John Munro (editor) - Reading the postwar future : textual turning points from 1944

READING THE POSTWAR FUTURE

For Theo and Clara Walker,

and for Clara and Roland Maloney,

who are the future.

READING THE POSTWAR FUTURE

Textual Turning Points from 1944

Edited by
Kirrily Freeman and John Munro

Contents

Kirrily Freeman

Radhika Desai

Michael DArcy

Luke Foster

Sarah Frank

Radhika Natarajan

Ajay Parasram

Chikako Nagayama

Suzanne Langlois

Katherine Rye Jewell

Chike Jeffers

Alan M. Wald

Rebecca E. Karl

John Munro

This volume began as a cross-corridor conversation along the lines of Have you ever noticed how many influential books were written in 1944? That conversation developed, over lunch and coffee, between marking and meetings, into a workshop at Saint Marys University in October 2017, organized with our friend and colleague Xiaoping Sun. A Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Connection Grant and support from the SMU History Department, Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research, and Presidents Office were indispensable for bringing together a number of scholars whose work features in this collection. We would like to thank them all for their early enthusiasm and continued support for the project. We especially thank Xiaoping who, though she was not able to contribute to the present volume, shaped the larger venture in invaluable ways.

Kirrily Freeman would like to thank colleagues and students in the History Department at Saint Marys University, especially Trisha Turner and Susan Haines who were of great help in organizing the workshop part of this project. Theo, Clara, and Colin Walker are my reason for being, and Im so grateful for their love and encouragement.

John Munro would like to thank the American Studies Program at the University of Tbingen, the Institute for English and American Studies at the University of Rostock, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for their generous support. In particular, I would like to thank Katharina Motyl, Astrid Franke, and Gesa Mackenthun for the warm welcome you gave me at your respective institutions as I worked on this volume. For me, this book began in Canada and ended in England, and I would also like to thank my colleagues in the History Departments at Saint Marys University and the University of Birmingham for their support. My gratitude is immense to Clara and Roland Maloney for, among other things, distracting me from always thinking about the past by keeping me in the joys of the present. And, as ever, I am grateful for Jacqueline Maloneys support, patience, and love.

In the publication of this volume, we would both like to thank Maddie Holder and Dan Hutchins at Bloomsbury. They have shepherded us swiftly and expertly through the whole process, and we couldnt have asked for better guiding hands. We are also grateful for the helpful feedback from the anonymous reviewers who took the time to improve this book with their wise suggestions, and to Joseph Gautham for his assistance at the production stage. To the workshop participants, thank you for what was a wonderful set of papers and conversations. To the contributors who joined this project after the workshop, and who took up our request (often out of the blue) to write something new on a short timeline, we are equally thankful.

Kirrily Freeman

Lee Miller was the only war correspondent in Saint-Malo in early July 1944. The US army had sent her there by mistakefemale reporters were meant to stay well behind the linesbut, sheltering in the rubble of the city still under bombardment, Miller photographed the devastation of Saint-Malo and its population ( Miller and Gellhorn, like so many of their colleagues, were well aware that what they were reporting on was not only the invasion of fortress Europe, but the opening of the final phase of the war.

Lee Miller, Ruined street , Saint-Malo, France, 1944. Courtesy Lee Miller Archives.

The year 1944, and D-Day in particular, occupy a central place in the national memories of the British and North American publics.

While 1944 appears as a major turning point in both memory and retrospect, Reading the Postwar Future demonstrates that it also felt that way at the time. From the Allied landings in Papua New Guinea on January 2which launched Operation Cartwheel in the South Pacificto the news from Los Alamos on December 30 that an American atomic bomb would soon be ready for testing, from the formal establishment of Charles de Gaulles French Forces of the Interior on February 1 to Heinrich Himmlers November 24 order that the crematoria at Auschwitz be destroyed in light of the inexorable westward march of the Soviet Red Army, the events of 1944 portended that an end to the conflict, if not imminent, was certainly coming into view. Just how the war would conclude remained subject to speculation, but 1944 brought a growing sense of certainty as to who the ultimate victors would be.

Allied progress in 1944from the west and from the eastsuggested not only that a postwar future could now be contemplated but also that it must, imperatively, be planned. The Big ThreeChurchill, Roosevelt, and Stalinhad been preparing for the liberation of Europe since 1943, but there was a widespread feeling, inspired not least by the lessons of the last war and its aftermath, that the scale of the global crisisand the geopolitical shifts that would accompany itrequired initiatives that were unprecedented in both scope and creativity and that solutions ought not be left solely to the leaders of these three governments alone. At the same time, six or more years of privation, restrictions, fear, and violence had marked people profoundly. This most devastating war in human history had such deeply dislocating effects that it left many yearning for normalcy, but uncertain about how they could emerge from the wreckage.

And what wreckage there was. Our cover photo shows the city of Cologne after round-the-clock Allied bombing raids in the fall of 1944, providing a strikingly different perspective from Lee Millers photographs of the ruins of Saint-Malo. The complete reconstruction of cities and infrastructures and the rehabilitation of communities and institutions, often from the ground up, would be required on a global scale.

Because of the magnitude of destruction already evident in 1944, the progression of Allied victories, and the beginning of relief and rehabilitation efforts for defeated and liberated populationsand perhaps despite the years place in national memorieshistories of the war often fold 1944 into what scholars have termed the long 1945. In the most immediate way, as Year Zero, 1945 marked the formal end of the war and the beginning of a postwar era characterized by the aftermath of liberation, defeat, victory, or conquest; by ongoing social and economic crisis and upheaval; by transitional or provisional politics and government; and by the initiation of programs aimed at a return to order.