July 21



Facing Death in a Culture of War


Week after week on CBS's CSI and its spinoffs, millions of Americans view
a hands-on immersion in the dead or, to be precise -- for the difference
is important -- in the pseudodead. The shows, which intensify the
transition between life and death so crucial to television stalwarts like
ER, have helped make the morgue a regular stop on TV. With their graphic
autopsies and computer-generated images of how people die, the CSI series
can be hard to watch, although America is clearly watching.

During the season that just ended, on Fox's 24, a missile launched at a
major East coast city threatened to kill as many as 10 million people.
Upping the ante, on ABC's Alias, a secret weapon that looked like a
spinning red ball threatened to produce 400 million dead. Long a staple of
the summer movie season, such narratives air our strongest fears but
function like The Perils of Pauline, in which the hero arrives just before
the train wreck. They seem like controlled, cultural experiments in
simulated loss -- complicated, adult instances of the toddler's game that
Freud called fort/da.

For at the same time that we are fascinated by the spectacle of death --
the simultaneity not being at all coincidental -- our culture reacted with
the strongest possible horror to the attacks on September 11, 2001. Events
in the war on terrorism -- the beheading of Western hostages, the
immolation of bodies, the desecration of body parts -- both fascinate the
public and repel it. But while we are fascinated by death, current U.S.
policy dictates, and the media observe, taboos on the news coverage of
coffins arriving from Iraq and funerals for our soldiers.

The disjunction between our attraction to spectacles of death and an
inability to cope or even think about the real thing unless it's safely
"over there" -- a divide that included the tsunami disaster, when Western
news media displayed the dead quite freely -- seems quite striking. It
stems in part from what I call the war complex: a disordered attitude
toward death that forms part of the heritage of world war.

Urged upon us repeatedly by World War II, but as insistently deflected,
the awareness of mass death lies at the core of modernity. Quick,
simultaneous, often arbritrary deaths, produced by technology's baneful
side: September 11 brought those facts home, although they had been with
us for some time because wartime consciousness did not end in 1945. The
continuing effects of the war complex are worth pondering during the
summer of 2005 -- a summer of important 60-year anniversaries of World War
II.

Writing as a cultural critic in 1915, Sigmund Freud observed that
technology, once a sign of progress, increasingly made war more efficient
but not less brutal, and he speculated that the distance from which we now
kill seems to diminish both respect for the enemy and remorse for his
death. What is more, and more shocking, he noted that large-scale war
trades not in single deaths -- already hard to bear -- but "in a multitude
of simultaneous deaths" that ignores the distinction between military and
civilian groups and "appears to us exceedingly terrible." The kind of war
Freud was describing, later called world war, produced a fundamental
alienation from and abstraction about destruction. But at the same time,
the sheer number of deaths, especially among civilians, and their
cumulative effect undermined customary euphemisms and produced changes in
consciousness that outlasted the end of combat.

"Our habit," Freud said, "is to lay stress on the fortuitous causation of
death" -- to ask, as people always do, What did he or she die of? In that
way, "we betray our endeavor to modify the significance of death from a
necessity to an accident" and to treat the dead with "something like
admiration for one who has accomplished a very difficult task." One sees
that still in the common parlance of obituaries: People "battle" cancer;
they die valiantly "after a long fight." In the same way, we portray
soldiers' deaths as brave and meaningful, even if some occur outside of
combat or on senseless missions. After September 11, it was common to
describe all of the World Trade Center dead, every one of them, without
exception, as "heroes."

If World War I made polite fictions about death difficult to sustain,
World War II made them even more so. What did people die of during world
war? They died "in the war" -- yes, they did. But in addition to all the
usual causes, they died by machine-gun fire or bombardments, their body
parts dispersed like projectiles; they died by gassing; they starved or
froze to death; they contracted typhus or diarrhea, life oozing away with
bodily fluids; they were burned or suffocated in "routine" and then in
area or incendiary bombings; they were evaporated by the atomic bombs;
they died of radiation sickness. The things people died of in world war
made euphemism difficult to sustain -- and so, in a sense, even more
necessary.

