24
ROBERT JAY LIFTON
I moved outward from interviews with individual survivors to groups
they formed, leaders emerging from among them and social cur–
rents in Hiroshima which they both created and were affected by.
This in tum required close attention to the post..atomic-bomb
his–
tory of the city, and to the relationship of that special history to
the rest of Japan and to the world at large, as well as to the city's
own earlier heritage. A significant part of that history consisted of
creative struggles - of writers, painters and filmmakers from both
within and without the city - to come to terms with Hiroshima.
And these historical and creative struggles were deeply bound up
with issues of memorialization and commemoration, with efforts to
move beyond the bomb while remaining true to its dead.
Finally, through a detailed elaboration of the ethos of the sur–
vivor, I was in some degree able to unite the individual-psychol–
ogical and historical currents I had observed. I compared survival
of the atomic bomb to survival of other massive death immersions
- of Nazi persecutions in our time, and of the plagues in the Mid–
dle Ages (as the latter reveal themselves through records); as well
as to survival of natural disasters, and of the "ordinary" deaths of
close friends and family members. I could then (in
this
and subse–
quent studies) raise questions about the general importance of the
survivor ethos for our age, of the degree to which we have become
historically prone to the survivor's retained death imprint, to
his
death guilt and his psychic numbing (or desensitization to death–
dominated images) and to his struggle for significance (or what I
call, after Langer, his
formulation).
These questions now intrude
into virtua!ly
all
of my work, and I do not
think
it
is
too much to
say that they haunt the contemporary imagination.
Thus, in my more recent book,
Revolutionary Immortality,
I
discuss Mao Tse-tung's relationship to the Chinese Cultural Rev–
olution in terms of his many experiences of individual and revolu–
tionary survival. I relate his creative use of the survivor state to his
extraordinary accomplishments as a leader, and consider the general
relevance of death symbolism, in broadest historical perspective, to
the present Chinese Cultural Revolution. By connecting certain
psy–
chological characteristics of Mao's personal and revolutionary style
with the predominant themes of the Cultural Revolution I attempt
to combine the great-man and shared-themes approaches.
