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UBC: Klemperer, Lingua Tertii Imperii
Mar. 20th, 2018 03:47 pm
Language of the Third Reich: LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii by Victor KlempererMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book is what happens when a Jewish philologist takes up a project to keep from going insane under Nazi rule. It is
amazing
.
Klemperer was a Jew married to an "Aryan" woman who refused to give him up. So he spent the years of the Third Reich in Dresden, working in a factory instead of a university, living in a "Jews' House," being harassed by the Gestapo, forbidden to read any books written by Aryans. . . and to keep himself sane, he started what today we would call #LTI: notes in his diary about the Lingua Tertii Imperii, the way Nazis used language, and the way their use of language infected and corrupted the German language as a whole.
This is a brilliant book. His observations about language always lead back to the society he's living in, the oppression he's suffering under, the way ordinary Germans behaved (along a sliding spectrum of anti-Semitism), the way the Gestapo thugs behaved, the character of Goebbels as revealed in his speeches . . . thousands of tiny details that even the best social history of the Third Reich can't offer, because this is a man observing and analyzing from ground zero.
I tend to prefer secondary sources to primary sources (I feel this is a terrible character flaw, but there it is), but Klemperer is both. He's analyzing his own experiences as they happen to him, analyzing his own reactions, and always digging at words, the words people use, the words people don't use, the way metaphors influence the way people think.
This reprint was published by Bloomsbury in 2013 (in a TERRIBLE sans serif font which I hate with a cold and venomous hatred), so it's still readily available. I got it from Amazon. If you are interested in the Holocaust, in Nazi Germany, or in linguistics, I cannot recommend this book highly enough.
View all my reviews
UBC: Lower, Hitler's Furies
Feb. 18th, 2018 11:02 am
Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields by Wendy LowerMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
[donated to library]
Wow, this is an excellent book. It's about women's place in the genocidal machinery of Hitler's empire in eastern Europe, and how that place is almost impossible to recover, because it's the history of support staff, to whom--of course--nobody pays attention. (The audiobook reader is also excellent.)
Lower tracks individual nurses, secretaries, teachers, and wives, uncovering evidence of their roles as witnesses, accomplices, and perpetrators. Concentration camp guards are not the only women who participated in the Holocaust. Since I was just reading about Irma Grese in Vronsky's Women Serial Killers, it was easy to make the comparison and see that these women who killed Jews unofficially were every bit as horrendous as the Beast of Belsen. (Wikipedia tells me Grese was also known as the Hyena of Auschwitz.)
But because their crimes weren't documented, and because West German courts did not consider eyewitness testimony sufficiently credible to warrant conviction (eyewitness testimony of the caliber of "I saw her pick up a child and kill it by beating it against the wall of the ghetto" or "I saw her lure children to her with candy and then shoot them in the mouth")--and because "denazification" was so woefully incomplete in Germany and Austria--most of them simply slipped away, back into anonymity.
Lower's is a Herculean task, and she does it very very well.
View all my reviews
UBC: April Moore, Folsom's 93
Jan. 10th, 2016 01:49 pm
Folsom's 93: The Lives and Crimes of Folsom Prison's Executed Men by April MooreMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
[Website: folsoms93.com.]
Does what it says on the tin. 93 convicted murderers you have almost certainly never heard of. The mug shots of all 93 are the best reason to pick up this book if you happen to find it.
Some of these 93 men were clearly guilty; some of them were guilty but insane (by 21st century standards); a couple were pretty clearly insane even by early 20th century standards (but were hanged anyway). It's not always easy to tell from Moore's writing whether her account of a given crime is what did happen or what the prosecution alleged happened, so I can't say for certain whether any of these 93 men were actually innocent of the murders for which they were hanged. (The cavalier pre-Miranda treatment of defendants' rights did on several occasions make my skin crawl.)
I am not a fan of the death penalty, and the evidence provided by this book certainly did not change my mind. Several of these murderers are horrifying (Elton M. Stone, David Fountain, Adolph Julius Weber, Earl Budd Kimball, Tellie McQuate, Walter Lewis), but so is Governor Friend Robinson, who, despite being a Quaker, was such a blind believer in capital punishment that he refused on principle to listen to any appeals. For that matter, so is Governor James "Sunny Jim" Rolph, who was opposed to the death penalty, and was generous with reprieves, but who thought that lynching was perfectly okay. And one's understanding of Rolph's opposition to the death penalty changes a little bit when he says things like, "I'm not inclined to let men hang when their crimes involve infidelity of their wife and breaking up of their home." Because if it's your wife's fault you murdered her, then surely you must be more deserving of mercy than other murderers. [/sarcasm]
Also, hanging, where you might die instantly, but you might just as easily hang there, strangling, for as much as fifteen minutes, is surely one of the least merciful forms of execution available.
