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War, Memory, Literature: Does Comparison Make Sense? Narrative as Counter-Memory: A Half-Century of Postwar Writing in Germany and Japan by Reiko Tachibana Review by: Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Winter, 1999), pp. 521-528 Published by: Sophia University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2668321 . Accessed: 29/04/2013 11:59 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Sophia University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Monumenta Nipponica. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 147.26.11.80 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 11:59:58 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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War, Memory, Literature: Does Comparison Make Sense?Narrative as Counter-Memory: A Half-Century of Postwar Writing in Germany and Japan byReiko TachibanaReview by: Irmela Hijiya-KirschnereitMonumenta Nipponica, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Winter, 1999), pp. 521-528Published by: Sophia UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2668321 .

Accessed: 29/04/2013 11:59

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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Sophia University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to MonumentaNipponica.

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Page 2: War, Memory, Literature: Does Comparison Make Sense?

REVIEW ARTICLE

War, Memory, Literature Does Comparison Make Sense?

IRMELA HIJIYA-KIRSCHNEREIT

Narrative As Counter-Memory: A Half-Century of Postwar Writing in Germany and Japan. By Reiko Tachibana. State University of New York Press, 1998. viii + 345 pages. Hardback $65.50; paperback $17.95. M i - UCH has been written on the two world wars as they are reflected in lit-

erature, both in the works of single authors and in so-called national literatures of a certain period considered as a whole. This makes sense,

given that for the nations involved these were this century's traumatic experi- ences per se. Memory has been another focal point in literary and cultural stud- ies for the past decade or so. The present book combines these two concerns and attempts a comparison. As is stated in the very first sentence, "This book exam- ines postwar German and Japanese narratives that serve as 'counter-memories' to the officially sanctioned versions of World War II" (p. 1). The author, Reiko Tachibana, rightly points out that there have been only a few efforts at compar- ing Japanese and German literature dealing with World War II experiences, and in her introduction she suggests that it should be worthwhile to consider con- vergences as well as differences between the two. We readily agree and follow her as she develops her theme.

After an outline in the introductory chapter of historical, literary, and critical contexts in both countries, Tachibana presents a roughly chronological three- step typology of literary examples. She begins by sketching narratives that appeared immediately after the war and, under the title "Evoking the Ruins: The Re-creation of Immediacy," compares samples of Japanese genbaku bungaku (A-bomb literature) and a literary war diary by Ooka Shohei with German Trum- merliteratur (literature of the rubble) by Ernst Wiechert, Wolfgang Borchert, and Heinrich Boll.

The next chapter is devoted to texts written between 1956 and 1971 by writ- ers such as Mishima Yukio, Heinrich B6ll, Guinter Grass, Oe Kenzaburo, and Ibuse Masuji. As the chapter title "The Achievement of a Distanced Perspective" suggests, the author finds in these works a more complex, critical, and distanced

THE AUTHOR is director of the German Institute for Japanese Studies, Tokyo.

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perspective on the war compared to writings produced in the immediate postwar period. "Emphasis on the protagonists' alienation from the societies in which they live" (p. 177) is a common feature, and through literary devices such as untrustworthy narrators, multilayered structures, and parody, the texts establish a distance with their readers and raise "problematical social and ethical issues" (p. 179).

In the third stage, literature in both countries, according to the author, trans- gresses geographical and psychological borders and gains panoptic perspectives. In the chapter "Expansion in Time and Place," Tachibana discusses novels such as Uwe Johnson's Jahrestage (Anniversaries), a four-volume novel published between 1970 and 1983; Christa Wolf's Kassandra (Cassandra, 1983); Oba Minako's Urashimaso (translated under the same title), published in 1977; and a 1980 story by Oe Kenzaburo titled "Memushiri kouchi saiban" (The Trial of "Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids"). She notes the "almost constant presence of the United States" in these works (p. 246) and observes that in the "deliberate mixtures of fiction and nonfiction, subjectivity and objectivity," they "not only problematize the past in a general sense, but also specifically incorporate inter- nationalized interpretations of the incomplete past" (p. 247).

