The Wages of Guilt

by Ian Buruma

  Intellectuals such as Müller or Syberberg or Adorno were right to be awed by the power of mass culture. Yet the impact of Holocaust in Germany, in particular, is not hard to explain. The Auschwitz of the courtroom, the chapel, or the museum had been an abstraction, a metaphor, a bunch of unimaginable statistics, the death of millions with no name. With The Diary of Anne Frank it was as though one of the nameless dead had risen from the mass grave and assumed an identity. The family of Dr. Josef Weiss, even in the incarnation of American soap opera characters, had an identity every German could recognize: solid, educated, middle-class. They could have been your neighbors; in fact, they were your neighbors, if you were of a certain age.

  Holocaust proved that metaphors and allusions were not enough to bring history alive. The Weiss family had to be invented, the past reenacted. The soap opera form had such a powerful effect because it was the opposite of Brechtian alienation: emotions are boosted, identification is enforced. We feel we know personally our favorite soap opera characters, just as we feel on intimate terms with a popular talk show host. Yet it is precisely that kind of identification that much postwar German art and literature has shied away from. Identification with the Jewish victims could not be done with real conviction; identification with the persecutors—that is, with your parents, your grandparents, or yourself—was too painful.

  How German viewers, or most non-German viewers for that matter, would have taken to Holocaust had the main characters not been educated, middle-class Germans, but, let us say, poor Romanian Gypsies, is an interesting question. I rather doubt that the impact would have been the same. Identification clearly has its limits.

  “After Holocaust,” wrote a West German woman to her local television station, “I feel deep contempt for those beasts of the Third Reich. I am twenty-nine years old and a mother of three children. When I think of the many mothers and children sent to the gas chambers, I have to cry. (Even today the Jews are not left in peace. We Germans have the duty to work every day for peace in Israel.) I bow to the victims of the Nazis, and I am ashamed to be a German.”

  Judging from the many letters published after Holocaust, this was a fairly typical response. A good number of people born after the war felt ashamed to be German. It would appear to confirm Christian Meier’s thesis that history is “in our bones,” that we carry the sins of our fathers on our backs, that history is in our blood. It is true that Germans were responsible for Auschwitz. But is shame in future generations of Germans a suitable or even a useful response? The novelist Martin Walser, who was a child during the war, believes, like Meier, that Auschwitz binds the German people, as does the language of Goethe. When a Frenchman or an American sees pictures of Auschwitz, “he doesn’t have to think: We human beings! He can think: Those Germans! Can we think: Those Nazis! I for one cannot …”

  This is the language of a man who is troubled by national identity. Adorno, a German Jew who wished to save high German culture, on whose legacy the Nazis left their bloody finger marks, resisted the idea that Auschwitz was a German crime. To him it was a matter of modern pathology, the sickness of the “authoritarian personality,” of the dehumanized SS guards, those inhumane cogs in a vast industrial wheel. Is there no alternative to these opposing views? I believe there is.

  Auschwitz was a German crime, to be sure. “Death is a master from Germany.” But it was a different Germany. To insist on viewing history through the “eyes of identity,” to repeat the historian Christian Meier’s phrase, is to resist the idea of change. Can one internalize Auschwitz from the point of view of the aggressors without falling prey to kitsch emotions of false guilt or even false pride? To assume that Auschwitz was caused by some awful flaw in the German identity, just as a streak of collective German genius produced Goethe and Brahms, is to perpetuate a kind of neurotic narcissism: at best a constant worry that the Germans are a dangerous people, at worst a perverse pride in an almost tribal capacity for sublime music and unspeakable crimes.

  HIROSHIMA

  BETWEEN THE FORMER Japanese and Italian embassies in Berlin, both built in the 1930s in the pompous classico-fascist style of Hitler’s dream city of Germania, runs a short, narrow street that used to be called the Graf-Spee-Strasse, after the German admiral, who died in 1914, in a battle with the British Navy off the Falkland Islands. Like many streets and squares in Berlin—Adolf-Hitler-Platz, Hermann-Göring-Strasse, etc.—it was renamed after the war. It is now called the Hiroshimastrasse.

