By Efrat Ben-Ze'ev, Ruth Ginio, and Jay Winter, eds.
Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010. Pp. ix, 223. ISBN 978-0-521-19658-1.
In many circumstances, one learns more from what is not said than from what
is said in any story being told, whether it be a child's fib or a friend's tall
tale. In this collection of essays, twelve scholars cogently analyze telling
instances of silence in collective tales of the chaotic and contentious actions
of war. Such silences, they contend, do something—or rather many things—to and
for those who participate in them, conveying much about the circumstances that
precipitate them and the historical events they dismiss.
The focus here is on twentieth-century wars in Europe, Africa, and the Middle
East. Two introductory chapters precede three sections of three essays devoted
to each of the designated geographic regions. This organization is both
unfortunate and advantageous. It strongly suggests a geographic unity not really
present in the essays, while obscuring the theoretical and topical links among
them. However, it also underscores the complexity of both the social uses of
silence and the scholarly investigation of them.
Jay Winter (Yale), in chapter 1 ("Thinking about Silence," 3-31), frames the
volume as a supplement and corrective to earlier works on war and remembrance.[1]
He claims that previous studies have cast remembering and forgetting as a strict
dichotomy, the former being positive and the latter negative for individuals and
communities. However, recent studies in anthropology, sociology, and even the
neuro- and cognitive sciences have revealed that memory is not nearly as static
and structured as once believed. Winter and the other contributors contend that
attention to silence sheds new light on the complex social, political, and
personal aspects of memory. They define silence as "a socially constructed space
in which and about which subjects and words normally used in everyday life are
not spoken" (4), specifically when a group explicitly or implicitly agrees not
to talk about something known to its members.
Winter identifies three primary impulses for the social construction of
silence: first is the managing of grief and loss in public displays of mourning
through "liturgical silences" (4). The second impulse is political or strategic,
that is, silence adopted to heal the wounds or lessen the impact of conflicts.
(The essay on societal silences after the Spanish Civil War offers a prime
example of this.) Finally, some groups create strategies of silence out of a
notion of privileged knowledge and experience. (A good illustration is presented
in the essay on Israeli veterans of the 1948 war for independence.) The essays
in this superlative collection examine various iterations of these impulses,
clarifying how groups construct memory and imagination in the shadows of war.
Before the several case studies of such silence, Eviatar Zerubavel (Rutgers),
in the second introductory chapter ("The Social Sound of Silence: Toward a
Sociology of Denial," 32-44), contextualizes the effects of silence on society
at large and examines how individuals and groups contribute to such silences. In
regard to silence's position between memory and oblivion, he writes that:
Rather
than simply failing to notice something, denial too involves an effort to
actively avoid noticing it. Moreover, it involves avoiding things that actually
beg for our attention, thereby reminding us that conspiracies of silence revolve
not around unnoticeable matters we simply overlook but actually around highly
conspicuous ones we actively avoid. That explains our choice of the proverbial
"elephant in the room," a creature of impossible stature and therefore highly
noticeable presence, to represent metaphorically the object of such
conspiracies.... Thus, if we ignore its presence, it can only be as a result of
active avoidance, as otherwise it would be impossible not to notice it. To
ignore an "elephant," in short, is to ignore the obvious (33).
Zerubavel insightfully notes that such conspiracies of silence become
stronger the longer they persist and the more people adhere to them.
Chapters 3 through 5 scrutinize issues of silence during and after European
conflicts. First, historian Mary Vincent (Sheffield) examines Spain's 2007 "law
of historical memory," an official attempt to recover the memory of atrocities
and pain during the Spanish Civil War (chapter 3: "Breaking the Silence? Memory
and Oblivion since the Spanish Civil War," 47-67). Such memories had been
cloaked in a conspiracy of silence until General Francisco Franco's death in
1975. Yet even after his death, Vincent notes, Spain treated both the Civil War
and Franco's brutal dictatorship as tragic periods better left in the past. The
guilt that pervaded society allowed individual healing and public unity while
repressing the painful past of the Spanish people. Only after 2007 have
Spaniards begun to recover a new social identity and a fuller picture of their
own past.
The next two chapters address German guilt and memory after the Second World
War. In chapter 4 ("In the Ashes of Disgrace: Guilt versus Shame Revisited,"
68-90), Jeffrey Olick (Virginia) reevaluates Ruth Benedict's classic
formulation of the shame vs. guilt cultural dichotomy.[2] Benedict claimed that
the West's culture of guilt, reliant on an internal conscience and absolute
standards of morality, differed sharply from Japanese shame culture, which was
far more concerned with external motivators and others' opinions of one's
actions. Olick shows that most Western cultures, and Germany in particular,
evince a complex mix of shame and guilt. He explores the public debates over a
collective German guilt for Nazi atrocities. Karl Jaspers represents the
inclination toward guilt, while Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt represent the
shame impulse within the broader German culture. Olick finds that there is a
sense in which guilt is a dominant motivation in society, but no clear distinction between guilt and shame as forces for German postwar
unification and healing.
