All americans. Watch the commute caters, monday at it 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan two. Watch the communicators, monday, at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan two. Author ran zwigenberg talked about how people remember world war ii and examined the accounts from the survivors of hiroshima, nagasaki, and the holocaust. This interview was recorded at the annual American Historical Association meeting. York isng us from new ran zwigenberg a professor of asian and jewish studies at penn state. The author of hiroshima and the global origins of memory. Thank you for joining us on cspans American History tv. Thank you for having me. You look at the two significant impacts upward or two, the holocaust and its impact on jews around the world and of course the bombings and reshma and nagasaki which ended the war in 1945. Has your research shown . My research now is on the psychiatric reaction, direction of the psychiatric establishment and that dealt with communities of survivors both in hiroshima and nagasaki and in the case of the holocaust. My first book on hiroshima talks about memory culture, the politics of memory that surround those two places and my first look at one chapter of that a psychiatrist who came to hiroshima and worked with hiroshima survivors and laser later also connected to people with holocaust survivors. My Current Research takes this chapter and expands it into a book project that we should look both the preand posthistory of this, both how people dealt with psychiatric establishment, psychologists, care workers and others dealt with the aftermath in hiroshima and nagasaki and also the aftermath in the space. In europe, in israel and United States and other places. Im looking from a comparative of robertlso because j lipton and communication between psychiatrists we can also look at the entanglement or connection between the histories of the world played. The 75this earmarking anniversary of the liberation of concentration camp in poland and germany in 1945, and the bombings in japan in august of 1945. 75 years later, what has your research told you about these events and how we remember and what we can learn from them . Dr. Zwigenberg the first thing you see, and i say it to my students, is there remember it differently as we go through the 75 years. Both how people related to those events and how people remember them, even individuals remember them if really across places, across cultures. Political camps and also across time. The change. In the beginning if we concentrate only on one aspect of the survivors. In the beginning, the very word survivor we use has a positive undertone of having overcome a great challenge, of having managed to deal with this challenge. But in the beginning they were not looking at it that positively. Take the case of israel, for example, and holocaust survivors. People do not want to talk about what happened. People were even ashamed of the fact that they do not fight back. That they were in the camps. They did not want to talk about the expense of the camps. Most people were silent publicly. They did not want to talk about the experience of the camps. Publicly people do not wish to talk about it. The same thing for the survivors that came to the United States that wanted to focus on rebuilding their lives and wanted to be integrated in the 1950s america and did not want to bring the experience from the old country into the u. S. So a very different beginning. Only after the 1960s and the holocaust case to people Start Talking about it more and it is the same in hiroshima. Hiroshima and nagasaki survivors did not talk and did not want to talk and would not talk publicly because there was american censorship that do not allow in most cases to talk about it. And again only later on post1955, 1960, people Start Talking about it and what we now call bearing testimony. This process by which people start to talk is part of the way people move from being victims to survivors and what we understand now. Do you think that was the case that people do not want to talk about it . If you expand it to people who served in world war ii, the greatest generation, they also refrain from discussing what they saw or what they witnessed. Why . Dr. Zwigenberg because our expenses are very much, and how we amend remember how we remember and frame our society our memories are framed by society around us. If you just talk about veterans that came back from world war ii, actually the u. S. Army, i will talk about my own research. About psychological trauma. The u. S. Army was one of the best armies in terms of dealing with shortterm mental stress and mental impact on soldiers. Talking it comes to about the longterm that is where we have a problem because the v. A. Did not knowledge longterm damage. And also people came back and they were treated like heroes. They wanted to see themselves as war heroes. They did not want to see the cells as tormented they do not want to see themselves as tormented, as having suffered. They wanted to think about the whole thing as a positive experience that made them into the man they are. People do not want to talk about the huge problems with alcoholism or spouse abuse. And psychiatrists did not know how