Confronting Memories of World War II: European and Asian Legacies ed. by Daniel Chirot, Gi-Wook Shin, and Daniel Sneider (review)

As the persistent “history wars” in contemporary East Asian politics continue to challenge peace in the region, scholars rightly bring their various disciplinary toolboxes to bear upon interpreting, explaining, and offering advice for the handling of seemingly irreconcilable memories. Shin and Sneider, among others, have written elsewhere about regionalism, reconciliation, and textbook politics.¹ In this collection, edited with Chirot, they engage directly with a popular myth that pitches a uniquely unrepentant “Japan” against an unreservedly/altruistically remorseful “Germany.”

The book’s collective strategy of debunking, or at least seriously complicating, this myth is to widen the comparative lens, explicitly as well as implicitly. Chirot shows how Germany’s Eastern and Western European neighbors urged and continually reinforced Germany’s apologetic stance—even if from vastly different political positions—which has contributed to the creation of amicable relations. He also notes that such reciprocity is entirely absent between Japan and its Asian neighbors. Sneider complements this approach by pointing out that what Japan regards as diverse and mainly pacifist memories about itself, its neighbors see as self-serving political tools that only in recent decades permitted genuine regional relationships. Regime legitimacy is the theme of Gilbert Rozman’s forceful chapter, which makes China its central focus but broadens the memory discourse to include three different historical narratives—glorifying China’s imperial past, demonizing Japan’s imperialism, and criticizing the United States—and their synergistic effect in keeping the memory disputes in East Asia burning.

Two chapters draw the comparison between Germany and Japan more directly. Shin takes stock of Japanese reconciliation efforts through a familiar list of accepted practices, from state apology to civic activism, highlighting how the role of the United States contributed to Japan’s divergence from Germany and its opportunities for the future. Berger measures German and Japanese politics of the past with the tools of historical realism, and, by throwing Austria into the mix, thoroughly discredits cultural determinism.

The rest of the contributions sheds light on the European and Asian legacies of war in more subtle ways through seemingly separate case studies that illustrate the contingency of memory. Frances Gouda’s fascinating juxtaposition of two “icons” of Dutch memory—Anne Frank and Sukarno—reveals diametrically opposed formations of memory at work in the same society—one geared toward reconciliation and the other toward an avoidance of postcolonial reckoning. A similar glimpse at the French memory of German occupation and colonial loss in Indochina would have been helpful; instead, Jackson deftly deconstructs the memory of Vichy, revealing a fragmented and multilayered memory landscape akin to postwar Japan’s. The final two chapters, by Igor Tarbakov and Roger Petersen, excavate the symbolism and emotional strategies behind post-Communist identities in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Asians and Europeans, it turns out, provide good company for each other in their diverse struggles with war memory. Although the book offers compelling analyses of intranational struggles with memory in both Asia and Europe, the international and especially regional dynamics involved in negotiating the legacies of a traumatic shared past make for particularly illuminating comparisons. One conclusion that emerges is that it is not enough for the perpetrator countries to want reconciliation. Indeed, the difference between Europe’s relatively successful and Asia’s comparatively unsuccessful reconciliation regarding the past decades may ultimately lie in the victims’ self-interest in both forging and accepting apologies in the name of regional integration rather than division.