War and Memory

Kriege und moderne militärische Konflikte bergen das wirkmächtige Potential den Verlauf der Geschichte in einer derart gestauchten chronologischen Abfolge der Geschehnisse zu verändern, die es für Gesellschaften schwer macht, sie in ihrer Gesamtheit und ihren überaus komplexen Konsequenzen zu fassen. Mindestens ebenso schwierig ist es für kleinere sozialen Entitäten, die blutigen, schockierenden, traumatischen und tieftraurigen persönlichen Erfahrungen, die ein Krieg mit sich bringt, zu begreifen. Dennoch sind die Assoziationen, die mit dem historischen Ereignis und der Erfahrung Krieg einhergehen, vielfältiger und facettenreicher, als man zunächst annehmen könnte. Wie das Kriegsgeschehen und sein mittelbares sowie unmittelbares Nachspiel erlebt werden, ist abhängig davon, aus welcher Perspektive man einen Krieg und seinen Ausgang erlebt. Welche Motive ein Staat, eine Nation oder eine Gesellschaft gehabt hat, die Krieg führte, mit welchem Ergebnis dieser Krieg zu einem Ende kam und welche kollektiven oder auch persönlichen Erfahrungen mit ebendiesem Kriegsende verbunden waren, spielt daher die maßgebliche Rolle, wenn man über die Rezeptionsgeschichte und die Erinnerungskultur einer Nation an einen Krieg spricht und sich dieser Problematik mithilfe eines kunsthistorischen, archäologischen, architektonischen oder auch soziologischen Zugangs nähert.

Wars are now mediated in unprecedented ways and through a variety of communicative forms. Correspondingly, there is an increasing awareness among those involved in war of the need to gauge and manage what is communicated. Communicating War: Media, Memory and Military contextualises these developments by locating the emergence of recent wars and terrorist activity in a wider frame of global socio-political change, highlighting the social, political and historical aspects of 'communicating war'. This includes: . the remembering and forgetting of wars through cultures of collective memory and media selectivity; . the organization, practice and culture of media institutions in the mediation of war information; . and the strategic use of information by military institutions and terrorist organizations in the execution of war and terrorist acts. Remaining sensitive to the complexities of conflict, the book moves beyond a focus on UK and US interventions and reflects upon the communication of war in relation to all forms of conflict, particularly terrorism and under reported civil conflicts.

Title: 'Shimakutuba de kataru ikusayu' to 'Maus- Aushuvittsu o ikinobita chichioya no monogatari' no kanōsei
[Japanese language article] In this article I compare the possibilities of representing and narrating the traumatic past, as well as the revealing of the context of recall and narration, in the documentary film about the Battle of Okinawa "Shimakutuba de kataru ikusayu" with the graphic novel "Maus: A Survivor's Tale".

