The War Complex:
WWII in Our Time – Marianna Torgovnick
For about twenty years, historians have examining how members of Anglo- American cultures collectively remember war and its consequences. Examples are Sarah Purcell’s Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory inRevolutionary America and David Blight’s Race and Reunion: The CivilWar in American Memory. English professors have also taken on collective memory, such as Paul Fussell’s incredible The Great War and Modern Memory.
English professor at Duke Marianna Torgovnick studies WWII
as a cultural touchstone, especially in light of the Bush administration
invoking it as a rallying exhortation in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist
attacks. In a series of essays she covers topics such as D-Day, Adolf Eichmann,
the Shoah, WWII films such as Saving Private Ryan, and the fiction of W.
S. Sebald. Mercifully, she keeps the jargon of Theory out, so the general reader can
follow her line of thinking. For instance:
The war complex . . . is the difficulty of confronting the fact of mass, sometimes simultaneous, death caused by human volition under state or other political auspices, in shorter and shorter periods of time, and affecting not only the military but also, and even more, civilians . . . The war complex shows up as gaps or ellipses in public discourses around histories of quick, technological mass death.
As an example of mass death she cites the “Taipei Rebellion,” which I think an editor should have caught and corrected to the “Taiping Rebellion,” a little-known civil war that killed about 20 million men, women, and children between 1850 and 1864 in China. I’ve often wondered how (and why) English professors have cottoned to the philosophy of Sigmund Freud so it was interesting to see her examination of Freud’s idea about the altered state of consciousness produced by large-scale war and its lasting effects beyond the end of hostilities.
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