Professional Documents
Culture Documents
History Revised
N othing stimulates the writing of history more than the end of history.
This is one conclusion that might be drawn from the geyser of fresh
historical work that has burst forth over the past decade. The books
that have received the most attention in recent years are devoted to revivifying
“public memory,” as it is now called. Among these the most famous have been
committed to returning all that has been “repressed” to the official record of our
bloody century. Such works are useful and can be morally admirable, especially
when they challenge the many new forms of historical revisionism that would
like to shape historical memory for some questionable contemporary purpose.
Yet there are other, more productive and interesting revisions also taking place
in the field of history today, and it is these which we have chosen to highlight in
this issue of Correspondence. The first such revision is the active reexamination of
In This Issue the national myths that grew up in the decades following World War II and have
shaped our political experience since. These myths have come under increasing
scholarly scrutiny in many countries recently. In Greece and Italy, for example,
History Revised
the standard historical accounts of the internal political conflicts that raged over
The Querelle Over Cultural History 2
Communism, Fascism, and liberal democracy are all being rewritten, as political
Gulag Denial 3 scientists Stathis Kalyvas and Nadia Urbinati report. In Israel, by contrast, a con-
History for Sale 4 tentious debate has broken out over what journalist Gadi Taub here calls the
The War That Will Not Thaw 5 “founding myths of Zionism,” whether in relation to the declaration of the State of
Post-Zionism & the Myths of Memory 6 Israel in 1948, the wars that followed, ethnic tensions between Sephardic and
The Two Italies 7 Ashkenazi Jews, and misunderstandings between the Orthodox and secular pop-
ulations. In all three cases the fact that national history is finally open to such pub-
Historians Under National Socialism 9
lic controversy is a hopeful sign of political maturity and confidence in the future.
The Greek Civil War in Retrospect 10 Quite different sorts of revision are taking place within the history profession
Revising Roger Garaudy 12 itself. As Michael Becker reports, German historians are currently disputing the
America the Radical? 13 purposes to which certain founders of the most important postwar schools of
research put their work during the war years. Elsewhere the debates are less
History and Historians politically charged and more concerned with the aims and methods of the histo-
History Goes Pop: Two Views 15 rian writing today. As Daniel Gordon writes in our pages, the controversy over
Hungarian Women’s History 16 historical method has long been centered in France, where for years the domi-
A New Kind of History 17 nant approaches focused on language, culture, and social transformations while
downplaying the importance of purely political phenomena. Now political his-
Frontiers of Science tory may be staging a comeback there. Another discussion has taken place
Icelandic Genes 18 among Anglo-American historians over the current vogue of “popular history,”
Left Darwinism 19 some of which is simply standard work aimed at reaching a broader audience,
Peter Singer 19 while the rest uses different narrative techniques to escape the limits of tradi-
Justice for Neanderthals! 20 tional scholarship. We here consider several views of these developments and
publish an original contribution to the question by historian Anthony Grafton.
Out of Africa? 20
The most important contemporary myth in need of revision may be that of the
Essays “end of history” itself. As Daniel Bell writes in his essay for this issue, recent
Fractures of Modern Civilization 21 events in the Balkans demonstrate that history is resuming, fueled by all the
hatreds and passions—especially religious passions—that have always driven it.
The Resumption of History 39
If he is correct, we can probably expect history as a form of intellectual inquiry
(continued on next page) to become more difficult yet all the more necessary. ◆
—Mark Lilla
History Revised
Japanese Economy
Japan & the Global Financial System 23
The Philosophy of Money 24
F rom 1945 to the late 1970s, European and North American scholars deba-
ted passionately the relative merits of social and political history. Since
the 1980s, the old dualism has been subsumed under the social and politi-
cal rubric of “culture.” A long historical deadlock has been broken by a third
party: cultural history.
Or has it? The new cultural history has created a confusing set of choices of
Japanese Melting Pot what to study. Intellectual history or popular practices? National history or
Multiethnic Japan 25 microhistory? Conscious actions or behavior-inducing institutions? Rapid
Buraku Liberation Movement 26 change or immobile structures? So many choices abound that the impulse to
restore a happy and orderly dilemma is already evident. The old dualism is re-
Views of Japan emerging, as a recent exchange between philosopher Marcel Gauchet and histo-
Japan, Made in U.S.A. 27 rian Roger Chartier superbly illustrates.
Korean-Japanese Reconciliation? 27 Chartier is a leading scholar of early-modern Europe and a prolific essayist on
Responsibility of Intellectuals 28 methodology. In his latest meditations, On The Edge of the Cliff: History, Language,
and Practices (Johns Hopkins, 1997), he has tried to synthesize the cultural turn
Word & Image in Japan and social history, rejecting economic determinism and emphasizing the “negoti-
In the Beginning Was the Word… 29 ated” character of all relations. He insists that ideas are not the byproducts of class
The Kanji Cultural Sphere 29 interests, but the very stuff of individual and group identities. Yet, paradoxically,
Plea for the New Japonisme 30 he repeatedly uses the term “social” to posit a layer of reality that explains culture
and politics: “discourse,” he declares, “is itself socially determined;” historians
Reports from Europe should focus on “the social configurations that make...political forms possi-
The “Forgotten” Germans 31 ble.”The word “social” crops up everywhere—“social science,” “social world,”
The New Right in Jacket and Tie 33 “social actors,” “social differences”—a mantra freed from linguistic analysis as if
Rhetoric of Social Cohesion 34 it were an assured reality, not a rhetorical item with its own intellectual history.
Tintinitis 35 In a long examination of Chartier’s book in Le Débat (Jan.-Feb. 1999), Gauchet
faults him for this contradiction. Gauchet is a political philosopher and historian
First Lady of Feminism 36
of modern democracy and the major heir to François Furet’s revisionist interpreta-
Iran Between Tradition & Modernity 36 tion of history, which stresses the autonomous play of rhetoric in the political
Swedish Brain Drain 37 sphere. While questioning Chartier’s notion of the social, Gauchet advocates a
Régis Debray’s Excellent Adventure 38 political mode of cultural history he calls “reflexive history,” one that includes
The Faceless Euro 38 the traditional terms of political analysis in its subject matter. A historian of party
conflict in modern France, for example, would not casually invoke “Left” and
Necrology “Right” but make the emergence of those very concepts a key part of the story.
Buñuel’s Regret 41 Gauchet, unlike Chartier, deftly illustrates his methodological claims, espe-
Louis Dumont 41 cially his most provocative one that reflexive political history envelops social
Jean Malaquais 41 history. Class conflict, he argues, is political, not socio-economic. During the
Giulio Einaudi 42 1789 revolution it was the idea of the rights of man that created intergroup
hatreds. In the nineteenth century, the working class in England could not have
Miscellany arisen without the preexisting idea of shared nationality.
Noblesse in Distress 14 Chartier responds to Gauchet’s criticism, but the social methodologist appears
Arendt and Heidegger 22 no match for the political theorist. They end in a stalemate. While Gauchet’s
examples of the primacy of the political are fascinating, the notion of “the polit-
Sentimental Education in Senegal 34
ical” is imprecise. What makes both the rights of man and the nation-state exam-
The Mother Tongue 40 ples of a “political” rather than a “social” configuration? What is the global def-
Dewy Decimas 42 inition of “political?” At one point Gauchet defines “political history” as the
Letras Libres 43 study of “the political dimension” of history. Chartier notes this tautology and
Gauchet’s yoking everything into his concept of “reflexive political history”—
List of Contributors 43 everything, that is, except the concept of politics itself.
Thus, each criticizes the other for being insufficiently self-conscious of his
A Report to Our Readers 44 categories and for exempting his methodological terms from the history of ide-
ologies. The impasse suggests that while history is enriched by self-conscious
study of language, it cannot easily relinquish its traditional scientific aims. Even
as theorists of language, historians cannot stop searching for a nonsubjective
method and causal forces independent of the imagination. ◆
—Daniel Gordon
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Gulag “Denial”
A t the beginning of this decade, it looked as though Russians were finally facing up to the
nightmares of seventy years of totalitarian rule. Not a day went by, it seemed, without some
new revelation about the past. Every newspaper, every magazine, every serious television
show probed the wound. Official commissions rehabilitated survivors as well as the dead; unofficial
curiosity-seekers quite literally stumbled upon the skeletons of the past in fields where the abandoned
ground heaved and rippled in distinctive patterns. In the (collectivization, purges, Gulag) run into double-digit millions.
wake of the failed coup attempt in 1991, euphoric crowds The late-1990s techniques here can be encountered from
descended on Lubyanka Square, the most notorious address park bench to parliamentary record. Unlike Holocaust
of Russia’s secret police, and dismantled the statute of Feliks deniers, most Gulag revisionists concede that there were vic-
Dzerzhinsky, the confederate of Lenin who created the All- tims; but very much like their German counterparts, the apol-
Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter- ogists of Soviet terror use a variety of strategies to reduce the
revolution and Sabotage in December death toll to an “acceptable” minimum.