View all my reviews
UBC: Bergen
May. 26th, 2014 09:07 amBergen, Doris. Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
( cut for length )
( cut for length )
UBC: Briggs
Jan. 13th, 2014 01:42 pmBriggs, Robin. Witches & Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchhunts. New York: Viking-Penguin Books, 1996.
For most of this book, I was planning to blog about it and say basically, "This is a pretty good book." And then I hit the last chapter and the evolutionary psychology and no. He lost all the good will he'd built up and I started yelling.
LEAVING THAT ASIDE, this is a pretty good book. It is interesting and helpful because it is a comparison of witchhunts in various countries, and since I don't know very much about European witchhunts except what "everybody knows," I found the material fascinating. And he pointed out something about why Salem is so weird that I knew, but hadn't ever really noticed, which is that only in the Salem witch trials would confessing save your life. In Salem, if you confessed to being a witch, your life would be spared. Those who were hanged were uniformly those who refused to confess. But in other places and times, unless you got incredibly unlucky, if you could withstand a round or two of torture and still profess your innocence, you were likely to be released. Those who confessed were burned. It's an incredibly important point--and like I said, it's something I knew--and one thing Briggs does very well is foregrounding the backwardness of the Salem trials.
But Briggs is a sloppy writer; in particular (and crucially for discussions of witchcraft accusations), he is sloppy about pronouns and antecedents, so that it becomes very difficult to tell what is the accused's testimony (i.e., what they actually said) and what is the accuser's testimony about what the accused said. This is very problematic.
He also falls into a logical fallacy--and it's all over the evolutionary psychology conclusion--which goes something like this:
1. There were people genuinely practicing witchcraft, that is, cursing their neighbors in the belief that they had the power to make that curse work.
2. There were people accused of witchcraft.
ERGO, the people accused of witchcraft were practicing witchcraft, and were therefore actually a threat to their accusers.
He's very insistent about citing the studies about present day cultures in which witchcraft is still a powerful belief, the studies we've all heard about where it's shown that if a witch curses someone who believes in the witch's power, the victim will, in fact, die. (He ignores some pretty crucial differences between those cultures and the culture he's studying.) And there's a lot of handwavy elision around the evidence that some accused witches did utter curses and threats against the people who would go on to accuse them, and things get all turned around until the people making accusations of witchcraft are actually right to do so. (This is largely where the evolutionary psychology comes in.)
And that is so completely wrong that it makes me yell at the book. There are so many victims of the witchhunts that, yes, the laws of probability say that some of them did practice maleficium and did believe that they were witches. But it is abundantly evident, over and over again, that the vast majority of people accused of being witches were no such thing. They were generally misfits, not outsiders so much as people who just didn't quite fit with their neighbors, who were quarrelsome or pushy or just inconvenient. They did not deserve what happened to them, and I'm actually kind of furious at Briggs for twisting things around to suggest that they did.
For most of this book, I was planning to blog about it and say basically, "This is a pretty good book." And then I hit the last chapter and the evolutionary psychology and no. He lost all the good will he'd built up and I started yelling.
LEAVING THAT ASIDE, this is a pretty good book. It is interesting and helpful because it is a comparison of witchhunts in various countries, and since I don't know very much about European witchhunts except what "everybody knows," I found the material fascinating. And he pointed out something about why Salem is so weird that I knew, but hadn't ever really noticed, which is that only in the Salem witch trials would confessing save your life. In Salem, if you confessed to being a witch, your life would be spared. Those who were hanged were uniformly those who refused to confess. But in other places and times, unless you got incredibly unlucky, if you could withstand a round or two of torture and still profess your innocence, you were likely to be released. Those who confessed were burned. It's an incredibly important point--and like I said, it's something I knew--and one thing Briggs does very well is foregrounding the backwardness of the Salem trials.
But Briggs is a sloppy writer; in particular (and crucially for discussions of witchcraft accusations), he is sloppy about pronouns and antecedents, so that it becomes very difficult to tell what is the accused's testimony (i.e., what they actually said) and what is the accuser's testimony about what the accused said. This is very problematic.
He also falls into a logical fallacy--and it's all over the evolutionary psychology conclusion--which goes something like this:
1. There were people genuinely practicing witchcraft, that is, cursing their neighbors in the belief that they had the power to make that curse work.
2. There were people accused of witchcraft.
ERGO, the people accused of witchcraft were practicing witchcraft, and were therefore actually a threat to their accusers.
