, 247, 254, 258, 344, 346, 365 Socialism, socialist, xiv, 23, 25, 30–31, 79, 148n7, 219, 238–39, 334–35, 344, 359–61 Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy, 140 solidarity, xi, 9, 62 Sordi, Alberto, 258, 261–62 Soriga, Paola, 277–79 sorrow, 48, 174, 203, 241 Soviet Union, xiv, 5, 16, 31, 97, 104, 182, 188, 190, 192, 195, 212, 291, 295–96, 298, 299n4, 304, 307, 311n1, 312n7, 321, 323, 325–27, 333–37, 339–41, 346–47, 358–60, 362, 364, 366, 370n5. See also USSR Soviet, xiv, 2, 5, 15–16, 31, 97, 104, 120–22, 125, 182, 188–92, 192–95, 202–3, 206, 212, 240, 253, 291–93, 295–96, 298, 299n4n5, 300nn11–12, 303–4, 306–10, 311n1, 312nn6–7, 312n9, 321, 323, 325–27, 329n3, 333–37, 339–70 Spain, xiv, 12, 16, 22–71, 142 SS, xi, 98, 103–4, 106–7, 111n12, 185–86, 188, 190, 323–24

Index | 387

stab-in-the-back myth, xiv Stalin, Joseph, xiv, 189, 194–95, 240, 299n4, 308, 313n11, 334, 336–37, 339, 341, 341n3, 342n5, 344–45, 352, 354n3, 358–62, 368–69 Stalingrad, 96, 120, 121, 209, 211 Stalinism, Stalinist, 16, 26, 298, 309–10, 311n1, 334, 336–38, 341, 345, 362, 368 Starobielsk, 305, 309 Staudte, Wolfgang, 205 Stavisky, Serge Alexandre, 159 suffering, xii, xiv, 3, 8, 45, 49, 52, 56, 101, 117, 136, 139–40, 147, 173–74, 181, 191–93, 203, 205, 210, 213, 238, 287, 307, 326, 334–35, 350, 361, 364, 369 suicide, 33, 47, 103, 169, 205, 230, 353, 363, 367, 369 survivor, 8, 69, 71, 124, 172, 174, 207, 210, 212–13, 226 symbol, xii, 2, 9–13, 36n1, 47, 52, 67, 86, 115–16, 119–23, 126, 131, 135–36, 146, 148n5, 166, 170, 175n1, 184, 201, 204, 206, 213, 227, 262, 269, 294, 304, 326, 328, 337, 351, 363

tourist, tourism, 10, 132–33, 136–41, 143, 146, 261–62 transnational, 9–10, 12–13, 63, 317, 326, 333, 339 trauma, traumatic, 14–15, 23–24, 35, 51, 61–65, 67–71, 114, 124, 158, 162–63, 172, 200, 205–6, 208, 210, 212–13, 219–21, 223, 225–26, 230–31, 287, 302, 317, 333, 369 Treblinka, 375 Triboulet, Raymond, 183 truth, 7–8, 28–29, 82, 99, 107, 118, 143, 194, 212–13, 222–23, 229, 248, 281, 303–11, 317, 328, 352–53, 360, 362, 365, 368–69 Turkey, xi Tvardovsky, Alexander, 359–61, 365

Teresa Giusti, Maria, 237–38 Thatcher, Margaret, 81, 91n11, 91n14, 115–17, 120 Thaw, 345, 354n3, 359, 361–62 The Battle of the River Plate, 105 The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, 109 The Eagle Has Landed, 103–4, 107 The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, 100 The McKenzie Break, 106 The Night of the Generals, 107 The One That Got Away, 106, 111n9 The Passage, 109 The Passionate Friends, 117 The Reader, 110 Third Reich, 15, 154, 187, 206–7, 211, 221, 223, 288, 290, 296–97, 304, 317, 320–25, 327 Tito (Broz, Josip), 247, 275 Togliatti, Palmiro, 239, 248n7, 271 Tolstoy, Leo, 281

Valderrama, Pilar de, 13, 40–41, 52–57 Valle de los Caídos, 56 Varesi, Valerio, 275 VE Day, 15, 81, 90, 115, 333–39, 341, 366 Vercors, 14, 166–76 Vergangenheitsbewältigung, 200, 210 Versailles (city), 124 Versailles Settlement (Treaty), xiii, 300n11, 324 Vichy Syndrome, 134, 146 Vichy, 10, 13, 72n3, 116, 131–50, 172, 244 victim, victimhood, xi, xv, 14–15, 23–24, 33, 47, 52, 55, 60, 62, 71, 71n2, 86, 88, 107, 109, 139, 144–45, 149n49, 157, 162–63, 172, 181–82, 185–87, 190–95, 197n25, 212, 214, 221, 226, 237, 239, 244, 247, 248, 258–59, 263, 270, 274, 277, 288, 291–94, 297–98, 304–7, 310, 317, 326–27, 328n1, 363, 369, 375–76

Ulbricht, Walter, 204 United States, USA, xiv, 170, 182, 184, 202, 252–53, 259, 334, 337, 345, 358 Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter, 200, 212, 214n1 USSR, 15, 193, 239, 246, 304, 306, 308–9, 311, 332–70. See also Soviet Union utopia, 29, 34, 154, 208, 219

