Description
Book Synopsis The death of authority figures like fathers or leaders can be experienced as either liberation or loss. In the twentieth century, the authority of the father and of the leader became closely intertwined; constraints and affective attachments intensified in ways that had major effects on the organization of regimes of authority. This comparative volume examines the resulting crisis in symbolic identification, the national traumas that had crystallized around four state political forms: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and East European Communism. The defeat of Imperial and Fascist regimes in 1945 and the implosion of Communist regimes in 1989 were critical moments of rupture, of "death of the father." What was the experience of their ends, and what is the reconstruction of those ends in memory?
This volume represents is the beginning of a comparative social anthropology of caesurae: the end of traumatic political regimes, of their symbolic forms, political consequences, and probable futures.
Table of Contents Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Theorizing Regime Ends
John Borneman
Chapter 1. From Future to Past: A Duce’s Trajectory
Maria Pia Di Bella
Chapter 2. Gottvater, Landesvater, Familienvater: Identification and Authority in Germany
John Borneman
Chapter 3. Two Deaths of Hirohito in Japan
Kyung-Koo Han
Chapter 4. The Undead: Nicolae Ceaus¸escu and Paternalist Politics in Romanian Society and Culture
David A. Kideckel
Chapter 5. The Peaceful Death of Tito and the Violent End of Yugoslavia
Tone Bringa
Chapter 6. Doubtful Dead Fathers and Musical Corpses: What to Do with the Dead Stalin, Lenin, and Tsar Nicholas?
John S. Schoeberlein
Notes on Contributors to the Death of the Father Project
Index
