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Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadows of War. Ian Buruma. New York: New York Review Books, 2014, $29.95, hardcover, 423 pp.
Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadows of War is a collection of 28 essays and reviews written by Ian Buruma and published in the New York Review of Books over the years 1987-2013. About half concern topics related to Germany: the Weimar Republic, Nazism, the Holocaust, Germans in exile; while eight have to do with Japan and/or East Asia: Pearl Harbor, kamikaze pilots, Eastwood's two Iwo Jima films, theme parks. The remainder showcase artists living and working in Paris, London, Calcutta, and New York.
Given the Germany / Japan focus of much of Buruma's longer work (The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan, Year Zero: A History of 1945), it is hardly surprising that his shorter pieces should reflect this same interest. For the reader of Theater of Cruelty, this is undoubtedly a good thing because when it comes to writing about the cultural manifestations of war and its aftermath in Germany and Japan, Ian Buruma is hard to beat.
What sets Buruma apart from other historians is that he seems to have spent an equal amount of time in the library, the archives, the theater, the art museum/ gallery, and the screening room. This gives Buruma's prose a richly layered texture to it that few others can match.
The essays are generally of two types. In the first, Buruma pairs two seemingly disparate subjects or genres (such as an obscure Kawabata title and an art exhibition in "Virtual Violence" or 3/11 and a John Dower book in "A Japanese Tragedy") to develop his theme. The second type is a kind of "call and response" form where Buruma asks then (sometimes) answers questions that occur to him while considering an artist's work or milieu. In "The Afterlife of Anne...