Politics and Cultures of Liberation The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/rsh Radboud Studies in Humanities Series Editor Sophie Levie (Radboud University) Editorial Board Paul Bakker (Radboud University) André Lardinois (Radboud University) Daniela Müller (Radboud University) Glenn Most (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa) Peter Raedts (Radboud University) Johan Tollebeek (KU Leuven) Marc Slors (Radboud University) Claudia Swan (Northwestern University Evanston) VOLUME 7 Politics and Cultures of Liberation Media, Memory, and Projections of Democracy Edited by Hans Bak, Frank Mehring and Mathilde Roza Cover image: Memory of the American Liberation of Nijmegen 1944/2014. Collage of diorama painting of the Crossing of the River Waal of the 82nd Airborne on 20 Sep. 1944 in Nijmegen, located in the National Liberation Museum 1944–45 in Groesbeek (with permission of the museum), photo of De Oversteek (The Crossing) Bridge in Nijmegen (© F. Mehring) and photo of the Commemoration Dome of the National Liberation Museum 1944–45 (© F. Mehring). Collage © Frank Mehring 2014. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/ 2018012768 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill.” See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2213- 9729 ISBN 978-90-04-29200-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-29201-7 (e-book) Copyright 2018 by the Editors and Authors. This work is published by Koninklijke Brill NV. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense and Hotei Publishing. 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Contents List of Contributors viii Introduction: Politics and Cultures of Liberation 1 Part 1 The Politics and Cultures of Liberation: Marketing, Memory and Mediation An Invasion of a Different Kind: The U.S. Office of War Information and “The Projection of America” Propaganda in the Netherlands, 1944– 1945 17 Marja Roholl Educating the Nation: Jo Spier, Dutch National Identity, and the Marshall Plan in the Netherlands 39 Mathilde Roza From Memory Repression to Memorialization: The Bombardments of Nijmegen 1944 and Mortsel 1943 65 Joost Rosendaal Playing in the Ruins of Arnhem: Reenacting Operation Market Garden in Theirs Is the Glory 76 László Munteán “Can Anybody Fly This Thing?” Appropriations of History in Reenactments of Operation Market Garden 94 Wolfgang Hochbruck On the Road to Nijmegen—Earle Birney and Alex Colville, 1944–1945 113 Hans Bak vi Contents Part 2 The Soundtrack of Liberation Liberation Songs: Music and the Cultural Memory of the Dutch Summer of 1945 149 Frank Mehring The Reception and Development of Jazz in the Netherlands (1945– 1970s) 177 Walter van de Leur Sounds of Freedom, Cosmopolitan Democracy, and Shifting Cultural Politics: From “The Jazz Ambassador Tours” to “The Rhythm Road” 192 Wilfried Raussert Part 3 Transnational Re- Locations Marching Towards Kullman’s Diner: Performing Transnational American Sites (of Memory) in Bavaria 211 Birgit M. Bauridl The Promise of Democracy for the Americas: U.S. Diplomacy and the Meaning(s) of World War II in El Salvador, 1941–1945 241 Jorrit van den Berk Liberation and Lingering Trauma: U.S. Present and Haitian Past in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker 265 Josef Raab The Japanese American Relocation Center at Heart Mountain and the Construction of the Post-World War II Landscape 285 Eric J. Sandeen Contents vii Part 4 Transnational Perspectives from the Archives The Cornelius Ryan Collection of World War II Papers 309 Doug McCabe “Quality First!” American Aid to the Nijmegen University Library, 1945– 1949 319 Léon Stapper The Marshall Plan: “A Short Time to Change the World” 344 Linda Christenson and Eric Christenson The Liberation Route Europe: Challenges of Exhibiting Multinational Perspectives 360 Jory Brentjens and Wiel Lenders List of Contributors Hans Bak is em. professor of American Literature at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, where he directed the American Studies program from 1996– 2008. He is the author of Malcolm Cowley: The Formative Years (U of Georgia P, 1993) and the editor of The Long Voyage: Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915–1987 (Harvard UP, 2014); he is now writing a full-fledged biography of Cowley. His articles on 20th-century American and Canadian fiction, drama, biography, multiculturalism, and the discipline of American Studies, have appeared in leading European and American journals. Research interests: con- temporary American and Canadian literature (Native American / First Nations literatures); instruments of culture (periodicals, publishers and “middlemen” of letters); the reception of North American literature and culture in Europe. He was President of the Netherlands American Studies Association (1990–2000) and the Association for Canadian Studies in the Netherlands (2000–2003), Treasurer of the European Association for American Studies (2000–2004), and served on the International Committee and the Committee on American Studies Departments, Programs and Centers of the American Studies Association. Birgit M. Bauridl is assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Regensburg, Germany. Her research focuses on triangular/transnational American Studies; critical regionalism; the American presence in Germany; concepts of (cultural) performance; and transnational memory. Her publications include Betwixt, Between, or Beyond: Negotiating Transformations from