Is Hiroshima memorial a fair legacy for Harry Truman?
Potsdam, Germany – Handsome villas on Karl Marx street here look out on the bending Griebnitzsee River. In one villa, occupied by Harry Truman in July 1945, history itself would fatefully bend.
President Truman called it "the little White House" – and it was here, while he was in Berlin for the Potsdam Conference, that word arrived of the first atom bomb test in New Mexico July 14. With strong urging from Winston Churchill, the Americans sent a letter to Japan, asking for surrender, or a "terrible destruction." The reply: mokusatsu – roughly, forget it.
Thus a new history began, a cold-war era stamped with a mushroom cloud.
During the cold war, Truman's villa was a propaganda tool for Soviet East Germany – labeled "nightmare house" for the American imperialists' decision to drop the atomic bomb. The Berlin Wall ran through its back garden, adding symbolic punch. Yet when the wall fell, the East German view of the home and its meaning did not.
The Potsdam city government, former communists, tried to make it a Hiroshima memorial. American expats and diplomats lobbied against a depiction of Truman, who initiated the Marshall plan and rebuilt Europe, as someone whose central legacy is destroying two Japanese cities and their inhabitants.
The place was sold to a think tank for the Free Democrats, the liberal party now in a ruling coalition with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The dispute seemed to fade. ...
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President Truman called it "the little White House" – and it was here, while he was in Berlin for the Potsdam Conference, that word arrived of the first atom bomb test in New Mexico July 14. With strong urging from Winston Churchill, the Americans sent a letter to Japan, asking for surrender, or a "terrible destruction." The reply: mokusatsu – roughly, forget it.
Thus a new history began, a cold-war era stamped with a mushroom cloud.
During the cold war, Truman's villa was a propaganda tool for Soviet East Germany – labeled "nightmare house" for the American imperialists' decision to drop the atomic bomb. The Berlin Wall ran through its back garden, adding symbolic punch. Yet when the wall fell, the East German view of the home and its meaning did not.
The Potsdam city government, former communists, tried to make it a Hiroshima memorial. American expats and diplomats lobbied against a depiction of Truman, who initiated the Marshall plan and rebuilt Europe, as someone whose central legacy is destroying two Japanese cities and their inhabitants.
The place was sold to a think tank for the Free Democrats, the liberal party now in a ruling coalition with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The dispute seemed to fade. ...