1917. They did not destroy the statue And the justifications are extremely
but moved it a few miles to a sculpture diverse, from the open rationalization of
park by the banks of the Moscow River. revolutionary terror, as in the case of
Nowadays, it seems Russia has come Sergei Feliksovich to the blurring of the
full circle. Last December 2, the State juridical definition of “criminal.” In an
Duma, the lower house of parliament, interview with national radio last fall,
voted overwhelmingly to restore Dzer- Communist Duma deputy Vassily Shan-
zhinsky’s statue to its former site. That is dybin remarked, “Yes, truly, a certain
unlikely to happen, for several reasons— number of people suffered. They in-
some of which demonstrate the extent of formed on each other: stool pigeons did
Russia’s rejection of its totalitarian past. their best, they informed, these people
But the vote genuinely reflected a funda- were arrested. They confessed, and they
mental shift in recent Russian politics. were sent away to certain places. For this
Eight years ago the apologists for the So- reason I don’t agree when people say that
viet system’s crimes were on the defen- we had political prisoners in the Soviet
sive. Defying firm evidence of millions of Union.” Shandybin was merely repeating
murders, they could only duck and dodge. Today denial is in arguments he had made in a Duma debate a week earlier, telling
fashion, as readers of Zyuganov’s Veryu V Rossiyu [I Believe in about a minor amendment to a law on “the rehabilitation of the
Russia] and the newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya can attest. victims of political repressions.” The ambitious original law had
The ranks of the deniers include people like Sergei passed without a peep in the post-putsch euphoria of fall 1991.
Feliksovich, a forty-one-year-old professor who lives sur- But when it came around to voting on a miniscule, essentially
rounded by photos of Castro and Stalin in a dingy room in a symbolic improvement in pension benefits for a small class of
communal apartment. He claims, interestingly, to despise many victims, it was roundly rejected by the Duma.
of the gray-faced members of the modern-day Communist Russian society still remains deeply divided over the coun-
Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). When it comes to try’s past, and the resulting calculations of realpolitik have
socialism, he is a self-acknowledged snob whose preferred intensified the climate of denial. The anniversary of the Great
model is a dictatorial “republic of scholars.” Yet he is no dilet- October Revolution of 1917 is still celebrated as a holiday in
tante. Colleagues credit him with keeping the youth organiza- Russia by its opponents as well as its enthusiasts—but it’s now
tion of the old Soviet CP alive in the underground during the known as the “Day of Harmony and Reconciliation,” a compro-
ban on communist activity after 1991. Like most deniers, he mise formula ironically demonstrating how far from those ideals
doesn’t claim that everything was sweetness and light; he con- Russia remains. The most recent Russian secondary-school his-
cedes that “repressions” took place under Stalin. But he tory textbooks fudge the issue of Soviet terror: a 1998 official
believes, first, that they were justified (by the greater good of text for eleventh-grade students gives no total figures for those
the revolutionary masses who weren’t repressed) and, second, “repressed” under Stalin; on the Great Terror of the 1930s it
that they weren’t as bad as all that. “According to the Interior counts only the army officers shot in 1937-38 (“more than
Ministry, there were 643,000 deaths between 1921 and 1953,” 40,000”) and victims of “conflicts within the repressive
says Sergei Feliksovich. “Perestroika scholars agreed with that organs”(“several tens of thousands”). Otherwise, the text bends
estimate.” It is hard to know which scholars he is talking about. over backward to stress the “constructive” aspects of what one
Most self-respecting historians assume Soviet-era death tolls chapter heading calls “Stalinist modernization.” Meanwhile,
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7
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Even before the end of the Cold War, questions were raised liberal party, might have played a role here but proved inca-
about atrocities committed by partisans of the Italian Resist- pable of being truly neutral between Fascists and Communists.
ance in the waning days of World War II. As the history of the Its radicalism, its lack of moderation, its anti-Fascist origins
period began to be rewritten, the standard account of the made it a de facto pro-Communist party.
Resistance seemed an ideological construction, and soon it was The intellectuals who have led the polemic on azionismo in
argued that the Resistance had not pursued a war of libera- recent years have insisted on the intolerant and Jacobin char-
tion but a civil war. This was a quite radical revision of his- acter of the Party of Action and its myth of “the two Italies.”
tory because it also changed perceptions of fascism and anti- This is part of what the philosopher Augusto Del Noce called
fascism. The Italians who fought on the “right” side–mainly “the Italian ideology” in a series of books he published in the
the Communists–had never called the Resistance a “civil war;” 1970s, and which have now inspired a young generation of
only the Fascists did. What finally broke that canonical tradi- intellectuals writing for periodicals like Liberal and newspa-
tion was the publication in 1991 of Una guerra civile: Saggio pers like Corriere della Sera. Del Noce (1910-1989) taught at the
storico sulla moralità della Resistenza [A civil war: historical Catholic University of Milan for many years and was known as
essay on the morality of the Resistance] by Claudio Pavone, a a sharp critic of the modern age. In his view, it was the rejec-
highly respected historian and anti-Fascist. Pavone argued tion of transcendence and the ensuing divinization of the indi-
that three wars had been fought during the Resistance: a vidual that inspired the negative utopias of modernity. Without
domestic war between Fascists and anti-Fascists; a war of lib- external and superior values capable of limiting the individual
eration against the Nazis, who after the armistice of 1943 were will to power, all values—even the liberal values of liberty and
a de facto occupation army; and, finally, a class war, which was equality—could be turned upside down. For Del Noce, azion-
fought by the Communists with the intention of overturning ismo was the most mature political form of a rationalism that
capitalism and instituting a Communist regime. These three descends into nihilism. In fact, he argued, the leaders of the
wars, Pavone concluded, could be defined as moments of a Party of Action were even more radical than their opponents,
broad civil war because in all three the enemies were Italians. since they rejected any form of religiosity or communitarian
Why has this interpretation of the Resistance as a civil war belonging. The anti-fascism of the azionisti was as destructive
been so explosive? Because, as Norberto Bobbio has ex- as that of the Communists while sharing a certain nihilism with
plained, in international law a civil war is one considered just fascism. The belief that azionismo was the expression of “the
by both parties and does not allow for clear moral judgment. other Italy” only reflected what Del Noce called the “absolute
If the Resistance was a civil war, then each Fascist was legiti- solipsism” of “the Italian ideology,” the dogmatic belief in
mately an enemy of each Communist and anti-Fascist, and vice modernity that cannot tolerate any mediation or compromise.
versa. And that would mean that the Resistance was not a “The Italian ideology” could only breed denial and division, as
force of unity against a foreign enemy but a source of division the war of Resistance has shown.
among Italians. Contrary to what both the anti-Fascists and Galli della Loggia translates Del Noce’s theory into a politi-
the Communists have claimed, Italy lost its unity precisely cal argument against the presumed modernity of azionismo.
during the Resistance. Whereas Del Noce criticized modernity in all its facets, Galli
In a provocative book, La morte della patria [The death of della Loggia instead accused “the Italian ideology” of having
the fatherland] (1997), the political scientist Ernesto Galli della removed the country from modernity by having identified the
Loggia used this reasoning in order to denounce the role of modern age with the Enlightenment and political Jacobinism.
azionismo in the making of postwar Italy. In his view, Italy in Italy lacked a moderate liberalism because its intellectuals
fact had a unitary identity before the collapse of Fascism. It regarded France, not England or America, as their model.
had a patria that was identified with the state and could have Rather than simply aiming to build a liberal state, they
resisted the German occupation had the government not aban- wanted, with ironically Jacobin rigidity, to forge a new man,
doned Rome to the German army in September 1943. The state albeit a liberal one. And in this they failed.
dissolved at the precise moment it was needed, forcing Italians Yet polemics about azionismo cannot but bring to mind
to guard their life and liberty and leaving them in the hands those of the Cold War. And in this sense it can be said that
of the Communist partisans or the Fascists. The Resistance the intellectuals engaged in them are no less Jacobin than
then deepened the fracture between the state and the nation their predecessors. ◆
by dividing Italian society into tribal ideologies. Thus, con- —Nadia Urbinati
trary to the leftist common wisdom, the Resistance did not
contribute to making the state legitimate, but rather made the
state an object of conquest by factional interests and encour-
aged citizens to identify themselves with parties instead of
the Italian Constitution. This determined the political charac-
ter of Italy until the early 1990s.