What soldiers experienced firsthand, even cultures by and large protected
from the harshest facts of war in the 20th century, like the United
States, felt in expanding circles. As world war more frankly and
deliberately involved civilians as a significant, sometimes dominant,
number of those killed, fear and apprehension became prominent emotions.
As it became harder and harder to put death out of mind, our defensive
formations grew ever more elaborate until, as W.G. Sebald might say, they
"reach their natural limit." As Freud (to cite him one last time) put it,
"In our civilized attitude toward death, we are once more living beyond
our means, and must reform and give truth its due."

How, then, do we count the dead of World War II? The victims of the
Holocaust? What does it mean that, in many instances, we cannot name or
even number the dead? That we often cannot bury them according to
tradition? How do such realities continue to affect the way we live now?

The United States lost relatively few civilians as a direct result of
World War II; in England, 60,595 civilians were killed, most in London,
with 82,182 seriously injured. The Soviet Union lost six million to seven
million civilians among a total casualty figure of some 20 million (total
estimates now reach 25 million or even 50 million, as archives open);
civilian losses in Poland were in the range of six million and included
huge numbers from both Jewish and non-Jewish populations. Estimates of
civilian casualties in China range from 2 million to 10 million -- a
mind-bogglingly wide swing -- with some estimates of world civilian dead
not including China at all. On the losing side, estimates of German
civilians killed range from 500,000 to more than three million, with
roughly 600,000 killed in Allied bombings; German military losses are
estimated at between 2.8 million and 4.7 million, with the most reputable
sources citing 3.5 million to more than 4 million. By way of contrast,
from 1941 to 1945, the United States enlisted 16,353,659 troops, with
292,131 battle deaths and 11,187 deaths outside of battle -- precise and
reliable numbers, although one hears, surprisingly often, higher numbers
cited. One of the asymmetries of war is that the larger the number of the
dead, the more chaos involved and the more unlikely that precise records
will exist.

The number killed in the Holocaust has become by convention "the six
million," though that figure, largely based on Nazi records, is partly
guesswork. Estimates of the total number of Jews killed range from 4.5
million to 10 million -- and the figure chosen can amount to fighting
words. Six million has lodged in cultural memory and will do.

About 70,000 died in Hiroshima at impact and during the first days
afterward, though that figure, too, remains partial guesswork. On the day
the bomb exploded, people walked around dazed, knowing that something
unprecedented had happened but having little way to understand the
harnessing of energy that had actually occurred.

In the context of such statistics, a 1947 essay on Hiroshima by the
cultural critic Georges Bataille slaps us in the face with an opening that
functions like an insult. "Let's admit it," he writes, "the population of
hell increases annually by 50 million souls. A world war may accelerate
the rhythm slightly, but it cannot alter it." He buttonholes his reader
with the proposition that "to the 10 million killed in the war from 1914
to 1918, one must add the 200 million who, during the same period, were
fated to die natural deaths." By the same measure, to the standard figure
of 50 million dead as a result of World War II from 1939 to 1945, we would
have to add roughly 300 million.

Bataille, with whom I'd like to linger just a bit to illuminate the war
complex, is both serious and ironic in bringing normal mortality figures
to bear against those produced by world war. On the one hand, there is
nothing special about mass death; it keeps the earth afloat, and the
greater horror would be the multiplication of lives ad infinitum. On the
other, as Bataille also recognizes, "the death of 60 thousand [the figure
he used for Hiroshima] is charged with meaning, in that it depended on
their fellow men to kill them or to let them live." For Bataille "the atom
bomb draws its meaning from its human origins," origins that swirl around
"a core of darkness," by which he means the presence of death.
"Misfortune's profound nonsense," he writes, remains "a basic component of
human life," but one that most people "dare not look in the face."

The atomic bombs may have formed, then, a grotesque imitation, an
intolerable simulacrum, of natural death. And because "a multitude of
deaths seems to us exceedingly terrible," the emotions the bombs generated
had to be bracketed under some category, such as "the alternative to an
invasion of Japan" or "civil defense and nuclear survival" or "nuclear
disarmament" -- anything other than, Death: see also, the inevitable.

