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The recent dedication of the World War II memorial and the sixtieth-anniversary commemoration of D-Day remind us of the hold that World War II still has over America's sense of itself. But the selective process of memory has radically shaped our picture of the conflict. Why else, for instance, was a 1995 Smithsonian exhibition on Hiroshima that was to include photographs of the first atomic bomb victims, along with their testimonials, considered so controversial? And why do we so readily remember the civilian bombings of Britain but not those of Dresden, Hamburg, and Tokyo?
Marianna Torgovnick argues that we have lived, since the end of World War II, under the power of a war complex—a set of repressed ideas and impulses that stems from our unresolved attitudes toward the technological acceleration of mass death. This complex has led to gaps and hesitations in public discourse about atrocities committed during the war itself. And it remains an enduring wartime consciousness, one most recently animated on September 11.
Showing how different events from World War II became prominent in American cultural memory while others went forgotten or remain hidden in plain sight, The War Complex moves deftly from war films and historical works to television specials and popular magazines to define the image and influence of World War II in our time. Torgovnick also explores the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the emotional legacy of the Holocaust, and the treatment of World War II's missing history by writers such as W. G. Sebald to reveal the unease we feel at our dependence on those who hold the power of total war. Thinking anew, then, about how we account for war to each other and ourselves, Torgovnick ultimately, and movingly, shows how these anxieties and fears have prepared us to think about September 11 and our current war in Iraq.
- Sales Rank: #4315152 in Books
- Published on: 2005-05-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.10" w x 6.00" l, 1.04 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 224 pages
Review
"Torgovnick has begun to do for the Second World War what for some years now thoughtful scholars and critics have done for the Civil War: to explore how our patriotism can survive if we acknowledge terrible truths. Her promising ethical solution transcends identity politics in a way that should open important further discussion." (Jonathan Arac)
"An audaciously wide-ranging cultural critique of how World War II has entered contemporary modern memory and consciousness. This is an important and illuminating book that will have a large and receptive audience." (James E. Young)
"Through personal rumination and inventive analysis, Torgovnick offers an inspiring model for a new way to write cultural history. Her lucid, companionable voice leads us through nightmare with exemplary generosity and intelligence." (Wayne Koestenbaum)
"A beautifully written meditation, at once wide ranging and intensely focused by the master thesis that at the heart of modernity lies the consciousness of war and the spectacle-horrifying and yet strangely narcotic-of mass death." (Stanley Fish)
"Marianna Torgovnick is one of our most brilliant and probing cultural critics." (Joyce Carol Oates)
CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2006 (CHOICE)
"A provoking and ethical book. . . . In an age when information is ephemeral, any book which recovers forgotten history is laudable." (James Ervin Rain Taxi)
"This book is wide-ranging, moving beyond American matters and authors. As a postmodernist critical approach, it succeeds in contextualizing American reactions to World War II by going deeper than national boundaries and impersonal narration." (Eric Solomon American Literature)
"Togovnick's book should find a wide readership among scholars of international relations who hope to understand how cultural reporesentations can shape attitudes towards past and future conflicts." (Ronald J. Granieri International History Review)
"Torgovnick serves as a kind of quirky and compelling guide on a walking tour of popular memory, drawing us in with her enthusiasm for her subject and provoking us to notice—and to think deeply about—the cultural and literary landscape of the post-World War II era." (Tami Davis Biddle The Historian)
From the Inside Flap
The recent dedication of the World War II memorial and the sixtieth anniversary commemoration of D-Day remind us of the hold that World War II still has over America's sense of itself. But the selective process of memory has radically shaped our picture of the conflict. Why else, for instance, was a 1995 Smithsonian exhibition on Hiroshima that was to include photographs of the first atomic bomb victims, along with their testimonials, considered so controversial? And why do we so readily remember the civilian bombings of Britain but not those of Dresden, Hamburg, and Tokyo?
Marianna Torgovnick argues that we have lived, since the end of World War II, under the power of a war complex—a set of repressed ideas and impulses that stems from our unresolved attitudes toward the technological acceleration of mass death. This complex has led to gaps and hesitations in public discourse about atrocities committed during the war itself. And it remains an enduring wartime consciousness, one most recently animated on September 11, 2001.
