UBC: Witnesses of War
Jan. 16th, 2009 11:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyStargardt, Nicholas. Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis. New York: Vintage Books: 2007.
(with an assist from:
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956. Transl. Thomas P. Whitney. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.)
This is a book about how children experience and understand war. Stargardt looks at the experiences in Nazi-occupied Europe of Jewish children, Polish children, Czech children, German children--some of them Nazis, some of them "juvenile delinquents" (this term includes an eight-year-old girl sent to the reformatory because she was being sexually abused--in the view of the child psychology of the day (and not just Nazi, either), she "seduced" the teenage boys and adult men who abused her), others disabled or "mentally ill" children (again, that tag covers a lot of ground). All of the children in this book are victims, and Stargardt is clear about that, but he's also clear that you can't do book-keeping with suffering: "There can be no cancellation of one horror by invoking another" (Stargardt 365). One of the most thought-provoking aspects of the book is the way he weaves back and forth from the Jewish children in Birkenau to the German children in Berlin, and does his best to be compassionate to both, without ever losing sight of the larger truth of the Holocaust.
Many of the German children whose diaries and experiences Stargardt recounts and analyzes are ardent Nazis. And Stargardt talks about why that is, both in the binary simplicity of Nazi morality and in the romanticism of its call for duty and self-sacrifice. Nazism taught children that they should desire to lay down their lives for their Führer, and they embraced that teaching. The Nazis claimed to value and protect children--the future of the Volk, etc. etc.--but when push came right down to shove, they sacrificed the future of the Volk by the thousand in completely futile actions, trying to prolong a war they had already lost. Not content with genocide, Nazism also ate its own young.
Those are the parts of the book that I didn't expect. The Holocaust is familiar, terrible ground; the lives (and deaths) of Jewish children followed patterns that I expected, although expecting them does not make it easier to read about and does not make me any less helplessly furious at people long dead. Likewise, the murder of disabled children--by and large, they were slowly starved to death, and this continued EVEN AFTER THE END OF THE WAR because the Allies left the hospital staffs in place, and the hospital staffs continued to do what they perceived as their duty--was something I was at least aware of, having read Robert Jay Lifton's excellent The Nazi Doctors. And I knew that Nazism went to great trouble to indoctrinate children, to twist them to its service. But I did not know how readily it discarded them.
Not, of course, that I should have found that surprising, either. Like Stalinist communism (which I am reading about in The Gulag Archipelago), Nazism always considered actual people--as opposed to the ideological Volk, which must be protected at all costs, and especially those costs visited on Poles and Ukranians and other untermenschen--expendable. A little ways on from the quote I posted yesterday, Solzhenitsyn says:
And Stargardt is addressing that question, too, noting the ways in which ideology was used on children, the ways in which the evil being perpetrated was seen as good, not merely by the Nazi party leaders and other men in power, but by ordinary Germans. And how in turn that evil became the justification for more evil, for the atrocities committed by the Red Army and the debasement, oppression, and slaughter of ethnic Germans by Czechs and Poles after liberation. (And then there are the anti-Semitic pogroms, proving that new evil and old evil can get along just fine, thank you.) The evil done to Germans does not change anything about the evil done by Germans, but at the same time, the evil done by Germans does not change anything about the evil done to them.
Two wrongs continue to fail to make a right.
(with an assist from:
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956. Transl. Thomas P. Whitney. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.)
This is a book about how children experience and understand war. Stargardt looks at the experiences in Nazi-occupied Europe of Jewish children, Polish children, Czech children, German children--some of them Nazis, some of them "juvenile delinquents" (this term includes an eight-year-old girl sent to the reformatory because she was being sexually abused--in the view of the child psychology of the day (and not just Nazi, either), she "seduced" the teenage boys and adult men who abused her), others disabled or "mentally ill" children (again, that tag covers a lot of ground). All of the children in this book are victims, and Stargardt is clear about that, but he's also clear that you can't do book-keeping with suffering: "There can be no cancellation of one horror by invoking another" (Stargardt 365). One of the most thought-provoking aspects of the book is the way he weaves back and forth from the Jewish children in Birkenau to the German children in Berlin, and does his best to be compassionate to both, without ever losing sight of the larger truth of the Holocaust.
Many of the German children whose diaries and experiences Stargardt recounts and analyzes are ardent Nazis. And Stargardt talks about why that is, both in the binary simplicity of Nazi morality and in the romanticism of its call for duty and self-sacrifice. Nazism taught children that they should desire to lay down their lives for their Führer, and they embraced that teaching. The Nazis claimed to value and protect children--the future of the Volk, etc. etc.--but when push came right down to shove, they sacrificed the future of the Volk by the thousand in completely futile actions, trying to prolong a war they had already lost. Not content with genocide, Nazism also ate its own young.
