Introduction: Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity

The introduction addresses the ‘modernity’ of Antonioni’s 1960s films in the context of the proliferation of the mass image in postwar culture on the one hand, and aesthetic and art-historical debates about medium specificity, and ‘purity’, on the other.

Victory over the Revolution

This chapter analyzes how the poetry from the first year after the war, the theme of the Leningrad blockade, and the postwar films about the war have passed into postwar culture. It recounts the Soviet nation's transition to normalcy after being scorched by revolutions and civil war, the ravages of collectivization and accelerated urbanization, and the Great Terror and the horrors of war. It also reviews the urgent task of the Soviet regime to refashion the past into a “usable past,” in which a new basis of legitimacy had to be forged and a definitive shaping of the new Soviet nation had to take place. The chapter explains how Stalinism repudiated the formula of Mikhail Pokrovskii that history is politics projected into the past. It also points out how the content of historicism determined by Joseph Stalin compliments current political goals.

The Pícaro at War: Vernacular Language and Violent Conflict in Grimmelshausen and Saro-Wiwa

This essay compares Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus (1669) and Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy (1985), approaching them as picaresque war novels that tell the story of a vernacular language becoming literary through brutal war. Despite differences of language, nation, and time, the novels of Grimmelshausen and Saro-Wiwa share a structural similarity traceable to their respective postwar contexts. These novels rewrite the expected relation between war and language. Instead of privileging the damage done to speech, they authorize a spoken language through the medium of a highly mobile rogue protagonist. Grimmelshausen and Saro-Wiwa contend with the question of whether a language, lacking the official status guaranteed by a sovereign state, is strong enough to constitute and represent a territory divided by civil war. In their works, war tears apart a territory and lays the foundation for its autonomous postwar culture all at once.

THE THIRTY YEARS’ CRISIS: ANXIETY AND FEAR IN THE MID-CENTURY UNITED STATES

In 1952, Bill Gaines, the entrepreneurial comic book publisher, embarked on a new venture. He had already made a name for himself by introducing the “horror” comics (Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Terror) that had rapidly acquired an eager readership. Those titles summoned up repressed aspects of postwar culture, reveling in sadism, sexual infidelity, and grisly torture. But the id knows many pathways, and in 1952 Gaines launched a humor magazine called Mad. The title was a celebration of unreason. As its icon, Mad boasted Alfred E. Neuman, a grinning half-wit who lived by the mantra, “What, me worry?”

Ruins and Fragments: Air War's Mnemonic Architectures

Revolving around Arne Schmitt’s photo series "Bunkererfahrung/ Bunker Experience" (2013), the essay engages with two discourses: 1) theoretical and artistic positions treating the bunker as a mnemonic space of war and modernism, including works by Paul Virilio, Magdalena Jetelová, Jane and Louise Wilson, and Robert Kusmirowski; and 2) debates about the air war and the role it played within West German postwar culture, initiated by W.G. Sebald, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge. Schmitt’s bunker series ties into these debates, as it makes a visual argument for the return of the bunker in the concrete structures of postwar modernism. It is hence not focusing on the space of the bunker itself but on its afterimage. By doing so, Schmitt not only examines the experience of war through the lens of the postwar but also suggests that we can access the trauma of the air war through that which has taken its place.