He's very insistent about citing the studies about present day cultures in which witchcraft is still a powerful belief, the studies we've all heard about where it's shown that if a witch curses someone who believes in the witch's power, the victim will, in fact, die. (He ignores some pretty crucial differences between those cultures and the culture he's studying.) And there's a lot of handwavy elision around the evidence that some accused witches did utter curses and threats against the people who would go on to accuse them, and things get all turned around until the people making accusations of witchcraft are actually right to do so. (This is largely where the evolutionary psychology comes in.)
And that is so completely wrong that it makes me yell at the book. There are so many victims of the witchhunts that, yes, the laws of probability say that some of them did practice maleficium and did believe that they were witches. But it is abundantly evident, over and over again, that the vast majority of people accused of being witches were no such thing. They were generally misfits, not outsiders so much as people who just didn't quite fit with their neighbors, who were quarrelsome or pushy or just inconvenient. They did not deserve what happened to them, and I'm actually kind of furious at Briggs for twisting things around to suggest that they did.
UBC: HItler: Hubris/Hitler: Nemesis
Mar. 17th, 2012 12:37 pmKershaw, Ian. Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris. 1998. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.
---. Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis. 2000. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.
I need to start with a tiny nit-picking piece of bitchery: nobody involved in the process of publishing this book caught the vice/vise mistake, and it happened more than once. Germany may have been caught in a vise of its own vices, if you want to be smartassed about it, but it was not caught in a vice. Thank you. Never mind. Two countries separated by a single language as per usual.
This is, as you may already have inferred, a biography for which the word "monumental" is not incorrect. 591 pages for the first volume, 841 for the second. It is, unfortunately, dated, because Kershaw was writing before the David Irving libel trial (I've blogged about books discussing the trial here and here), so there are some things (mercifully, mostly incidental details rather than anything crucial) for which Irving is the only source. Other than that--and while I'm remarking on Kershaw's flaws--his prose style is adequate at best. And it's not surprising, given the length of the project, that we don't maintain a steady state of "best." So you're not reading for the prose here.
Historians of Nazi Germany can be roughly divided into two camps: intentionalists, who believe that Hitler planned every step of the Final Solution, and functionalists, who believe that Hitler didn't plan any damn thing and the functionaries and bureaucrats of the Third Reich made the Final Solution up as they went along. (This is a reductive schema, and most historians, more accurately, fall somewhere on the continuum between the two poles.) Kershaw is a functionalist--which is an interesting perspective to write a biography of Hitler from, because it means that at every turn, he's looking for the least amount of agency from Hitler commensurate with the historical outcome. And what's really interesting about his biography is the degree to which he has to admit that Hitler was indispensible to the Final Solution, that it couldn't have happened without him and that, even though he shied away from direct involvement, none of it happened without his knowledge and approval.
(Functionalism does occasionally lead him into some rather odd corners: he is the only historian of the Third Reich whom I have read who argues that the Fritsch-Blomberg debacle wasn't planned by anyone, that it was bad luck and stupidity on all sides. Even the clusterfuck surrounding poor Fritsch. Although Kershaw does seem to believe that Blomberg knew his wife had been a prostitute and was trying to keep that a secret from Hitler, which seemed to me like a dubious piece of blame-the-victim thinking. But I digress.)
Kershaw is very very good at explaining, not merely the patterns in Hitler's thinking--the way that what he said in Mein Kampf in the 20s and what he did when he came to power in the 30s are of a piece--but the way in which his habits of thought remained consistent, and the ways in which they both brought him to power and caused his downfall. In particular, Hitler habitually thought in polarized binaries. He habitually radicalized any conflict into an all-or-nothing scenario ("Here ve see," as Monty Python say, "ze life-or-death struggle between ze pantomime horse and ze other pantomime horse for ze position in the merchant bank."), and he believed, from first to last, that compromise was unacceptable. Seeing the pattern in his early life makes his "leadership" during WWII, if not exactly explicable, at least comprehensible.
As a functionalist, Kershaw is also excellent at showing the degree to which the other power-elites of Germany were culpable in the Nazi seizure of power and in Nazi Germany's unprovoked and indefensible assaults on Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, Russia . . . He stresses repeatedly that even though invasion after invasion was Hitler's idea, he couldn't have done it without the willing and frequently enthusiastic cooperation of the Wehrmacht and the rest of the German government. Hitler led Germany into World War II, but he did it with his followers treading on his heels. Kershaw shows the way that "working toward the Führer"--the method by which second- and third- and fourth- tier Nazis and government officials (and the two categories were not necessarily identical) tried to anticipate what Hitler wanted--both meant that Hitler rarely if ever had to issue an explicit order and that any initiative deemed to be what Hitler wanted would inevitably snowball, as everyone tried to jump on board.
