Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness

by Elizabeth D. Samet

Overview

A wide-ranging work of cultural history and criticism that reexamines the impact of post–World War II myths of the “good war"

In Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life. She exposes the confusion about American identity that was expressed during and immediately after the war, and the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans—all of which were suppressed in subsequent decades by a dangerously sentimental attitude toward the United States’ “exceptional” history and destiny.

Samet finds the war's ambivalent legacy in some of its most heavily mythologized figures: the war correspondent epitomized by Ernie Pyle, the character of the erstwhile G.I. turned either cop or criminal in the pulp fiction and feature films of the late 1940s, the disaffected Civil War veteran who looms so large on the screen in the Cold War Western, and the resurgent military hero of the post-Vietnam period. Taken together, these figures reveal key elements of postwar attitudes toward violence, liberty, and nation—attitudes that have shaped domestic and foreign policy and that respond in various ways to various assumptions about national identity and purpose established or affirmed by World War II.

As the United States reassesses its roles in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the time has come to rethink our national mythology: the way that World War II shaped our sense of national destiny, our beliefs about the use of American military force throughout the world, and our inability to accept the realities of the twenty-first century’s decades of devastating conflict.

2022-07-13
The author’s first historical novel explores the perils of motherhood in prewar Nazi Germany.

In 1939, three women live at Heim Hochland, a home for “racially pure” unmarried mothers in a secret breeding program to create Aryan babies for Hitler. Gundi Schiller and Hilde Kramer are pregnant, and Irma Binz is a nurse. Basing her novel on a real Nazi program, Coburn skillfully intertwines the stories of distinctly different personalities: Gundi secretly distributes anti-Nazi flyers; Hilde is a true Hitler Girl; Irma just wants to do her job and stay out of trouble. Secrets abound: Gundi had sex with a Jew; Hilde wants to be an actress; Irma treats injured resistance fighters. Gundi carries the most weight in this carefully researched story, and she is the most sympathetic. A leering doctor rhapsodizes to her, “You, my dear, are perfection. I have been waiting for a girl with your features since we started the program four years ago.” And the man everyone presumes to be the father, her friend Erich Meyer, looks “as if he'd been plucked straight off a Nazi propaganda poster.” But she has actually only had sex with Leo Solomon, and if the baby shows evidence of being a Mischling, a mix of Jew and Aryan, it will be euthanized and Gundi could be arrested. Hilde, who looks like she could pull a plow and has a figure that “look[s] like a can of evaporated milk,” seems aimless and shallow. The 18-year-old miscarries the baby of her married Obergruppenführer lover but hopes to get pregnant by him again when he returns to Heim Hochland. She certainly isn’t making the “productive contributions to Germany” that her mother and SS officer father want. She feebly attempts to impress Propaganda Minister Goebbels when he pays a visit, pitching a movie idea: All is good until a Jew comes to town. It’s an old idea, he says dismissively. On one level, this compelling story is about women and babies; on another, it portends a dark future of concentration camps and war.

A deep well of discussion topics for book-club readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374716127
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	11/30/2021
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	920 KB

About the Author

Elizabeth D. Samet is the author of No Man's Land: Preparing for War and Peace in Post-9/11 America; Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest and was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2007 by The New York Times; and Willing Obedience: Citizens, Soldiers, and the Progress of Consent in America, 1776–1898. Samet is the editor of Leadership: Essential Writings by Our Greatest Thinkers, The Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, and World War II Memoirs: Pacific Theater. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Grant and the Hiett Prize in the Humanities, she was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to support the research and writing of Looking for the Good War. She is a professor of English at West Point.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Is This Trip Really Necessary?
Introduction: One War at a Time
1. Age of Gold
2. Dead-Shot American Cowboys
3. Thieves Like Us
4. War, What Is It Good For?
5. Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels
Epilogue: Age of Iron

Recommended Books and Films
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

11/01/2021

The popular perception of WWII as the "Good War" hides a darker reality, according to this iconoclastic study by West Point English professor Samet (No Man's Land). Challenging rose-colored takes on the war as the triumph of the democratic common man over fascist tyranny, Samet argues that America's war was a morass of indiscriminate carnage fought by draftees with little ideological motivation—and, in the case of Black soldiers facing racial discrimination, deep ambivalence—amid considerable public disaffection on the home front. Worse, she contends, the retrospective veneration of the war as "a testament to the redemptive capacity of American violence" justified misbegotten military adventures in Vietnam, Iraq, and elsewhere. Concentrating more on critical theory than politics or history, Samet probes interpretations of war in literary and cultural works from Shakespeare's Henry V to 20th-century war novels, Saving Private Ryan, and film noir's jaundiced view of an America coarsened and corrupted by the conflict and the troubled veterans returning from it. Samet's analysis is sometimes incisive but more often rambles through age-old indictments of the glorification of war. Ultimately, this intriguing provocation is too broad and unfocused to reveal much about why America keeps going into battle. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"Sets high bar for historical fiction...Every historical fiction novel should strive to be this compelling, well-researched and just flat-out good." — Associated Press

