Hiroshima und Auschwitz
The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 3, No. 1, January 19, 2015.
Mit freundlicher Erlaubnis von Japan Fpcus
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Never Again: Hiroshima, Auschwitz and the Politics of Commemoration
もう二度と…　広島、アウシュヴィッツと記念の政治学
Ran Zwigenberg

Abstract:
Ran Zwigenberg makes a case for revising the history of Hiroshima and its global connections and importance. Focusing on the little known episode of the 1962 Hiroshima-Auschwitz Peace March, he argues that the march was a unique point of convergence between multiple national narratives of victimization. The Peace March illustrates the emergence of a shared discourse of commemoration of WW II following the Eichmann trial and others, which agents like the marchers facilitated and which emerged from multiple Western and non-Western sources.

In 1962 a young Jewish American psychiatrist by the name of Robert Lifton visited the Hiroshima Peace Museum. Lifton described his visit to the museum in a letter to his friend David Riesman, “I had seen many such pictures before…but somehow seeing these pictures in Hiroshima was entirely different…we left this part of the exhibit reeling…Both of us anxious, fearful and depressed–Betty [Lifton’s wife] to the point of being physically ill.”1 Lifton decided to stay in Hiroshima and help its survivors. His research greatly altered our understanding of Hiroshima and the psychiatry of trauma. It would be hard to find similar responses by visitors today. The Liftons’ reaction to the museum was not just a function of their encounter with the horror of Hiroshima but of the heightened awareness of the importance of the city in light of the global tensions that would bring the world to the brink of nuclear war that same year. The museum and Peace Park today are far calmer places. Perhaps even too calm. The message of peace, felt so urgently by Lifton, has lost its edge in Hiroshima. Italian journalist Tiziano Terzani captured the mood of the place succinctly when he wrote, “In Hiroshima…even the doves are bored with peace.”2 The serenity and passivity of the memorial begins right at the entrance to the museum,