The Wages of Guilt (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Ian Buruma
- First Published: 1994
- Type of Work: Current affairs; history
- Time of Work: The 1990’s, with reference to the 1930’s, 1940’s, and 1950’s
- Setting: Germany and Japan, as well as other areas of Europe and Asia affected by World War II
- Genres: Nonfiction, Current affairs, History
- Subjects: Memory, World War II, Guilt, Germany or German people, Massacres, Atomic bomb, Japan or Japanese people, Persian Gulf War, Photojournalism or photojournalists
- Locales: Germany, Japan
World War II is ever with us, although perhaps for Americans rather less immediately than what we narcissistically call “Vietnam,” as though the word described our own pain and disillusion rather than a country in Southeast Asia. As George Orwell wrote in 1948: “As the successive wars, like ranges of hills, rear their bulk between ourselves and the past, autobiography becomes a sort of antiquarianism.” Yet World War II still haunts. A Texas farmer sends photographs to his family from New Guinea, with handwritten captions such as “Village elder. 32 years old and already an old...
[The entire page is 2094 words long]
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