DW-tv recently aired Mathias Haentjes’s film called Mein Germany – US-Soldaten im Trümmerland. Seen from the perspective of former US occupation soldiers, especially the photographer Tony Vaccaro, it tells the story of Germans and Americans learning to know one another despite the atmosphere of political re-education and paranoia about hidden Nazis. Another name for the film might have been Romance in the Rubble – Defeated German Women Leading American Soldiers Astray. The film is original in that it manages to show happy postwar cityscapes despite ruins. It is upbeat and, except for one scene, free of downtrodden refugees. Most notable are the many laughing children.
And yet, the whimsical script jars with Vaccaro's images of brutal military destruction. Even the mounds of brick and cement are romanticized, however, by cinematic intrusions as when shapely legs peddle across the screen, the maiden's skirt flying. Why is not Iraq this way, or Gaza, or Bosnia, or Dafur, or any number of other postwar venues? The answer is simple, no slim German Fräuleins. Just kidding.
What were the postwar years like? Let me shift briefly to three German perspectives from people who lived through them.
Conditions were bad. While Western Allies doused Germans with collective guilt, Eastern Allies hounded, imprisoned, and killed them. Philosopher Karl Jaspers remembered how in the summer of 1945 posters were hung up in all towns and villages. The posters consisted of pictures and stories from Belsen and the crucial statement, “You are the guilty!” Horror gripped many who had indeed not known this, Jaspers wrote, and something rebelled: who indicts me there? No signature, no authority—the poster came as though from empty space. Likewise, the chronicler Karl Wind of the town of Andernach in the Rhineland reported how depressed the mood was. Some people told him that they no longer turned on the radio. It only spoke of the individual and collective guilt of Germans that they had to recognize and accept it, that they had only duties now but no rights that they must atone for what was done and prove their worth. But nothing was said about the hundreds of thousands of innocent women, children, and old men who burned to death from the bombing.
Between May and August of 1945, “wild expulsions” took place. They were called “wild” because they took place before the three major Allies, Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill met in Potsdam to discuss the “humane” transfer of the defeated from former German territories in the East to the rump of Germany in the West: “wild” also because the rage against German refugee women and children exceeded comprehension. In his “East Prussian Diary,” an unnerved physician Hans von Lehndorff, a Christian of the Confessional Church, asked himself. What is it that we are actually witnessing here? Is it simply an expression of natural savagery or of revenge? Of revenge perhaps, he thought, but in a different sense. Does not the creature revenge itself here against the human being in one and the same person, the flesh against the spirit that was forced upon him? … And these indoctrinated children, fifteen, sixteen years old, that throw themselves like wolves upon women without knowing what it is all about. This has nothing to do with Russia, nothing to do with any particular nation or race – it is humankind without God, the disfigured mask of the human being.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Friday, August 27, 2010
Continuing the Discussion: Antje and Karla
Blame it all on Darwin, I mean the use of race, nationality, and the idea that competition between the sexes is a key evolutionary mechanism with the consequence that man has ultimately become superior to woman. The National Socialists played with it and gave it a slight twist, namely, the idea that competition between races, nationalities, or ethnic groups is a key evolutionary mechanism with the consequence that Nordic man has ultimately become superior to all else.
It is a great achievement that civilization, by means of World War II, decisively defeated Darwin’s twist—Darwin’s twisted cross. That defeat is an empirical fact achieved by the phenomenon we have largely overlooked—I mean, allied Cooperation.