  This choice of name, said to have annoyed the Italians considerably, had nothing to do with the Japanese. The left-wing Berlin senate chose it as an expression of its pacifism. But even if the Japanese had no part in this, it perfectly caught the prevailing Geist of postwar Japan. To the majority of Japanese, Hiroshima is the supreme symbol of the Pacific War. All the suffering of the Japanese people is encapsulated in that almost sacred word: Hiroshima. But it is more than a symbol of national martyrdom; Hiroshima is a symbol of absolute evil, often compared to Auschwitz. There is a Hiroshima-Auschwitz Committee in Hiroshima. In at least one novel about Hiroshima, the Japanese and the Jews are singled out as the prime victims of white racism. There was even a plan, in the late 1980s, to build an Auschwitz memorial in a small town near Hiroshima.

  The atom bomb attack on August 6, 1945, was, in the words of a Hiroshima University professor, Saika Tadayoshi, “the worst sin committed in the twentieth century.” Professor Saika was the author of the famous inscription on the A-Bomb Cenotaph in Hiroshima Peace Park, built around a stone coffin containing the names of A-bomb victims: “Let all the souls here rest in peace; for we shall not repeat the evil.”

  The phrasing is deliberately vague. But lest visitors to the Peace Park think that “we” refers exclusively to the Japanese government during the war, a sign was put up in the early 1980s to clarify the matter, in English and Japanese: “It summons people everywhere to pray for the repose of the souls of the deceased A-bomb victims and to join in the pledge never to repeat the evil of war. It thus expresses the ‘heart of Hiroshima,’ which, enduring past grief and overcoming hatred, yearns for the realization of world peace.”

  Hiroshima (the name is often written in the phonetic characters used to transcribe foreign names, to make the place sound more international, more universal) has the atmosphere of a religious center. It has martyrs, but no single god. It has prayers, and it has a ready-made myth about the fall of man. Hiroshima, says a booklet entitled Hiroshima Peace Reader, published by the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, “is no longer merely a Japanese city. It has become recognized throughout the world as a Mecca of world peace.”

  The great hall of the main railway station is always full of uniformed schoolchildren, Boy Scout groups, old-age pensioners, foreign tourists, dignitaries, and country folk, following the flags of their guides. They are among the millions of people who make their pilgrimage to Hiroshima each year. All visit Peace Park, the site of a thriving commercial district before it was demolished by the bomb, which exploded overhead. It is now the center of the Hiroshima cult.

  It is even harder to imagine what happened in Hiroshima than it is at Auschwitz, for the horror of Hiroshima was compressed into one singular event, which left hardly a visual trace. In a sense, of course, the entire modern city of Hiroshima is evidence of the bomb. The slick shopping streets, the public parks, the baseball stadium, the high-rise hotels, even the old castle, rebuilt in concrete—none of this was there before August 6, 1945. It is as if the scene of the crime, as it were, had been utterly erased, or rather, buried under a brand-new city, like a modern Troy, or the former Warsaw ghetto.

  And yet, for the visitor, especially a Caucasian, who is always assumed to be a foreigner, and usually an American, it is hard to forget the legacy of the bomb. This is not just because of the many monuments, plaques, and memorials, which are indeed impossible to miss, but also because you cannot walk through Peace Park without feeling self-conscious. No Japanese will be so crass as to come up to you and say:
“You did this, you are guilty of mass murder.” But when schoolchildren approach you, prompted by their teachers, to ask what you think of peace, you feel that some gesture of atonement, or at least a word of regret, is demanded. You are asked to declare peace in the name of your race, the white race, the one that many Japanese blame for dropping the bomb.

  The park is a veritable Lourdes of shrines, monuments, stones, bells, fountains, and temples, commemorating the dead and offering prayers for peace. The shops in Peace Park sell key rings, ballpoint pens, T-shirts, coasters, postcards, books, cups, Buddhist rosaries, chopsticks, etc., all with prayers for peace. Most of these souvenirs bear a picture of the bombed shell of the former Hiroshima Prefecture Industrial Promotion Hall, now known as the A-Bomb Dome. The real thing stands just across the river that runs at one end of the park, as a permanent reminder of the evil that was done. Ceremonies are held there, and paper lanterns are floated in the river as symbols of the souls of the dead. Gray and white peace doves, hundreds of them, flutter around the trees, planted, so the guide explained, “by individuals and groups, both inside and outside Japan, who wanted to remember the souls of the victims and pray for peace.” There is a sign near the cenotaph that reads: “If you touch the doves, please rinse your mouth and wash your hands to prevent the disease they carry.”