to deal with this. Psychiatrists, one of the things the literature talks about is when they could not, when veterans and it some cases could not adjust to postwar society the blame was put not on the veterans but on the women around them. They do not nurse them. It is has a name for it. The 1950s. If you suffered you were not man enough. Is something this that prevented people from talking. Up until vietnam even. Become such ad common word in our vocabularies, posttraumatic stress syndrome . Intowigenberg ptsd came the psychiatric manual, the dsm three, manual of the American Psychiatric association in 1980. The recent in historical terms. Up until 1980 there was no, generally speaking, was no acknowledgment by the psychiatric establishment of the effective ptsd. Only after 1980, the activist , this had become more acknowledged that this is part of a broader, cultural shift in the u. S. And other places. It enabled us to talk more about the suffering of soldiers during war. Vietnam had a big part of it. Thisin the insertion of clinical term into the manual. And the ability of people to talk about it. Lipton and robert j other psychiatrists come activist who worked with veterans against the war in new york city and other places, are very much responsible for the insertion of this into our culture. What my research looks at, the prehistory, and how much hiroshima and the holocaust were a very big part of this story. Because usually when people talk about it they talk about ptsd connecting to shell shock. Connecting to a whole history of trauma that mostly dealt with a context of military history. But i look mostly at civilians and the citizens, they had much less resources. And they faced a much more uphill battle in getting acknowledgment for suffering and treatment for suffering. This is were Mice Research comes. And again, to very different events but very significant events but very significant event in World War Two. The span of years, four or five years of the horror of the concentration camps under hitlers germany, and president trumans decision to bomb hiroshima and nagasaki to end the war in japan. The survivors of these two traumatic instances, how did they differ between how the jewish people. With that versus those in japan . Dr. Zwigenberg i hesitate to talk about the jewish people as a whole because there are so many differ communities that dealt with us. And the reaction israel is different than the reaction in the u. S. And in europe. Generally speaking, there is more openness to talk about it within communities and the jewish example. There is much less openness to talk about it in the japanese case. Even within communities. Even with Community Organizations and care organizations. It is not that no one talks about it. There is talk within the communities, but not to the same extent. What i would concentrate on and what surprised me is how similar they are. In both cases and how, for exam, one thing people do not want to do both cases is to get the mentalof having been a having sustained mental damage. Sufferingame their through physical elements. Ailments. This is also true of the medical establishment that looks for physical or somatic symptoms. Think about ptsd, at the time there was no social acknowledgment of this as something which was legitimate. It was not a legitimate kind of suffering. And a big part of it, very big difference is the fact that there was no Compensation Scheme set up in the hiroshima case. Compensatedtate jewish victims the germans the americans were not to come in session and did not see it as something they should do. If you dont have the compensation, if you do not have the institutional incentive for people to come forward at a talk suffering, and try to also put it into medical very much a is reluctance from a survivor point of view to come forward and to tell doctors, listen, i have this and this and this. Something you have in both cases, and the japanese and the jewish case there is a disease called bood up vio, similar to the gulf war syndrome. Doctors cannot figure out what it is. They cannot figure it out. People were completely healthy. That they could not get up. They do not have any energy. They were depressed. Believedoctors did not the victims. In this case, and this was similar things in the jewish case and in both cases, people actually looked into more physical illness more quote unquote serious physical onus. It is not a monolithic group and each condition is separate. Dr. Zwigenberg there is the model what im looking at is how this model was created. And how robert j lipton shut down other people on the battle line and others actually looked at those very disparate communities and how it came to create a certain model. A clinical model based on western medicine. The model of ptsd. That is come from observation of those people in the case of lipton and hiroshima. Veterans, holocaust survivors, coming together to have what we know call the model of peach sd. It is a very western model. It was of ptsd. It was important at the time to talk about how maybe we need to step back from this clinical western model and look at how it did its work, but maybe we have to look at how cultural, the specific ways to deal with trauma. Are much more