Here I must refer readers to a fascinating paper by Kathleen Boiling Lowrey published in Anthropology Today, vol 26, no 4, August 2010, pp 18-21 entitled “Alfred Russel Wallace as ancestor figure.” Lowrey puzzles why it is that Darwin won the upper hand in evolutionary theory when anthropological research shows overwhelmingly that not competition but cooperation is the more powerful mechanism behind human evolution. She finds part of the answer in the following: (a) Darwin’s explanation was more congenial to his era than was that of Alfred Russel Wallace, and more importantly (b) while Wallace was by far the superior fieldworker who spent years living on his own in the Malay archipelago he was rather spiritual. Wallace “considered the lush complexity of human thought a serious mystery, one inexplicable within the necessity-driven framework of natural selection” (ibid:21). In other words, while Darwinian evolution answered the question, “Is this all there is?” with “Yes,” Wallace answered “No.”
When Antje responded to my last post, she showed that she was a superior fieldworker and being such brings valuable insights. Regarding the question of nationality and collective guilt of “the German”, she addressed her peers as follows:
So next time you talk to somebody about their nationality or their country you should realise that the moment you do that, you jerk them right out of who they are and force them to look at themselves from the outside and through your eyes. You force exteriorisation on them. That’s not a horrible thing to do, not for you anyway; but know that you always lose a bit of the person you were talking to when you do that. As a result, you will never know them for who they are, you will only know them for who you want them to be: Foreigners.
Wallace by being a superior fieldworker went beyond mere empathy; he became aware of what he called “aesthetic sensibility” as the marker of humanity. He did not force “exteriorization” on them nor impose on them racial or national homogeneity. He saw their depth and beauty and the individual variation thereof. Most amazingly, “Wallace attributed this definitive human capacity to some sort of higher power.”
It is a great achievement that civilization, by means of World War II, decisively defeated Darwin’s twist—Darwin’s twisted cross. That defeat is an empirical fact achieved by the phenomenon we have largely overlooked—I mean, allied Cooperation.
Here I must refer readers to a fascinating paper by Kathleen Boiling Lowrey published in Anthropology Today, vol 26, no 4, August 2010, pp 18-21 entitled “Alfred Russel Wallace as ancestor figure.” Lowrey puzzles why it is that Darwin won the upper hand in evolutionary theory when anthropological research shows overwhelmingly that not competition but cooperation is the more powerful mechanism behind human evolution. She finds part of the answer in the following: (a) Darwin’s explanation was more congenial to his era than was that of Alfred Russel Wallace, and more importantly (b) while Wallace was by far the superior fieldworker who spent years living on his own in the Malay archipelago he was rather spiritual. Wallace “considered the lush complexity of human thought a serious mystery, one inexplicable within the necessity-driven framework of natural selection” (ibid:21). In other words, while Darwinian evolution answered the question, “Is this all there is?” with “Yes,” Wallace answered “No.”
When Antje responded to my last post, she showed that she was a superior fieldworker and being such brings valuable insights. Regarding the question of nationality and collective guilt of “the German”, she addressed her peers as follows:
So next time you talk to somebody about their nationality or their country you should realise that the moment you do that, you jerk them right out of who they are and force them to look at themselves from the outside and through your eyes. You force exteriorisation on them. That’s not a horrible thing to do, not for you anyway; but know that you always lose a bit of the person you were talking to when you do that. As a result, you will never know them for who they are, you will only know them for who you want them to be: Foreigners.
Wallace by being a superior fieldworker went beyond mere empathy; he became aware of what he called “aesthetic sensibility” as the marker of humanity. He did not force “exteriorization” on them nor impose on them racial or national homogeneity. He saw their depth and beauty and the individual variation thereof. Most amazingly, “Wallace attributed this definitive human capacity to some sort of higher power.”
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Response to Antje's Responders on Being German by Karla Poewe
The three responses posted on Antje’s Blog are very thoughtful. Most people remember pasts because their lives were destroyed in some way or another and they need to understand what happened and come to terms with it. Unfortunately, the politicization of memory has complicated what should remain simple, namely, the fact that memories are personal, limited, and powerful. This simplicity is destroyed when following wars, victors demand reparations, rectifications, retaliation and universal blame. Much later occurs the construction of official histories and their memorialization. One of its consequences is that perpetrators and victims become permanently associated with specific peoples.
