ABSTRACT
The post-war silence is related to mass urbicide and numbing after the camps are opened and to nuclear denial. The impact of air war and atomic bombing on Japanese and German memory culture is related to the nuclear age; living on the atomic grid as a context for modern memory. This is linked to the Mitscherlichs’ thesis An Inability to Mourn, and psychic numbing (Lifton) to silencing and denial in Germany, also to the prose of W. G. Sebald on city destruction, or the art of Anselm Kiefer. The writing of Terrence Des Pres, the photographs of Del Tredici and nuclear denial in the West, especially the USA, is discussed, as is the 1995 ‘Enola Gay’ exhibition cancellation at the Smithsonian Museum. A developing, and postnational, anti-war memory culture is linked to Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the Hiroshima Panels (art of the Marukis in Japan; image 7.1) and the threat of omnicide in such films as Peter Watkins’s The War Game and The Journey. On nuclear war, photography, films, poetry and prose are used to consider the longer-term cultural context beyond mass bombing of German cities and the memory of Nazi crimes, or August 1945.