388 | Index

Victor Emmanuel III, 237 Victory Day. See VE Day victory, 81, 96, 106–7, 119, 121–22, 174, 183, 188–89, 291, 307, 319, 329n3, 333–41, 344–45, 353, 358–60, 365–67, 370 Viganò, Renata, 273, 278–79 Vīķe-Freiberga, Vaira, 336 Viñas, Ángel, 24–33 Violante, Luciano, 247, 269–70 violence, xiii-xv, 23–24, 26–27, 29–31, 34–36, 131, 163, 173, 209, 213–14, 246, 271, 273, 275, 277, 282, 348, 364, 374 Vittorini, Elio, 273, 282 Vivarelli, Roberto, 238 Vladimov, Georgy, 366 Voltaire, 154

Waugh, Evelyn, 120–22 wealth, wealthy, 15, 34, 48, 208, 254, 256–57, 261 Wehrmacht, 107, 170, 185–86, 205, 209, 213, 290–91, 294, 322–23 Wells, H.G., 117 Went the Day Well?, 102–103 westernisation, 256, 263 Westerplatte, 294–96 White, Hayden, 4, 6–7 Wicki, Bernhard, 209–10 Wiechert, Ernst, 201, 203 Wiesel, Elie, 185 Wilson, Harold, 117 Wolski, Marcin, 316, 320–22, 324–27 Wu Ming, 279

Wajda, Andrzej, 310 Wales, 85–86 Wannsee, 66–67, 125, 325 war crime, 105, 144, 195, 300n8 War Guilt, xiii-xiv war memorial, xi, 88–89, 145 Warsaw, 107, 191, 242, 287, 289, 296, 297, 305, 320–21, 374

Yad Vashem, 241 Yeltsin, Boris, 188–89 Yugoslavia, xiv, 238–39, 275

xenophobic, 3, 246–47

Zhukov, Marshal Georgy, 182, 189, 197n12, 313n11 Zulu, 115 Zychowicz, Piotr, 316, 320–27

Studies in Contemporary European History Editors: Konrad Jarausch, Lurcy Professor of European Civilization, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a Director of the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Studien, Potsdam, Germany Henry Rousso, Senior Research Fellow at the Institut d’histoire du temps présent (Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Paris) Volume 1 Between Utopia and Disillusionment: A Narrative of the Political Transformation in Eastern Europe Henri Vogt Volume 2 The Inverted Mirror: Mythologizing the Enemy in France and Germany, 1898–1914 Michael E. Nolan Volume 3 Conflicted Memories: Europeanizing Contemporary Histories Edited by Konrad H. Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger with the Collaboration of Annelie Ramsbrock Volume 4 Playing Politics with History: The Bundestag Inquiries into East Germany Andrew H. Beattie Volume 5 Alsace to the Alsatians? Visions and Divisions of Alsatian Regionalism, 1870–1939 Christopher J. Fischer Volume 6 A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance Edited by Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth Volume 7 Experience and Memory: The Second World War in Europe Edited by Jörg Echternkamp and Stefan Martens

Volume 8 Children, Families, and States: Time Policies of Childcare, Preschool, and Primary Education in Europe Edited by Karen Hagemann, Konrad H. Jarausch, and Cristina Allemann-Ghionda Volume 9 Social Policy in the Smaller European Union States Edited by Gary B. Cohen, Ben W. Ansell, Robert Henry Cox and Jane Gingrich Volume 10 A State of Peace in Europe: West Germany and the CSCE, 1966–1975 Petri Hakkarainen Volume 11 Visions of the End of the Cold War in Europe, 1945–1990 Edited by Frédéric Bozo, Marie-Pierre Rey, N. Piers Ludlow, and Bernd Rother Volume 12 Investigating Srebrenica: Institutions, Facts, Responsibilities Edited by Isabelle Delpla, Xavier Bougarel, and Jean-Louis Fournel Volume 13 Samizdat, Tamizdat, and Beyond: Transnational Media During and After Socialism Edited by Friederike Kind-Kovács and Jessie Labov Volume 14 Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks, and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s Edited by Davide Rodogno, Bernhard Struck, and Jakob Vogel

Volume 15 Tailoring Truth: Politicizing the Past and Negotiating Memory in East Germany, 1945–1990 Jon Berndt Olsen

Volume 19 Wartime Captivity in the Twentieth Century: Archives, Stories, Memories Edited by Anne-Marie Pathé and Fabien Théofilakis

Volume 16 Memory and Change in Europe: Eastern Perspectives Edited by Małgorzata Pakier and Joanna Wawrzyniak

Volume 20 Ambassadors of Realpolitik: Sweden, the CSCE and the Cold War Aryo Makko

Volume 17 The Long Aftermath: Cultural Legacies of Europe at War, 1936–2016 Edited by Manuel Bragança and Peter Tame Volume 18 Whose Memory? Which Future?: Remembering Ethnic Cleansing and Lost Cultural Diversity in Eastern, Central, and Southeastern Europe Edited by Barbara Törnquist-Plewa

Volume 21 Migration, Memory, and Diversity: Germany from 1945 to the Present Edited by Cornelia Wilhelm Volume 22 From Eastern Bloc to European Union: Comparative Processes of Transformation since 1990 Edited by Günther Heydemann and Karel Vodička