"With this novel Jennifer Coburn gives compelling and necessary literary voice to those impacted the most by Adolf Hitler’s haunting and ironically dehumanizing scheme to generate racially pure infants. Skillfully researched and told with great care and insight, here is a World War II story whose lessons should not—must not—be forgotten." — Susan Meissner, bestselling author of The Nature of Fragile Things

"The Handmaid's Tale meets WWII in Cradles of the Reich, which explores the little-known history of Hitler's Lebensborn program and its goal of mass-breeding racially fit babies for the master race. Three German women are destined to collide at a Bavarian breeding home: a blond beauty desperately concealing her unborn child's Jewish heritage, a Nazi official's fanatical young mistress, and a nurse determined to keep her head down in the home's increasingly sinister program of forced adoptions, queasy eugenics, and racial cleansing. Jennifer Coburn's debut historical novel is adept, unforgettable, and brilliantly unsettling!" — Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Rose Code

"I loved Cradles of the Reich, Jennifer Coburn's fascinating and incredibly well-researched look at this little-known Nazi breeding program and three women whose lives intersect there. Don't miss this wonderful historical fiction debut!" — Martha Hall Kelly, New York Times bestselling author of The Lilac Girls and Sunflower Sisters

"Cradles of the Reich masterfully delves into the warped underbelly of the Nazi’s Lebensborn Program for racial engineering. With grace and a deft hand, Jennifer Coburn creates indelible female characters that leave us heart torn. This book kept me breathless from chapter to chapter. I couldn’t put it down until the final heroic page." — Sarah McCoy, New York Times bestselling author of Mustique Island

"The hopes and dreams of three women collide in this shocking story about a little-known Nazi breeding home in Bavaria. Jennifer Coburn has written a brave and highly original novel; fans of historical fiction will find it compelling—and indeed essential—reading." — Kitty Zeldis, author of Not Our Kind

"A deep well of discussion topics for book-club readers." — Kirkus

"...Ample topics for discussion groups. For fans of Martha Hall Kelly's The Lilac Girls, Lisa See's The Island of Sea Women, Jennifer Worth's Call the Midwife, and World War II women’s stories." — Booklist

"The engrossing plot, richly drawn characters, and underlying horror make this a book that lingers in the reader’s mind." — New York Journal of Books

From the Publisher

11/01/2021

In her latest book, Samet (English, West Point; No Man's Land) argues that many of the myths about the Second World War, especially the notion of the "greatest generation," have a negative influence on the American psyche. Indeed, she makes a compelling case that nostalgia for the war serves to promulgate an image of a national golden age to which those experiencing doubt about American exceptionalism "can always retreat." Utilizing a variety of primary sources, Samet effectively demonstrates that this nostalgia has permeated popular culture throughout the 20th century and up to the present day. She makes the intriguing assertion that there is a direct link between World War II propaganda and the U.S. Civil War; for example, she writes that imagery of Abraham Lincoln was more often used in WWII propaganda than images of George Washington—an interesting point for discussion. Her contention about the connection between World War II and the Civil War in the popular consciousness, however, seems informed more by current conversations surrounding collective memory. VERDICT A thought-provoking, thoroughly researched work that asks readers to reconsider World War II mythology. Samet's analysis, solidly based in pop culture, will be welcomed in public library collections and will appeal to readers of military history.—Frederic Krome, Univ. of Cincinnati Clermont Coll.

Library Journal

★ 2021-09-29
Samet investigates a vital question: “Has the prevailing memory of the ‘Good War,’ shaped…by nostalgia, sentimentality, and jingoism, done more harm than good?”

The author, a professor of English at West Point, engages in a simultaneously deep and wide exploration of the way the meaning and memory of World War II have shaped American identity, its sense of standing in the world, and narratives of other wars: Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, “and, retrospectively, the Civil War.” Drawing on a vast number of sources, including histories; firsthand accounts in letters, memoirs, and reportage; fiction; movies (produced during and after the war); comic books; and the Army’s guidebooks for soldiers, Samet smoothly distills the myths Americans have told themselves to justify the epithet of the “Good War” for a noble battle to liberate the world from fascism. That self-righteous myth, Samet asserts, “appeals to our national vanity, confirms the New World’s superiority to the Old, and validates modernity and the machine.” The experience of the war was marked by disillusion and confusion in the battlefield and on the homefront. The author underscores the ambivalence that pervaded the nation. Even as reports circulated about Nazi atrocities, most Americans were indifferent. The Pacific war, writes Samet, was “complicated by bitter racism” against the Japanese, while postwar novels and films “exhibit [the] confusion, discontent, and disaffection” felt by many returning soldiers. Furthermore, violence became not just associated with battle, but “an end in and of itself.” For example, “in the absence of a foreign enemy against whom to deploy their violence, comic books moved in the direction of brutality and horror.” Violence remains a lasting legacy of the war, leading Americans “repeatedly to imagine that the use of force can accomplish miraculous political ends even when we have the examples of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan to tell us otherwise.” Not just timely, Samet’s work is incisively argued and revelatory in its criticism.

A cogent analysis of the cultural realities of war.

Kirkus Reviews