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| Vol.24, No. 05 | October 2, 1998 |
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| Vol.24, No. 05 | October 2, 1998 |
By Kim Brockway
More than 50 years after it ended, the Second World War remains a contested issue in the history and memory of many countries.
Whether it be the Nazi gold scandal in Switzerland, the long shadow of Vichy in France, Japan's Rape of Nanking and of Korean "comfort women," or Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan," the war remains at the forefront of politics and culture in the late 1990s.
In a series of upcoming lectures, Japan historian Carol Gluck, the George Sansom Professor of History, will examine this international phenomenon in the context of the present obsession with public memory and the challenge it poses both to the understanding of history and to the moral effort to "do justice to the past."
The lecture series "Past Obsessions: War and Memory in the Twentieth Century" will be presented on consecutive Mondays, Oct. 12, 19 and 26, at 8 p.m. in the Dag Hammarskjold Lounge on the 6th floor of Columbia's International Affairs Building, 420 West 118th Street. Admission is free. The talks are the sixth in the Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures sponsored by the University Seminars at Columbia.
The first lecture, "Operations of Memory," on October 12 is about "stories" and how memory works in the twentieth century.
The second lecture, "No Accounting for History," on October 19 treats the "truths" of history in the presentations of historians, witnesses, the courts, the media, films, museums and commemorations.
The concluding lecture on October 26 asks "What's the Use of the Past?" to pose the question of doing "justice" to generations past and yet to come.
Since 1975, Gluck has taught at Columbia in the departments of History and East Asian languages and cultures, and as a member of the East Asian Institute. Her book, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (1985), received the Historical Association's John King Fairbank prize in East Asian History in 1986 and Columbia's Lionel Trilling Award in 1987.
She edited, with Stephen Graubard, Showa: The Japan of Hirohito (1992) and, with Ainslee Embree, Asia in Western and World History (1997), and is completing a book entitled Versions of the Past: The Japanese and Their Modern History, a study of historical consciousness in modern Japan. She is the recipient of Columbia's Mark van Doren Award for teaching and the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates. Gluck's lectures, supported by a bequest from the Leonard Hastings Schoff and Suzanne Levick Schoff Memorial Trust, will be published by Columbia University Press.