Even before that politicians, be they representatives of the victors or of the defeated use memories selectively to achieve certain ends, for example, the settling of borders (like the Oder-Neiße), or the pacifying of new neighbors (like the Soviet Russia), or dismantling of industry (as in the Ruhr Gebiet), and so on. The chaos of postwar years is more or less forgotten—by all that is but the general suffering and deprived population, the evacuees or refugees. Many of these are silenced.
The guilt that many Germans feel has not to do with a genetic predisposition, but with postwar indoctrination, education, and with lower motives like exclusion or denigration.
Let me give one personal example. More than four decades ago when I was in my twenties, an immigrant, and university student in Canada, I was nominated for a Woodrow Wilson fellowship. I passed successfully the essay stage and went for a final selection interview. The interview was held in a hotel in downtown Toronto. Once there, I was welcomed and handed over to an interviewer. We sat down. I was unbearably nervous, but also excited to talk about my favorite topic at the time, Levi-Strauss’s anthropology. Then the interviewer rolled up his shirtsleeve. You can imagine what went through my mind. But it was not that, rather, he showed me a number tattooed into his arm. “Do you know what that is?” he asked me. “No,” I said, then stopped, hesitated, thought, and surmised that this must be what people talked about ... it can’t be I thought. I still feel my eyes burning as I looked at him. As if from a great distance, I heard him say, “Sometimes two cultures meet, and they clash, and it’s fatal.” My heart pounded, pounds now, as I tell it. I got up and left.
I cried all the way home. Why? He had all my personal information. He knew I was born 1941 and a toddler at the time of the worst mass killings of Jews. He knew, and he did that when I was most vulnerable, and as an immigrant desperate for financial help. Well, he had his revenge. He demanded guilt and he succeeded in receiving it. He was wrong in what he did, even in what he said. And I should have answered back. Instead, I felt numb and choked up.
Total defeat, even when necessary as it was with the Nazis, is an existential condition. It marks us for life. I do not wish it upon anyone.
Even before that politicians, be they representatives of the victors or of the defeated use memories selectively to achieve certain ends, for example, the settling of borders (like the Oder-Neiße), or the pacifying of new neighbors (like the Soviet Russia), or dismantling of industry (as in the Ruhr Gebiet), and so on. The chaos of postwar years is more or less forgotten—by all that is but the general suffering and deprived population, the evacuees or refugees. Many of these are silenced.
The guilt that many Germans feel has not to do with a genetic predisposition, but with postwar indoctrination, education, and with lower motives like exclusion or denigration.
Let me give one personal example. More than four decades ago when I was in my twenties, an immigrant, and university student in Canada, I was nominated for a Woodrow Wilson fellowship. I passed successfully the essay stage and went for a final selection interview. The interview was held in a hotel in downtown Toronto. Once there, I was welcomed and handed over to an interviewer. We sat down. I was unbearably nervous, but also excited to talk about my favorite topic at the time, Levi-Strauss’s anthropology. Then the interviewer rolled up his shirtsleeve. You can imagine what went through my mind. But it was not that, rather, he showed me a number tattooed into his arm. “Do you know what that is?” he asked me. “No,” I said, then stopped, hesitated, thought, and surmised that this must be what people talked about ... it can’t be I thought. I still feel my eyes burning as I looked at him. As if from a great distance, I heard him say, “Sometimes two cultures meet, and they clash, and it’s fatal.” My heart pounded, pounds now, as I tell it. I got up and left.
I cried all the way home. Why? He had all my personal information. He knew I was born 1941 and a toddler at the time of the worst mass killings of Jews. He knew, and he did that when I was most vulnerable, and as an immigrant desperate for financial help. Well, he had his revenge. He demanded guilt and he succeeded in receiving it. He was wrong in what he did, even in what he said. And I should have answered back. Instead, I felt numb and choked up.