According to Galli della Loggia, the only possibility for
political redemption could have come from the liberals.
However, Italy did not in fact have a strong liberal party, nor,
above all, a liberal culture. The Party of Action, then, the only
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A major controversy flared up at the annual meeting of the German Historians’ Association
last autumn. It divided the profession, scandalized the general public, and rages on in the
cultural sections of the German national press. Basically, it concerns the Nazi past of German
historians, in particular that of Werner Conze (1910-1986) and Theodor Schieder (1908-1984). But it
also involved a conflict between generations and between historical schools. Oonze and Schieder entered
the historical profession during the 1930s. Both were among work along more traditional lines. And since the 1990s a
the most prominent members of their discipline, dominating young new third generation of postwar historians have turned
personalities, innovators, and influential teachers from the from social-history approaches to cultural studies, gender his-
1950s on, and both became later Presidents of the German tory, micro-history, and other new trends in history, with
Historians’ Association. Conze founded the Working Circle for themes they consider to have been neglected in the work of
Modern Social History in Heidelberg and initiated research on the older political, social, and economic historians. In posing
social history, especially on the industrial work force, when this their questions they have also turned to new kinds of sources
was still unusual terrain. He also co-edited—with Otto Brunner and new methodological approaches. Being further removed
and Reinhard Koselleck—the great dictionary for Geschichtliche from the war than older historians were and are, some of them
Grundbegriffe [Basic Historical Concepts], still the touchstone have also raised their own questions about it.
for conceptual history in Germany. Schieder was editor of the Today the older distractions of the Cold War have all but
Historische Zeitschrift, the country’s leading historical journal. disappeared, to be replaced by a widely felt need to redefine
He introduced comparative study of the modern nation-state, policies of remembrance and memory under new political cir-
made contemporary history a more accepted field, and greatly cumstances. One fruitful new area of investigation is the his-
broadened the scope of social history. tory of academic research under National Socialism, and its
In the fifties and sixties both Conze and Schieder led at- partial integration of research activities into the war efforts
tempts to establish a new approach to social history in Germany. and the Holocaust. There have been studies of organizations
The real breakthrough only occurred in the late sixties and like the Forschungsgemeinschaften (“research communities”)
early seventies through efforts of a younger generation. Its main which had been largely ignored. And we now know much
representatives were Schieder’s student Hans Ulrich Wehler, more about the involvement of certain fields like eugenics,
and Jürgen Kocka; together they established what was later geography, or population studies in the planning and ideolog-
called the Bielefeld School of social history. Until then the vast ical justification of the war of destruction in the East. And,
majority of German historians viewed history mainly from the finally, all this has led to new explorations into historical work
standpoint of politics and were politically conservative. under National Socialism.
Starting in the early seventies the Bielefeld School provided the Early studies in this area suggested that the National Social-
first visible alternative to a political history approach by focus- ist views of history had mainly penetrated a few institutions,
ing on society. They did not ignore politics and events, but they leaving the rest of the profession relatively untouched. The
felt that socio-economic factors, long-term trends, and class general view was that the historical profession had been very
conflict had not received due attention. They borrowed freely conservative and mainly not averse to National Socialism, but
from the methodologies of the social sciences, especially sociol- that this had not radically affected historical research between
ogy and economics, and kept abreast of historiographic devel- 1933 and 1945.
opments abroad. The School called its approach ”Historical This image changed radically when the work of some acad-
Social Science,“ and founded its own journal, Geschichte und emic historians in the 1930s came under closer scrutiny. New
Gesellschaft [History and Society], in 1975. investigations by the younger historians in the 1990s altered
One achievement of the Bielefeld School was to have rede- the image of several historians who became prominent in the
fined the relation of historical studies to the present, drawing 1950s and 1960s, and first met with a mixed reception from
on responses to National Socialism. They saw history as cri- the older generation of the 1990s. Although some of these
tique, with a practical dimension and public function. It was studies were reviewed in the national press there was no pub-
crucial to them never to lose sight of 1933 in studying the lic reaction to them until the annual convention of the German
German past. Politically, the School flourished in the period Historians’ Association, when the panel on this subject over-
of the first coalition government of liberals and social democ- shadowed all other meetings and events there.
rats, when Willy Brandt was redefining German foreign pol- The public debate revolved around the cases of Conze and
icy, and the student movement was in full swing. Their work Schieder, and their relations with the Volksgeschichte (People’s
epitomizes many of the sentiments of the period. History) school of the thirties, based largely in Königsberg,
Today the Bielefeld School is part of the academic historical which some have seen as heavily involved in National Socialist
establishment, but not predominant. Many historians still ideology. According to Wehler’s summary of others’ recent
9
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partition through the transfer of Greek Macedonia to Greece’s party walked out in protest), the left-wing version of the civil
northern neighbors. war became a staple of official discourse and schoolbooks.
Most of the work produced during this period took the Contrary to expectation, the end of the Cold War has hardly
form of popular pamphlets, rich in references to the violence altered this situation. The last months of 1997 saw the succes-
and the “un-Greekness” of the Left, but rather short on facts. sive (and commercially successful) publication of a significant
The emphasis was placed more on the last phase of the civil number of historical books, heavily biased in favor of the Left.
war than on the period of the occupation. The most useful A climate of ideological suspicion prevails. For instance, a
part of this otherwise forgettable production are memoirs Greek journalist writing a book review in 1998 quipped that
published by prominent military leaders of the government the political orientation of the authors of books on the civil
army and a series of publications of military history pub- war can be “sensed immediately and with certainty.” More-
lished by the Historical Service of the army. For years, the over, serious historical research has been impeded by the sad
basic source on the period of occupation remained the mem- state of the Greek archives, the non-availability of the largest
oirs of the British agents who worked with the partisans. part of the archives of the Communist Party, and one of the
During this period historical works sympathetic to the Left most outrageous acts of destruction of a country’s collective
were only published outside Greece. memory: the burning of millions of personal files (held by the
The political liberalization of the 1960s was eventually police) and related state documents concerning both the civil
reflected in the historiography of the Civil War. The first left- war and the postwar period in celebratory bonfires all over
wing interpretations began to appear in Greece. The main the country during the summer of 1989. The intention was to
lines of the leftist thesis (which, of course, comes in many ver- celebrate the “national reconciliation” and the “true end of
sions) can be summarized as follows: EAM was a broad-based, the civil war” on the occasion of the formation of an extraor-
mostly non-communist mass movement, which expressed the dinary coalition cabinet which included the Greek right and
popular aspirations for liberation from foreign occupation and a leftist coalition containing the Communist party!