In these times -- which have become even more apprehensive and, even
worse, accustomed to being so -- when forced to choose between "the
horrors of war and giving up any of the activities through which it
believes it must secure its future," Bataille notes acerbically, "society
chooses war." As we have seen once again, in times of crisis, individuals
look toward the nation for security, even though nations willingly
sacrifice their military and, under certain conditions, significant
portions of their civilian populations. Such observations go a long way
toward explaining Americans' desire for security in the wake of September
11 and the evolving cultural memory of that event, which, thus far at
least, has followed patterns also found in the cultural memory of World
War II.

And despite its prominence in American life, cultural memory about that
war is highly selective. Once again the media provide valuable clues about
the state of that memory. Where were you, where was I, on June 6, 2004?
Unless we did not turn on the TV that day, we were watching, moment by
moment, 60th-anniversary commemorations of D-Day, an event that cost
America 2,403 fatalities, roughly the same number as those killed at the
World Trade Center. D-Day -- the subject also of the first major film
about World War II combat in 25 years, Steven Spielberg's Saving Private
Ryan -- forms a prime element of war memory in the United States. Like
presidents before him (notably Ronald Reagan), President Bush used the
approaching anniversary to announce policies and set priorities: in Bush's
case for the war on terrorism as our generation's challenge, "the storm in
which we fly."

Other events or ideas prominent in American cultural memory include "the
greatest generation," citizen soldiers fighting totalitarianism, the U.S.
role in liberating Nazi camps and at Nuremberg, the Holocaust, and
genocide as something that should never happen again. Those events and
ideas form part of America's image of itself, frequently cited in public
discourse and often memorialized. They place Americans in virtuous, heroic
roles -- how we like to think of ourselves and to present ourselves to the
world. And, like D-Day, they have been deployed by the current
administration around the war in Iraq, as, for example, when President
Bush's visit to Auschwitz coincided with the opening of mass graves in
Iraq, providing a visual link between the Holocaust and Saddam Hussein
that seemed, for many people, to justify the war.

Which events from World War II have been elided, on the other hand, from
cultural memory? Which facts, while known, do not inform America's image
of World War II or America's image of itself?

Here again, media coverage provides one index, especially in contrast to
the lavish coverage of D-Day. Where were you on May 8, 2005, the 60th
anniversary of V-E Day, the end of the war in Europe? We're unlikely to
remember, because the press and other media covered little more than
President Bush's visit to Russia and a silly incident about driving a car.
And, for the most part, the true significance of Bush's visit remained
hidden in plain sight. It recognized, no doubt as a favor to President
Vladimir Putin, a fact that is known but has never entered America's image
of World War II: the enormous Soviet sacrifice so crucial to victory in
World War II.

Like Soviet losses, events elided from American cultural memory tend to be
either those that do not seem to involve "us" or those that place the
United States in equivocal or ambiguous roles at best: internment camps
for Japanese and Japanese-Americans; incendiary bombings of cities in
Germany and Japan; the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; to some
extent the war in Asia as a whole, as opposed to the war in Europe. While
part of the public record, and hence provably "known," such events have
not quite fully registered in America's image of World War II or in
America's image of itself. Yet events that do not seem to involve "us"
often do. Surely it's time, and more than time, to broaden our sense of
which events affect "us" and which do not, or, more generously, to define
a sense of "us" able to empathize with others.

Sixty-year anniversaries are important -- a point when history can be
reconfigured and the past can be reimagined in diverse ways, as the critic
Georg Lukacs put it, as the vital precondition of the present. Where will
we be on August 6 and August 9, the 60th anniversaries of the dropping of
atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? A recent flurry of books about
those events suggests that we may be noting them via media coverage and
understanding more fully how they have shaped our lives since World War II
and continue to do so as the United States wills that only "we" have
nuclear weapons. But it's also possible, given past events, that we'll be
watching reruns of CSI, or 24, or Alias, or heading to the local cineplex
to see the latest imaginary spectacles of death. The war complex, our
intimate and our familiar, continues to inform American culture, with
World War I drawing a template, World War II drawing the patterns large,
and September 11 bringing them home.

(source: The Chronicle of Higher Education; Marianna Torgovnick is a
professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of The War
Complex: World War II in Our Time, published this year by the University
of Chicago Press, from which this essay is adapted.)