the Liminal Sphere of Contemporary Black Performance Poetry (2013); South Africa and the United States in Transnational American Studies (co-ed. Udo J. Hebel; Amerikastudien/ American Studies 59.4 (2014)); Approaching Transnational America in Performance (co-ed. Pia Wiegmink, 2016). She is Managing Director of the Regensburg European American Forum, member of the ASA International Committee (2016- ), and former Chair of the ASA Women’s Committee. With Pia Wiegmink (Mainz) she heads the international research network “Cultural Performance in Transnational American Studies” (German Research Foundation / DFG). Jorrit van den Berk obtained his PhD in American history from the University of Leiden (2012). He has taught US history and foreign policy at the Universities of Leiden, Utrecht, List of Contributors ix and Nijmegen. Currently, he is engaged in independent research into the pub- lic diplomacy of the Marshall Plan, among other projects. He is the author of the book “Becoming a Good Neighbor among Dictators. The US Foreign Service in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018). Jory Brentjens studied history at the Radboud University Nijmegen where he specialized in Roman and medieval history. Brentjens also has an academic teaching degree in history from the Radboud University Nijmegen. During his studies Brentjens worked in various positions at the Valkhof Museum in Nijmegen. Since his graduation in 2014, Brentjens works as a historian for the National Liberation Museum 1944–1945 and the Liberation Route Europe Foundation. Linda Christenson was co-executive producer of the 1997 PBS special, The Marshall Plan: Against the Odds . She has subsequently collaborated on projects with the U.S. Department of State at the Hôtel de Talleyrand, the Plan’s former headquarters in Paris, including creating a permanent exhibit, “The Marshall Plan: A Vision of a Family of Nations , ” and contributing to Concorde , a book about the historic building. She also presented a program at the Hôtel de Talleyrand on the Marshall Plan’s film program. She has presented the documentary and participated in symposia in the U.S. and Europe. Mrs. Christenson is the creator and editor of The Marshall Plan Filmography (www.marshallfilms.org). Eric Christenson is a writer and a retired teacher of English and American Civilization. He was co-executive producer of the 1997 PBS special, The Marshall Plan: Against the Odds and the scriptwriter of the documentary Legacies of Social Change: A Hundred Years of Professional Social Work in the United States . He has subsequently collaborated on projects at the Hôtel de Talleyrand, the Plan’s former headquarters in Paris, including creating the permanent exhibit “The Marshall Plan: The Vision of a Family of Nations”; contributing to Concorde , a book about the historic building; and writing speeches. He has presented the documentary and participated in symposia in the U.S. and Europe. Wolfgang Hochbruck completed his doctoral dissertation at the University of Freiburg in 1990 after studying English, German, and History in Germany, Canada, and the U.S., x List of Contributors service in the navy, and a number of years as a journalist. He held various positions in North American Studies in Osnabrück, Mannheim, Stuttgart, and Braunschweig before he returned to Freiburg in 2003. Past and current proj- ects include the Civil War in American memory, Living History as theatrical performance, nineteenth century melodrama, and volunteerism as an inte- gral and constitutive aspect of a republican civil society. He published four monographs and ca. 100 articles on a variety of subjects from Native American Studies via American, Canadian, German-American and Zimbabwean litera- tures to security studies. Wiel Lenders studied History at the Radboud University Nijmegen and Museology course programs at the University of Leiden. After his graduation he worked in secondary education at the HAN University of Applied Sciences in Nijmegen and at the University of Groningen. Presently, Lenders is managing director of the National Liberation Museum 1944–1945 in Groesbeek. Lenders is author and editor of various publications in the field of WWII history and European integration and he is involved in several international European projects such as The Liberation Route Europe. Walter van de Leur is professor of Jazz and Improvised Music at the University of Amsterdam, on behalf of the Conservatory of Amsterdam. He is the author of the award- winning Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn (New York: Oxford UP, 2002), and the founding editor of the five-volume Oxford History of Jazz in Europe (scheduled for publication 2018–2022). Van de Leur has led the Dutch work packages for two European-funded research projects: Rhythm Changes (Jazz and National Identity), and CHIME (Cultural Heritage and Improvised Music in European Festivals)—on behalf of these projects he has directed a number of conferences. His is on the editorial board of Jazz Perspectives , a peer-reviewed journal published by Routledge, and has pub- lished chapters and articles in a variety of peer-reviewed academic journals and edited volumes. Doug McCabe retired in August of 2016 as Curator of Manuscripts in the Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections at Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, USA. He was also archivist for the Cornelius Ryan Collection and he is presently working on several books and is a