a more just social order. EAM would have come to power by Yet despite these obstacles, a revisionist trend is slowly (and
peaceful means had it not been stopped by the British who still timidly) emerging. Recent work focuses more on the
supported the local oligarchy and sponsored mass violence period of the occupation, takes into account social and eco-
against it. Forced by the British to resort to arms in December nomic factors, adopts a view “from the ground up” with a
1944 and 1947, this popular movement lost only because of strong local bent, places Greek history in a wider comparative
foreign (British and, then, US) intervention. Those who fought perspective, and relies on unconventional material to make up
against Nazi Germany were executed or languished in prisons for the absence of archival sources, such as oral history, local
while former collaborationists became part of the postwar studies, personal memoirs. What emerges is a very complex
power establishment. and nuanced set of shifting and segmented loyalties, heavily
After a seven-year hiatus due to the military dictatorship informed by local considerations and conflicts, in which ter-
(1967-1974), this literature all but erased former right-wing ror was never the monopoly of a single camp. In addition, new
interpretations. A Greek-American journalist, Nicholas Gage, groundbreaking work examines the civil war in Macedonia,
who visited Greece in 1977, describes a situation in which which appears to have been an exceedingly complex conflict
“posters, movies, books, popular songs and the youth organi- blending ethnic and ideological conflict with such diverse par-
zations in the universities were united in celebrating the guer- ticipants as Slavophone Macedonians, Greek Macedonian Tur-
rillas of the civil war as heroes. It seemed that the best talents kophone refugees from Asia Minor, Greek Macedonian refu-
of Greece were busy rewriting the history of the war.” When gees from Bulgaria and the Caucasus, and various groups of
the same journalist published an autobiographical book in the transient nomads—all speaking different dialects and lan-
early 1980s about the execution of his mother by the guages. We still know little about the multifaceted aspects of
Communist guerillas in 1948, the intellectual establishment this conflict in which identities were so fluid. For example, a
and the majority of the media reacted in a vociferously nega- Slavophone peasant of Macedonia could be a self-professed
tive way; and when the Hollywood filmed version of the book Bulgarian komitadji collaborating with the German occupation
was released soon after, the Communist youth organization authorities, a member of the Slavophone guerrillas of ELAS, a
picketed movie theaters and harassed moviegoers. Around the member of Tito’s Macedonian partisans, or a right-wing Greek
same time, when the renowned Greek philosopher Cornelius nationalist. The first findings to come out of this literature
Castoriadis voiced a public criticism of leftist interpretations undermine the perception of the civil war as a conflict between
of the civil war (he deemed them Stalinist), he was openly and two well-defined and entrenched ideological camps. In Greece,
vehemently insulted in the first page of the Athens newspa- as elsewhere, a sensible understanding of civil war only seems
per with the highest circulation. The victory of the Socialist to emerge when its passions have subsided. ◆
party (PASOK) in 1981 turned this version of the civil war into —Stathis N. Kalyvas
state orthodoxy much along the same lines that the right had Sources: Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: the Experience of
with its own in the 1950s. Following the long-awaited official Occupation, 1941-44, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
recognition of EAM as a resistance organization in 1982 (in the Giorgios Margaritis, Apo tin itta stin exegersi: Ellada, anixi 1941-
context of a highly emotional debate in the National Assembly fthinoporo 1942 [From defeat to insurrection: Greece, spring 1941-fall
during which the opposition center-right New Democracy 1942], Athens, Politis, 1993.
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Eventually the Abbé was forced publicly to withdraw his argument goes, aimed chiefly to cleanse and preserve, and
support, but by then the attention of the media was focused not to destroy, the status quo.
on the case. Although it was long fashionable to link this historical view
After a long series of legal maneuvers, Roger Garaudy was to the advent of the Cold War and America’s increasingly com-
finally tried and convicted in early 1998 and fined nearly placent, conservative political mood, its roots run much
$25,000. The case is still on appeal. In the meantime, how- deeper. Long before 1945, Marxists and other neo-Jacobins
ever, the Garaudy case had been picked up by certain Arab had set the terms of debate about modern revolutions (among
intellectuals who claimed he was being punished for his faith Marxists and anti-Marxists alike). Accordingly, the French
and who themselves were beginning to repeat his negationist Revolution was widely considered the eighteenth-century
theses. This tendency was recently attacked by the long-time harbinger of the great revolutions to come. By comparison,
Palestinian academic and activist Edward Said, who in Le the American Revolution looked tame—happily so to some,
Monde diplomatique (August 1988) argued that any such sadly so to others. There was no reign of terror in America, no
negationist strategy was morally repugnant and politically cult of the Supreme Being, no Bastille or regicide or sans-
suicidal. “How can we expect the entire world to recognize culottes. And instead of Marat, Saint-Just, and Robespierre,
our sufferings as Arabs if we are unable to recognize those of the American Revolution produced James Madison, Thomas
others, even if they are our oppressors?” he asked, adding Jefferson, and George Washington—gentlemen radicals, in-
that “the measures of oppression and censorship of the press deed, slaveholders all.
and public opinion are in any case much more disquieting in To be sure, early in this century, a generation of so-called
the Arab world than in France!” But Garaudy’s case is still Progressive historians tried to locate underlying class strug-
the focus of attention in parts of the Arab world, as can be gles within the American Revolution. Yet the acknowledged
seen by browsing through the several Web-sites devoted to failure of the scattered American movements from below made
his trial. it difficult to see them as the Revolution’s guiding force. In
And while all this controversy swirls around him, the eighty- those few places where such movements succeeded (as they
six-year-old Roger Garaudy continues to write, apparently reju- did, for a time, in revolutionary Pennsylvania), they hardly
venated by his most recent conversion to scientific anti- amounted to radical insurgencies on a par with later move-
Semitism. Among his books published last year was Le procès ments in France. Even the most incendiary pro-American agi-
du sionisme israélien [Israeli Zionism on Trial], which defends tator, Tom Paine, was no match for his Gallic counterparts, a
his position on the Holocaust, charges the Zionists with having fact dramatized when Paine, fresh from his American victo-
collaborated with the Nazis, and unmasks the “pseudo-theo- ries, lent his hand to the French Revolution—and wound up
logical myth of the chosen people.” Another was Les États-Unis, languishing in a Jacobin prison for nearly a year as a sus-
avant-garde de la décadence [The U.S., Avant-Garde of Deca- pected counterrevolutionary.
dence], which holds up to ridicule America’s obsession with the Yet today, the familiar consensus about the American
market, its cultural imperialism, and, of course, its support of Revolution has crumbled. The researches of Bernard Bailyn,
Israel. Most of these small works are now published by a press Gordon S. Wood, and others have raised serious doubts about
in Lebanon, which then presumably spirits them into France. the Lockean origins of the American rebels’ political ideas.
And eventually they make their way to the little bookshop Some scholars have found that the “common-sense” philoso-
behind the curtain, off the Rue Saint-Honoré. ◆ phy of the Scottish Enlightenment (and especially the writ-
—ML ings of David Hume) played a much larger role in America than
had been previously assumed. More broadly, ideas associated
America the Radical? with the Country Party opposition of early eighteenth-cen-
tury England (referred to in academic shorthand as “republi-
13
History Revised
14
History and Historians
15
History and Historians
16
History and Historians
17
Frontiers of Science
Icelandic Genes
I celand attracted worldwide attention in 1998 due to a controversial parliamentary bill enabling
the creation of a centralized database containing health records of the whole population. Advocates
of the database proposal claimed it would yield valuable information concerning public health
and preventive medicine. The media attention resulted from a clash between two forces. On the one
side were the main promotors of the bill, Dr. Kári Stefánsson, Chief Executive Officer of a private
genomics company, the Icelandic government, and enthusias- of knowledge, and that I confidently leave to our politicians
tic citizens; on the other, the Icelandic Medical Association, to handle.” This sanguine assessment stands in stark contrast
the Data Protection Commission, the former Director of Public to the inability and unwillingness of the government and min-
Health, the Genetics Committee, three national ethics boards, isterial bureaucracy to deal competently with the database
various geneticists, physicians, members of parliament, and a project. The database law might actually be described as an
growing number of alarmed citizens. attempt to serve the interest of one com-
The controversy began in March pany by dismantling regulatory struc-
1998, and continues as the Icelandic tures that had evolved since the 1960s
health system is restructured for its when the Genetics Committee was estab-
database future. The controversy lished and funded by the U.S. Atomic
mainly centered on the abrogation of Energy Commission.
informed consent (data from the liv- As an increasing number of Icelanders
ing will be included unless individu- ask to be kept out of the centralized data-
als opt out, and data from the dead base, the genetics company has resorted
cannot be excluded), on freedom of to advertisements in the country’s largest
research (the retainer of the exclusive newspaper, the Morgunbladid. The com-
database licence stands to gain a pany appeals to citizens’ responsibility
unique advantage in medical and to contribute to global improvements of
genetics research), and possible health and help fight diseases by agree-
infractions of the privacy of the ing not to desert the database. The
country’s 270,000 inhabitants. Icelandic anthropologist Gísli Pálsson
Ina Kjøgx Pedersen recently ob- even argues in Weekendavisen that
served in the Danish newspaper Western post-Renaissance morality be
Weekendavisen that Iceland may well reassessed in light of biotechnology
become the setting for the worldwide breakthroughs. In the New York Times
debate over genetics. To understand he claims that the database controversy
Pedersen’s prognosis it is important to understand the finer was resolved as a result of “a democratic process,” implying
details of the story, especially how the aggressive and charis- that it was a reasoned process, that the database project enjoys
matic Dr. Stefánsson managed to succeed. The advantages of broad community support, and that the controversy is over.
