The wounds of nations

Horror cinema, historical trauma and national identity

Linnie Blake

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719075940
• eBook ISBN: 9781847796851
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

The wounds of nations explores the ways in which horror films allows international audiences to deal with the horrors of recent history – from genocide to terrorist outrage, nuclear war to radical political change. Far from being mere escapism or titillation, it shows how horror (whether it be from 1970s America, 1980s Germany, post-Thatcherite Britain or post-9/11 America) is in fact a highly political and potentially therapeutic film genre that enables us to explore, and potentially recover from, the terrors of life in the real world.Exploring a wide range of stylistically distinctive and generically diverse film texts, Blake proffers a radical critique of the nation-state and the ideologies of identity it promulgates, showing that horror cinema can offer us a disturbing, yet perversely life affirming, means of working through the traumatic legacy of recent times.

PART I

German and Japanese horror: the traumatic legacy of the Second World War

Introduction

On 15 August 1945, shortly after the cataclysmic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Emperor Hirohito took to the radio waves to acknowledge in highly circumspect courtly language that the ‘war situation’ had developed ‘not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.’ In order to avoid what he termed ‘the total extinction of human civilisation,’ Hirohito proclaimed to a weeping public that Japan would have to ‘endure the unendurable and suffer the un-sufferable’ by accepting the nation’s unconditional surrender to Allied, specifically American, forces.¹ In subsequent months, twenty-five of Japan’s military leaders were tried for war crimes by the Military Tribunal of the Far East – seven were hanged while local military commissions condemned a further 920 war criminals to death and over 3,000 to prison.² But further trauma to Japanese self-image was to follow as, until 1952, Japan’s entire cultural tradition was subject to radical and enforced transformation at the hands of the American Occupation. Introducing a new constitution, the Americans revised the education system ‘with the aim of eliminating propaganda and the harmful nationalistic elements’³ that had initially led to the nation’s militarisation. Women were given the vote, the age of male suffrage was lowered to twenty, trade unions were allowed to develop while radical land reform led to a more equitable distribution of the nation’s agricultural resources. Thus the Japanese people, traumatised both by the catastrophic militarisation of their nation (that had led to the death of some four million combatant and civilian Japanese) and by an enforced refashioning of Japanese culture and society (in the image of American capitalist democracy) now undertook a frantic quest for Nihonjinron: or what it now meant to call oneself Japanese.⁴

Some months earlier, of course, Japan’s wartime ally Germany had itself conceded defeat, Germany also being subject to seismic alterations to its psycho-geographical and socio-cultural landscape as the nation was initially divided into zones differentially controlled by Allied forces and then partitioned into the Soviet-controlled communist East and the capitalist West, the economic recovery and socio-cultural rehabilitation of the latter being spearheaded once again by the United States, here under the auspices of the Marshall Plan. Thus Berlin, Germany’s capital and the site of Hitler’s ignominious suicide became home to the infamous Berlin Wall: the material and conceptual synecdoche for the Cold War between the superpowers that would dominate world politics for the next forty-five years. As the two halves of the nation struggled with its bifurcated identity, the wall thus became a site of trauma on which was inscribed the militarisation of Germany under Hitler, the horrors of the war years, the nation’s military defeat, the catastrophic hardship that followed in the wake of the war, the social and cultural dislocations engendered by partition and, ultimately, the traumatic re-unification of the nation in the wake of 1989’s collapse of the Soviet Union.

Japan too had its own material site of trauma, that being the city of Hiroshima, the original Ground Zero, whose bombing would become to the Japanese ‘the supreme symbol of the Pacific War,’ encapsulating ‘all the suffering of the Japanese people, a symbol of absolute evil, often compared to Auschwitz.’⁵ Thus, for unrepentant right-wing elements the A-bomb was the price Japan had paid for pursuing its territorial destiny in South Asia. For the Left it was a kind of ‘divine punishment for Japanese militarism’, providing the Japanese people with ‘the sacred duty, to sit in judgment of others, specifically the United States, whenever they show signs of sinning against the “Hiroshima spirit”’.⁶ Thus politically bifurcated, culturally dislocated and suffering from the ongoing psychological fallout of the war, modern Japan and modern Germany struggled into being. And although their political histories and cultural practices were very different, both countries would either encode the trauma of the war and subsequent struggles for a cohesive national identity in their popular culture or mark its occurrence in significant absences, slippages and silences that themselves stand as testimony to the existence of un-addressed and hence unassimilated horrific events in each nation’s past.