Showing how different events from World War II became prominent in American cultural memory while others go forgotten or remain hidden in plain sight, The War Complex moves deftly from war films and historical works to television specials and popular magazines to define the image and influence of World War II in our time. Torgovnick also explores the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the emotional legacy of the Holocaust, and the treatment of World War II's missing history by writers such as W. G. Sebald to reveal the unease we feel at our dependence on those who hold the power of total war. Thinking anew, then, about how we account for war to each other and ourselves, Torgovnick ultimately, and movingly, shows how these anxieties and fears have prepared us to think about 9/11 and our current war in Iraq.
About the Author
Marianna Torgovnick is professor of English at Duke University and director of Duke’s New York Program in Arts and Media. She is the author of numerous works, including Primitive Passions: Men, Women, and the Quest for Ecstasy, Gone Primitive: Modern Intellects, Savage Lives, and Crossing Ocean Parkway, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Most helpful customer reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
elegant and original
By C Smith
THE WAR COMPLEX is a wonderful book--disturbing and illuminating, historicallly rich and politically timely. It begins with a startling and sweeping observation: the history of the twentieth century is a history of almost continuous war; "modernity" is virtually always "wartime"; and the accelerated violence of World War II, directed against military and civilian populations alike, is the centerpiece of our shared past. To understand the modern mind, then, we have to understand how it has been transformed by exposure to mass killing. We have to remember not only the storming of beaches and the liberation of capitals, but also the concentration camps, the firebombing of homes, the eradication of whole cities by atomic bombs.
One problem, of course, is that we remember World War II too much. It is invoked, for instance, as a justification for more war, as when politicians and media depicted 9/11 as a repetition of Pearl Harbor--at attack on America that demanded an old-fashioned, full-scale military response. Violence, experienced and remembered, begets violence. This is a symptom of what Torgovnick cals "wartime consciousness": overexposed to mass death, we organize the world according to antagonisms. It's always "us against them."
Torgovnick's daring and imaginative undertaking, in THE WAR COMPLEX, is to try to think her way through and out of "wartime consciousness." Some hawks and dullards will complain that the book is too personal, too meditative, that it turns to the imagination and the study of art when war is a matter of politics, when mass death is a matter of statistics. They will miss the point. When wartime is all the time, when our societies and our minds are built to be combat-ready, moving beyond these dominant patterns requires some unorthodox thinking. Therefore THE WAR COMPLEX considers, for example, "the kind of imaginative projections that novels can provide, their opening up of a space based on social realities, but not determined by them." And therefore, in her unconventional book--moving elegantly among the spheres of history and psychology, politics and the arts--Torgovnick adopts a personal, sometimes even confessional mode of writing. It's the opposite of self-indulgence. It's an effort to discover some grounds of "identification," some pattern of human connection beyond wartime.
9 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Relevant book for our times
By Samia at the Cairo House
World War II holds a unique place of privilege in the American, and Allied, historical imagination. It was the war of the greatest generation; the uncontroversial war, the just war; the last war when good and evil were clearly delineated in the minds of Americans. World War II is the shorthand reference used to evoke moral high ground and uncomplicated patriotism.
History is written by the victors, as the adage goes, with all that implies of selectivity of memory. Which history, and which war, one chooses to invoke, is a matter of politics. For instance, before the American invasion of Iraq in 2002, both opponents and proponents resorted to analogies to earlier conflicts to serve their argument. For opponents, the specter of the quagmire of Vietnam was raised, with its searing images of civilian suffering. For proponents, WWII was relentlessly presented as the glorious model, with Pearl Harbor and Munich the ready references.
But the legacy of World War II may not be as uncomplicated or as controversial as we choose to remember it in America and much of Western Europe. In "The War Complex", Duke professor Marianna Torgovnick explores the images of D-Day, the media spectacle of the Eichmann trial, the emotional legacy of the Holocaust, Hiroshima and the A-bomb, to discover how the selective process of memory still shapes our picture of the conflict and of subsequent conflicts, including the response to September 11th.