Those are the parts of the book that I didn't expect. The Holocaust is familiar, terrible ground; the lives (and deaths) of Jewish children followed patterns that I expected, although expecting them does not make it easier to read about and does not make me any less helplessly furious at people long dead. Likewise, the murder of disabled children--by and large, they were slowly starved to death, and this continued EVEN AFTER THE END OF THE WAR because the Allies left the hospital staffs in place, and the hospital staffs continued to do what they perceived as their duty--was something I was at least aware of, having read Robert Jay Lifton's excellent The Nazi Doctors. And I knew that Nazism went to great trouble to indoctrinate children, to twist them to its service. But I did not know how readily it discarded them.
Not, of course, that I should have found that surprising, either. Like Stalinist communism (which I am reading about in The Gulag Archipelago), Nazism always considered actual people--as opposed to the ideological Volk, which must be protected at all costs, and especially those costs visited on Poles and Ukranians and other untermenschen--expendable. A little ways on from the quote I posted yesterday, Solzhenitsyn says:
To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.
[...]
Ideology--that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and give the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem god instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses, but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.
Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed those millions?
(Solzhenitsyn 173-4)
And Stargardt is addressing that question, too, noting the ways in which ideology was used on children, the ways in which the evil being perpetrated was seen as good, not merely by the Nazi party leaders and other men in power, but by ordinary Germans. And how in turn that evil became the justification for more evil, for the atrocities committed by the Red Army and the debasement, oppression, and slaughter of ethnic Germans by Czechs and Poles after liberation. (And then there are the anti-Semitic pogroms, proving that new evil and old evil can get along just fine, thank you.) The evil done to Germans does not change anything about the evil done by Germans, but at the same time, the evil done by Germans does not change anything about the evil done to them.
Two wrongs continue to fail to make a right.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-01-16 06:24 pm (UTC)I've read a little bit about this before, but it's usually something that's glossed over in the Holocaust histories. I think I need to read this book now.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-16 06:36 pm (UTC)That part filled me with helpless fury, and I don't have the personal stake in the issue that you do.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-17 03:44 pm (UTC)Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 1986.
(You may already be familiar with the Lifton--or you may not want to read it. But I just started rereading TND and thought, since it is an enormous burglar-bludgeoning doorstop of a book, that you might want a reference for the section specifically on this topic.)
no subject
Date: 2009-01-17 04:43 pm (UTC)I skimmed Lifton about 15 years ago. I really should give it a closer reading.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-16 06:25 pm (UTC)I don't know if you are aware of them, but if you're reading up on Stalinism, may I recommend to you the prison memoirs of Eugenia Ginzberg (2 vols -- Into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind) which recount her experiences as a victim of the purges of the 1930s. Extraordinary woman and a riveting account. They go in and out of print but are usually findable.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-16 06:39 pm (UTC)The Stalinism is, at the moment, mostly an outgrowth of the Nazism, but my reading on mid-twentieth-century totalitarianism is slowly drifting eastward (via Ukraine, which got fucked from both sides), so I very much appreciate the recommendation.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-16 08:02 pm (UTC)I'm thankful to learn of the Stargardt book and will look for it.
Another recent book on the Nazis that rather blew my mind was Richard Rhodes' Masters of Death, which traces the the Holocaust back to its improvised beginnings. An amazing point which Rhodes puts forward is that gassing did not come about because it was more efficient but rather to preserve the "moral character" (I kid you not) of the SS men, who were being too much affected by killing people with their machine guns and pistols.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-16 08:07 pm (UTC)And the executions were affecting the SS men. Badly. However, both they and Himmler saw this, not as evidence that what they were doing maybe needed to be thought through one more time, but as evidence of the great sacrifices necessary for the Volk and the Fatherland.
I can never get my head around it, no matter how many books I read.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-17 05:35 pm (UTC)The secret police were quite aware that they were becoming monsters, and explicitly defined that as the sacrifice of their souls in the service of the common good. Brr. ("You can't handle the truth!" squared.)
no subject
Date: 2009-02-04 10:09 pm (UTC)(since I see I forgot to say thank you when you posted it)
no subject
Date: 2009-01-16 08:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-16 07:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-16 08:50 pm (UTC)Thanks for posting about it.
I haven't introduced myself yet: I'm Marion Erika from Berlin and started to read your lj because I loved reading Melusine so much.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-16 09:02 pm (UTC)And thank you!
no subject
Date: 2009-01-17 07:10 am (UTC)History is definitely one of my favorite genres so thanks. I am especially interested in the Stargardt book; I also have a huge stake when it comes to child victims and will never look away from any of it be it past or present.