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?

CDC or CPC (Center for People Control)?

Auschwitz inmate Czeslowa Kwoka (taken by prisoner and photographer Wilhelm Brasse)

Is it easier to control a disease than a person? There are some diseases which don’t respond to anything and simply progress along their deadly course. But most diseases respond to medicines. We take penicillin and other antibiotics for infection and chemo and radiation rid the body of many cancers. But controlling people is another matter. We may subdue another person through threats, intimidation and emotional blackmail. But the results of colonization which have left in their wake a whole generation of angry offspring, some of whom have themselves resorted to terror tactics are plainly visible in the recent upsurge in the kind of violent activities that have afflicted France. The French have upgraded their security. But will containment actually work? Even massive genocide has not actually proven effective in ridding enemies of each other. The attempts by the Hutus to murder the Tutsi, the Nazis to eliminate the Jews and the Turks to erase the Armenians are three prominent cases which illustrate the regenerative nature of the human spirit. Attempts to crush and repress actual kindle fires and in some cases unfortunately lead to oppressed minorities reenacting the sins of their oppressors. On an individual level, the results of domination and subjugation are evidenced by our soaring divorce rates. South Africa is a unique example where inspired by the spirit of personalities like Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission became 
another path whereby revenge was replaced with remembrance. Tunisia has recently also taken a similar path (“Torture Claims in Tunisia Await Truth Commission,” NYT, 5/19/15). “Turn the other cheek” rather” than an eye for an eye” have been the guiding premises of that revolutionary commission.  “Never Again!” is the famed motto of Holocaust survivors. It’s a lesson that both individuals and national states need take to heart.

Little Murders

Are there bad people, or just people with problems that get of hand? The former Serbian leader Radovan Karadzic is now on trial in The Hague, accused of war crimes, but he was once a psychiatrist, a person trained to understand and treat the condition of those suffering from mental illness. Is this a contradiction? For many years following the war, Karadzic lived incognito, sporting long hair and a beard and practicing alternative medicine. His training and the identity he adopted are belied by the fact that he was a murderer and a killer. But surely manifest content is significant; surely some part of him was interested in healing.

Hitler loved dogs. The young Stalin wrote poetry and there were those who thought he might become a priest. What is it that unites these murderers? How do human beings whose behavior shows signs of empathy for others make an about face whereby the brother becomes the other?  Only last week, another crime shocked the nation: the murder of 13 people at Fort Hood, by yet another psychiatrist. What made Major Nidal Malik Hasan open fire? Was he bad or mad?

Little Murders is the title of a play by Jules Feiffer. In a sense, all of us are capable of homicide, and maybe even genocide on a small scale. The beloved wife, friend, business associate, or relative suddenly becomes the enemy, the other, and the vitriol is directly proportionate to the love that once existed. A sense of victimhood can always be counted on to induce revenge. Racial pride was an organizing principle of the Third Reich, allowing for whole new classifications of others. The notion of a shared injury can also become a unifying force that unites a whole population in mass paranoia. Historic feelings of persecution by Christians may have been one of the many causes of the Turkish massacre of its Armenian population. What set the Hutus against the Tutsis, the Janjaweed against the rebels in the Sudan? And what explains the viciousness with which Bosnian Serbs turned against the Muslims with whom they had lived in peace for decades? 

These are no mere squabbles of property lines, money and political power. The depraved indifference to human life that is characteristic of mass murder has the quality of a passion, the kind of passion that once contained the germs of human love. Weren’t the Crusades and the Inquisition about love of God? And yet an academic understanding of the roots of conflict does little to assuage the pain. The guilty still must face trial, even if, as in the case of Karadzic, they refuse to show up.