appropriate. What we do now, as we go to the communities, for exam communities devastated by the tsunami in japan in 2013, we sent Mental Health professionals , western Health Professionals to talk with japanese patients that may be do not have the same mechanism to deal with what we know would call trauma. Maybe they need a different way to deal with that, much more culturally specific. What we do now is knock at the same result. Nowi will what we do just not get the same result. By journalist Ethan Walters called crazy like us about says how we export our categories, we meaning americans america. About a i will talk case of depression in japan. Depression in japan up until a couple years ago was not considered to be a clinical situation. Very extreme cases of depression were clinical. But it was not some thing you deal with by taking pills. However American Pharmaceutical Companies wanted to open up japan as a market. So they started this pr campaign talking about depression as some hold of the heart. They created this disease in order to export the pharmaceutical products to deal with it. And people start thinking about it and medical way. You can say this is culturally insensitive. When i teach at i say wait a second, to pan also has a big problem with suicide. A huge problem with suicide. So, maybe there is a place for it . But what we need is more sensitivity, i would say and more culturally specific, more negotiation between communities and doctors and how we do with this what is busily a western model in a nonwestern circumstance. And those who served in World War Two now in their 90s so we are rapidly losing the greatest generation. But has the memory of world war ii 75 years later, has the global memory changed or or involved . Or evolved . Dr. Zwigenberg im going to be part of events next year commemorating 75 years of history. I also will give lectures and military museums and other places. I have been giving thought to this. To we now understand the war be a much more complex thing then we saw the first 50 or 60 years. How it was a good war in general. We were fighting the nazis. And the japanese empire. But there was also a lot to think about the heritage for the postwar in terms of terror bombing, this is a necessity of the bomb. The atrocity of 19 any five would not antifor a five would not happen to the same extent today. Theres more understanding by military personnel. And the real warfare the u. S. Conducted peer you can just speak about the u. S. Case. On the other hand, if i look at develop it in japan, much less understanding now of the horrible things the japanese did in asia and to western p. O. W. s and others that there was before. Theres a right wing shift there as there is in other places were people are complaining they are tired of apologizing. So there progress in some cases. An retreat in others. There is more understanding overall of the complexities of what happened. And the memory is less glorified and more nuanced. The book hiroshima the , origins of global memory culture in our conversation with ran zwigenberg a of asian and jewish studies at penn state. Thank you for being with us. Thank you forg inviting me. Youre watching American History tv covering history cspan style. Account,ered, i went archival films, lectures and College Classrooms and visits to museums and historic places. All weekend, every weekend, on cspan3. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] tonight at 9 00 eastern on afterwards pulitzer prizewinning journalist Nicholas Kristof and sheryl we don report on issues facing the working class in Rural America in the book, tight rope, they are interviewed by organ democratic senator oregon aquatic senator jeff merkley. Many people in small towns and Rural America, people are walking on a tight rope. One missed and they fall. There is no safety net. Over the last 50 years we have vastly overdone it. We have become obsessed with this personal responsys latina narrative, blaming the people who fall off the tight rope. Personal responsibility narrative. Watch afterwards tonight at 9 00 eastern on book to be on cspan2. Tv,his is American History exploit our nations passed every weekend on cspan3. Past. Loring our nations 75 years ago we launched an invasion of it will jima. To the shores of iwo jima tells the story of the brutal 36 day battle in which nearly 7000 marines were killed. Felt in color by u. S. Service members and edited by warner bros. Studios, this documentary was nominated for an academy award. This film includes graphic scenes of war and death that may disturb some viewers. In 30 minutes, historians Stephen Broadwell explains why the revolutionary war hero Benedict Arnold betrayed the american cause. 340 40 p. M. Eastern, pacific, Smithsonian National air and Space Museum Curator Dorothy Cochran talks about the legends and legends of Amelia Earhart who set records. At 8 00 p. M. Eastern on the presidency historians talk about Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass on emancipation. That is coming up here on American History tv. This is the pacific as you know it. Why stretches of water. But this is the pacific as the joint chiefs of staff knew it. A battlefield. A vast
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