co-innkeeper with his wife of HummInn Haven. List of Contributors xi Frank Mehring is chair and professor of American Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen. He teaches twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual culture and music, theories of popular culture, transnational modernism, and processes of cul- tural translation between European and American contexts. His publications include Sphere Melodies (2003) on Charles Ives and John Cage, Soundtrack van de Bevrijding (2015) and The Mexico Diary: Winold Reiss Between Vogue Mexico and the Harlem Renaissance (2016). In 2012, he received from the European Association for American Studies the biennial Rob Kroes Award, which recog- nizes the best book- length manuscript in Europe in American studies, for his monograph The Democratic Gap (2014). He organized the first international symposium on Winold Reiss in Berlin (2011) and co-curated exhibitions on Winold Reiss (2012), the Marshall Plan (2013), and Liberation Songs (2014) in New York, Nijmegen and The Hague. László Munteán is assistant professor of Cultural Studies and American Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. His publications have focused on the memorialization of 9/11 in literature and the visual arts, photogra- phy, urban culture and architecture, and cultural heritage. In a broader sense, his scholarly work revolves around the juncture of literature, visual culture, and cultural memory in American and Eastern European con- texts. He is co-editor of Materializing Memory in Art and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2017). Josef Raab is professor of North American Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. His research interests include Inter-American Studies, ethnic- ity (especially U.S. Latinas and Latinos), borders, cultural hybridity, and the whole range of U.S. American literature from the seventeenth to the twenty- first century. He has also written on U.S. Catholicism, the German presence in the United States, city narratives, television, film, and transnationalism in the Americas. The most recent books he edited or co-edited are New World Colors: Ethnicity, Belonging, and Difference in the Americas (2014), The New Dynamics of Identity Politics in the Americas: Multiculturalism and Beyond (2014), and Spaces— Communities—Discourses: Charting Identity and Belonging in the Americas (2016). Since 2009 Josef Raab has also been the founding president of the International Association of Inter-American Studies. xii List of Contributors Wilfried Raussert is chair of North American and Inter-American Studies at Bielefeld University. He is the director of the project “Entangled Americas” sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Education (2013–2019). He is co-coordinator of the international network “Black Hemispheric Americas” (http://www .uni-bielefeld.de/ias/blackamericas). Since 2009, he has acted as executive director of the International Association of Inter-American Studies and he is currently member of the International Committee of the ASA (USA). He just recently published The Routledge Companion to Inter-American Studies (2017). He is co-founder of the Center for Inter-American Studies at Bielefeld University and general editor of the peer-reviewed online journal fiar forum for inter-american research . His research interests include the cultural study of music, transnational American Studies and Inter-American Studies. Marja Roholl is an independent scholar. She taught for over 35 years at Erasmus University Rotterdam (History), Amsterdam University (American Studies) and MIT, Cambridge USA (Literature), and now works as an independent scholar. Her research and publications focus on representations of America in Dutch peri- odicals in the 19th and 20th century; 1930s American culture; World’s Fairs and American cultural diplomacy in the 20th century. She has also worked as a researcher for museum exhibits on American culture in the Netherlands and on the Marshall Plan as well as for documentaries on the Cold War in the Netherlands and on American propaganda in the Second World War. Currently she splits her time between Utrecht and Cambridge, where she participates in MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. Joost Rosendaal is an assistant professor of political-cultural history from 1500 at Radboud University, the Netherlands. He is a specialist on revolution and war studies with an emphasis on regional diversity and a multi-perspective approach. His publi- cations are, among others, on the Dutch and the French revolutions of the 18th century and on the Second World War especially in the Nijmegen-region. His book Nijmegen ‘44 was translated as The Destruction of Nijmegen, 1944. American Bombs and German Fire (2014). He is president and research-director of the foundation to empower the remembrance of WOII in Gelderland. Mathilde Roza is associate professor of American Literature and American Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, where she served as program List of Contributors xiii director for several years. A Fulbright recipient, she engaged in extensive archi- val research in preparation for a critical biography of American lost generation writer Robert Coates entitled Following Strangers: The Life and Works of Robert M. Coates (South Carolina University Press, 2011). In addition to American modernism and the international avant-garde, her research focuses on pro- cesses of identity formation, cultural diversity, contemporary North American ethnic and indigenous writing, and the interplay between culture and politics. Eric J. Sandeen received his Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Iowa in 1977. He directed the University of Wyoming’s American Studies Program from 1982 to 2014 and continues to serve as the Founding Director of the Wyoming Institute for Humanities Research. Many of his publications have focused on photography and American culture. Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America examined a famous photographic exhibit as a cultural text. Sandeen also works on public sector American Studies projects, the most recent of which surveys the contemporary landscape surrounding the Heart Mountain, Wyoming site where Japanese and Japanese Americans were incar- cerated during World War II. Sandeen has held Fulbright awards in Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, and, most recently (2014) at Radboud University, the Netherlands. Léon Stapper studied English and General Literature at the Radboud University Nijmegen. After his studies, he joined the staff of the Nijmegen University Library and is nowadays collection manager for the humanities. He is also active as transla- tor (Northrop Frye, G.B. Shaw, Michael Burleigh, Andre Schiffrin) and publi- cist ( Van Abélard tot de Zwaanridder ; an annotated bilingual edition of Keats’s poetry). He contributed to a first (partial) history of the Nijmegen University Library, Capita Selecta (1995), and published a number of exhibition guides for that same institution. © Hans Bak, Frank Mehring and Mathilde Roza, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004292017_002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the prevailing CC-BY-NC License at the time of publication. Introduction: Politics and Cultures of Liberation L’homme enfin n’est pas entièrement coupable, il n’a pas commencé l’histoire; ni tout à fait innocent puisqu’il la continue. 1 Albert Camus, L’Homme Révolté, 1951/ 1966 (355) At the opening of the exhibition Routes of Liberation: European Legacies of the Second World War , in Brussels on 13 February 2013, Martin Schulz, then President of the European Parliament, identified the development of multiple-perspectives on war, liberation, and remembrance as a desirable or even necessary European aspiration. Referring to Albert Camus’ convic- tion that human beings may not be “entirely guilty” when looking at past developments in history, he agreed with the French philosopher and author that they are not “wholly innocent” either, since it is they who shape future developments of history. Schulz went on to remind his audience that “man would be wholly guilty, if he started to forget.” 2 The issue raised by Schulz, the importance of remembering, is an urgent and complicated one: how can we counterbalance one-dimensional processes and acts of repression, exclusion, erasure, forgetting, and misinformation that often characterize(d) remembrances of the processes of war and liberation in favor of understand- ing the multidirectional, competing, and often conflicting dimensions of remembering war and liberation? Looking back on the course of the 20th century, including the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union, the themes of war and liberation play a cen- tral role in the collective memory of many Europeans, shaping both national and supranational perspectives on how the ideal of democracy should be anchored, preserved, and projected. At the same time, the term liberation is loaded with connotations vastly different across the various nations involved, depending on political and cultural contexts. 3 Since liberation embodies not 1 English translation: “In the end, man is not entirely guilty, he did not start history; nor is he wholly innocent, he continues it.” See http://www.europarl.europa.eu/former_ep _presidents/ president- schulz- 2012- 2014/ en/ press/ press_ release_ speeches/ speeches/sp -2014/ sp- 2014- february/ speech- by- the- president [accessed 15 Jan. 2016]. 2 Ibid. [accessed 15 Jan. 2016]. 3 Closely tied to the experience of liberation from political oppression is the value of personal freedom from “restrictive or discriminatory social conventions and attitudes.” The Oxford 2 Introduction: Politics and Cultures of Liberation a single idea but rather refers to a complex set of values, any effort at defin- ing the term needs to take into account equally varied and often contested notions, whether approached from an intellectual, social, economic, political, or ethical perspective. For example, from a moral angle the term liberation has been used to claim legitimacy for a variety of grievances associated with victimizations, fears about current developments, as well as hopes and visions of the future. 