Torgovnik examines the narratives of D-Day, and how they played into the image that Americans want to see of themselves: "good versus evil, American multiculturalism (within limits, since racial segregation was still in place) versus the homogenous racial Ûbermensch or `Jap,' citizen soldiers fighting a necessary war against the forces of totalitarianism, us versus them." She argues that our carefully constructed cultural memory of war, and the cumulative state of mind called wartime consciousness, persisted well beyond the end of hostilities right through the Cold War and remained ready to be reanimated after September 11.
"The war on terrorism...promises an indefinite prolongation of wartime states of mind. That prolongation suggests one strong reason why you should read this book. `The War Complex' probes the cost of sustained wartime consciousness on a society and a culture, which are more than military." That is only one argument for the relevance and timeliness of this insightful, wide-ranging study that balances solid scholarship with lively, accessible writing. Torgovnik brilliantly combines history, psychology of war, memoir, and imaginative literature, to expose the construction of the war complex and to imagine a way out based on an ethics of identification
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
The Freud complex
By Sceptique500
As recounted by Mastro Titta, the hangman to several Popes, executions in the Papal States between 1802 and 1865 took place in the public square. Huge crowds came to gape. For a long period of Titta's tenure the bodies of the criminals were then quartered and the body parts exposed at street junctions. The public spectacle of death and retribution was part of everyday life, there and elsewhere - even in the US, where people watched lynchings until the turn of the century.
Cossetted in turn of the century Vienna Dr. Freud phantasised about Eros and Thanatos, and what not. He worried about the effects of overhearing parental sex noises on the innocent minds of children - blissfully oblivious to the fact that privacy was the privilege of very few in the last few centuries of humanity's evolution.
It is therefore a bit of a shock to find, in the XXIst century an author who is still a "card-carrying cultural Freudian". She writes: "The death instinct, the will of living matter to return to an inanimate state that existed prior to life, exerts a pull toward what seemed to Freud a "form of perfection", albeit one that we "cannot admit" (pg. 135). Now stop to reflect a bit what Freud seems to be saying: living matter, also bacteria, crows, and what not, has a "will" - i.e. consciousness - to return to an inanimate state. Yes, this is the cultural Freud, the man who ambitioned himself as the Haeckel of psychology, and thought that "ontology recapitulates phylogeny" also applied to the mind. If you believe such things, be welcome to the book.
"In these times of ours, which have only gotten worse, "the military art of destruction gains unprecedented means"... the author intones, oblivious to most of history. About one third of the German population died during the 30 Years War, few of them peaqcefully; 100 million out of 105 million Amerindians wasted away in a couple of generations; the Taiping Rebellion killed twenty million or so... and humanity has only discovered mass killing in the XXth century? Mass killing - "on the hoof" and in full view - was happening all the time, one at a time (unless they were burned or buried wholesale), in rivers of blood. Terminal torture and lingering death was the preferred mode. Freud's disillusion about civilization (pg. 134) only reflects the widening of his provincial bourgeois experience.
Culture history is fascinating for its details and unexpected linkages between themes. Myths are worked and reworked like so much clay, and the pottery that is then made out of it is each time similar and profoundly different. Culture history escapes, even more than regular history, overarching themes and interpretations. It is never more than myths about myths, which one should take lightly, as evidence of our unsettled mind - not the product of transcendent forces. An associated danger is sweeping assertions, like: "what I believe in fact to be true: that the XXth century consists almost entirely of a state of mind tinged, and sometimes dominated, by war consciousness" (pg. 137). I doubt that most of humanity would share - or care about - this "truth".
The author devotes a chapter to Sebald. The sublimely ephemeral, floating writing of Sebald is, with Herta Müller, the best of Germany's after war writing. Sebald would have been horrified, I suspect, by the author's approach, which resembles boilerplate to be riveted with quotes.
On the other hand, her thoroughness may have led her to verify her quote of Freud's quote: "If you want to endure life, prepare for death". Fascinating wording, for the Latin original, which Freud himself translates, is: "Si vis vitam, para mortem". Now the volitive and virile "vis" (infinitive: "velle") is usually translated with "want" - a far cry from the German "aushalten", or the English "endure". Freudian slip?
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