There is also a dramatic disparity between the extent of these atrocities, and our understanding of the bombings of British cities in the Second World War. The attacks on Coventry and London form one part of a kind of national folk memory – the ‘Blitz spirit’ has entered the language as testament to the indefatigability of the British people in the face of fascist assault. Yet we cannot see the fascism inherent in the firebombing of the Japanese capital city and its civilians. We rightly remember the dead of Coventry and the London Blitz, but – to put these bombings into some kind of historical context – 1,236 people were killed in raids on Coventry between August 1940 and August 1942, and 28,556 people were killed in the attacks on London between September 1940 and May 1941. A total casualty figure of just under 30,000 civilians killed by bombing over a two-year period – the same number killed in Hamburg on a single night.
And, five months later, how can we begin to describe Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Annihilation.
Japanese children, women and men, hundreds of thousands of them, vaporised by our side – supposedly fighting ‘the Good War’ against fascism. Still the most obscene act of terrorism ever committed – quite literally the creation of a state of terror for the people of those cities – dwarfing all that al-Qaeda and the ‘Islamic State’ have ever done. No warnings, no dropping of atomic bombs in remote areas as a demonstration of what could be done – but exploding two nuclear weapons on cities full of children, women and men, the vast majority of whom had little or no responsibility for the war the Japanese state was fighting; 140,000 human beings killed at Hiroshima, 80,000 killed at Nagasaki, and thousands more dying in subsequent years from injuries, radiation and birth defects caused by the two bombs.fn3 Ever since I first found out, as a child, about these crimes of state terrorism on an unimaginable scale, 6 and 9 August became oppressive shadows for me with every summer that passed. I don’t believe we as a society have begun to come to terms with the evil that was unleashed, in our names, on those two days in 1945.
Years before he became an artist, Joseph Beuys was a pilot in the Luftwaffe in the Second World War, flying many missions on the Eastern Front as a rear-gunner, and being shot down once, following which event (depending on who you believe) he was either saved by Tatar tribesmen who wrapped his body in fat and felt for twelve days, or retrieved by a German search party and taken to a military hospital. But, either way, the war left him wounded, both physically and emotionally. For the rest of his life he was driven by the need to address the violence of silence, especially relating to the permanent scar of the Holocaust, and Germany’s cultural death during Nazism, which had allowed all else to follow. Seeing Anselm Kiefer’s work recently at an exhibition in London I was struck once again by all he shares with his mentor Beuys – far beyond the remarkable textural qualities in both artists (the felt, fat and rusted metal in Beuys, the straw, ash and wire in Kiefer). They also shared a belief that Germany had had to create a new language and culture for itself, after the absolute dead end represented by Nazism – this sense of a culture which had completely self-destructed. He puts it like this in a 2011 interview:
The Germans have cut themselves off from half of their culture; they have disabled themselves.5 One thing is the Holocaust, the other is the amputation of oneself. All of the culture of the 1920s and 30s, in all its fields – theatre, philosophy, cinema, science, etc – disappeared.
Beuys, like Sebald and Kiefer, had enjoyed a seemingly peaceful childhood – growing up in the valley of the Rhine in Cleves, near the Dutch border. But, being a generation before Sebald, he had the misfortune to be old enough to participate in the war. Afterwards he suffered a series of breakdowns throughout the 1950s, the years of the German ‘economic miracle’, recuperating only slowly on a farm not far from his childhood home. He came to art as a way of dealing with his own wounds and fragility, but soon he realised the connection between his war-shattered self and Germany’s traumatised identity. He never bought the myth of renewal because he felt all was being built on foundations of amnesia. Many of the people who built the camps and ran the institutes of the Reich were still in power.
The first public art commission he put in for, in March 1958, was an international competition for a memorial at Auschwitz. I vividly recall seeing this piece, now arranged as a vitrine, in a museum in Darmstadt. In its conjunction of images – melted wax, a mummified rat, a tangle of rusted wire, electric rings, medicine phials – an essence of the insane terror of Auschwitz is transmitted. It remained, for him, the dark backing of the mirror in which all his subsequent work was reflected. In 1975 he created a piece – Show Your Wound – installed in a bleak concrete subway in Munich, consisting of mortuary trolleys and sinister-looking tools and medical equipment. It is not possible to look at these trolleys and implements without thinking of the Holocaust, the shadow that Beuys continually returned to. He knew this wound could never heal as long as people treated it as a finished episode in history, safely distanced from the present. He was haunted by the continuity of the Holocaust, in patterns of thought and behaviour:
The human condition is Auschwitz, and the principle of Auschwitz finds its perpetuation in our understanding of science and political systems, in the delegation of responsibility to groups of specialists and in the silence of intellectuals and artists.6 I have found myself in permanent struggle with this condition and its roots. I find that we are now experiencing Auschwitz in its contemporary character … Ability and creativity are burnt out, a form of spiritual execution takes place, a climate of fear is created – perhaps even more dangerous because it is so refined.
*
Some years ago I was watching TV in the early hours, aimlessly flicking from channel to channel, when I came across black-and-white images of what seemed to be some kind of massacre. There were shots of police attacking demonstrators, bloodied heads. I started listening to the men and women interviewed, speaking in French, and immediately started recording the programme (this was in the days of VHS, when I’d always have a blank tape on standby). I pieced together what they were saying. This event had happened on 17 October 1961, following a peaceful demonstration for Algerian independence, and, most shockingly, it had happened in the centre of Paris. I was disturbed that I’d never heard about it before. I was even more disturbed by what I learnt subsequently. The witnesses were describing being rounded up in the police headquarters on the Île de la Cité, close to Notre Dame Cathedral – the Paris police chief at this time was Maurice Papon, the former senior Vichy official and Nazi collaborator. These are the words of two of these witnesses, Idir Belkacem and Cherhabi Hachemi:
The courtyard was full of Algerians. We heard they were going to finish us off. The police told us: ‘It’s your last day on earth. Pray, because you won’t ever be seeing your family again. We brought you here to be eliminated pure and simple. Every single one of you.’ We were petrified. To protect ourselves we all huddled in the centre of the courtyard but the Algerians in the front rows fell like dead leaves.
They beat us with truncheons of a kind I’d never seen before. They had cords attached to the ends. They put the cords around people’s necks. They did it to me, but by reflex I had lowered my chin, and it stayed there [at this point Hachemi gestures to between his lower lip and chin]. Then they began to garrot people. I saw people losing consciousness. Their eyes bulged out and they lost consciousness.fn4