Close to the end of Philip Roth’s 1998 novel, I Married a Communist, in a characteristically straightforward fashion, the text raises a self-reflexive question: Why would anyone write a novel about the American 1950s at the dawn of the new millennium? The question, thus, concerns the relevance of the fifties for the post–Cold War era, and it translates into the enigmatic simplicity of an honest provocation: Why now? Roth’s answer is quite clear. The primary narrator of the book is the ninety-year-old retired English teacher Murray Ringold, who relates his brother Ira’s tragic demise during the McCarthy era to his one-time student, Roth’s recurrent character, Nathan Zuckerman. At one point, the following dialogue takes place between Murray Ringold and Nathan Zuckerman:
“Nathan, I’ve never had a chance to tell this story to anyone this way, at such length. I’ve never told it before and I won’t again. I’d like to tell it right. To the end.”
“Why?”
“I’m the only person still living who knows Ira’s story, you’re the only person still living who cares about it. That’s why: Because everyone else is dead.” Laughing, he said, “My last task. To file Ira’s story with Nathan Zuckerman.”
“I don’t know what I can do with it,” I said.
“That’s not my responsibility. My responsibility is to tell it to you.”1
Upon first glance, this passage reads as a blatant tract on the transmission of historical knowledge. By calling attention to the singularity of the act of transmission, the novel speaks of the ethical duty of the witness to tell it, to tell it right, and to tell it all. At the same time, however, the passage also highlights the unique responsibility of the listener, which is drastically separated from that of the witness. At the heart of this tautological logic (the responsibility of the witness is to speak out, while the responsibility of the listener is to listen), a gap opens up that functions as the very condition of the ethical dimension of historical narration. But in a more specific sense, besides being an ethical allegory, the passage is also a reflection on a concrete historical situation. Murray Ringold’s words are, indeed, revealing: “I’m the only person still living who knows Ira’s story, you’re the only person still living who cares about it.” What the passage and the whole book records, then, is the final and irrevocable “becoming-history” of the American 1950s. In a certain sense, the special experience that the book diagnoses is that the lived reality of the fifties is disappearing as we are reading the novel. Soon, no one will be alive who actually saw it, and only a very few who still care.
But today, more than a decade after the publication of Roth’s book, we are facing a slightly different situation. Since the novel predates the events of September 11, 2001, obviously it does not raise the question of the actuality of the Cold War from the perspective of the global war on terrorism. But the last couple of years have clearly shown that the war on terrorism can hardly be fully understood without a reflection on the persistence of the rhetoric of the Cold War. Today, however, another kind of generational question can be raised in addition to the one discussed by Roth. For us, it is not only the beginning of the Cold War that is irrevocably fading into history. More than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we find ourselves at a historical turning point: we are now at least a whole generation away from the end of the Cold War. The first generation has come of age for which the entirety of the Cold War is pure history. One possible consequence of this obvious historical fact will be that, more than ever before, we will be able to see the history of these four long decades as a more or less unified “episode” within a set of broader developments.