Each chapter begins with a brief introduction and ends with a synopsis of its content. Subsections are devoted to a single work, with cross-references to other texts discussed in the chapter. The author frequently takes up topical as well as technical points of comparison. The subject matter of Mishima' s novel Kinkakuji (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, 1956) is thus juxtaposed to Boll's Billard um halb zehn (Billiards at Half-Past Nine, 1959), as both deal with arson, while Oe's story Mizukara waga namida o nuguitamo hi (The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, 1971) is likened to Grass' s Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959) in that both, according to the author, employ "remarkably similar narra- tive techniques" (p. 145).

The author has unquestionably gathered an impressive number of sources, both primary and secondary, on Japanese and German postwar fiction writing, and in her discussions of the works she provides valuable hints concerning the use of similar narrative patterns and techniques in comparable settings. Some readers will also appreciate observations that do not necessarily relate to the topic of counter-memory but provide clues to the assessment of specific works, such as Tachibana's discussion of Ibuse Masuji's use of the actual diary of a hibakusha, or A-bomb victim, in his prize-winning novel Kuroi ame (Black Rain, 1966), a fact he at first concealed and acknowledged later only reluctantly, suppressing the publication of his source material (pp. 175-77). The merits of this study, therefore, clearly lie in bringing together two distinct postwar literary traditions under the general rubric of counter-memory. But as is to be expected from an ambitious project such as this, the study contains a number of stumbling stones. I

l Stumbling stones in the most literal sense are the many misprints, beginning in the table of contents with Heinrich Holl instead of Boll, faulty romanizations, and macrons in wrong places such as Oda Makoto instead of Oda (p. 182) or urashimaso instead of urashimaso (p. 203).

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For one, there is the question of audience. Inferring from the kind of basic information Tachibana provides, she intended her book for a general audience with almost no background knowledge of postwar Japanese and German history and literature. The rough sketches she offers as a backdrop to her analyses of lit- erary works, however, give a cliched and distorted picture, leading the reader to question the validity of her overall findings. It would have been wiser to expect readers to find general information about German and Japanese society in other relevant sources, all the more so as full consideration of the case of Germany requires a two-track delineation until 1989. The author does not fully distinguish between the historical trajectories of East and West Germany, but loosely inter- mingles them, and instead of tapping the rich research on postwar society car- ried out by generations of historians, political scientists, and the like, she relies heavily on comments by literary figures such as Oe or Grass, the latter of whom, for instance, sees "the shadow of the Third Reich in the new United Germany" (p. 3).

The underlying presumption of the study presents another problem. It vaguely assumes the existence of "official" versions of wartime history in both Germany and Japan that are to be contrasted with literary counter-memory. There are a number of difficulties with such an assumption. For one thing, it forces the "offi- cial" version into an inappropriately uniform mold. Tachibana maintains, for instance, that "each government also has tried to suppress a resurgence of dis- quieting wartime memories, urging instead a revised and more positive image of the past" (p. 2). If this were so in the case of Germany, what would Tachibana make of those intensive public debates of the past years regarding a central holo- caust memorial in Berlin, supported both by Chancellor Kohl and the present Chancellor Schroder, or regarding the Goldhagen book claiming widespread popular support for Hitler's policies, the Wehrmacht exhibition, the Walser state- ment criticizing exploitation of the holocaust, and other comparable topics?2 Further, while in the instance of both West and East Germany and the present German state we might speak of generally accepted, albeit clearly differing, his- torical perspectives, in Japan, down to the present day, scholars such as Carol Gluck have pointed out, there is no comparable, broad consensus regarding recent history. The notion of "counter-memory," which presupposes deviation from, if not opposition to an official view, thus seems tricky. This problem might have been avoided by adopting a less categorical approach. One could, for instance, look at literature not as "counter-memory," but as a form of public memory. This is the stance recommended by Ernestine Schlant, the co-editor of the other comprehensive study of Japanese and German postwar literature, who points out in her introduction that "literary truth often goes deeper than political or economic analysis, and [that] it reflects the conditions and values of the soci- ety under which it was created."3

