Review of “1960”

Review of 1960 by Rob Baxter:

Al Filreis’s 1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern, is a compendium of the belated responses of fiction, poetry, history, painting, sculpture, film television and every medium of art and communication to the language defying incomprehensible horror visited on mankind from 1933 to 1945. The Nazis came to power in Germany only fifteen years after a four-year war that resulted in more than ten million deaths, however World War I, viewed by many as a clash of European empires crashing under their own weight, did not have a Holocaust leaving six million people deliberately and methodically slaughtered for reasons of religion and ethnicity: it did not have massive aerial bombardment; and it did not end with atomic weapons. World War II and its proceeding decade left language unable to cope. As an example, Filreis explains that William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, although heavily praised as a masterpiece of extended journalism and history at its finest, employed a Sgt. Joe Friday just the facts mode of linear narration that almost completely failed to deal with the sociological and psychological challenges that needed to be overcom

e to answer the requirements of a new historical method. Referring to George Steiner’s “project of the language of survival” Filreis writes, ” These words and modes would need to be employed within a greater idea of postwar narration finally aware of itself as commensurately discontinuous doubtful and still bereft, its very “I” an ongoing problem.”

Narration finally aware of its limits. Commensurately discontinuous: the linear mode of Shirer and others is simply inadequate to recount barbarism and evil on such a grand scale Doubtful: a form of narration aware of its own possible inadequacies as it lurches toward understanding. a narration that probes, that does not seek final interpretations.

Why 1960? Why fifteen years belated from the dramatic military victories that ended the war in Europe and the Pacific? There were many reasons for the delayed responses not the least of which were: the multiple ways that survivors coped with the Holocaust and the deep psychological scars of victims and witnesses; the very nature of witnessing and remembering; the rise of a savage right-wing in the United States that sought everywhere for communists during and after the Korean War; and the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann which opened the gate to examining horror at its most basic level.

Throughout the book Filreis leads us to the new language (Chapter 7 is titled “Disaster Defies Utterance: Arts of the Unsayable”) through the work of Paul Celan, George Steiner, Hannah Arendt, Ingeborg Bachmann, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, Albert Camus, Rod Serling, Louis Zukofsky, Amiri Baraka, Chinua Achebe, and W.H. Auden. Certitude is gone. Passages into understanding are opened.

This is a book that had to be written. The old narrative line cannot cope with the modern world and language being made over. Al Filreis’s 1960 is a guidepost that will start serious conversations and inspire the scholarship needed to examine what we have lost and how we have changed.