May 12, 2016
Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), “The present cultural state of America would give us a good opportunity for studying the damage to civilization which is thus to be feared.” His enduring nightmare, that America, with its notions of Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, would be “gain[ing] control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man” was made real in 1945. In August of that year atomic bombs were deployed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing over 100.000 people immediately, 10s of thousands through radiation exposure later, and devastated most of the attacked cities. Current talk of “Let’s make America great again!” hints at a willingness to repeat this kind of strategic annihilation, and one wonders if and what we’ve learned from history, if anything at all; it also makes Freud seem quite prescient.
Jenkins’ The Armed Man devotes two movements to the horror caused by nuclear incendiary devices, Angry Flames (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy3K9wbHA7w) and Torches (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roNU_ORGTSk). I configured the landscape in the montage Angry Flames as some kind of Rohrschach depiction in reference to the Freudian analysis. I added photographs of figures from a sculpture which has an interesting history. A war memorial in Hamburg, celebrating soldiers with the slogan “Germany must live even if we have to die,” is now prominently faced with a “counter-memorial,” a sculpture by Alfre Hrdlicka that depicts the Hamburg firestorm (the largest areal bombing before Dresden and Hiroshima by allied forces) and the loss of life when concentration camp inmates were put on board of a ship that the British sank.
For Torches I used a photograph of an amazing exhibit I saw in Paris, that documented a different kind of loss of life: Prune Nourry’s Terracotta Daughters.
(http://www.prunenourry.com/en/projects/terracotta-daughters.)
The artist created over a hundred of these girls to point to selective abortion practices in Asia, which have far reaching consequences.
Martha Ullman West
Wonderful photos Friderike, thank you. When I was in high school, I sometimes babysat, and one night I chose to take John Hersey’s Hiroshima with me to read after the children were in bed. The house was quiet, so quiet that all I could hear was the noise of the refrigerator. Well into the book, the refigerator emitted a sort of hiccup and I found myself starting to dive under the sofa. Later that year, the Hiroshima maidens, their faces scarred, came to visit my school, a Quaker school that remains dedicated to peace in the world. There is no way that this American could ever forget this horrific event. And for me and many others the single most terrifying thing about Donald Trump is the possibility of his finger on the button.