Total defeat, even when necessary as it was with the Nazis, is an existential condition. It marks us for life. I do not wish it upon anyone.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Response to Antje Bednarek's Being German
Response to Antje Bednarek’s Being German.
By Karla Poewe
Antje Bednarek, a friend and colleague of a younger generation, wrote some thoughts about how she, having grown up in the former GDR, feels about being German. In her words, “solitude and silence are chronic conditions for me whenever I am faced with the German past and the Second World War.” When she wants to enter that past and Germany’s guilt directly rather than through countless publications, she does so by way of her grandmother’s stories. During her puzzles about that past (read Holocaust) and guilt (read collective guilt), she mentions Schlink’s work “The Reader.”
I want to talk about Schlink in a moment, but before I do so, I must make potential readers aware of a book that, although written by a British historian, has already moved beyond the German Schlink. The book’s title is “After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation” (2007). It is by the historian Giles MacDonogh. The book is a factual account of the past only now including the first postwar years and most interesting, it includes a full chapter on the history of Guilt. The reader is shown how it was formulated, made collective, imposed upon and rejected by very thoughtful Germans of the time. When MacDonogh titles a subsection “Fringsen,” I still hear my Grandmother’s consolation when I told her, filled with guilt and remorse, that I had stolen coal from a moving train. “Ach was Kindchen,” she said, that is only “fringsen.” Read what MacDonogh has to say about it on pp. 368-369.
Here are my thoughts about Schlink’s thoughtful novel, “The Reader.” In my view, the main point made by Schlink is that there is no escape from the Holocaust, even when according to Pascal Bruckner’s “Der Schuld Komplex” (2008), French students, for example, have lost interest in the topic.
But according to Schlink there is no escape from that past. How does he convince his readers of it?
First, the story does not allow any escape from that horrible history through, for example, Christian faith. Faith is silent, almost shockingly so.
Second, the story does not allow an escape from that historical past through love. The love of the reader for Hanna is dead. His use of smell is symbolic here. Love of the main character for other women did not work either.
Third, there is no escape from the history of horror through philosophy. His father's blatant failure to give wise advice is telling here.
Fourth, there is no escape from the history of horror through the law either. Look at the sections describing the trial.
Fifth, there is no physical escape. The monuments to the horror do not enlighten nor free the narrator—or the viewer looking at them.
In other words, the post-war generation is trapped in the history that the war-generation created, hence the sense of general numbness that overcomes readers of the novel.
Finally, Schlink raises the question, what are we of the post-war generation to do? Is the answer nothing? Can it just be nothing?
To find an answer, we have to step outside of the book and look at the author. Schlink did do something. He wrote a book about it. That perhaps is the only hope, that and what one of my students said, namely, that there is a relationship between the book and millions of readers who are thinking about horrors committed by one generation with which future generations have to cope.
There is, however, another way as my friend, the late Frank Eyck, astutely observed, and it lies with the first point that Schlink rejected. The whole of Western history from the time of Christ, and before him the Hebrew prophets, was a rejection of collective guilt in favour of personal, that is individual, guilt.
Thus while there can be no forgetting of the past there can be forgiveness and the recognition that not all Germans participated in, or were even aware of, the Holocaust. As a child, I certainly was not. What I knew was bombing, hunger, acts of violence, and being a witness to death and rape. To impose guilt upon a generation that was too young to have participated in the horrors of the Nazi regime is to indulge in the psychological torture of people who were tortured physically years before. At least the Russians recognized this.
They took their revenge brutally and immediately. But, then they sought reconciliation by forgiving Germans who were either too young to have been Nazis, or who had valiantly resisted the Nazis. Is it not ironic that an officially atheistic state (the former Soviet Union) took a Christian approach to the issue of guilt while the “Christian” West continues to seek pagan revenge on Germans? In the process, we are ignoring the fact that we are repeating history. After all, National Socialism grew out of a pagan milieu that sought revenge on their “perceived” enemies. To personify, revenge simply never gets it right.
