Long Shadows
Truth, Lies and History
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Publisher Description
How do nations reinvent themselves after cataclysmic events? Who gets to decide what happened yesterday, then to propagate the tale, and what are the consequences of their choices? These are some of the questions author and historian Erna Paris carried with her through the United States, with its long-buried memory of slavery; to South Africa, to sit in on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's attempts to heal the divisions of apartheid; to Japan, France and Germany and the unresolved pain of Hiroshima and the Holocaust; and to the former Yugoslavia where she exposes the cynical shaping of historical memory, and the way the world community responded to the lethal outcome of that half-imagined history.
Combining gripping storytelling with insight and sharp observation, Paris takes us to the places of reckoning—be they courtrooms or concentration camps—and finds hope in the way ordinary people grapple with the defining events of their lives. Evocatively written, her journey illuminates a crucial subject that straddles the 20th and 21st centuries.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Paris makes an argument that psychologists and anyone who's spent any time on the couch will recognize: countries must confront painful historical episodes in order to resolve them. After completing several books on the aftermath of the Holocaust, including Unhealed Wounds, about the trial of Klaus Barbie, head of the Gestapo in Lyons, the author visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1996, engendering her interest in the worldwide phenomenon of national tragedy, collective memory and its frequent partner in crime, national amnesia. She covers Japan's reckoning with its WWII atrocities, the burgeoning debate over slavery reparations in the U.S., South Africa's post-apartheid reconciliation process and the recent violence in post-Communist Yugoslavia; the Holocaust's legacy comprises the largest section. Paris, a Canadian Jew, offers no easy answers as she examines how "the past is managed to suit the perception of our present needs. The question is, Whose perception and whose needs?" Focusing on the victims and their heirs as well as on the perpetrators and theirs, she explores, among other things, the psychology of shame, guilt, power and disenfranchisement. Paris too often repeats her point that history is "unmasterable," the book's only shortcoming. But after attending trials and interviewing survivors of atrocities around the world, Paris concludes that the painful process of justice is necessary. Otherwise, as in Japan, where the confrontation has been haphazard at best, "Pandora's untamed Furies have been known to wait, forever if necessary, for their next release."
