Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture
Cambridge University Press, 9/15/2014
EAN 9781107071278, ISBN10: 1107071275
Hardcover, 348 pages, 23.1 x 15.5 x 2.8 cm
Language: English
In 1962, a Hiroshima peace delegation and an Auschwitz survivor's organization exchanged relics and testimonies, including the bones and ashes of Auschwitz victims. This symbolic encounter, in which the dead were literally conscripted in the service of the politics of the living, serves as a cornerstone of this volume, capturing how memory was utilized to rebuild and redefine a shattered world. This is a powerful study of the contentious history of remembrance and the commemoration of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima in the context of the global development of Holocaust and World War II memory. Emphasizing the importance of nuclear issues in the 1950s and 1960s, Zwigenberg traces the rise of global commemoration culture through the reconstruction of Hiroshima as a 'City of Bright Peace', memorials and museums, global tourism, developments in psychiatry, and the emergence of the figure of the survivor-witness and its consequences for global memory practices.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. 'The most modern city in the world'
city planning, commemoration and atomic power in Hiroshima, 1945–55
2. Modernity's angst
survivors between shame and pride
1945–60
3. Socialist bombs and peaceful atoms
exhibiting modernity and fighting for peace in Hiroshima, 1955–62
4. Healing a sick world
Robert Lifton, PTSD, and the psychiatric reassessment of survivors and trauma
5. The Hiroshima Auschwitz Peace March and the globalization of victimhood
6. A sacred ground for peace
violence, tourism and the sanctification of the Peace Park, 1963–75
7. Peeling the red apple
the Hiroshima Auschwitz Committee and the Hiroshima-Auschwitz museum, 1973–95
Conclusion
the other ground zero? Hiroshima, Auschwitz, 9.11 and the world between them
Index.