Was there anything? As a tourist in the tourist areas of New Orleans you won’t find many traces of Katrina.The popular sites of the town show hardly any traces of the hurricane that paralyzed the city in 2005. The superdome where tens of thousands were stranded for days, with scarce support and not enough toilets, has been returned for years to a sports arena. In the Vieux Carré gentrification blossoms, on the third weekend of June the French Quarter is like a cattle market, on Bourbon Street live music comes out of every open door, bars and restaurants are full. The bons temps are rolling. Not one face is masked, and nobody ever asks whether you are vaccinated. Like Katrina, COVID-19 too is history.
If you want to know how it was in August 2005 you got to go to the museum. Next to the Cathedral the Louisiana State Museum shows how the city was overwhelmed, how warnings of wrongly constructed and insufficiently maintained levees were ignored and how resolute citizens took matters in their own hands, helping those who were stuck on the roofs of flooded houses, when the authorities were out of soap. The real catastrophe of Katrina did not take place in the tourist areas of New Orleans but further out. A hotel employee tells us that the area where he lives was flooded because a levee worker was not on his post. He had to be evacuated and no one thought of looking for a replacement. At one point later the mayor responsible for the incident was sued, the employee continued. When asked about the outcome of the suit, he just laughed. About 300 000 people – half of the population at the time – has not come back.
We enlist for a bike tour, three informative hours guided by Brian, a playwright. He says the history of New Orleans can be framed in four keywords. First, The French, founders and first colonizers in the 1700s. Second, The Spanish, which received the city after the French-English war in 1763 until another takeover by the French in 1802. Third, The Americans, which one year later bought the whole Mississippi basin from Napoleon, with borrowed money from Holland and his enemies in England. Fourth, gamblers, thieves, and whores – der colorful species of humanity which puts its stamp on the city history to this day. Remember the gubernatorial election of 1991, when a corrupt Democrat stood against a racist former Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. Democratic stickers read Vote for the cool, it’s important. Our tour begins at the house of legendary jazz trumpeter King Oliver, past the failed project of an empty high-rise which turns into a ruin because no one would touch it (the city put it under a preservation order), then through the French Quarter where Miss Doreen plays the clarinet, legs fidgeting, the husband on the sousaphone accompanying, on to the Tremé area where the statue of Louis Armstrong stands, and finally ending in the Garden District where Brian points out the Swiss Chalet Style home of actress Sandra Bullock.
*
One remarkable post-Katrina sight added to New Orleans is the National World War II Museum, a vast expanse relating the events of the war – strictly from an American viewpoint, always hands-on and close to the tale of the common soldier. In the entry hall you see a D-Day landing craft, product of Higgins of Louisiana. From the ceiling hangs a C-47 transporter, made by Douglas, the precursor of the legendary DC-3. More, way more military gear awaits the visitor in the halls further on (no, the Swiss Oerlikon anti-air guns provided for the Wehrmacht were not spotted), in great detail the chronicle of the two-front war in Europa and Asia is outlined, campaign by campaign, from the battle of the bulge in west of the Rhine to the carnages in the Pacific. The propaganda effort of the American friends of Hitler (America First) is documented along with the trickery of the President Roosevelt (Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars”) and the hesitancy of neutral America to enter the war, suddenly turning to total mobilization of arms production (arsenal of democracy) after the raid of Pearl Harbor.
*
All –most – is said but weighed according to the measuring system of America’s national post-war history. This is entirely understandable. “History” agrees with the victors which are writing it. Self- inspection and self-criticism – the German’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung – is not so much to be expected from them than from the losers. Still, the presentation in the National Museum leaves an uneasy feeling with the visitor, the feeling of being the object of a political purpose – a manipulation to fortify a national self-definition in the process of becoming less assured and more brittle. As a Swiss, I left the show feeling a whiff of exercise “Diamant”, the self-congratulatory event with which self-conscious Switzerland in 1989 commemorated – or rather celebrated – the outbreak of the war, the only nation to do so in such a manner.