4 While traumatic memories of war, destruction, and particularly the Holocaust are at the center of many debates about a common framework of European memory (Sierp 2014, Sollors 2014, Watten 2015), this volume contributes to the ongoing discourse of mapping, analyzing, and evaluating memories, rituals, and artistic responses to the theme of “liberation” (Erll 2010, Hebel 2009, Rothberg 2009). While the liberation ending World War II was a multi- national event, the postwar memories of it are often defined by national characteristics and interests, and hence intrinsically selective. Also, views on other participating national entities are often one-dimensional: in the context of World War II and the Cold War, for instance, liberation is often closely associated with the United States as a liberating force, conceptualized as a beacon of freedom and stark proponent of democracy (Ellwood 2012, Fluck 2009, Kroes and Rydell 2005, Paul and Schock 2013, Mehring 2014, Pells 1997, Stephan 2006, Wagnleitner 1991). Existing memory cultures, we argue, need to be confronted with international contextualizations, and be placed in transnational frameworks. The essays brought together here conjointly explore the memory of liberation by bringing into play both national and transnational trajectories that inform audio-visual and literary representations, commemorative practices, and sites of memory. The contributions explore how the national is framed within a dynamic system of intercultural contact zones highlighting often competing agendas of remem- brance. Conjointly, the essays in this volume illuminate how the production, (re)mediation, and framing of narratives within different social, territorial, and political environments determine the cultural memory of liberation. Rather than dealing with one-dimensional and uncomplicated categories of liberation and oppression, this volume opens up new venues to better understand the English Dictionary distinguishes between active and passive agents. On the one hand, “liber- ation” refers to the “action of liberating (esp. from confinement or servitude)”; on the other hand, “liberation” describes “the condition of being liberated.” 4 If no idea is more fundamental to the identity of Americans as individuals and as a nation than “freedom,” as Eric Foner argues (xiii), then “liberation” can be described as a key term for the experience many Europeans share. Both terms are linked in the sense that liberation paves the way for a new experience of freedom which, in some way or another, had been taken away before. Introduction: Politics and Cultures of Liberation 3 struggles, disagreements, and debates that necessarily come to the fore when they are approached from multiple (national) perspectives. An important theoretical assumption that underlies this volume is that the politics and cultures of liberation inform educational, public, cultural and polit- ical institutions. The same holds for commemorative practices, which combine public affect (as defined by Erika Doss 2010), modern media, and performa- tive acts (in the sense of what Jay Anderson describes as “living history” and Wolfgang Hochbruck as “Geschichtstheater”). For example, memorials celebrat- ing the experience of liberation from oppression have the capacity to provide spaces and subjects that permit cultural and political creativity and prompt acts of responsible democratic citizenship. The study of culture in a political climate or context, from fine arts to photography, graphic design, and film, can reveal both national and transnational agendas that utilize the memory of liberation for overcoming chauvinism, ethnic prejudice, and foster mutual understand- ing. In addition to visual culture, as Jacques Attali and scholars in the field of sound studies (Sterne 2003, Schafer 1986, Paul and Schock 2013) have sug- gested, the politics and cultures of liberation can also be understood through music: new sources and archives can be activated to combine “transnational optics” (De Cesari and Rigney 2014) with transnational sonics so that memories of liberation can be experienced both visually and aurally across the traditional boundaries of the nation-state. Such recent approaches testify to the need for novel interdisciplinary theories and methodologies which can move beyond traditional approaches governed by a focus on national cultures. We argue that transnational studies can provide such a critical frame of reference. The essays compiled in this volume seek to provide new interdisciplinary and intercultural perspectives on the politics and cultures of liberation by exam- ining commemorative practices, artistic responses, and audio-visual media that lend themselves for transnational exploration. Rather than adhering to a single theoretical approach, the seventeen essays gathered here offer a wide range of diverse intercultural perspectives on media, memory, liberation, (self) Americanization, and conceptualizations of democracy from the war years, through the Cold War era to the 21st century. All contributions in one form or another seek to explore the possibilities of interdisciplinary and transna- tional approaches. Hence, the individual essays are informed by a wide array of theoretical and methodological concepts based on media studies, memory studies, history, literary studies and art history. The contributions evolved from symposia and workshops held between 2013 and 2015, which celebrated 25 years of American Studies at Radboud University under the theme “The Politics and Cultures of Liberation.” They also reflect the ongoing research agenda of the European Network of the same title, which the American Studies 4 Introduction: Politics and Cultures of Liberation program at Radboud University launched at the 20th EAAS conference in The Hague (2014). 