In chapter 5 ("On Silence, Madness, and Lassitude: Negotiating the Past in
Post-War West Germany," 91-112), Svenja Goltermann (Freiburg) looks at the
reactions of German soldiers after the war's end. Overcome by both the country's
need to rationalize the actions of the National Socialist regime and the ardent
denazification programs of the period, the soldiers concealed their past actions
out of political necessity and in response to cultural pressure often applied by
their own families. While, in popular psychological jargon, "trauma" came to
represent Germans' experiences of war, soldiers were left in a nebulous void of
denial, able to reintegrate into society only by keeping silent about their
wartime experiences.
The next three chapters are devoted to Africa. Chapters 6 and 7 explore the
tense interactions of colonizing powers with indigenous peoples, with stress on
the French in Africa, showing how both oppressed and oppressors used silence for
their own purposes. In chapter 6 ("Silences on State Violence during the
Algerian War of Independence: France and Algeria, 1962-2007," 115-37), Raphaёlle
Branche (Paris) and Jim House (Leeds) explain that the French, hoping to
downplay the abuses of the period, have long remained silent about the events of
1961. Likewise, Algerians who endured oppression and torture kept silent as a
means of coping, even within their own families. However, in the 1980s, their
children broke with those patterns of behavior as a means of combating the
anti-Algerian sentiment prevalent in their own day. Seeking full acceptance into
the larger French culture, the young activists spoke out about public abuses and
racism, but not about the torture inflicted on many of their family members.
Similarly, Ruth Ginio (Ben Gurion Univ.) explores the veil of silence
surrounding France's occupation of Senegal in chapter 7 ("African Silences:
Negotiating the Story of France's Colonial Soldiers, 1914-2009," 138-52). Much
of the violence of the period was initiated by Africans drafted into the French
forces, a co-exploitation that aroused deep discomfort in both France and
Senegal in the post-colonial period. As Ginio brilliantly states,
Speech acts are selective, to be sure, but so are silences, especially those
which describe the ugliness of a colonial past in which black soldiers broke the
protest of black men and women struggling against their French masters. The men
in uniform were therefore in a liminal position, half way between the subjugated
and the subjugators. The story of their lives and fate both during the two world
wars and in the years of decolonization is redolent with silences, with
selective occlusions and exaggerations related to the needs of today more than
the events of yesterday (139).
In chapter 8 ("Now That All Is Said and Done: Reflections on the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission [TRC] in South Africa," 153-70), Louise Bethlehem
(Hebrew Univ.) discusses efforts to bring about reconciliation and unity in
post-apartheid South Africa. Empowered to grant immunity for crimes committed
under apartheid, as long as their perpetrators publically confessed them, the
TRC also gave voice to the victims of such crimes, in hopes that dispelling the
silence surrounding the period might heal the nation. Bethlehem masterfully
notes the strengths and weaknesses of such an approach. She points out that
during the public testimonies, the greatest boon to those testifying was their
assigned comforters, who silently aided and strengthened them during and after
their statements. Such silent aid was especially conspicuous in testimonies
about rape and molestation. Bethlehem's express purpose is to demonstrate that
telling one's story does not automatically ensure healing: "Silence itself can
be powerfully resonant, especially when it concerns the frail and vulnerable
human body" (170).
Conversely, in chapter 9 ("Facing History: Denial and the Turkish National
Security Concept," 173-80), Taner Akçam (Clark Univ.) calls for an end to
Turkey's formal silence about the events of 1915 and the dissolution of the
Ottoman Empire. He maintains that Turkey did immense damage to its very identity
and its people when it subsumed historical memory under issues of "national
security." He calls for an end to such silences as the only real avenue for
Turkey's entrance into the greater European society. It should be noted that
Bethlehem's essay is in many ways a counterbalance to Akçam's, and the reader
might better read them in reverse order.
The final two chapters investigate silences in the history of Israel. Chapter
10 ("Imposed Silences and Self-Censorship: Palmach Soldiers Remember 1948,"
181-96), by Efrat Ben-Ze'ev (Ruppin Acad. Ctr.), is the best essay in the
collection. The elite soldiers of the 1948 war perpetrated many heinous acts
during the conflict and would speak of them only with each other during an
annual meeting called the "Party of the First." Even the soldiers' families were
excluded until 1998, when a changed political environment and the reflection
that comes with old age induced the soldiers to let their families attend the
meeting, thus breaking the long-held silence.
While Ben-Ze'ev explores the personal use and dissolution of silence, in
chapter 11 ("Forgetting the Lebanon War? On Silence, Denial, and the Selective
Remembrance of the 'First' Lebanon War," 197-216), Asher Kaufman (Notre Dame)
treats the public memory of Israelis' actions during the "First" Lebanon War of
1982. Tracing both public memory and silence through the career of Ariel Sharon,
he elucidates how entire nations can drape widely known events in silence. Since
the Lebanon War did not fit into any of Israel's prevailing narratives, it was
simply ignored.
As a whole, Shadows of War offers fascinating case studies of the many
and varied ways silence serves society. While the essays are accessible to a
general audience, they will be most helpful to professional historians. Both
will appreciate the concise, valuable footnotes that do not overpower the text.
The work is certainly not without faults, however, notably in its poor
organization and sometimes tenuous links between chapters. Nonetheless, these
groundbreaking essays invite readers to rethink their understanding of memory,
denial, and healing after war. Military historians should read Shadows of War
for the light it sheds on the complicated and highly problematic uses of
silence.