'It can be difficult to escape national confines when thinking about peace and war – even for the peace movement.' Photo: 'Postnational Memory, Peace and War: Making pasts beyond borders' book cover
Postnational Memory, Peace and War: Making pasts beyond borders
Author: Nigel Young. Review by Ken Smith.
It can be difficult to escape national confines when thinking about peace and war – even for the peace movement. Key reference points often relate to specific conflicts. Conscientious objection, Quaker service, CND, white poppies and peace demos all have roots in UK history.
So, yes, the book does chronicle what lies behind some tragically iconic words: Somme, Guernica, Hiroshima, Vietnam, Bosnia and, above all, Holocaust or Shoah. Yet this tour of human inhumanity does not simply depress, for two reasons. First, there is a very strong emphasis on the witnesses – combatants, civilians, writers, artists – who have not only borne witness to atrocity but also shown how the human spirit can affirm shared values beyond violence and destruction. From the world war one poets to the creators of the Hiroshima panels to the epic films of Claude Lanzmann on the Shoah and Peter Watkins on nuclear destruction, there have been affirmations of a transnational mourning and hope.
It is in this light that Nigel Young’s book has a relevance beyond academia. It works its way towards an energising message for the future – that we can create narratives of both mourning and hope beyond national borders and ancient enmities. But to accept Thomas Hardy’s adage ‘If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst’ is to grasp why the author feels the need to revisit, in a focused, unsensational way, the main horrors of the twentieth century’s wars.
Secondly, the book is studded with vignettes of personal experience, as the author revisits sites of memory and mourning. These often touch on the very specific and local (influenced by WG Sebald). One heartening anecdote retells the author’s boyhood encounter with railway-labouring Italian prisoners of war. Their warm welcome and sharing of a wartime treat – espresso coffee – exemplifies the author’s theme of crossing borders.
Yet this personal odyssey necessarily involves far darker encounters as Young visits Thiepval, Verdun, Birkenau and Hiroshima. Intent on avoiding ‘atrocity tourism’ or the ‘museumization’ of these sites, he works his way beyond the official narratives, which often present us with what he terms ‘prosthetic memories’. These, like the screen memories of Freud’s patients, serve to obscure rather than illuminate. Always, he seeks out counter-narratives. Some are the testimonies of citizen witnesses, like local Buddhist responses to the Vietnam war, while others are the ‘memory-work’ of artists like Paul Nash or Otto Dix, determined to memorialise the reality of conflict.
From such witnessing Young finds a foundation for transnational remembering and consequent shared action. He faces up to problems in achieving this, from nationalism and fundamentalism to social media absorption in an eternal present. But he finds heartening examples of those creating ‘a global archive of the past in the present’, reaching out beyond ethnic or religious barriers to create a ‘Transnational Memory’ through which past suffering and future hopes can be shared.
Ken is a lecturer at the University of Bradford