(red.): Alt henger saman med alt! Festskrift til Øistein Espenes på 70-årsdagen. FHS/Luftkrigsskolens skriftserie vol. 37, Trondheim 2020, s. 173-188. Temaet for artikkelen er ulike forståingar av materielle minne som på ein eller annan måte kan knytast til militaer verksemd og krig. I dei seinare tiåra har synet på kva kulturminne som skal reknast som verneverdige, allment sett endra seg mykje, og artikkelen ser naerare på korleis desse endringane har gjort seg gjeldande også for kulturminne etter krig og militaermakt. Drøftinga vil i alt vesentleg halde seg til norske tilhøve og avgrense seg til materielle kulturminne. 1 I Nyhavna i Trondheim ligg Dora 1 og 2-to tyske ubåtbunkerar frå andre verdskrigen. Berre ein vart ferdig, men murverka som står att av den andre, har imponerande dimensjonar. I Laksevåg ved Bergen står det også att ein stor del av ubåtbunkeren Bruno. Langs den franske atlanterhavskysten ligg fem tilsvarande anlegg som alle er større enn dei norske. Bunkerane er mellom dei største betongbygga i Europa, og dei ligg der som permanente minne om krig og okkupasjon. For den som kjenner historia, framstår dei også som handfaste minne om det strategiske krigsspelet som u-båthamnene inngjekk i. Om dei er bevaringsverdige som kulturminne, er likevel ikkje utan vidare klart. Dei kan nok vere spektakulaere på sin måte, men vakre er dei ikkje, heller ikkje gamle. Mange vil også meine at krig og kultur ikkje let seg foreine. Krig inneber som regel ikkje berre massedød, men også materielle øydeleggingar i stor skala, og da går heller ikkje bevaringsverdige sivile kulturverdiar fri. Dei internasjonale døma på verdifulle kulturminne som har vorte øydelagde gjennom krig, er mange. Stundom kan motiva for øydeleggingane vere rein terror eller bevisste ønske om å ta frå ein forakta fiende viktige kulturelle symbol. Som oftast er det likevel krigens logikk som ligg bak, der det gjeld å finne effektive metodar fram mot militaer siger. Eit døme på dette finn ein i Peter Englunds store bok om den første verdskrigen, Stridens skönhet och sorg. Der skriv han mellom anna om øydelegginga av så vel den armenske domkyrkja som den store moskeen i Van i Aust-Anatolia den 25. april 1915. Da hadde armenarane i byen gjort opprør i ein fortvila freistnad på å unngå folkemordet som dei tyrkiske styresmaktene alt hadde slept laus. Den venezuelanske offiseren Rafael de Nogales hadde verva seg i den tyrkiske haeren og var i Van da dette skjedde. «Krig er krig», skal han ha sagt til den tyrkiske kommandanten som i første omgangen vegra seg for å bombardere moskeen, der dei siste opprørarane skaut ifrå minareten. 2 1 Takk til Jon Olav Hove og Aud Mikkelsen Tretvik for gode kommentarar. 2 Englund (2009), 121f.

Este artigo analisa as representações sobre a Segunda Guerra Mundial, veiculadas em livros didáticos japoneses para a escolarização básica, produzidos entre 1993 e 2002. Discute a omissão do Estado em relação aos crimes de guerra cometidos pelo Japão e as diferentes memórias produzidas por indivíduos de diferentes gerações, dentro e fora da escola que resultam em dois grandes modos de compreender o referido evento: o pacifista, para os mais jovens, e o nacionalista, para os mais idosos.

(Sorry for the poor English editing - A/N)

War responsibilities represent one of the most controversial and debated issues in the global Postwar scenery. In contemporary society, this discourse is all but defined and its ambiguity is particularly evident in Japanese recent history.
Is it really this “easy” for these Japanese who want to deny Japanese wrong-doing during the Second World War to do so?
The intent of this essay is to trace down the Historical development of Public Memory and Responsibility after 1945, in the Postwar struggle to reconstruct Japanese identity, to better understand the perception of war experience among the Japanese.

N.B. The uploaded paper is a slightly longer, earlier version of “Rashomon perceived: The challenge of forging a transnationally shared view of Kurosawa’s legacy,” in Davis, Blair, Robert Anderson, Jan Wall eds., Rashomon Effects: Rashomon, Kurosawa and their legacies. Routledge, Abingdon, 2016. The present version, which carries a title different from the chapter in the above book, contains more citations which may be of value to researchers.

The Japanese government is taking off the gloves with academics who research, write, and talk about sordid or awkward aspects of Japan’s twentieth-century history. This campaign ranges from harassment and intimidation to legal action in support of a sanitized past. In conversations with dozens of academics from around the world between 2016 and 2018, I found a consensus that the situation has worsened considerably and that this is counter- productive, undermining “Brand Japan” by showing the world a glowering nationalism. Governments around the world are not keen to endure their critics, but in Japanese studies what had been sporadic and episodic has become more systematic and intrusive on Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s watch.

This thesis proposes a new perspective on Malaysian Chinese studies by exploring issues of identity formation refracted through the lens of contestations of war memory, communal history and state-sponsored national history. In multiethnic Malaysia, despite persistent nation-building programs towards inculcating a shared Malaysian national identity, the question as to whether the Chinese are foremost Chinese or Malaysian remains at the heart of Malaysian socio-political debates. Existing scholarship on the Malaysian Chinese is often framed within post-independent development discourses, inevitably juxtaposing the Chinese minority condition against Malay political and cultural supremacy. Similarly, explorations of war memory and history echo familiar Malay-Chinese, dominant-marginalised or national-communal binary tropes. This thesis reveals that prevailing contestations of memory and history are, at their core, struggles for cultural inclusion and belonging. It further maps the overl...

