Sixty Years After V-E Day, Americans Selectively Remember World War Two, Duke Professor Says
The "wartime consciousness" generated by World War II lasted long beyond actual hostilities into the 21st century.
Six decades have passed since German troops in Europe laid down their arms on May 8, 1945, but Americans' perceptions of World War II still contain omissions that reflect our cultural memory of the era, says a Duke University English professor and author of a new book about how Americans remember World War II.
D-Day, the liberation of France, the opening of the concentration camps, V-E Day, trials for crimes against humanity: The U.S. role in World War II contains many events "that make us feel good about ourselves and show a face we like to show," says Marianna Torgovnick, author of "The War Complex: World War II in Our Time."
But other parts of World War II history, such as the Soviet role in defeating the Germans and the U.S. role in incendiary and atomic bombings, "have never registered in America's image of World War II or in America's image of itself" and remain, curiously, "hiding in plain sight," she says.
Torgovnick says the "wartime consciousness" generated by World War II lasted long beyond actual hostilities into the 21st century, ready to be reanimated by the events of 9/11.
"World War I sketched a template; World War II wrote such patterns large; 9/11 echoed in the American imagination because it brought such patterns home," she says.
Echoes of World War II were prominent in 2003, as well, when the U.S. invaded Iraq. Justifications for the war invoked fears and apprehensions about "all the things that might happen to us or to our families -- suicide bombings, biological or chemical attacks, nuclear explosions," Torgovnick says.
"The costs of sustained wartime consciousness on a society and a culture are more than military," she says.
In her book, she says that "an unresolved and perhaps unresolvable attitude towards mass death caused by human beings wielding technology in shorter and shorter periods of time, death that proceeds under state or political control and sometimes does not just kill human beings but vanishes bodies," permeates the 20th century and continues into the 21st century.