Hiroshima
The Origins of Global Memory Culture

An original and compelling new analysis of Hiroshima's place within the global development of Holocaust and World War II memory.

Ran Zwigenberg (Author)

9781107416598, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 25 February 2016

348 pages, 18 b/w illus.
23 x 15.4 x 1.8 cm, 0.51 kg

'This is an exciting topic, treated here with an impressive, unprecedented range and depth of research, as its purview extends from Hiroshima to Israel. The author's archival excavations include local newspapers carrying articles on the atomic bombing and personal interviews. He takes up topics from architecture to psychiatry in examining the sociocultural transformation in the construction of memory from 1945 to 1995. As all this should suggest, the book's main value is in its descriptive richness, the abundance and diversity of the information it presents.' Yuki Miyamoto, The Journal of Japanese Studies

In 1962, a Hiroshima peace delegation and an Auschwitz survivor's organization exchanged relics and testimonies, including the bones and ashes of Auschwitz victims. This symbolic encounter, in which the dead were literally conscripted in the service of the politics of the living, serves as a cornerstone of this volume, capturing how memory was utilized to rebuild and redefine a shattered world. This is a powerful study of the contentious history of remembrance and the commemoration of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima in the context of the global development of Holocaust and World War II memory. Emphasizing the importance of nuclear issues in the 1950s and 1960s, Zwigenberg traces the rise of global commemoration culture through the reconstruction of Hiroshima as a 'City of Bright Peace', memorials and museums, global tourism, developments in psychiatry, and the emergence of the figure of the survivor-witness and its consequences for global memory practices.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. 'The most modern city in the world': city planning, commemoration and atomic power in Hiroshima, 1945–55
2. Modernity's angst: survivors between shame and pride: 1945–60
3. Socialist bombs and peaceful atoms: exhibiting modernity and fighting for peace in Hiroshima, 1955–62
4. Healing a sick world: Robert Lifton, PTSD, and the psychiatric reassessment of survivors and trauma
5. The Hiroshima Auschwitz Peace March and the globalization of victimhood
6. A sacred ground for peace: violence, tourism and the sanctification of the Peace Park, 1963–75
7. Peeling the red apple: the Hiroshima Auschwitz Committee and the Hiroshima-Auschwitz museum, 1973–95
Conclusion: the other ground zero? Hiroshima, Auschwitz, 9.11 and the world between them
Index.

Subject Areas: Asian history [HBJF]