Main content

Enough About the War, Dad

Episode 5 of 5

Michael Goldfarb tells the stories of Americans who fought and lived through World War II. Dr Howard Shevrin was a psychoanalyst whose war story influenced his later career.

7 December 2021 marks the eightieth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and with it America's entry into World War II.

Americans' war experience was substantially different from that of Britons. Michael Goldfarb's father was among the World War II generation christened "The Greatest Generation" in popular culture. He uses the stories he heard growing up from the Americans who fought the war to explore those differences both during the conflict and in the years immediately following.

Dr Howard Shevrin was a psychoanalyst whose own war story influenced his later career. He bored his family with his relentless telling of throwing his sidearm at a German machine gun nest, rather than firing it, when he finally faced the enemy, during the Battle of the Bulge. While in a field hospital, he came across a copy of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams - how consciousness arises from the interface with the physiology of the brain became his life’s work.

These are memories imperfect and embellished but they create a picture of what America was like during the war years and how the war came to be woven into America's national myth. He acknowledges just how mighty the forces were that propelled the children of these veterans away from that myth when the call came to serve in Vietnam.

Available now

14 minutes

Last on

Fri 3 Dec 2021 22:45

More episodes

Next

You are at the last episode

See all episodes from The Essay

Broadcast

  • Fri 3 Dec 2021 22:45

Death in Trieste

Death in Trieste

A 1760s murder still informs ideas about aesthetics, a certain sort of sex, and death.

Watch: My Deaf World

Watch: My Deaf World

Five compelling experiences of what it is like to be deaf in 21st-century Britain.

The Book that Changed Me

Five figures from the arts and science introduce books that changed their lives and work.

Download The Essay

Download The Essay

Download all the episodes from the series and listen at your leisure.

Podcast