such a project, he argued, were many. He trumpeted the Similar hubris led the current Director of Public Health to
promise of controlling runaway health costs and stemming speak in the New Yorker of stepping into a new world, and
the brain drain from Iceland by offering high-skill jobs. He seeing little reason to be bound by rules “that existed in a dif-
also appealed to the pride of the local population by claim- ferent era for a different world.” The database controversy
ing that its health records were a natural resource akin to fish- highlights the need to protect hard-won human rights like
ing stock and hydroelectric and geothermal power. Finally, informed consent and protect vulnerable cultures against
he sold gullible foreign investors and reporters on the myth databank takeovers. What kind of human rights will be possi-
of Icelandic genetic and racial homogeneity. The propaganda ble in the brave new genomic world? ◆
has been facilitated by uncritical reporting in foreign media —Skúli Sigurdsson
that was lapped up by the Icelandic media and by the Feb- Sources: Sturla Fridriksson, “Erfda-audlind Íslendinga” [Genetic
ruary 1988 signing of a five-year contract, potentially worth national resource of the Icelanders], Morgunbladid, December 12,
$200 million, between the Icelandic genomics company and 1998.
Hoffmann-La Roche, one of the world’s major pharmaceuti- Ina Kjøgx Pedersen, “Genetisk nationalisme,” Weekendavisen,
cal companies. February 26 - March 4, 1999.
Foreigners have had opportunities to sample the utter banal- Uta Wagenmann, “Island: Ein Volk wird abgespeichert [Iceland:
ity of Dr. Stefánsson’s rhetoric. Weekendavisen quotes him as A People is being stored], Gen-ethischer Informationsdienst/GID,
saying: “There is no evil knowledge, only evil administration February 1999.
18
Frontiers of Science
Left Darwinism?
19
Frontiers of Science
20
Essay
21
Essay
22
Japanese Economy
23
Japanese Economy
24
Japanese Melting Pot
Multiethnic Japan
T he growing size of the foreign population in Japan poses new challenges to the Japanese wel-
fare system, which is based upon the assumption that all children and parents speak Japanese,
share Japanese customs, and eat Japanese food. Setsuko Lee, an associate professor at Tokyo
Women’s Medical University, has edited a book that examines the health and welfare of children with
foreign parents in light of their legal status and access to medical services and education. Professor Lee
worked as a midwife at a hospital in Osaka before studying at stringent school rules and distinctive customs traditionally
Osaka University and Tokyo University, where she took a doc- accepted by Japanese parents sometimes confuse foreign par-
torate in public health. ents. For example, female students are usually forbidden to
Japan is usually portrayed as a homogeneous country with dye their hair or paint their nails in Japanese schools.
almost no non-Japanese residents, but the reality is now much Part of the problem is quite simply that Japanese schools are
different. Today the presence of foreigners is considerable in not designed to teach students who do not speak the Japanese
parts of Tokyo and other big cities. Traditionally the great language. Starting in the 1970s, however, the Japanese educa-
majority of the foreign nationals living in Japan were Koreans, tion system found itself confronting a new problem: Japanese
with a sprinkling of Chinese. But starting in the late 1980s, children whose fathers had been assigned to jobs abroad were
newcomers from the Philippines and Brazil as well as the returning to the homeland with little or no formal instruction
United States and other Western countries have dramatically in their native language. Since then, special Japanese language
altered the composition of the foreign population in Japan. classes have been established in some schools. Even though
With more foreigners living in Tokyo, the number of children the linguistic problems children with foreign parents face are
with foreign parents is also increasing dramatically; the much greater, of course, this experience of the 1970s means
Japanese birth rate, meanwhile, is in steep decline. In Tokyo that Japanese schools have not been caught entirely unawares
and Osaka, more than 7 percent of total marriages performed by the multicultural dilemma.
in 1996 were international. As a result, 2.7 percent of the An even more difficult problem is how to keep the Ja-
babies born in Japan today have at least one foreigner for a panese-speaking children of foreigners from losing their
parent. In Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward, the figure is a startling 12.2 native tongue. Children who speak only Japanese could face
percent. Japan is experiencing both the benefits and chal- a serious handicap on their return to their native countries.
lenges of multiethnicity. If they stay in Japan, however, other communications prob-
One of the trickiest problems is language. Except for Kore- lems may grow out of the gap between the Japanese-speak-
ans who have lived in Japan for many years, it is still rare for ing younger generation and their non-Japanese-speaking
foreign mothers to speak Japanese, and it is even more unusual parents. Moreover, if initial reports are any indication, these
to find Japanese who can speak Tagalog or Portuguese. Local children can expect to run into a serious identity crisis as
authorities and health-care providers started tackling these they get older. In a country based on the assumption that
difficulties by introducing multilingual services, organizing everybody speaks only one language and shares the same
“mother groups” who speak the same languages, or introduc- cultural background, children who have foreign parents but
ing translation machines. The Japanese medical services also can speak only Japanese are bound to discover something
face challenges because many of the newcomers are not cov- “non-Japanese” in themselves. At some point, inevitably,
ered by medical insurance. Since all Japanese nationals are they begin to wonder who they “really” are. Some local
covered by some medical in- authorities have set up classes
surance program, doctors tend for local students in Spanish
to give treatment without dis- and Portuguese, but this is a
cussing the costs involved, cosmetic effort at best. What
which can create trouble in the Japan ultimately needs is a
case of foreigners. The way that society better equipped to cope
Japanese doctors handle infor- with people of different ethnic
mation also tends to lead to backgrounds. ◆
conflict with their Western —MT
patients, who tend to prefer a Source: Lee Setsuko, ed., Zainichi
more forthright approach. gaikokyjin no Boshikenko [Public
Grade-school children are health services for foreign mothers
generally better at adopting and children], Tokyo: Igaku Shoin,
the Japanese lifestyle than 1998.
their parents. But the relatively
25
Japanese Melting Pot
26
Views of Japan
Japan, Made in U.S.A. the American picture of Japan as peculiar and backward
remains unchanged. But as noted by Carol Gluck, a scholar
and bureaucrats, despite the fact that the correspondents, Source: Zipangu, ed. Japan, Made in U.S.A., New York: Zipangu,
with few exceptions, speak very little Japanese. One reason 1998.
the Western media hold such sway is that Japanese intellectu-
als have vaguely thought of major American publications as a
model for the free flow of information in a prosperous democ- Korean-Japanese
ratic society. But a bigger reason for officials’ readiness to talk
to Western journalists is that their publications are read and Reconciliation?
quoted all over the world, unlike the Japanese media, which
have virtually no international reach. Even among Japan’s
Asian neighbors, intellectuals get much of their information
about Japan through the American media.
But the New York Times, the flagship of America’s authori-
J apan and South Korea have never been good neighbors
in modern times. Despite the fact that more than fifty
years have passed since colonial rule ended, and that
the two industrial democracies share security, political, and
economic interests in the region, the darkness of history has
tative media, transmits a very distorted image of Japan. That is continued to sour their relations. Kim Dae Jung, who was
the central assertion of Japan, Made in U.S.A., a book put elected President of the Korean republic in December 1997,
together by a group of eleven Japanese people living in New is trying to change that. Even the Japanese recognize that he
York who have found much that is questionable in the paper’s is taking a more conciliatory approach than his predecessors,
coverage of their country. The group, which calls itself Zipangu who focused on issues of history and territory (there is a dis-
(which was Marco Polo’s name for Japan), assesses problematic pute over a small island in the Sea of Japan, or East Sea, as
aspects of specific articles, and bolsters its thesis by including Koreans call it). Shortly before President Kim’s official visit
short essays by and interviews with American and Japanese to Japan, which left a highly positive impression there, the
scholars and journalists. The book even contains an interview Japanese monthly Sekai printed an interview with him in its
with Nicholas Kristof, chief of the Tokyo news bureau of the October 1998 issue.
