JEFFOVERSIn 2017 – shortly before Remembrance
Day, 11 November (known in the United
States as Veterans Day) – the Guardian
columnist Simon Jenkins called for an
alternative: “a Forgetting Day, a Move On
Day, a Fresh Start Day”. Unsurprisingly,
his proposal fell on deaf ears.
Eighty years on, most countries
involved in the Second World War remain
fixated by this particular conflict – especially the United
States. It is taught extensively in A merican high schools.
Many museums across the US are devoted to it, while many
more allocate it generous space in their displays. Each year,
thousands of new studies are published on the subject, while
novelists continue to choose it as a historical backdrop.
But it is on screen that the scale of America’s obsession
with the Second World War becomes clear. Aside from
the large number of television dramas and documentaries
produced each year, there are now so many feature films on
the subject – most of them American-made – that the full
list spans multiple Wikipedia pages. And this is not about to
change. After tailing off in the late 20th century, the number
of films about the Second World War produced each year is
climbing again.
Why can’t the US escape the grip of the Second World
War? Mainly because of the way this story is told. The
American narrative is not only heroic – the country strides in
to rescue Britain, arm Russia and liberate Europe – it is also
satisfying, with justice meted out to the Japanese in response
to the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941.
In addition, this conflict seems to be imbued with Manichean
clarity. Unlike modern-day wars on drugs or terror, there is
no ambiguity about where or who the bad guys are, and when
or how the conflict ends.
In our more fractured Trumpian age, perhaps the over-
whelming allure of the Second World War is that it allows us
to remember a time when millions of Americans set aside their
political differences and came together as one.Henry Hemming is an author specialising in history and spying.
His new book is Our Man in New York: The British Plot to Bring America
into the Second World War (Quercus, 2019)UNITED STATE S“The American narrative is
heroic – the country strides
in to rescue Britain, arm
Russia and liberate Europe
- and satisfying”
Henry Hemming
Rebecca Clifford is associate professor of modern history at Swansea
University. Her new book, Orphans of the Storm: Children After
the Holocaust, will be published by Yale University Press in 2020The Second World War continues to
resonate widely today – and perhaps
the most intensely examined subject
is the Holocaust. In novels and films,
in memorials and in the classroom,
we constantly encounter its history
and memory. Only a rare person in
21st-century Britain could be unaware
of the basic details of the attempt, by
the Nazis and their collaborators, to annihilate Europe’s
Jewish populations during the Second World War.
However, this was not always the case. In fact, the term
‘Holocaust’ (as we use it now) entered common parlance
only in the 1970s, and the widespread commemoration of
the Holocaust, which is now part of the fabric of contempo-
rary Western societies, developed in the 1990s.
It was the specific context of the end of the Cold War that
led to this shift. During the Cold War, when Western coun-
tries were locked into an alliance against the Soviet bloc, it
was politically difficult to have a public discussion about war-
era crimes against humanity, because Germany was a key ally.
This changed as the Cold War ended after the fall of the
Berlin Wall in 1989, and the crimes against civilian popu-
lations that were one of the hallmarks of the Second World
War entered powerfully into public discourse.
The 1990s was a key decade in terms of the public mem-
ory of the Holocaust, but that was nearly 30 years ago. Why,
then, do we continue to talk so much about the Holocaust?
The simple answer is that the genocide of Europe’s Jews has
enormous contemporary resonance.
Over the past t wo years, we have seen the return of popu-
list politics globally, often accompanied by xenophobia, rac-
ism and a general rise in intolerance against ethnic minority
groups. At the same time, we have seen that anti-Semitism
remains very much alive on both the extreme right and the
extreme left – and as long as that is the case, we will fail to
escape the grip of the Second World War. We are all too
aware of where such ideas end.
THE HOLOCAUST“We continue to talk about
the Holocaust because
the genocide of Europe’s
Jews has enormous
contemporary resonance”
Rebecca Clifford