By Karla Poewe
Antje Bednarek, a friend and colleague of a younger generation, wrote some thoughts about how she, having grown up in the former GDR, feels about being German. In her words, “solitude and silence are chronic conditions for me whenever I am faced with the German past and the Second World War.” When she wants to enter that past and Germany’s guilt directly rather than through countless publications, she does so by way of her grandmother’s stories. During her puzzles about that past (read Holocaust) and guilt (read collective guilt), she mentions Schlink’s work “The Reader.”
I want to talk about Schlink in a moment, but before I do so, I must make potential readers aware of a book that, although written by a British historian, has already moved beyond the German Schlink. The book’s title is “After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation” (2007). It is by the historian Giles MacDonogh. The book is a factual account of the past only now including the first postwar years and most interesting, it includes a full chapter on the history of Guilt. The reader is shown how it was formulated, made collective, imposed upon and rejected by very thoughtful Germans of the time. When MacDonogh titles a subsection “Fringsen,” I still hear my Grandmother’s consolation when I told her, filled with guilt and remorse, that I had stolen coal from a moving train. “Ach was Kindchen,” she said, that is only “fringsen.” Read what MacDonogh has to say about it on pp. 368-369.
Here are my thoughts about Schlink’s thoughtful novel, “The Reader.” In my view, the main point made by Schlink is that there is no escape from the Holocaust, even when according to Pascal Bruckner’s “Der Schuld Komplex” (2008), French students, for example, have lost interest in the topic.
But according to Schlink there is no escape from that past. How does he convince his readers of it?
First, the story does not allow any escape from that horrible history through, for example, Christian faith. Faith is silent, almost shockingly so.
Second, the story does not allow an escape from that historical past through love. The love of the reader for Hanna is dead. His use of smell is symbolic here. Love of the main character for other women did not work either.
Third, there is no escape from the history of horror through philosophy. His father's blatant failure to give wise advice is telling here.
Fourth, there is no escape from the history of horror through the law either. Look at the sections describing the trial.
Fifth, there is no physical escape. The monuments to the horror do not enlighten nor free the narrator—or the viewer looking at them.
In other words, the post-war generation is trapped in the history that the war-generation created, hence the sense of general numbness that overcomes readers of the novel.
Finally, Schlink raises the question, what are we of the post-war generation to do? Is the answer nothing? Can it just be nothing?
To find an answer, we have to step outside of the book and look at the author. Schlink did do something. He wrote a book about it. That perhaps is the only hope, that and what one of my students said, namely, that there is a relationship between the book and millions of readers who are thinking about horrors committed by one generation with which future generations have to cope.
There is, however, another way as my friend, the late Frank Eyck, astutely observed, and it lies with the first point that Schlink rejected. The whole of Western history from the time of Christ, and before him the Hebrew prophets, was a rejection of collective guilt in favour of personal, that is individual, guilt.
Thus while there can be no forgetting of the past there can be forgiveness and the recognition that not all Germans participated in, or were even aware of, the Holocaust. As a child, I certainly was not. What I knew was bombing, hunger, acts of violence, and being a witness to death and rape. To impose guilt upon a generation that was too young to have participated in the horrors of the Nazi regime is to indulge in the psychological torture of people who were tortured physically years before. At least the Russians recognized this.
They took their revenge brutally and immediately. But, then they sought reconciliation by forgiving Germans who were either too young to have been Nazis, or who had valiantly resisted the Nazis. Is it not ironic that an officially atheistic state (the former Soviet Union) took a Christian approach to the issue of guilt while the “Christian” West continues to seek pagan revenge on Germans? In the process, we are ignoring the fact that we are repeating history. After all, National Socialism grew out of a pagan milieu that sought revenge on their “perceived” enemies. To personify, revenge simply never gets it right.
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