5 This anthology is divided into four sections, each of which has a separate focus: 1) The Politics and Cultures of Liberation: Marketing, Memory and Mediation, 2) The Soundtrack of Liberation, 3) Transnational Re- locations, and 4) Transnational Perspectives from the Archives. The fourth section is part of our efforts to ground transnational American Studies locally by highlighting the potential of specific archives and institutions to contribute new sources and perspectives related to the theme of our book. 6 The opening section on The Politics and Cultures of Liberation: Marketing, Memory and Mediation presents Dutch, American, Japanese-American, and Canadian perspectives on the experience and framing of liberation in the context of World War II. Marja Roholl’s essay focuses on “The Projection of America,” a U.S. Office of War Information Overseas Branch program, explored here through its operations in a particular national setting: the Netherlands, 1944– 45. The goal of the Overseas Branch was not only to smooth the transi- tion from occupation and war to liberation, but also to help shape a new world order under the aegis of the United States. The campaign’s most important tools were films and illustrated magazines. But the Overseas Branch saw these media as more than mere implements. It also helped the American film and publishing industries to protect and expand their markets, even if that was at odds with the official message of the propaganda campaign. Local circum- stances mattered crucially to the deployment of “The Projection of America” program, as the Dutch case study shows. The liberation of the Netherlands took much longer than anticipated, with the Dutch government fully re-installed only in June 1945. This essay explores how the program’s goals and products were tailored to meet local circumstances. The Dutch case underlines the importance of the local in understanding how propaganda was deployed and received. “The Projection of America” campaign was part of the invasion and 5 The European Network “Politics & Cultures of Liberation” wants to provide an innovative platform for European scholars of North American and Cultural Studies to present their research projects, coordinate future projects, workshops, organize conferences, and estab- lish joint seminars and summer school initiatives. The network welcomes researchers who convene under the umbrella of the European Association of American Studies. The network aims to contribute to what we envision as a crucial goal of American Studies: to reunite our academic discipline with responsible citizenship thereby building new bridges towards a truly democratic society. More information under www.ru.nl/col 6 For more information on “grounding transnational American Studies” see our international spring academy mission statement under http://www.ru.nl/ nas/ information/ rudesa/ Introduction: Politics and Cultures of Liberation 5 the liberation; it also provided the prototype for America’s postwar cultural diplomacy efforts. Mathilde Roza focuses on the Dutch illustrator and pen artist Jo Spier. Spier made crucial contributions to two successful Marshall Plan booklets that were distributed in the Netherlands: Het Marshall-Plan en U , about the benefits of the Marshall Plan, and Als We Niet Hélemaal van de Kaart Willen Raken , a pro- motional booklet about the Technical Assistance Program in the Netherlands. Roza zooms in on the ways in which national identity and traditional con- ceptions of “Dutchness” were deployed as marketing strategies to “sell” the Marshall Plan to the newly liberated Dutch, not just in the official narratives in favor of the Marshall Plan that Spier contributed to, but also in other media, including two “Marshall films” by the famous Dutch filmmaker Herman van der Horst. Joost Rosendaal puts the complicated memory and commemoration prac- tices of the Nijmegen bombing at the center of his analysis on destruction, liberation and reconstruction. Taking his cue from a television documentary that explores the difficulties of comparing the destruction of Rotterdam by the National Socialists with the one in Nijmegen, caused allegedly by mistake by Allied American fighters on 22 February, 1944, Rosendaal examines how potentially traumatic events are repressed from memory and commemorated in different ways. As a case study, he turns to the bombardment and asks about the reasons for the delay of commemorations by several decades. His essay critically examines the specific narrative that American bombers allegedly had the intention to destroy a German city beyond the border. Would such an explanation make it easier for the population to cope with the tremen- dous loss of lives and the material damage caused by those who would later be remembered as liberators? Nijmegen in the Netherlands and the Belgian town of Mortsel are remarkable case studies to illuminate comparatively the more general problem regarding the function of self-censorship and political correctness in processing a traumatic historical event. Laszló Munteán sheds new light on the mediated memory of Operation Market Garden, a combined air and ground offensive launched by the Allies in September 1944, aimed at securing bridges across rivers in the Netherlands in order to facilitate the northward advance of the army and, ultimately, to end the war by Christmas. The campaign was unsuccessful and the First British Airborne Division had to surrender after days of arduous battle. One year later the veterans of this division returned to Arnhem to reenact the battle in the form of the film Theirs Is the Glory, directed by Brian Desmond Hurst. Released in 1946, the film was shot on the former battlegrounds in and around Arnhem, exclusively featuring soldiers who participated in or witnessed the battle. Munteán argues