2 A random search in two Internet book catalogues by the keyword "holocaust" yielded 149 German titles in the case of buecher.de and 222 titles for amazon.de; this may be taken as an indi- cation of the extent to which this issue remains a topic of wide concern in Germany today.

3 Schlant and Rimer 1991, p. 1. This statement is also quoted by Tachibana on page 123.

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Overly rigid pursuit of the premise of "official version" and "counter-memory" in the end leads Tachibana to disappointing conclusions such as the sweeping statement that "both nations saw the persistence of excessive materialism, eth- nic and racial prejudice, authoritarian institutions, and other cultural trends of the sort that had contributed to the outbreak of World War II and had been pre- sent throughout the war and afterward" (p. 249). "Excessive materialism, ethnic and racial prejudice" and "authoritarian institutions" might be attributed to vir- tually any nation (with the difference that in the case of Japan and Germany they are held responsible for the outbreak of Nazism and militarism). By confining her conclusions to platitudes such as those quoted above, the author has ignored the chance to go beyond the observations about the function of literature as mem- ory already formulated in regard to many of the individual works she considers. Nor can she convince us that a comparison of the Japanese and German case has brought additional insight and sophistication to the discussion.

The time is ripe for more differentiated inquiries, and Japanese-German com- parisons can indeed form a platform for new insights that draw their persua- siveness from a carefully crafted framework. As one example from the field of history, through a comparative discourse analysis of postwar Japanese and German historiography, Sebastian Conrad has shown how historiography in West Germany, which was decidedly anti-Marxist, and Japanese historiography, heavily influenced by Marxism, in fact followed parallel trajectories in evaluat- ing the past. Although both criticized thinking in national terms, they neverthe- less were focused on the nation. Moreover, seeking to distance themselves from a problematic past, in an operation Conrad terms "temporalizing space," histo- rians in West Germany and Japan associated the "East" with backwardness, while regarding the "West," represented by the Occupation forces, as the sphere of modern civilization promising progress and a positive future. As they thus incor- porated their national histories into a design of global history, their redefinitions of the (originally geographical) coordinates of "East" and "West" led to a refor- mulation of national identity.4 Petra Buchholz similarly has examined popular movements of personal-history writing (jibunshi) and remembrance in Japan against the backdrop of a German-Japanese comparison.5 From her analysis of Japanese "personal histories" dealing with Showa history she concludes that, contrary to the general image of Japan as exhibiting far-reaching amnesia and disinterest in its problematic past, the sheer number as well as specific qualities of jibunshi show them to constitute a substantive element in public memory. Other projects in progress compare World War II in public memory in Germany and Japan6 or postwar education in the two countries.7 The comparison of post-

4 Conrad 1999. 5 Buchholz 1999. 6 Seraphim 1996. The comparison of World War II in the public memory of Japan and Germany

is also the subject of Seraphim's Columbia University Ph.D. thesis. 7 This subject is being researched by Julian Dierkes, a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University

and currently a research fellow at the German Institute of Japanese Studies (DIJ). See also

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war Japanese and German literature is certainly another area deserving investi- gation, but what is crucial for this as for all these new projects is to formulate clearly defined (and answerable) questions at the outset. Tachibana's study con- tains numerous aspects that invite comment, both concerning her discussion of single works and her analytical framework. May some critical hints suffice in this context to indicate paths for further exploration.