  Behind the cenotaph is the Flame of Peace, donated by the Japan Junior Chamber of Commerce. It represents two hands opened to the skies. The flame was lit with torches carried by religious groups and representatives of various Japanese corporations. Next to it is the Monument of Prayer, a statue of a man, woman, and child. If you step on the stone placed in front of the pedestal, a musical box plays a tune entitled “Spirits, do not weep beneath the ground.”

  Visitors behave at the cenotaph in the way people usually do at Japanese shrines, when there are no special ceremonies to perform. They pray, they toss coins in the Pond of Peace behind the stone coffin, and they take photographs of one another to commemorate the occasion. Schoolchildren in navy-blue and black uniforms file past, laughing and yawning and slouching. They are instructed by their teachers to copy the words of the inscription in their notebooks. The atmosphere is not at all solemn; it rarely is at Japanese religious sites. The only somber note, droning through the children’s voices, is the sound of the Peace Bell nearby. It is inside a concrete dome, which, my guidebook said, “expresses the universe.”

  Watching the laughing schoolkids, I was reminded of another memorial site I had visited, some years before. Then, too, I was struck by the casualness of Japanese visitors to a blood-soaked place. It was on Saipan, a small island in the Pacific, next to Tinian, an even smaller island, whence the Enola Gay took off for Hiroshima. Saipan had been a thriving Japanese colony, and when the U.S. Marines landed in 1944, the fighting was so fierce that at least 25,000 Japanese and nearly 4,000 Americans died in just a few days. But the worst of it was the mass suicides of hundreds of civilians, mostly women and children, who threw themselves off a cliff. Some who hesitated were shot in the back by Japanese snipers. This melancholy spot is marked by a sign, which says, in Japanese and English: “Suicide Cliff.” Young Japanese tourists, mostly girls, giggled and took snapshots of one another.

  It is only when hierarchy is involved that people in Japan become almost oppressively solemn. The day after I visited Hiroshima, I had half an hour to spare in Fukuoka, the biggest city in Kyushu. In front of the main railway station, I watched a ceremony in aid of road safety. Young girls in uniforms, with bands saying “Miss Road Safety Fukuoka 1992,” stood in identical poses, white-gloved hands folded, feet pressed together, as old men in black suits held forth gloomily about obeying traffic regulations. A brass band stood in attendance, stiff, in straight rows, like Prussian soldiers. And the various city dignitaries, wearing the bands and badges of their respective offices, were lined up behind the speakers, like generals at a parade. There was not a smile to be seen, not a whisper to be heard. Here, everyone knew his place, and order ruled, here where the point was not the killing of hundreds of thousands in war, but the promotion of safe driving in peace.

  What is interesting about Hiroshima—the Mecca rather than the modern Japanese city, which is prosperous and rather dull—is the tension between its universal aspirations and its status as the exclusive site of Japanese victimhood. Tucked away in a corner, outside the park, is a monument to the Koreans who died from the A-bomb attack. Many of them had been forced to work in Japan during the war. The monument, erected in 1970 by the South Korean residents’ association in Japan, stands on a large stone tortoise, the mark of a Korean grave. The tortoise is covered with wreaths, flowers, and paper cranes, bearing the names of various Korean organizations. Next to the grave marker is a sign, in English and Korean. It tells the story of 20,000 Koreans whose “sacred lives” were “suddenly taken from our midst.” They were given no funerals or memorial services, so “their spirits hovered for years, unable to pass on to heaven.” They were not enshrined in the Japanese park, and later attempts by local Koreans to have the monument moved into Peace Park failed. There could only be one cenotaph, said the Hiroshima municipal authorities. And the cenotaph did not include Koreans.