Times and writer of some of the articles that the group deemed Given strong popular Korean sentiment against Japan, Kim
problematic. Japan, Made in U.S.A. is a bilingual publication did not fail to comment on the history question. But the tone
in Japanese and English, and published simultaneously in of his comments was moderate and constructive. “In coming
Japan and the United States. to terms with the past, the most important thing to under-
The compilers contend that Japan-related coverage in the stand is that it is really meaningless for other countries to
New York Times focuses on events and phenomena at the demand that Japan do so or tell it how it should do so. It is,
periphery of Japanese society, such as loveless marriages, rather, a problem of how the Japanese people themselves and
rush-hour subway mashers, and comic books full of depic- the Japanese government reflect upon and come to terms with
tions of rape. By presenting these isolated cases as the norm, the past…. The Korean people do not harbor feelings of re-
the authors say, Times journalists exaggerate the eccentricity venge toward Japan. It is incorrect to say that Koreans persist
and otherness of Japan. The journalists invariably attribute in bringing up the past. Yet there is a strong fear that because
these phenomena to Japan’s “backwardness,” as exemplified Japan’s own efforts to come to terms with its past are still lack-
by feudal tradition, a herd mentality, sexual inequality, and a ing, in the future Koreans may be victimized again. Out of this
bureaucratic mind-set. Japan, Made in U.S.A. clearly demon- fear, Korea always feels the need to mention the past to Japan.
strates the frequency of such articles. One of the contributors In turn, I think, Japan gets tired of hearing the same thing
is Charles Burress, an American journalist who decries the over and over, and a vicious circle occurs. Because of this
heavy use of war metaphors in Times articles about Japan, recurring pattern, the Korean people focus only on the past
including references to Japanese investment in the United and do not know enough about some of the positive sides that
States as an “invasion.” He says articles often present Japan as Japan has shown in the postwar period, such as fifty years of
a monolith, which is a caricature far removed from reality, and successful democracy, the renunciation of war, the Peace
often portray Japanese citizens and leaders in condescending Constitution, as well as its being the largest aid donor to devel-
terms. He also notes a lack of real effort to present the Japanese oping countries.”
position in coverage of trade and other issues on which Japan What is the reason for Kim’s move toward reconciliation? It
and the United States have differences. may be his philosophical commitment to democratic values,
The portrait of the American press that emerges from these which are shared by contemporary Japan and may outweigh
observations is not a flattering one. Rather than challenge concerns about the past. Instead of portraying the two coun-
people’s preconceptions, the American media peddle an image tries as aggressor and victim, Kim made clear that both coun-
that appeals to the market by playing up stereotypes. And so tries share problems which they should overcome together.
27
Views of Japan
28
Word and Image in Japan
29
Word and Image in Japan
took various language and script reforms. Vocabulary praised, is not drama or movies, nor documentaries or books,
changed, and abbreviated forms of characters were adopted, but animation. Because the writer’s own personality is
changing the very form of kanji. All this made cross-cultural strongly reflected in the contents, anime can be said to be the
communication via kanji difficult. software that Japan can be most proud of.
With the advent of the computer, however, things took This is not the first time that a subculture in Japan, which
another major turn. Today the Japanese use computers to has not received praise in its own country, was recognized
write their own language, which mixes kanji and the pho- and highly valued abroad. In the Edo Era, ukiyo-e was looked
netic characters known as kana. It has also become common- upon as artwork of the masses done on what seemed to be
place for people in China, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, wrapping paper. However, when japonisme reached abroad,
Vietnam, and ethnic Chinese communities in the United ukiyo-e became one of the major influences on the formation
States to use computers to write in kanji. Meanwhile, differ- of the French Impressionists. In learning the methods of
ent countries and regions have created their own kanji codes. ukiyo-e, Western art expanded the scope of expression, find-
As a result, Japan, China, Taiwan, Singapore, and South ing a new form of expression.
Korea have different codes for the same kanji. There is an In this sense, animation and comics can be said to represent
urgent need to rectify the problem of incompatible codes in the modern japonisme. What is really interesting is that just
this age of instantaneous international information exchange in the same way that as ukiyo-e was able to respond to the sit-
via the Internet. uation in which as it was being seen as a dying form of art in
The kanji cultural sphere steadily dismantled in the post- Japan it was also being praised in the West, so too in anima-
war period is about to be resurrected on a vastly wider scale tion do we see the same trends. The reasons for this trend are
in the age of electronic media. There is a certain irony in the as follows.
revival of a traditional Eastern culture sphere by means of The reason that the animation industry in Japan grew is
state-of-the-art technology first developed in the West. Be that because it chose a path different from that of Walt Disney. In
as it may, with closer regional interchange via kanji once more order to reduce both production costs and time, techniques
becoming possible, the existence of this shared script will were used to reduce the characters’ movements.
undoubtedly contribute in no small measure to Asia’s future In the era of low budgets, this technique, the flow of the
development and stability. ◆ story rather than the movements, was emphasized. In this
—Kiyokazu Washida way, expressions were deeper than in the family-type car-
Source: Tetsuji Atsuji, “Kanji bunkaken no kobo” [The rise and toons of Disney. Moreover, because Japan’s broadcast rules
fall of the Kanji cultural sphere], InterCommunication, Winter 1999. were looser than those in America regarding references to
and displays of sex and violence, the target age of its viewers
Plea for the New Japonisme was increased and in turn this steadily created more demand
for anime.
30
Reports from Europe
31
Reports from Europe
cept of a nation of victims, not actors or offenders (the German or by a counter-tendency viewing all policies of ethnical
word Täter covers both translations), had originally allowed cleansing as the enemy while pleading for the granting of
all Germans, migrants as well as others, to push supposed out- German citizenship to everyone living in Germany continu-
ward ascription of the role of offender into the background ously, irrespective of descent.
and to concentrate on the collective memory and traumas of The third central topic in the construction of a German
misery, deprivation, and loss. The GDR had chosen the sec- identity and a national past has been the historical place of
ond alternative, antifascism without self-reflection. Seeing the the Holocaust in German history. In the last twenty years it
new socialist state as an inheritor and offspring of the tradi- has become the object of intensified debates. Two genera-
tions of resistance to National Socialism, it incorporated in its tions of Germans coming of age in the sixties and nineties
identity and accepted cultural heritage only those selected have broken the silence of the fifties by questioning their
elements of the national past which it regarded as progressive. parents and grandparents about the Holocaust. To them the
The construction of the third alternative, a more critical, Shoah appears as more strange and foreign and is therefore
less selective, and self-reflective look at the national past, only all the more suitable for seeing themselves by contrast to it
set in during the sixties and seventies. As the images of war, as completely different Germans. They have engraved the
destruction, and refugees began to recede first from reality Holocaust into the predominant German image of history
and then from memory, the victimization myth no longer and defined it and the steps leading to it as something every
made sense and was gradually replaced by an actor’s myth civilized state has to prevent.
connected with three other central themes of the German past As the numbers and public perception of German emigrants
and present which increasingly became main sources of iden- from the East have changed, these three elements of identity
tity building and national memory. construction have gradually replaced the victimization myth
According to Münz and Ohliger, one of these three central which in the 1990s did not seem to have much to offer to a
topics has been the German economy. Over the past fifty years Germany preoccupied with the themes of unification, the
Germans constructed for their “country of poets and thinkers” transition from the Bonn to the Berlin republic, and the unem-
a new economic identity around their trust in the strength of ployment problem. The refugee organizations have largely lost
their new export-oriented economy symbolized in the DM cur- their political influence. The integration of refugees and
rency. In the nineties this has taken the form of seeing Ger- migrants has not resulted in increased appeals for repeated
many as paymaster and motor of the European Union. public recognition of their past traumas. On the contrary,
Secondly, the role of the foreigner, in contradistinction to their living memory has almost become a private affair, ex-
whom a German national identity has been constructed, has pressed through increased tourism to their former living habi-
changed. The construction of France as the traditional enemy tats. According to Münz and Ohliger, the revival or attempted
of Germany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries instrumentalizations of past myths remains, however, a slight
had been replaced by the anti-bolshevism and anti-Semitism possibility. ◆
of the Nazis, and then by the anti-communism of the West, —MB
and the anti-capitalism and anti-fascism of the GDR. Since Source: Rainer Münz and Rainer Ohliger, “Vergessene Deutsche—
1989 there has been a vacuum here. There are signs that it may Erinnerte Deutsche: Flüchtlinge, Vertriebene, Aussiedler” [Forgotten
be filled either by the construction of a new enemy around Germans—Remembered Germans: Refugees, Expellees, and Emi-
Islam and foreign, especially Turkish, migrants in Germany, grants], Transit, Autumn 1999.
