The Future of Nostalgia

Margalit Fox’s Times obituary of Svetlana Boym, the Curt Hugo Reisinger professor of Slavic languages and literatures and comparative literature at Harvard (“Svetlana Boym, 56, Scholar of Myth and Memory Dies, NYT, 8/22/13) discusses one of her works, The Future of Nostalgia. Fox writes,  “Throughout the book, Dr. Boym grappled with two essential questions. Can a past that has slipped out of reach be reclaimed by means of nostalgia? Should it ever be?” Fox goes on to elaborate on two kinds of nostalgia that Boym identifies, "one salubrious” and affording consolation and one dangerous in its attempts to be “restorative.” Fox quotes Boym about the latter case to the effect that, “This kind of nostalgia characterizes national and nationalist revivals all over the world, which engage in the anti-modern mythmaking of history by means of a return to national symbols and myths.” Thus one type of nostalgia for the past might result in works art like Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March and Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity and the other the other the treatment of historical wounds by the excavation and elevation of the Swastika. A similar tendency infused the Serbian crusade for ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and in particular the siege of Sarajevo, a city of both historic and mythic significance for both Bosnians and Serbs. The same might be said of the slaughter of Tutsi by Hutus and of Shiites by Sunnis (and the reverse) and of Armenians by Turks to name only a few modern holocausts. Boym’s fascinating obit describes a deracinated existence which must have provided the existential experience for the creation of her theories and her premature demise only adds a bittersweet ending to a dramatic story of survival in the Soviet era. The brilliantly oxymoronic title of the book epitomizes the historical conundrum that Boym explores. And what is fascinating is how unclear the divide is between the two forms of memory that Boym underscores. At what point is melancholy turned into militant idealization? When does the reliving of the past, with its litany of depredations, turn into a crusade against imagined slights that have no real relation to present reality and life?

The Grand Inquisitor

The Times reported that two of the names on the bomb packages sent to synagogues in Chicago by Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen were addressed to famous Inquisitors who had persecuted Muslims in medieval times. Diego Deza, a successor to the infamous Tomás de Torquemada, was one of the names, and Reynald Krak “…is another name for Reynald of Châtillon—a French knight of the Second Crusade who wantonly killed Muslim pilgrims and was later beheaded by Saladin, the Kurdish warrior famous for his defeat of Western invaders in the 12th century” (“In Parcel Bomb Plot, 2 Dark Inside Jokes,” NYT, 11/2/10). It is curious that the terrorists sent bombs addressed to Inquisitors to synagogues, since both Jews and Muslims faced a common fate at the hands of the Inquisition. In any event, this strain of terrorism seems like something out of a Dan Brown novel in which the past itself actually plays a murderous role. But the curious element is the significance that centuries-old conflicts hold for the modern-day terrorist mind. This was particularly obvious in the massacres at Sarajevo during the Bosnian-Serb conflict, in which the place itself was so resplendent with both relatively recent (the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which precipitated World War I) and more ancient hostilities between Christians and Muslims. These conflicts seethed beneath the surface normalcy that had been cultivated during the Tito era, in which ethnicity was subsumed under the ideology of a benevolently despotic totalitarian state. Stephan Daedalus comments that “history is a nightmare,” and it always creates a shudder when one realizes how powerful historical memory is and how it’s passed on to generation after generation. Who would have thought that names like Reynald de Châtillon and Diego Deza could be on the minds of jihadists in Yemen, a country that, on the space-time continuum, seems light years from The Crusades?