Hermann Detzner’s 'Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen' (1921) purports to chronicle the author’s sojourn in the jungles of Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, the German colony on Papua New Guinea, during World War I. While the narrative is based on facts, much of it is fictionalized and embellished. Written in the early days of the Weimar Republic by an alienated member of the so-called 'Frontgeneration,' the text reflects the author’s yearning for a return to the imperial era. 'Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen' tries to align New Guinea, its landscapes and native inhabitants, with the German homeland and thus to make the case for Germany’s continued right to overseas colonies. While Detzner’s generation was heavily implicated in the rise of Nazism, Detzner, despite his ardent nationalism, seems to have steered clear of the movement. His exposure to radical alterity in New Guinea might have played a part in making a racist ideology unappealing to him.

I cd. ‘epigrammi delle Guerre Persiane’ (o ‘epigrammi di Maratona’, a seconda di quale delle due interpretazioni oggi prevalenti si accolga) costituiscono una delle prime forme di memoria degli eventi. Tra i molteplici problemi interpretativi posti dal monumento, relativamente sia alla sua natura sia ai referenti storici degli epigrammi su di esso iscritti, e dunque all’identificazione dei caduti commemorati, un dato pare indiscusso, vale a dire il riferimento a Maratona del testo inciso nella fascia inferiore del cd. Lapis A.
Quale ‘storia’ relativa a Maratona il testo racconti, è tuttavia incerto. Comunemente edito secondo tentativi di lettura avanzati decine di anni fa, spesso scaturiti da approcci poco sensibili a un orizzonte storico complessivo e alla problematica della memoria pre-storiografica delle Guerre Persiane, il testo epigrafico offre in realtà una rappresentazione della battaglia di Maratona sintetica, non scevra di tratti già narrativi, simile nei suoi contenuti a quella della Stoa Poikile, di poco successiva, e a quella più tardi proposta da Erodoto.

Battle for Manila in February to March 1945, which was once given considerable publicity in the Japanese War Crimes Trials (1946-1948), has long been the subject of amnesia in Japan, the United States, and even in the Philippines. The 50th year's anniversary (1995) marked the quiet beginning of protest against forgetting with the erection of a small memorial by the civic group Memorare Manila 1945. Since then, both the media and scholars have begun to give more attention to the Battle and its historical significance with an increasing number of publications reviving memories of the city's "death", i.e. Japanese atrocities, U.S. shelling, and all the sufferings of the civilians under siege. Will it be another "Rape of Nanking" for Japan in the near future? With this big question in the author’s mind, this paper will first focus on an 1976 essay contributed by Carmen Guerrero Nakpil, a woman journalist from the Guerrero clan of Ermita, to a coffee table book titled "Manila" co-authored by an actress-photographer Gina Lollobrigida who was commissioned to shoot euphoric photographs of the Philippines under Marcos dictatorship for the purpose of tourist promotion. Strangely enough, Nakpil pours All-American place names in her celebration of the city’s modern urban landscape while hardly mentioning Manila's real local place names including Ermita, a major tourist attraction of the 1970s and the place where she was born and grew up in the 1920s to the 1930s. Examining (1) Nakpil's recent autobiographies published in 2006 and 2007, which so vividly and tenderly depicted her days in prewar Ermita as well as postwar manic and frenzy days of a widowed journalist; (2) Benedict Anderson's anatomy of Nakpil's sibling Leon Ma. Guerrero's translation of Nori Me Tangere (by Jose Rizal) in 1961, as well as; (3) Nakpil's one of well known columns in 1967 which spoke out about her ordeal in the Battle for Manila, February 1945, the paper will discuss the "post war history" of a major object-loss, or PTSD as experienced by Filipino elites such as Nakpil who suffered so much during the genocidal experiences under the battle which slaughtered hundred thousands civilians by Japanese atrocities, massacres, and U.S. indiscriminate shelling.