First, there is the question of the identification and selection of the objects for study. The author has based her selection of works to consider largely on a by- now-conventional understanding of important examples of artistic war memo- ries, complemented in the case of Japan by some lesser-known documentary texts such as personal diaries and short stories by a number of different writers and a novel by Oba Minako. Why this choice, and why include non-artistic materials on one side? What about their different semantic status? Why confine the texts examined to those of a more-or-less autobiographical nature? (Which leads to the circular conclusion that the respective works are strongly autobiographical in nature; see pp. 251, 254.) Why not include works by authors born during or after the war? An immense choice would have offered itself in the German instance, at least, while in that of Japan, consideration of literature from the mar- gins of society, for instance by Korean or Okinawan writers, would certainly have widened the perspective.8

One wishes also that in making her selection the author had addressed more explicitly the issue of thematic and temporal focus. To name only the two most common settings of the works considered, the plots of some deal exclusively with wartime events (including the immediate postwar days, in the case of some examples of A-bomb literature), while others concentrate on the postwar years, with flashbacks linking two or more levels of time. It goes without saying that these differences in narrative focus reflect different authorial intentions and may be expected to evoke different reactions from readers. One will certainly not read in the same way a work that purports to deal with the postwar years, even if it is marked by eruptions of wartime reminiscences, and one that leaves no doubt from the beginning that its concern is wartime events in a "historical" setting.

The question of genre and media is also relevant. Would a discussion of other, more popular forms of fiction have led to similar conclusions? Should not the quest for manifestations of war memory include those dramas dealing with war guilt that drew wide public attention in Japan and Germany, such as Kinoshita Junji's Kami to hito to no aida (Between God and Man, 1972) and Peter Weiss's

Rosenzweig 1998, a recent monograph that examines American educational policies during the Occupation period in Germany and Japan. Like other recent studies, it challenges the conven- tional wisdom that educational reforms were a success in Japan and a failure in Germany by show- ing that their acceptance or non-acceptance depended on the degree to which the new policies could be linked to the underlying educational traditions of the two societies. Unlike the other stud- ies mentioned here, this work does not refer to primary or secondary sources in Japanese.

8 For a literary work dealing with wartime events by a young Okinawan writer, Medoruma Shun, and its reception in Japan, see Hijiya-Kirschnereit 1998.

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Die Ermittlung (The Investigation, 1965), to name only the most famous exam- ples? And what about genres such as comics or manga, TV productions, and films based on literary fiction?

Second, in regard to public response, can the function of literature as public memory be adequately discussed without taking into account the general recep- tion of a work at the time of its publication (and possible changes in its reception over the course of time)? Rather than identify works with the attitudes of their authors, to the point of discussing the author's personal history, as Tachibana has done, it would have been more fruitful to analyze how particular works have been viewed and interpreted. Why, for example, as Tachibana states on pages 197-98, was the theme of coming to terms with the wartime past not even rec- ognized as a feature of Oba Minako's novel Urashimaso by Japanese critics? How can it function as "a work of counter-memory" (p. 197) in this circum- stance? Is it reasonable to adduce as an instance of "counter-memory" a work such as the above-mentioned 1980 story by Oe, which received little attention at the time of publication or even later. What, in other words, makes a work func- tion as memory? Is a certain degree of fame or canonization required? Socio- logical as well as epistemological questions need to be addressed in this context.

Third, does it really make sense to compare texts of A-bomb literature with Triimmerliteratur, or fiction dealing with the Auschwitz experience? On what basis can a comparison yield insights? Literature has undoubtedly played an emi- nent part in the formation of what is now termed the "holocaust discourse" in contemporary German literature, as has been shown by a recent German study.9 It hardly seems feasible, though, to play this complex off against other discur- sive bundles such as stories focused on the experiences of hibakusha or the imme- diate postwar struggle for existence.