From this perspective, then, it becomes clear that the most striking feature of the history of Cold War studies is that from the day of its inception, the discipline has been an integral part of the very field that it studied. It is common to discuss the history of Cold War studies by distinguishing three distinct waves, with the time elapsed since the end of the Cold War counting as the fourth. During the 1950s, the historiography of the Communist question was dominated by liberal anti-Communists. The second, so-called “revisionist” period, which got underway in the late sixties, was a reaction against the fervent anti-Communism of the fifties and was therefore primarily centered around a critique of American anti-Communism. The third period, which coincides with the conservative political turn of the eighties, saw the continuation of the debate between “traditionalists” and “revisionists,” with the latter (liberal) position dominating American academia. While traditionalist scholars formulated a critique of Communism based on the methodologies of political history, diplomatic history, and international relations, revisionist scholars critiqued anti-Communism by relying on a “new social history” that always insisted on particular contextualizations of local problems at the expense of more general questions relating to the Cold War. After the collapse of Russian Communism, however, the revelations provided by KGB files and the infamous Venona intercepts severely damaged the credibility of revisionist accounts. Discussing this fourth wave of Cold War historiography, scholars speak of the clash of traditionalist “triumphalism” (which celebrates its final victory over critiques of anti-Communism) and the revisionist myth of a “lost cause” (which is a set of more or less desperate attempts to salvage the revisionist heritage).2
The point I want to underline here is that for most of its history, Cold War studies was structured by Cold War politics—even after the end of the Cold War. The split between “orthodox” and “revisionist” scholars was simply a displaced reflection of the ideological conflicts of the era, which survived (in the form of an institutional hangover) well into the 1990s. In other words, the political conflict of the Cold War defined the limits of the discipline. But the most important question of our times is the following: How will post–Cold War politics rewrite the history of the Cold War and thereby redefine the basic structures of the whole discipline? For some time now, one of the most urgent tasks of contemporary scholarship has been to move beyond these old paradigms.3
My analysis of anti-Communist aesthetic ideology was intended to be a contribution to this reconfiguration of the field. First, it aimed to inscribe the discussion of the Cold War in a much boarder theory of modernity. My argument was based on the assumption that the Cold War institutionalized a “limit case” or “limit experience” of modernity. This is why, for example, it was within the framework of the Cold War that the move toward post-modernism took place. I chose to focus on the 1950s because I perceived this decade to be the period during which an inherent tendency of modernity assumed an extreme form. The long history of this modernity starts with the circumnavigation of the world and ends with the perfect tripartite division of this world into inimical camps by the Cold War. To put it briefly, the underlying idea of the previous chapters was that the Cold War represents the birth of a new kind of global politics, a breaking point in the history of power and the law: it was a phase in the history of Western political institutions during which the exception increasingly became the norm.4 Without dismissing all the previous political experiments that were necessary to reach this point of development, we could say that the Cold War represented one of the first successful efforts to impose a global order through the full consolidation and institutionalization of a perpetual crisis. In fact, the paradox captured by the very name “Cold War” makes it clear that the primary means of this transformation was the indefinite suspension of the dividing line between war and peace.
This approach to the Cold War, based on a broader historical perspective, will allow us to expand our arguments in two opposing directions. First, it makes it possible to ask new questions about the ideological prehistory of the Cold War. As is often the case, historical events create their own histories by making visible new constellations of the past in a retroactive fashion. For if the aesthetic ideology that we have examined here and the four figures that it relies on to designate the limits of representation do in fact constitute a more general tendency of modernity, the discursive analysis carried out here can be applied to earlier periods as well. The world, the enemy, the secret, and the catastrophe haunt the modern imagination because they are historically contingent figures produced by a set of constitutive exclusions. In this sense, we could even argue that the Cold War brought about an extreme (maybe even a reductive but most certainly a quite rigid) manifestation of this aesthetic ideology. But by giving shape to an extreme form of this ideology, it put something on display that had been hiding for a long time in the dark laboratories of modernity.
At the same time, we can now also ask new questions about the consequences (and not only the “origins”) of the Cold War. Our experiences today seem to confirm the assumption that some of the basic coordinates of this aesthetic ideology remained operational even after the end of the Cold War. In this regard, for example, we can easily detect a direct connection between the Cold War and the war on terror, which bears witness to a certain rhetorical as well as an institutional continuity between the two eras. Nothing would be easier today than to image that the contemporary companion piece to The Naked Communist and The Naked Capitalist would bear the title “The Naked Terrorist.” But this emphasis on continuity should not make us blind to the decisive historical differences that define every singular historical situation. Of course, the point is not necessarily to identify a “perpetual cold war” at the heart of modernity, but it would be equally shortsighted to deny the demonstrable persistence of a structure that gives shape to the very worlds that we inhabit. The analysis of these breaks and transformations, however, is mostly a task still ahead of us.