  At the beginning of 1946, the governor of Hiroshima Prefecture invited a number of distinguished local people to offer ideas on how to reconstruct their city, which had virtually disappeared. Ota Yoko, a novelist, who survived the A-bomb, wanted many trees to be planted in the new Hiroshima. “I would like to interweave dream and reality in harmony to enrich the citizens’ lives,” she said. Another person felt that a rich cultural life was needed. Yet another (an abbot) wanted many Buddhist temples scattered about the city. But the most remarkable suggestion came from the deputy mayor of Kure, a port outside Hiroshima, where many of the battleships were built during the war. He wanted “to keep the vast expanse of the burnt-out area intact as a memorial graveyard for the sake of everlasting world peace.”

  Some people regret that this never came to pass. Starting in the 1980s, a former high school teacher from Osaka named Uno Masami has written a series of popular books about the need to learn from the Jews, specifically from the ways they dominate the world. These books sold in the hundreds of thousands. One of them, entitled The Day the Dollar Becomes Paper, has a chapter on Hiroshima. Hiroshima, Uno wrote, should have been left as it was, in ruins, just as Auschwitz, so he claims, was deliberately preserved by the Jews. By reminding the world of their martyrdom, he said, the Jews have kept their racial identity intact and restored their virility. The Japanese, in contrast, were duped by the Americans into believing that the traces of Japanese suffering should be swept away by the immediate reconstruction of Hiroshima. As a result, the postwar Japanese lack an identity and their racial virility has been sapped by American propaganda about Japanese war guilt.

  This is an extreme position. Few Japanese would go so far, even though, as readers, they might find it pleasantly provocative. But if one leaves aside the antisemitism and the idea of keeping Hiroshima in ruins, it is an opinion widely held by Japanese nationalists. The right always has been concerned with the debilitating effects on the Japanese identity of war guilt imposed by American propaganda. However, right-wing nationalists care less about Hiroshima than about the idée fixe that the “Great East Asian War” was to a large extent justified.

  The left has its own variation of Japanese martyrdom, in which Hiroshima plays a central role. It is widely believed, for instance, that countless Japanese civilians fell victim to either a wicked military experiment or to the first strike in the Cold War, or both. The A-bomb, in this version, was dropped to scare the Soviets away from invading Japan. This at least is an arguable position. But the idea that the bomb was a racist experiment is less plausible, since the bomb was developed for use against Nazi Germany. Yet many Japanese believe it. One of the more eccentric books on this topic was written by Koochi Akira, a former employee of the United Nations, who argued that the bomb was a deliberate form of genocide
planned by white racists. Uno Masami, who holds similar views, has claimed that these racists were Jews. Again, such opinions are extreme. But, judging from what appears in Japanese periodicals and on bestseller lists, not that far from the mainstream.

  There is another view, however, held by leftists and liberals, who would not dream of defending the “Fifteen-Year War.” In this view, the A-bomb was a kind of divine punishment for Japanese militarism. And having learned their lesson through this unique suffering, having been purified through hellfire and purgatory, so to speak, the Japanese people have earned the right, indeed have the sacred duty, to sit in judgment of others, specifically the United States, whenever they show signs of sinning against the “Hiroshima spirit.” This is at the heart of what is known as Peace Education, which has been much encouraged by the leftist Japan Teachers’ Union and has been regarded with suspicion by the conservative government. Peace Education has traditionally meant pacifism, anti-Americanism, and a strong sympathy for Communist states, especially China.

  “World Peace begins in Hiroshima” was the slogan on the flags and banners, draped in black, carried by A-bomb survivors praying at a Shinto shrine on the first anniversary of the bombing. “The world is still controlled by ‘the philosophy of power,’ ” said the mayor of Hiroshima on August 6, 1987. “We must convert the world to the Hiroshima spirit.” This means that whenever America, with logistical and financial help from its Japanese ally, uses military force—in Korea, for example, or in Vietnam, or the Persian Gulf—it is seen as a betrayal of the A-bomb victims, a stab in the heart of Hiroshima.

  In one respect, at least, left-wing pacifism in Japan has something in common with the romantic nationalism usually associated with the right: it shares the right’s resentment about being robbed by the Americans of what might be called a collective memory. The romantic nationalists think that the U.S. occupation after the war deliberately destroyed sacred traditions, such as the imperial cult, without which the Japanese could have no identity. The romantic pacifists believe that the United States, to hide its own guilt and to rekindle Japanese militarism in aid of the Cold War, tried to wipe out the memory of Hiroshima.