Memory: Wolfgang Schivelbusch's conceptually ambitious and historically subtle study of the "dreamland" of national mourning saves 9/11 for a brief and suggestive epilogue, where current catastrophes are set in the context of a century and a half of variously melancholic and elated myth-making, writes Brian Dillon
When, in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Centre, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen declared the attack "the greatest work of art ever produced by the devil", the general outrage was perhaps understandable; as if the prophet of sonic cacophony had merely, grotesquely, taken mass murder for a species of monstrous performance, as if real suffering and carnage had been instantaneously aestheticised into pure mythology. Yet surely Stockhausen's appalled critics had missed something crucial and considered in his apparently rash formulation; if 9/11 was, for its perpetrators, a symbolic act, it was also destined to become the contested locus of all manner of memorial struggles. Stockhausen's faintly demented aphorism had at least the virtue of admitting, at a little too early a juncture, where martial mythology has always sprung from - a perverse confluence of art and religion.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch's conceptually ambitious and historically subtle study of the "dreamland" of national mourning saves 9/11 for a brief and suggestive epilogue, where current catastrophes are set in the context of a century and a half of variously melancholic and elated myth-making. Military defeat, he argues, inspires a phantasmagoric array of collective imaginings, a baroque architecture of trompe-l'oeil memory which has never ceased to draw on the most archaic and unlikely emblems for its visions of grief and hope. Freud wrote that melancholia is primarily a matter of a misplaced and hallucinatory mourning, the fantasised memory of a lost object which never really existed. Vanquished nations grieve in the same fashion, conjuring a vast theatre of anachronistic precursors and untimely avatars whose job it is to make an unbearable present vanish into the mythic past.
A strangely uniform medievalism characterises every stage of the historical pageant Schivelbusch presents. In the wake of the Civil War, the American South may have cast about for historical antecedents in ancient Greece and the English Civil War (the image of the Confederate "cavalier" still lingers in the cliché of Southern gentility), but it found its most uncanny ancestral likeness in the fiction of Sir Walter Scott. While certainly exploiting the obvious parallels with Scotland (both territories hopelessly at odds with an infinitely more powerful neighbour), the South conceived of itself primarily in terms of Scott's medieval novels: the world of Ivanhoe recast as the fantasy of an inherently Southern chivalry and honour (even the medieval tournament was replayed in public spectacles of marksmanship). A veritable "Walter Scottland" replaces the real, devastated territory, just as France re-imagines itself according to the mythology of the Song of Roland after its defeat by Germany in 1871, and Germany in turn (via Wagner) appropriates for its self-image the hero of the Niebelungen, Siegfried. In the leap out of history into mythic time, the defeated nation discovers itself to be pursuing a wholly other course, a dream narrative which the supposed victor (relying on mere industrial and economic might) can never hope to match. Thus arises the strangest of Schivelbusch's many sedulously pursued paradoxes: military defeat is transformed into moral victory.
With that insight, a whole hideous - and occasionally ludicrous - dreamscape of sacrifice, atonement and redemption opens up, brazenly borrowing its iconography from Christianity. In France, the motif of a national wound (the loss of Alsace and Lorraine) becomes a grisly fetish for the collective unconscious, a weird conflation of the Republican and the Catholic: the "sacred heart" of France. There is, says Schivelbusch, a perverse euphoria in defeat; initial depression gives way to manic fantasies of blood-letting: the French army's massacre of the Communards, or the mad German plan to send the Kaiser himself to the front line in 1918, there to meet with his glorious, useless, messianic demise. At the other end of this anachronistic continuum, the dilapidated loser embraces the idea of a newly invigorated and futuristic national body: hence the peculiar obsession in post-first World War Germany with sporting prowess, and the proliferation of dance crazes.
For all Schivelbusch's careful diagnosis of the collective pathology of military defeat, his book's most vivid impression is of the odd psychological and cultural congruity of victor and vanquished. In 1871, a French journalist wrote patriotically of Germany: "nations tend to slip on the blood they have shed", a phenomenon already visible to the young Friedrich Nietzsche, who had spent part of the previous autumn tending the German wounded. The mature Nietzsche would later declare that Germany's victory had been won at the cost of its culture. The defeated nation's perception of its own cultural sovereignty over the victor may be a form of tortured wish-fulfilment, but its mirror image is military hubris. The consistent lesson of The Culture of Defeat must surely be that monuments to victory on foreign soil have a tendency, in retrospect, to look like open wounds in a nation's memory, reminders of a lasting defeat.
Brian Dillon is writing a book about private and public memory.
The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning and Recovery. By Wolfgang Schivelbusch, translated by Jefferson Chase, Granta, 403pp. £25