The War Complex: World War II in Our Time

As a long-time admirer of Marianna Torgovnick's work, I am very happy with the Duke professor's latest intellectual work. Torgovnick has the gift of exposing how what we assume to be true can manipulate us ("Hidden in Plain Sight"). We all think we know World War II -- the "good" war that has become more important as the U.S, has made some questionable choices internationally over the last few decades. Torgovnick has been digging below the surface for the last few decades now, and her latest attempt just might be her best so far, although her many admirers will, I believe, want more in the future.

This is a penetrating, important book, simultaneously accessible and learned, about the troubling place of the Second World War in American culture.

THE WAR COMPLEX is a wonderful book--disturbing and illuminating, historicallly rich and politically timely. It begins with a startling and sweeping observation: the history of the twentieth century is a history of almost continuous war; "modernity" is virtually always "wartime"; and the accelerated violence of World War II, directed against military and civilian populations alike, is the centerpiece of our shared past. To understand the modern mind, then, we have to understand how it has been transformed by exposure to mass killing. We have to remember not only the storming of beaches and the liberation of capitals, but also the concentration camps, the firebombing of homes, the eradication of whole cities by atomic bombs. One problem, of course, is that we remember World War II too much. It is invoked, for instance, as a justification for more war, as when politicians and media depicted 9/11 as a repetition of Pearl Harbor--at attack on America that demanded an old-fashioned, full-scale military response. Violence, experienced and remembered, begets violence. This is a symptom of what Torgovnick cals "wartime consciousness": overexposed to mass death, we organize the world according to antagonisms. It's always "us against them." Torgovnick's daring and imaginative undertaking, in THE WAR COMPLEX, is to try to think her way through and out of "wartime consciousness." Some hawks and dullards will complain that the book is too personal, too meditative, that it turns to the imagination and the study of art when war is a matter of politics, when mass death is a matter of statistics. They will miss the point. When wartime is all the time, when our societies and our minds are built to be combat-ready, moving beyond these dominant patterns requires some unorthodox thinking. Therefore THE WAR COMPLEX considers, for example, "the kind of imaginative projections that novels can provide, their opening up of a space based on social realities, but not determined by them." And therefore, in her unconventional book--moving elegantly among the spheres of history and psychology, politics and the arts--Torgovnick adopts a personal, sometimes even confessional mode of writing. It's the opposite of self-indulgence. It's an effort to discover some grounds of "identification," some pattern of human connection beyond wartime.

World War II holds a unique place of privilege in the American, and Allied, historical imagination. It was the war of the greatest generation; the uncontroversial war, the just war; the last war when good and evil were clearly delineated in the minds of Americans. World War II is the shorthand reference used to evoke moral high ground and uncomplicated patriotism. History is written by the victors, as the adage goes, with all that implies of selectivity of memory. Which history, and which war, one chooses to invoke, is a matter of politics. For instance, before the American invasion of Iraq in 2002, both opponents and proponents resorted to analogies to earlier conflicts to serve their argument. For opponents, the specter of the quagmire of Vietnam was raised, with its searing images of civilian suffering. For proponents, WWII was relentlessly presented as the glorious model, with Pearl Harbor and Munich the ready references. But the legacy of World War II may not be as uncomplicated or as controversial as we choose to remember it in America and much of Western Europe. In "The War Complex", Duke professor Marianna Torgovnick explores the images of D-Day, the media spectacle of the Eichmann trial, the emotional legacy of the Holocaust, Hiroshima and the A-bomb, to discover how the selective process of memory still shapes our picture of the conflict and of subsequent conflicts, including the response to September 11th. Torgovnik examines the narratives of D-Day, and how they played into the image that Americans want to see of themselves: "good versus evil, American multiculturalism (within limits, since racial segregation was still in place) versus the homogenous racial Ûbermensch or `Jap,' citizen soldiers fighting a necessary war against the forces of totalitarianism, us versus them." She argues that our carefully constructed cultural memory of war, and the cumulative state of mind called wartime consciousness, persisted well beyond the end of hostilities right through the Cold War and remained ready to be reanimated after September 11. "The war on terrorism...promises an indefinite prolongation of wartime states of mind. That prolongation suggests one strong reason why you should read this book. `The War Complex' probes the cost of sustained wartime consciousness on a society and a culture, which are more than military." That is only one argument for the relevance and timeliness of this insightful, wide-ranging study that balances solid scholarship with lively, accessible writing. Torgovnik brilliantly combines history, psychology of war, memoir, and imaginative literature, to expose the construction of the war complex and to imagine a way out based on an ethics of identification