In the immediate post-war period in Japan, then, a pervasive sense of outraged victimhood could be seen in the popularity of A-bomb films, such as Hiroshima (1953) and Black River (1969), the first insisting on Japan’s victim status in its depiction of American tourists buying as souvenirs the bones of the Japanese dead, the latter advocating vengeance in the form of a radiation victim turned syphilitic prostitute whose chosen clients are American GIs. Clearly there were unresolved issues here. But if America’s nuclear assaults on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had allowed Japan to stake a legitimate claim for victim status, and in so doing attempted to nullify the outrages perpetrated at the hands of nationalistic Japanese militarism, Germany had no such opportunity to evade responsibility for past misdeeds. For all its cities lay in ruins, for all its population starved in the streets, the revelation of the Nazis’ systematic genocide of millions of Jews, communists, homosexuals, gypsies and disabled people nullified not only any claims to victim status, but called into question the German people’s right to inclusion in the international community of nations. Hitler’s Endlosüng (or Final Solution), it was revealed, had not only demanded the compliance of the now defunct Nazi military machine, but the selfsame industrial giants that continued to dominate the economic landscape were shown to have competitively tendered for a share in the profits of genocide. Millions of German individuals, of course, had also gone about their daily lives regardless of the slaughter occurring on their doorsteps. So, while Japan sought to bind up the traumatic wounds of pre-war militarism and military defeat by conceptual recourse to the bombing of Hiroshima, there was little that could conceal or attempt to heal Germany’s psycho-social and politico-cultural injuries, for what it meant to call oneself a German had become inextricable from the industrialised and state-sponsored slaughter of millions. As Primo Levi put it, it was now impossible to establish how many people

could not not know about the frightful atrocities being committed, how many knew something but were in a position to pretend that they did not know, and, further, how many had the possibility of knowing everything but chose the more prudent path of keeping their eyes and ears (and above all their mouths) well shut.⁷

If the traumatised survivors of the Nazi genocide had become, in Cathy Caruth’s formulation, ‘the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess,’⁸ repeatedly suffering from the events they had survived while endlessly witnessing (from the site of trauma) that trauma’s rational impossibility, then those complicit in such impossible events were themselves traumatised by deeds they dare not own. For as Dominick LaCapra has argued, ‘perpetrator trauma’ not only exists but must be worked through ‘if perpetrators are to distance themselves from an earlier implication in deadly ideologies and practices.’⁹

The problem was, of course, the steadfast refusal of elements of the Japanese and German nations to claim ownership, and hence responsibility, for the horrors of the past. Thus, while Japan’s post-war devotion to peaceable business development would see it outstrip all countries bar the United States in terms of international economic might while domestically attaining ‘greater equality of income distribution than any other industrial economy’¹⁰ in the world, even the most cursory exploration of Japanese popular culture would seem to indicate a range of unresolved traumas relating to wartime events and post-war cultural transformation that themselves function as a means of concealing, though not healing, the wounds of the past. For a culture notionally driven by Wa, or awareness of the necessity of harmony between all elements of society, Japanese popular culture continues to be strikingly saturated with images of sexual violence whereby, as Ian Buruma has outlined at length:

photographs of nude women trussed up in ropes appear regularly in mass circulation newspapers; torture scenes are common on television, even in children’s programmes; glossy, poster-sized pictures of naked pre-pubescent girls are on display in the main shopping-streets; [and] sado-masochistic pornography is perused quite openly by a large number of men on their way to work on the subway.¹¹

Such barely-repressed violence, sitting so uneasily alongside the official values and cultural practices of Japanese society, would be echoed in the profound silence regarding the Holocaust that characterised German popular culture until the 1970s when the New German Cinema set about articulating Die Unbewaltigte Vergangenheit, or the prematurely silenced and highly traumatic past. Lacking external investment and hence the opportunity to attract an international audience, German cinema of the post-war years had confined itself to popular nativist genres – Heimatfilmes, for example, focusing on community and familial life in rural Germany, and adventure films based on popular German novels offering a slice of derring-do while historical films set in Imperial Austria allowed for a little escapism, even as romantic adventures and comedies set in picturesque locations provided undemanding amusement. What was not mentioned were the events of wartime: specifically the complicity of the German people in the genocide of millions. Not until the 1960s did things change as the Young German Cinema, later the New German Cinema, addressed the Hitler years – not ‘from above’ but as lived reality. With the 1970s emergence of films like Syberberg’s highly theatrical Hitler – A Film From Germany (1977), Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), Kluge’s The Patriot (1979) and Edgar Reitz’s sixteen-hour television documentary Heimat (1984) an identifiably German cinema could be seen to emerge; one that operated in dialogue with the ways in which other nations had represented the German past. But for all these films sought to evoke the horrors of that past, often through witness testimony, the disgusting viscerality of the Shoah’s annihilation of millions was not a subject for graphic depiction. And this is where horror cinema can be seen to fulfil a significant socio-cultural and psycho-political function.