*
Let’s be fair. A fair assessment of the presentation in the exhibition halls of New Orleans would have to make a comparison with the ones of other victors. I don’t know whether and where Russia presents its victory over Hitler-Germany in museal form, but I know that this victory was – and is – milked dry in order to shore up support for the regime, and certainly the horrors of Stalinism were – and are – getting short shrift in these endeavors. I doubt that France, also a victor, maintains a World War II Museum. I have seen the War Cabinet Museum at 10 Downing Street in London, entirely focused on Prime Minister Churchill whose past as a naval butcher in the First World War is equally neglected as his colonial hybris. Compared with these the American presentation is an enlightened one. The forced encampment of Japanese Americans is quite broadly described, and even more so the racial discrimination of blacks (“African-Americans”) and Indians (“native Americans”) that went on for decades despite their considerable part in the war effort (the native peoples provided the largest proportions of soldiers). But the presentation is one-sided. The exhibition is called “the road to Berlin”, but it is neither said nor shown that it was the Red Army that conquered the German capital. The suicidal national fanaticism of the Japanese is recalled in word, sound, and image, as well as the hundreds of thousands of assumed casualties which were avoided by dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the ways of the making of those decisions, the evaluating of which pros and which contras, is kept in the shadow. One room is devoted to the liberation of a concentration camp in Austria, with a Jewish veteran as a virtual interview partner (the man, is shown sitting on a screen, and some computer program fishes for answers to a visitor’s question in the material from a long interview). But not a word of the sad American role at the Evian conference of 1938 which was convened as a last-ditch attempt to provide refuge for the persecuted Jews of Europe. Generally speaking, the National World War II Museum is exceedingly long on details and so much shorter on context.
*
Why? Why this wealth of information, spreading like an oil spill from one hall to the other? Why at the beginning of a new century (the museum was inaugurated in 2000) which could leave behind the sufferings of the one before? Precisely because of that. World War II was the last American war to be written up as a heroic victory in the history books. What came after were ties (Korea), defeats (Vietnam) and political errors (Iraq, Afghanistan). After the Vietnam “engagement”, the last under the rules of the draft, the American population was sick of waging war. Soldiers were not considered heroes but practitioners of a dismal trade. But in the years after Ronald Reagan had the Caribbean mini-island of Grenada attacked (1983) and George Bush the Elder kicked the Iraqis out of Kuwait (1991), the outlook changed. By God we kicked the Vietnam syndrome, declared Bush after the end of his gulf war, and what he meant was: The military is again established as a tool of foreign policy. By and by the mood changed, and growing acceptance in Congress and population allowed for opening the toolbox almost at will. After nine eleven, the attacks of September 2001, America has been almost permanently at war, accompanied by the steady droning of support for the men and women in uniform. It is a small minority of members of Congress which opposes those wars with consequence, and the media have long abandoned the public accounting of the victims. President Biden, the anti-Trump, closes his speeches with God Bless America and God bless our men and women in uniform.
*
The veneration of the military and its agents is back in America. But things are not as they used to be in the fifties when the USA as the almighty superpower had large swaths of the globe at its beck and call. Nine eleven is not Pearl Harbor. Kim Jong-un or Vladimir Putin are not Adolf Hitler. No battle of the bulge will win the conflict with the Chinese. Compared to two generations ago the superpower is reduced. It reaches limits, left and right. Germany builds its gas pipeline in the East Sea as she sees fit and Chancellor Merkel tells President Biden at their last joint appearance matter-of-factly that the two allies won’t see eye to eye every time. It is this shrinking of American power from overwhelming mere huge that is behind the big show in New Orleans. The heroic lore of World War II is repotted from the memories of the veterans and the “narratives” of literature into a museum. There, they are untouchable, set in the concrete.
*
Back in the time, when the war ended, the watchword never again, universally. Nie wieder Krieg. The books of contemporary writers jeered and ridiculed the heroics and honor in war in soldiery and warfare – the values so omnipresent today – because the reality of war ground them to dust. If you want to know how it was in those times, you have to read the novels. If you want to know what the national authorities want you to think how it was, you visit that museum in New Orleans.