32
Reports from Europe
33
Reports from Europe
34
Reports from Europe
Tintinitis
When a nation’s parliament devotes a day to determining the the world as one big Tintin album, less successful than the
politics of a comic-book hero, some clarification is called for— real ones, to be sure, but like them, colorful, nuanced, and
especially for Americans, most of whom grow up without Tintin full of interesting characters good and bad. Nor, I fear, am I
albums. The February 3 debate of five deputies of France’s alone in this, since the twenty-odd albums that make up the
National Assembly who are also members of the Club des par- Tintin series have been translated into some forty languages
lementaires tintinophiles was televised throughout Europe but and dialects.
also in Canada and Australia (one wonders if it aired in Russia, The central hero first appeared exactly seventy years ago,
since Tintin’s “rehabilitation” by the French Communist Party to no great acclaim—in a badly drawn, badly narrated album.
for his counterrevolutionary behavior “in the land of the Soviets” He would surely have been quickly forgotten if the quality of
in 1929). Seventy years after the the drawing and of the plots had
amiable boy-reporter set out on not improved almost miracu-
adventures that would pit him lously, reaching a pinnacle in the
against Soviet communism, U.S. work of the 1950s and ‘60s.
free-market excesses, African And while the immense talent
slave-trading, Latin American of Tintin’s creator, the Belgian
dictatorship, Asian drug traffic, draftsman Georges Rémi, who
and much more, French politicians signed himself Hergé, has never
across the political spectrum been in doubt, his personality is
claimed Tintin for their own— regularly called into question. It’s
Gaullist or centrist, “the perfect been dissected by sociologists and
synthesis of the current Left coali- mined by psychoanalysts, who’ve
tion”—though ultimately found put both him and his characters
him to stand “to the right of the on the couch. (Thus Captain Had-
Left and the left of the Right.” dock’s becoming the owner of a
A strange concern to show a boy castle has been seen as compensa-
not French at all but Belgian-born, tion for the author’s frustration
as his early adventures in the over his illegitimate birth.)
Congo attest. Hugely popular in Certain historians (mainly ama-
his homeland, he caught on in teurs ) have also pointed out that
France particularly during the Oc- from Hergé’s Les Aventures de Tintin au Pays des Soviets, (Casterman) Hergé’s sensibilities are quite far
cupation, when French paper rationing allowed the Belgian dis- from contemporary: in Tintin au Congo, the second album, the
tributor of his creator “Hergé” to profit from sudden lack of com- blacks of what was then a Belgian colony are presented with a
petition. Indeed it is Hergé’s conduct in the war years, as revealed paternalism one can at best smile at: nice folk, of course—his-
in recent biographies—his alleged Nazi sympathies and collabo- tory’s bad guys are the whites—but naïve and gullible. Other
rationism, his anti-Semitic gags run in his far-Right newspaper critics have noted that, during the German occupation, Hergé
strip but suppressed in later book versions—that first called into wasn’t quite as brave as we know we would have been.
question the political correctness of a character who is the first These attacks have only increased with the republication of
hero of many millions of children (or boys, at least). Since the Hergé’s very first Tintin album on the occasion on the hero’s
French parliament examined the political record of Tintin him- seventieth anniversary. Criticism would be confined to its
self and not his maker, we asked our friend Rémi Brague to elu- still-rudimentary technique if the story didn’t concern
cidate l’affaire Tintin through his lifelong familiarity with the Tintin’s adventures in the Land of Soviets [Tintin au pays des
books themselves. soviets], which was first published in 1929. Its portrayal of
the misery and oppression created by the Leninist regime
35
Reports from Europe
Hergé was hard on Japan for its occupation of China, and laid well-known philosophy professor in Paris who has also pub-
the facts out in a particularly harsh light: an intervention jus- lished on Kierkegaard and on architecture, as well as the
tified by a faked coup. Unmasking its underlying ideology, he Critique de l’égocentrisme [Critique of egocentrism], which
shows its “civilizing mission” to be a cover-up for sordid inter- appeared in 1996. Her most recent work, Politique des sexes
ests, the control of the opium traffic. [Politics of the sexes] (Seuil) is a defense of “parity,” the prin-
To the charges leveled against Hergé, let me, however, add ciple that a fixed percentage of political offices should be
an observation that’s rarely been made, though it’s incredibly reserved for women.
obvious. I’m referring to the album Tintin en Amérique. In it, The French debate over parity has been interesting for two
we glimpse a society in which a policeman winks at a dis- reasons. First, it shows that although French feminism is not
guised gangster who holds a smoking gun in one hand and a as militant (nor as suspicious of sexuality) as American femi-
wad of dollar bills in the other. At the height of Prohibition nism, it is far from dead. Second, the debate has split both the
the sheriff collapses dead-drunk so that he can’t rescue Tintin, right and the left, so that defenders and opponents of the prin-
who’s about to be lynched. Workers in a jam factory go on ciple can be found all across the political spectrum. Ms.
strike because the management has decided to lower the price Agacinski’s position is that the question of gender should be
of the dead rats they buy to make “hare pâté.” We see Indians seen as one more manifestation of human “difference” that
being evicted by the army from their reservation, where oil’s challenges Western notions of universal humanity. What dis-
just been discovered. A low-angle shot shows a papoose being tinguishes gender, however, is that it is a universal form of dif-
whisked off by his mother who, with a bundle on her shoul- ference—that is, everybody has one. Since that is the case,
der, is being chased down by a bayonet-wielding soldier. The she argues, there is no risk that taking gender into account in
child, in tears, drags a teddy bear that could have come politics risks making it the special interest of a few. Once we
straight out of some riveting scene in The Third Man. have, she then hopes we will become more comfortable with
The point is clear by now: I solemnly accuse Hergé of anti- what she calls mixité in general, and less blindly attached to
Americanism. But anti-Communism? Nonsense! If there’s any- abstract notions of universal citizenship. ◆
one to accuse of that, it would be people like Ciliga, Orwell, — ML
Kravchenko, Milosz, or Solzhenitsyn. And everything sug-
gests they were just basely plagiarizing Hergé—outdoing him
at that because, next to the way they present the reality of the Iran Between Tradition
Soviet Union, Tintin’s caricature seems almost mild.
Hergé’s real, unpardonable crime is his anti-Americanism. and Modernity
So why is there no outcry against it? What is the government Mohammad Khatami, President of Iran, recently published a
doing? ◆ long article written exclusively for the Frankfurter Allgemeine
—Rémi Brague Zeitung. This in itself is a remarkable event: voices from Iran’s
Sources: Frédéric Potet, “Au Parlement, Tintin est à droite de la wide spectrum of debate normally reach a German audience only
gauche et à gauche de la droite” [In Parliament, Tintin’s left of the through journalistic or scholarly mediators from the West. And
Right and right to the Left], Le Monde, February 5, 1999. at the moment, news from Iran is quite contradictory. Iran’s polit-
Tim Judah, “‘Tintin in the Dock,” The Guardian (London), ical system faces not only increasing social discontent, but all the
January 30, 1999. problems inherent in a dual-sovereignty system. One aspect of
this situation is the copresence of censorship with broad-ranging
First Lady of Feminism debate. Another is the ambivalent image of Khatami. Is he just a
more flexible defender of theocratic rule, or Iran’s only chance for
36
Reports from Europe
37
Reports from Europe
Régis Debray’s philosemitic, while some Albanians formed SS units under the
occupation. Debray draws a final parallel between the wars in
Excellent Adventure Kosovo and Algeria, warning Chirac that France risks losing as
much in the Balkans today as it did in North Africa forty years
38
Essay
39
Essay Miscellany
40
Necrology
Michel Foucault—was all the rage. Yet individualism is fraught with dangers,
its attentive readers saw that Dumont’s not least of which is a nostalgia for a
Buñuel’s Regret
approach to anthropology, which he
claimed had been inspired by Tocque-
holistic world we can never return to.
