Not a Beginning but an End Melvin J. Lasky, Diarist

Diaries presume a posterity that might find meaning in their pages; the meaning of Melvin Lasky’s diary lies in its literary form, as well. What begins as a young New York intellectual’s chronicle of adventures is overtaken by a starker confrontation with ruin and holocaust, and the form breaks from straightforward narration into modernist fragments. Alongside Lasky’s “official” military histories, his diary sketched a counterhistory, in which the American occupation did not inaugurate a new historical era, but rather marked a longer era’s dismal conclusion. This epiphany would inflect the cultural cold war that was to come.