“Is this a plea for historians to be granted some of the moral authority of the traumatized, of the survivor?” That’s Michael Roth, a historian and president of Wesleyan University, commenting on “Can Historians Be Traumatized by History?,” an article recently published in The New Republic. Based on that headline, I was initially sympathetic to Roth’s skepticism. But the article, by James Robins, moved me. It begins with the story of Iris Chang, the historian whose book The Rape of Nanking (1997) Robins credits with “resurrecting for a new generation the half-forgotten savagery unleashed on Chinese citizens by the Japanese Imperial Army” in 1937. Chang’s research required numberless hours absorbed in accounts of murder, rape, torture, mutilation. Especially crucial were her videotaped interviews with traumatized survivors. The Rape of Nanking made Chang a star.
Seven years later, having undertaken a research project on the Bataan Death March of 1942, Chang drove into the hills and shot herself through the mouth. She was 36.
It would be too simple to attribute Chang’s suicide solely to her immersion in the atrocities of World War II. And pace the thrust of Robins’s article, I doubt that “trauma” is the right interpretive frame for the psychic harms that can be caused by studying past brutalities. But that doesn’t mean those harms aren’t real. And while they might not confer the moral authority of the survivor — Roth’s worry — they confer another kind of moral authority: the wisdom of the witness. That wisdom has risks. David Rieff, in a book called In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and its Ironies, quotes La Rochefoucauld: “No man can stare for long at death or the sun.”
