War Party Planner

The reason big festivals on the Mall are curated is because when they are not, the results can be disastrous. Last September's spectacle by the National Football League, Pepsi Vanilla and Britney Spears will live in infamy.

The American Battle Monuments Commission -- which built the memorial -- knew whom to call to plan the $3.1 million Mall reunion and tribute: the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, operated by the people who produce the annual Folklife Festival. Based in that Chinatown office, they are an unusual assembly of talents. About a third of the permanent staff of 50 are PhDs with a flair for public presentation. The rest are specialists in the design and technical fields necessary to put on a good show.

Creating the tribute has required hiring an additional 65 people -- including Deutsch, who is not on the permanent staff but has worked on several festivals over the years. Deutsch typed up the original proposal for the World War II tribute after brainstorming with Folklife Center Director Richard Kurin and Folklife Festival Director Diana Parker, who are overseeing the event. He works every day with technical and design directors, and relies on sub-curators and coordinators focusing on specific pavilions and overall logistics.

But Deutsch embodies the center's maverick blend of academic rigor, real-world curiosity and unpredictable whimsy that enables conversations across cultures -- or generations.

So how does a guy with a name like Deutsch end up with a job like this?

The name is Hungarian Jewish. Jim Deutsch's grandfather got a job working on a ship before World War I, and when it docked in America, he got off and melted into the New World.

Deutsch's late father was a master sergeant in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He didn't talk about it much, but after the war he refused to eat rice.

Raised in New Jersey, Deutsch graduated from Williams College in 1970 with a degree in American civilization, a grab-bag discipline he chose because courses in film, music, history, English, philosophy, politics and art are all relevant.

He got a job as a reporter covering police for the Indianapolis Star, but decided he didn't have the heart to ask grieving loved ones for quotes. He drove his Volkswagen bus to Orlando, where he operated the monorail at Disney's Magic Kingdom. After a stint as a National Park Service ranger and archaeologist in Arizona, he piloted the VW to Fairbanks, where he became a librarian.

He picked up a master's degree in American studies from the University of Minnesota in 1976, then decided to spend some time in the Deep South. He consulted maps and novels and got a job as the sole reporter and photographer for the Yazoo City (Miss.) People's Press. A small-town reporter didn't have to be so pushy. Later, he took an administrative job with the library system in Billings, Mont., because it is on the Great Plains.

"I wanted to cover all the regions of the United States," Deutsch says. "That was very deliberate. My travels were a kind of non-academic way of continuing my education."

He sought employment in each place because he didn't want to be a "casual visitor." What did he discover? Some things you've heard about -- regional differences, the diversity that is the engine of popular culture. But Deutsch says that to grasp the particulars behind such generalizations, you must live them -- the smell of spring flowers in Mississippi, the seeming warmth of zero-degree weather in Alaska when you wear short sleeves because it is no longer 60 degrees below.

In the 1990s, he received a PhD from George Washington University, writing his dissertation on portrayals of returning WWII vets in film and fiction. Then he began traveling overseas, lecturing in Germany, Poland, Armenia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Kyrgyzstan, Romania, Turkey, explaining America and learning about those cultures. He also taught at GW while continuing his peculiar self-education -- becoming a Census enumerator in 2000 to get in people's homes and hear the statistics that underlay their stories. He also worked at the Folklife Festival. One year he wired cowboys for sound as they worked cattle within sight of the Capitol. He was one of the coordinators two other years, including the Silk Road festival of 2002, where he oversaw bringing the painted truck from Pakistan and the nomads from Kazakhstan.

When the World War II project came up, Deutsch's experience with festivals and his knowledge of the era made him a good candidate for curator.

His dissertation on portrayals of returning vets explored something that later generations may have forgotten about the greatest generation. So many of the movies and novels were dark. In "The Best Years of Our Lives," three veterans find themselves estranged from their families, alienated from their jobs or wrestling with disability. In "In a Lonely Place," Humphrey Bogart plays a maladjusted vet accused of murder. Frank Sinatra is the protagonist struggling with heroin addiction in the movie version of Nelson Algren's "The Man With the Golden Arm."

The popular portrayals run contrary to the image of postwar boom and optimism that many people think of today. According to Deutsch, 1946 had the highest divorce rate until the 1970s.

The disaffected vet from the Vietnam War is familiar, but World War II? Deutsch says it's a recurring element of American culture after all wars. Bleak post-Iraq war movies and literature are next.

"Some of these people literally went through hell," Deutsch says. "A common theme is the civilians back home don't understand what they went through."

He is sitting on a bench at the Mall, as finishing touches are put on tents for Wartime Stories and the Reunion Hall. The program he has curated is designed to go one more step toward helping later generations understand what the greatest generation went through. For each other, and for strangers, the aging men and women will conjure up the chill of the English Channel, the warmth of boyhood friendship across the fence of a Japanese internment camp, the self-denial of ration coupons, the hope of broken codes and victory gardens and big-band swing -- all the things they felt before they returned home to the smell of Mississippi flowers and the frostbite of Alaskan winters so long ago.

The roving scholar's work here is almost done. Next, he'll be teaching a course in films of the 1960s and planning a lecture tour of Mongolia.