Among his other works in English are
“As I drift toward my last sigh I ville, offered a potentially powerful cri- From Mandeville to Marx (1977) and
often imagine a final joke. I convoke tique and alternative to the various Essays on Individualism (1986).
around the deathbed my friends who structuralisms then. In a famous preface —ML
are confirmed atheists, as I am. Then to that work, Dumont argued that
a priest, whom I have summoned, anthropology had foundered on the
arrives; and to the horror of my problem of individualism. Old-fash- Jean Malaquais
friends I make a confession, ask for
absolution for my sins, and receive
extreme unction. After which I turn
ioned anthropologists studied inequal-
ity among individuals in societies where
the very notion of the individual was
J ean Malaquais, who died in Decem-
ber at the age of 90, was a French
writer of a rare sort. He was, to begin
over on my side and expire. absent; structuralists, on the other with, not French at all. Born Wladimir
But will I have the strength to hand, made the inverse mistake by Malacki in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1908,
joke at that moment? treating modern societies as though Malaquais ran away from home as a
Only one regret. I hate to leave they were “structured” like premodern teenager and made his way to France,
while there’s so much going on. It’s ones. Anthropologists saw individual- where he worked as a miner, a deck
like quitting in the middle of a ser- ism everywhere, or nowhere. hand, and a vegetable porter in the Les
ial. I doubt there was so much What Dumont learned from Tocque- Halles Market of Paris. He also learned
curiosity about the world after ville is that there are two sorts of soci- French, and by 1938 had written his
death in the past, since in those eties in the world—holistic-hierarchical first novel, Les Javanais, which de-
days the world didn’t change quite and individualistic—and that they must scribes the life of foreign workers in the
so rapidly or so much. Frankly, be studied in different terms. While he “Java” lead and silver mines of Pro-
despite my horror of the press, I’d began his career studying the former vence. This work made its way into the
love to rise from the grave every type, he devoted his mature years to hands of André Gide, who admired its
ten years or so and go buy a few analyzing the modern world of democ- realistic style and epic grandeur, and
newspapers. Ghostly pale, sliding ratic individualism. As French intellec- arranged for its publication in 1939.
silently along the walls, my papers tuals began moving away from Marxism Leon Trotsky immediately reviewed it,
under my arm, I’d return to the and structuralism in the 1970s, Du- favorably, which helped it win the pres-
cemetery and read about all the mont’s work on modern individualism tigious Prix Renaudot.
disasters in the world before became highly influential among philo- Malaquais received news of the prize
falling back to sleep, safe and sophers, political theorists, sociologists, while serving on the Maginot Line in
secure in my tomb.” and even historians, among them Fran- 1939, the beginning of a war that would
—Luis Buñuel çois Furet, who was also rediscovering change his own destiny. He eventually
from his memoir My Last Sigh Tocqueville in this same period. made his way to the free zone in the
Dumont’s later work, which he col- south of France, where he befriended a
lected under the general title Homo number of important émigrés, among
aequalis, focused on the rise of the mod- them Heinrich Mann and Walter Ben-
Louis Dumont ern West out of Christianity, the devel- jamin. With the help of one of the
41
Necrology Miscellany
one count on to set examples for a life?” thought (the unorthodox Gramsci’s,
he asked. Malaquais never attracted such above all) with the liberalism of the Dewy Decimas
devotees in France, though that may
change. In the last five years of his life Les
Javanais was republished to much
movement Giustizia e Libertà (see page
7, “The Two Italies”); nor did he ever
neglect staunchly Catholic writers,
T oday’s international vogue for live
audience-vote poetry contests was
partially inspired by the birth of the
acclaim, followed by his war journals. though his Catholics were invariably poetry “slam” in the 1980—to be exact,
There are now plans to reissue the rest of Communist or left-wing. Launched with at the NYorican Café, on New York’s
his long-neglected works. a volume on America’s New Deal, the Lower East Side. Evoking aggressive
Einaudi list included the first publica- collisions, early “slams” were neo-Beat,
tion in the West (1957) of the USSR- yet also contemporary with the psycho-
Giulio Einaudi banned Doctor Zhivago as well as agons of daytime talk-shows; now, even
42
Miscellany/Contributors
43
A Report to Our Readers
THE COMMITTEE ON
INTELLECTUAL CORRESPONDENCE A Report to Our Readers
is an international project spon-
With this issue the Newsletter of the Committee on Intellectual Correspondence
sored by the Suntory Foundation acquires a new title. When the Committee was formed in 1997 by representatives of
(Japan), the Wissenschaftskolleg zu the Suntory Foundation, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the American
Berlin and the American Academy Academy of Arts and Sciences, our aspiration was somewhat grand. As we wrote in
of Arts and Sciences. the first issue, “we wish to contribute, if possible, to the renaissance of a cultural
milieu where intellectuals and serious teachers and writers, as well as curious scien-
Directors tists and public figures, can learn about the cultural and intellectual issues of other
Daniel Bell countries.” But since our means were limited the decision was made to begin slowly
Wolf Lepenies with a project that would be of immediate use to those interested in intellectual life
Masakazu Yamazaki abroad. Our first project was to produce a low-budget newsletter that would report
on recent intellectual debates taking place in international publications, while giv-
ing our readers enough references to find the original articles or books in question.
Associates The publication would be edited cooperatively in three countries, appear twice a
Michael Becker year, and be distributed free-of-charge to leading figures in intellectual and cul-
Masayuki Tadokoro tural life in the Americas, Europe, and Asia.
Yet under the editorship of Daniel Bell, the Newsletter immediately became a more
Editor substantial and (in our view) more handsome publication, appearing as a forty-odd
Mark Lilla page, type-set review. The reaction of our readers and the international press has
been so overwhelming that it was felt the publication’s title should more accurately
reflect what it had become. And so we present Correspondence: An International
Managing Editor
Review of Culture and Society. The review will still appear twice yearly and continue
David Jacobson to cover developments in Western Europe, the U.S., and Japan, though we hope
soon to be in a position to bring news from Latin America, Africa, and Eastern
Graphic Designer Europe. We are also planning to develop special sections on important themes, such
Glenna Lang as the symposium on history in the current issue. Among the themes we hope to
cover soon are religion and educational policy.
We would like to think we are succeeding in our efforts and are encouraged to learn
U.S. Address:
that others think so, too. The German weekly newspaper Die Zeit (March 11, 1999)
CORRESPONDENCE recently devoted an enthusiastic article to the review which led to over five hundred
c/o Council on Foreign Relations inquiries to our offices from German readers alone. Keeping in mind that vanity goeth
58 East 68th Street before the fall, we have decided to share with you what Die Zeit had to say:
New York, New York 10021 Usually anything we receive marked “newsletter” is some institution’s dreary
sheet of random information—anything but news of actual interest to an out-
Telephone: (212) 434-9574 sider. Here is something completely different: the Newsletter of the Committee
FAX: (212) 861-0432 on Intellectual Correspondence comes out twice a year and there’s hardly a dull
moment in its packed forty-eight pages.
E-mail: cic@cfr.org
This English-language publication manages quite charmingly to ignore stan-
dard modern layout expectations—there are a few Grandville illustrations, and
as much text as possible—a boon for readers, and particularly those readers who
The Committee on Intellectual grieve that they can’t read everything. The Newsletter presents news of what
Correspondence acknowledges with used to be called “intellectual life.” The team scours periodicals, academic litera-
gratitude the financial support of the ture and belles lettres from the world over, to inform its readership of the latest
Sasakawa Peace Foundation of Japan. developments in clear, comprehensible language. Today, everyone bandies about
the term “globalization,” but who really knows what’s on their neighbors’ mind?
Daniel Bell writes: “Our intention was to overcome the cultural parochialism
that has walled off many countries from one another, and the specializations
that have created hermetic discourses which isolate the disciplines “
In this particular issue, the subjects include the future of the publishing indus-
try after digitalization, English culture policy after Blair, news of the Italian book
trade, Pierre Bourdieu’s radicalization, Latin-American novels after Magical
Realism, the German cult of Hannah Arendt, the end of egalitarianism in post-
recession Japan. The delight of the Newsletter is the sense this has all been shaken
together and tossed over its pages like some marvelous surprise packet.
We hope you share in that delight. ■
— ML
44