As argued in the Introduction to this study, critical engagement with a nation’s horror cinema offers a significant means of not only grappling with the traumatic past and in so doing measuring the effects of social, political and cultural transformation of the nation on its citizens, but of exposing the layers of obfuscation, denial or revisionism with which those wounds are dressed in service of dominant ideologies of national identity. Accordingly Chapter 1 explores the ways in which the generic conventions of body horror, which by its very definition has the capacity to disgust and outrage audiences, allows for a powerful and potentially cathartic engagement with otherwise unrepresentable aspects of the German past. And that Buttgereit’s films should have been subject to the most radical acts of state censorship in Germany since the Second World War bespeaks not only of the ongoing trauma of Germany’s prematurely bound and hence unhealed historical wounds but of the cultural significance of this little-known cult film director. He finds a place in this study of predominantly mainstream horror cinema not only because the distinction, in Germany of this period, is considerably more permeable than is usually the case, but because of Buttgereit’s own determination to peel back the bindings of the nation’s wounds. Thus revelling in the dark irrationality of the Romantic tradition that had informed German Expressionism before him, Buttgereit sets out to address the trauma of the past by an insistent looking upon the dead and what may or may not be done with them, remembering the past and the possibility of remembering otherwise. It is a mode of film making that in all its viscerality forces the audience to look at that which they would rather avoid, offering a counter-memory to Nazi cinema’s elision of its own bloody deeds and a representation of human desire that rejects the power dynamics of heterosexual pornography and slasher-horror alike.

Chapter 2 is similarly concerned with a range of post-war anxieties, here specifically Japanese. It argues that these were engendered initially by the militarisation of the nation, subsequently by its wartime defeat, by its social, political and cultural Americanisation and by Japanese reactions to that process. Focusing on the onryou, a narrative of supernatural female vengeance, the generic conventions of which stretch back to the oral tradition of popular storytelling, it explores how this horrific sub-genre allows for a decoding of traumatic memories that continue to fester in post-war Japanese culture, despite the bindings of American-style democracy. In the awareness of the cultural hybridity of the highly Americanised Japan, and of the Japanese people’s self-appointed mission to monitor American contraventions of the ‘Hiroshima spirit’ therefore, the consideration of wartime trauma is extended to Gore Verbinski’s recent Hollywood adaptation of Nakata Hideo’s Ringu, examining how the onryou’s generic conventions allow for an ongoing exploration of the perils of militarism in the neo-imperialistic American present; how the massive trauma of the Japanese engendered by Hiroshima may provide, as its survivors hoped, a lesson to the world about the evils of military ambition, the horrors of war and premature post-traumatic reaffirmations of ideologically dominant conceptions of national identity.

Notes

1 R.J.C. Butow, Japan’s Decision to Surrender (Stanford: University of California Press, 1954), p. 248.

2 Paul Johnson, A History of the Modern World from 1917 to the 1990s (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991), p. 428.

3 Joy Hendry, Understanding Japanese Society (Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies Series, London: Routledge, 1996), p. 17.

4 Johnson, History of the Modern World, p. 426.

5 Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 92.

6 Buruma, Wages of Guilt, p. 98.

7 Primo Levi, ‘The Drowned and the Saved,’ in Levi and Rothberg (eds), The Holocaust, p. 31.

8 Caruth, ‘Trauma and Experience,’ in Levi and Rothberg (eds), The Holocaust, p. 194.

9 Dominick LaCapra, ‘Trauma, Absence, Loss,’ in Levi and Rothberg (eds), The Holocaust, p. 200.

10 Johnson, History of the Modern World, p. 734.

11 Ian Buruma, A Japanese Mirror: Heroes and Villains of Japanese Culture (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 220.

1

The horror of the Nazi past in the reunification present: Jörg Buttgereit’s Nekromantiks

We are separated from yesterday not by a yawning abyss, but by the same situation. (Camus)

Everyone bears the guilt for everything, but if everyone knew that, we would have paradise on earth. (Dostoyevsky)

These two epigraphs, from the opening and closing titles of Yesterday Girl (1966), Alexander Kluge’s pioneering work of Young German Cinema, provide an entirely apposite introduction to the concerns of this book; for here I will explore two recent works of experimental, historically grounded and hence political German films that effectively encapsulate my conceptual and critical agenda. They are Jörg Buttgereit’s Nekromantik and Nekromantik 2. For although Buttergereit’s much-banned necro-porn horrors have been frequently dismissed as little more than ‘disappointingly witless’ and ‘morbidly tit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: traumatic events and international horror cinema
• Part I German and Japanese horror: the traumatic legacy of the Second World War
• Part II The traumatised 1970s and the threat of apocalypse now
• Part III From Vietnam to 9/11: the Orientalist other and the American poor white
• Part IV New Labour new horrors: the post-Thatcherite crisis of British masculinity
• Conclusion: horror cinema and traumatic events
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index