Reconciliation March 14, 2019

Copyright © 2019                               John F. Oyler 

March 14, 2019

Reconciliation

As is frequently the case, a couple of different recent incidents have combined to get me interested in the concept of reconciliation. The first incident was the February edition of the Andrew Carnegie Free Library and Music Hall’s fine “Second Saturday Civil War Lecture Series”.

This presentation, entitled “The Meaning and Legacy of Gettysburg”, was made by a well-qualified Civil War historian, retired Air Force officer David Albert. One of the several concepts that he believes contribute to the long-term legacy of this sacred battleground is that of reunion.

It is well known that the battlefield was the site of regular reunions of men from both sides who fought in the battle, for many years. Mr. Albert exemplified this by showing a famous photograph of two grizzled veterans, one in Union blue and the other in Confederate gray, shaking hands in 1913, fifty years after the battle. It is not clear why this concept became so important at Gettysburg, but indeed the battlefield has become a symbol of reconciliation, the eventual healing of a great wound.

A week or so after attending this presentation I came across a 1958 newspaper clipping while researching for one of our workshops on the history of Bridgeville High School. It cropped up because one of my classmates, Raymond Sherp, was in a photograph accompanying the article.

At that time Raymond was a member of Edwin Peterson’s famed creative writing course at the University of Pittsburgh. In fact, he was one of four of Professor Peterson’s students who had placed among the top five winners of the Atlantic Monthly’s national short story competition.

I was surprised to see that one of the other students in the photograph was a young man named Paul Zolbrod. Could this be the same Paul Zolbrod I had met in the early 1950s? A very short Internet search confirmed that it was indeed the same person. In addition, I learned that Zolbrod had had a distinguished academic career at Pitt, followed by an equally distinguished career teaching English at Allegheny College.

I also found a video of a fairly recent interview of Dr. Zolbrod for the Veterans Breakfast Club, which includes numerous references to a novel he wrote about the Korean War, “Battle Songs”. I also learned that his military service paralleled mine. He was drafted seven months before me and he too served in Japan immediately after the Korean cease-fire was signed.

Obviously I had to read the book. It was written when he was a graduate student, but never published until 2007. Despite its obscurity I found it to be quite thought provoking; it is the March selection for our book club.

Zolbrod describes “Battle Songs” as a story of the Korean War in four movements. It documents the experience of four young men from Western Pennsylvania who are drafted early in the 1950s and end up in combat in Korea. The four movements refer to four different perspectives on war in general as personified in four different young men.

The first perspective is man’s inherent need for conflict, to show his superiority over his inferiors. The second perspective is man’s instinctive need to fight to protect his companions against their common enemies. The third perspective is the absolute horror and insanity of war.

The final perspective I found to be profound, the idea that the only way a combatant can overcome his guilt about participation in such an uncivilized activity is by reconciliation with his enemy. In “Battle Songs” the author exemplifies this by inventing a relationship between a noncombatant GI in Tokyo (like me or Zolbrod) and a bitter, badly injured survivor of Hiroshima.

This is not a new concept for me. In last week’s column I mentioned three books dealing with POW camps -- “The Unbroken”, “The Narrow Road to the Deep North”, and “When Hell Froze Over”. In each of them the theme of reconciliation is highly emphasized.

Historically, reconciliation has an excellent track record. I recently heard Todd DePastino give a fine presentation on the conclusion of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles, which focused on punishment rather than reconciliation, virtually assuring the certainty of World War II. In contrast, our treatment of the defeated Axis powers after World War II has produced healthy nations that are among our strongest partners.

If reconciliation is such a powerful force for good, can we use it to resolve other longstanding problems? Our society is plagued by guilt trips for massive social injustices of the past – the Holocaust, slavery, and the uprooting of the Native Americans. 

I try to distance myself from guilt regarding the Holocaust by the fact that my ancestors left Germany seven generations ago; nonetheless I share the genes of the Nazis. I have always claimed that none of my ancestors owned slaves and that they fought to free them. However recent information suggests that our assumed progenitor, Johann Georg Euler, did indeed have a plantation in New Jersey, complete with slaves. I never had much success avoiding responsibility for taking Pennsylvania from the Lenape and Seneca; certainly my ancestors were heavily involved in that venture. 

I wish I believed that there was some way we could achieve reconciliation with these people. Somehow being resolved to treat them as equals isn’t enough. Perhaps reconciliation requires forgiveness by the offended party. I wonder what we can do to achieve that.