Fourth, the author's claim to cover "a half-century of postwar writing" is mis- leading, for the latest texts discussed in detail date from 1980 and 1982 respec- tively, and much has happened in both countries since then. To take Germany as an example, as Thomas Steinfeld has noted in a review article on the occasion of the 1998 Frankfurt book fair, "memory has never been more garrulous" than at present when those later-borns "remember" what they have not experienced themselves.10 Steinfeld, who also discusses the meaning of different degrees of chronological distance, observes that recent novels have rediscovered epic nar- ration and appear to return to the language of the nineteenth century. This con- stitutes a remarkable deviation from the experimental patterns that Tachibana highlights in her discussion of German and Japanese literature of the 1960s through the early 1980s. Had she included literature of the late 1980s and early 1990s and discussed works such as the 1995 "Der Vorleser" (The Reader) by Bernhard Schlink (born in 1944), to cite what is probably the internationally best known example of this new trend, her tripartite grid would certainly have looked

9 Braese 1998. See also Arnold 1999. 10 Steinfeld 1998.

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different.1I (Needless to say, we would also expect a discussion of more recent Japanese developments in this area.)

Finally, by concentrating on the analysis of narratorial devices and techniques, Tachibana inevitably undermines her project of uncovering the role of literature as historical counter-memory. To confine oneself to the intra-literary level while seeking to show how literature exerts extra-literary functions appears contradic- tory. A highly sophisticated and self-reflective methodology is needed to cope with the problems of such an analysis, all the more so given a comparative frame- work. Yet the foundations have been laid, and we should be grateful to Tachibana for preparing the ground for further exploration of how exactly artistic fiction (or works of a more popular nature, or documentary literature) contributes to collective memory in the complex interplay of individual creation and public response.

I I For a consideration of "postunification" literature, see, for instance, Schlant 1999.

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REFERENCES

Arnold 1999 Heinz Ludwig Arnold, ed. Literatur und Holocaust (Literature and the Holocaust). Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 1999.

Braese 1998 Stephan Braese. Deutsche Nachkriegsliteratur und der Holocaust (German Postwar Literature and the Holocaust). Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 1998.

Buchholz 1999 Petra Buchholz. "Schreiben und Erinnern: Uber den Umgang mit der Vergangenheit in Japan" (Writing and Remembering: How the Past is Dealt with in Japan). Ph.D. dissertation. Free University, Berlin, 1999.

Conrad 1999 Sebastian Conrad. Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Nation: Geschichtsschreibung in Westdeutschland und Japan, 1945-1960 (In Search of the Lost Nation: Historio- graphy in West Germany and Japan, 1945-1960). Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999.

Hijiya-Kirschnereit 1998 Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit. "Kriegsschuld, Nachkriegsschuld: Vergangenheitsbe- waltigung in Japan" (War Guilt, Postwar Guilt: On Japan's Coming to Terms with Its Past). In Vergangenheitsbewaltigung am Ende des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, ed. Helmut Konig et al. Opladen and Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1998.

Rosenzweig 1998 Beate Rosenzweig. Erziehung zur Demokratie? Amerikanische Besatzungs- und Schulreformpolitik in Deutschland und Japan (Education for Democracy? American Occupation and School Reform Politics in German and Japan). Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1998.

Schlant 1999 Ernestine Schlant. The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holo- caust. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Schlant and Rimer 1991 Ernestine Schlant and J. Thomas Rimer, eds. Legacies and Ambiguities: Postwar Fiction and Culture in West Germany and Japan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

Seraphim 1996 Franziska Seraphim. "Der Zweite Weltkrieg im offentlichen Gedachtnis Japans: Die Debatte zum funfzigsten Jahrestag der Kapitulation" (World War II in Japan's Public Memory: The Debate on the Fiftieth Anniversary of Surrender). In Uberwindung der Moderne? Japan am Ende des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, ed. Irmela Hijiya- Kirschnereit. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1996.

Steinfeld 1998 Thomas Steinfeld. "Der bittere Geschmack des Augenblicks" (The Bitter Taste of the Moment). Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 6 October 1998.

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