The collective remembrance of war constitutes a focal point for memory studies , and as such it has also found an echo in Ancient History . Within the conceptual framework offered by memory studies, in this chapter I want to consider the way in which Late Iron Age individuals and communities in Gaul and Iberia remembered war, particularly the zenith of battle, and the role of this remembrance in the construction and enunciation of their identities. Being aware of the huge cultural and social diversity of the Late Iron Age, I do not intend a complete overview nor do I advocate a homogenous picture. I will limit myself to an analysis of some of the elements and the dynamics which were active in the dialectic between past and present that constructed memory. I hope that this sketch is useful for further and deeper forays into the subject. For a copy of the paper, please send  me a message.

El artículo examina la obra gráfica de Luis Fernando Rojas referente a la Guerra del Pacífico y su contribución a la formación de la cultura visual del conflicto. Por medio de un análisis de los recursos visuales y estéticos desplegados en sus trabajos se da cuenta de la creación de un imaginario heroico en torno a la guerra y su vínculo ideológico con el nacionalismo chileno. La narrativa visual de la guerra proporcionada por las ilustraciones del artista se propagó de manera sistemática en la opinión pública de la época, alcanzando una gran difusión social y popularidad.

In Thomas Hürlimann’s Familienroman Fourty Roses the elements of the Jewish culture and the memory problems are virtually conspicuous. Most studies of family novels or generation novels (Generationenromane) put their focus on the identity and family problems. However, we must not overlook the significant role of the Jewish elements, which are defined as “Jewish motifs” in my paper, namely, “on the way”, “father-child relationship”, for the two motifs are vital in the understanding of this novel. Both motifs are closely related to the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish culture. At the same time, they serve as important agents in literary staging of the Jewish memory in the novel: The self-emancipation and assimilation of Swiss Jews in the 20th century, the suffering of Swiss Jews under the waves of anti-Semitism, the disintegration of the traditional social structure from the perspective of a Jewish family, as well as the corruptness of the post-war Swiss society are all mixed with memory issues and Jewish motifs. According to the memory theories by Jan and Aleida Assmann, with regard to the impact of Nazi history of World War II, the related collective memory is currently on the threshold of transitioning from a communicative memory to a cultural one. In this novel Hürlimann following this trend tells exactly "the great collective history in miniature of family stories and combines private inner perspective with an outer perspective" to narrate the painful or distressing experiences of the victimized Swiss Jews during and after Nazi period.
My work is divided into four chapters. Following the introduction I devote the second chapter to the theoretical foundations of the whole work with a discussion of the cultural memory and the literary memory. In this chapter I have given my definition to “Jewish motif”, which as a form of literature motif till now has not received much attention in the literature studies. The main part, namely the third chapter, wherein I take approaches of the motif research from the memory perspective based on the theories of Jan and Aleida Assmann as well as Astrid Erll. This part is focused on a detailed analysis of the motifs "on the way", "father-child relationship" as well as some closely related elements and metaphors, such as "light", "image of Africa", "hotel", “luggage”, “scissors” as well as their roles in the reconstruction of memory. In this novel, each Jewish motif functions just like a "optical prism": When the stories of the shattering Jewish family falls like a ray of light through the "prism", one can see not only each surface of the “prism” – the archetype and the cultural background of each motif, but also an intertwinement of individual memory of the protagonist Marie together with the cultural memory of the Jews, not least a reflection of the Swiss society in different ages. All this is presented to the readers like a colored band.

Keywords: Jewish motifs; individual memory; cultural memory; family novel;

ABSTRACT

An under theorized area of Dark and War Tourism studies concerns the appropriation of tours for the perpetuation of political propaganda. Taking the case of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that separates North and South Korea this study demonstrates the extent to which heritage tours are used to present the political and military arguments of the South in order to persuade visitors of the justification of their actions in the ongoing conflict between North and South Korea.

KEYWORDS
DARK TOURISM, WAR TOURISM, HERITAGE, POLITICS, SOCIOLOGY, KOREAN WAR, NORTH KOREA, SOUTH KOREA, DMZ, PANMUNJEOM, MILITARY HISTORY, PROPAGANDA, PERSUASION, MANIPULATION, MILITARY HISTORY, CONFLICT STUDIES