Most Americans would recoil at the idea that Hollywood had once held hands with Hitler. Could such reassuringly American films as Inglourious Basterds and Schindler’s List have been prefaced by years of cooperating with the Nazis? Yet Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration and Thomas Doherty’s Hollywood and Hitler were released last year, the controversy was intense. The New Yorker issued a scathing review of Urwand, Harvard University Press received criticism for publishing his book, and accusations of slander were thrown from both sides. Even seventy-five years after the start of World War II, the controversy looms large.
This issue of the Literary Supplement explores why the past can be so contentious. One natural point of departure is the Holocaust, with its endless ramifications in fields as diverse as international relations and semiotics. Nancy Ko uses the Open Hillel debate as a springboard for exploring how memories of the Holocaust are invoked in Israeli power politics. Western guilt for the past, she argues, enables complicity in the present. Emily Wang looks at that same Western complicity, not from the perspective of hard realism, but through the looking glass of the Boston Holocaust Memorial and the stone blocks of its counterpart in Berlin. Public commemoration is a space for remembering, but it can also be a place for forgetting.
Memory politics is most commonly the study of trauma: the searing eventfulness of the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide are highly visible starting points for the field. But collective memory need not be about an event. It can also be a highly diffuse process, like colonialism, or globalization, or the retelling of a nation’s founding myth. Samir Durrani challenges the notion of censorship and free speech as opposing concepts, placing it in the context of French memory laws about its colonial past in North Africa. Matt Shuham shows us how the political rhetoric of both James Madison and Glenn Beck are anchored in the founding legends of our country. Tyrik Lacruise explores how musical ballads shape the legacies of the Civil Rights Movement. Remembering isn’t just an internal state. It is also intimately tied to rhetoric, music, film and art: it is a speech-act.
At the risk of reaching too far back into history, we might take a cue from Aristotle: “Poetry is more philosophical and more weighty than history, for poetry speaks of the universal, history of the particular.” It is my pleasure to introduce the HPR’s Literary Supplement on memory, which acts as that elusive middleman between reality and fiction, history and poetry. Whether we turn to the lyrics of David Bowie, textbooks in France, or monuments in Berlin, we should not forget that above all, memory is a construction of the present.