Aside from a much better grasp of how Nazi Germany "worked" (and I use the word loosely), I came away from Kershaw's biography of Hitler with a profound sense of the paucity of Hitler's inner life, how wretchedly little there was of him beyond three or four idées fixes (and all of them crystallized and immune to modification after about 1923), wrapped up in ambition and garnished with hate. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
---. Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis. 2000. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.
This is, as you may already have inferred, a biography for which the word "monumental" is not incorrect. 591 pages for the first volume, 841 for the second. It is, unfortunately, dated, because Kershaw was writing before the David Irving libel trial (I've blogged about books discussing the trial here and here), so there are some things (mercifully, mostly incidental details rather than anything crucial) for which Irving is the only source. Other than that--and while I'm remarking on Kershaw's flaws--his prose style is adequate at best. And it's not surprising, given the length of the project, that we don't maintain a steady state of "best." So you're not reading for the prose here.
Historians of Nazi Germany can be roughly divided into two camps: intentionalists, who believe that Hitler planned every step of the Final Solution, and functionalists, who believe that Hitler didn't plan any damn thing and the functionaries and bureaucrats of the Third Reich made the Final Solution up as they went along. (This is a reductive schema, and most historians, more accurately, fall somewhere on the continuum between the two poles.) Kershaw is a functionalist--which is an interesting perspective to write a biography of Hitler from, because it means that at every turn, he's looking for the least amount of agency from Hitler commensurate with the historical outcome. And what's really interesting about his biography is the degree to which he has to admit that Hitler was indispensible to the Final Solution, that it couldn't have happened without him and that, even though he shied away from direct involvement, none of it happened without his knowledge and approval.
(Functionalism does occasionally lead him into some rather odd corners: he is the only historian of the Third Reich whom I have read who argues that the Fritsch-Blomberg debacle wasn't planned by anyone, that it was bad luck and stupidity on all sides. Even the clusterfuck surrounding poor Fritsch. Although Kershaw does seem to believe that Blomberg knew his wife had been a prostitute and was trying to keep that a secret from Hitler, which seemed to me like a dubious piece of blame-the-victim thinking. But I digress.)
Kershaw is very very good at explaining, not merely the patterns in Hitler's thinking--the way that what he said in Mein Kampf in the 20s and what he did when he came to power in the 30s are of a piece--but the way in which his habits of thought remained consistent, and the ways in which they both brought him to power and caused his downfall. In particular, Hitler habitually thought in polarized binaries. He habitually radicalized any conflict into an all-or-nothing scenario ("Here ve see," as Monty Python say, "ze life-or-death struggle between ze pantomime horse and ze other pantomime horse for ze position in the merchant bank."), and he believed, from first to last, that compromise was unacceptable. Seeing the pattern in his early life makes his "leadership" during WWII, if not exactly explicable, at least comprehensible.
As a functionalist, Kershaw is also excellent at showing the degree to which the other power-elites of Germany were culpable in the Nazi seizure of power and in Nazi Germany's unprovoked and indefensible assaults on Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, Russia . . . He stresses repeatedly that even though invasion after invasion was Hitler's idea, he couldn't have done it without the willing and frequently enthusiastic cooperation of the Wehrmacht and the rest of the German government. Hitler led Germany into World War II, but he did it with his followers treading on his heels. Kershaw shows the way that "working toward the Führer"--the method by which second- and third- and fourth- tier Nazis and government officials (and the two categories were not necessarily identical) tried to anticipate what Hitler wanted--both meant that Hitler rarely if ever had to issue an explicit order and that any initiative deemed to be what Hitler wanted would inevitably snowball, as everyone tried to jump on board.
Aside from a much better grasp of how Nazi Germany "worked" (and I use the word loosely), I came away from Kershaw's biography of Hitler with a profound sense of the paucity of Hitler's inner life, how wretchedly little there was of him beyond three or four idées fixes (and all of them crystallized and immune to modification after about 1923), wrapped up in ambition and garnished with hate. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
UBC: Hitler's Empire
Jan. 7th, 2012 08:14 amMazower, Mark. Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. 2008. New York: Penguin Books, 2009.
Short version: Nazis. Most incompetent Evil Overlords in the history of ever.
( longer version behind the cut )
Short version: Nazis. Most incompetent Evil Overlords in the history of ever.
( longer version behind the cut )
Ayçoberry, Pierre. The Social History of the Third Reich, 1933-1945. Transl. Janet Lloyd. New York: The New Press, 1999. [library]
Fritzsche, Peter. Life and Death in the Third Reich. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 2008. [library]
These were an interesting unintentional pairing. The Ayçoberry was exactly what it says on the tin: a social history of the Third Reich. It didn't tell me anything I hadn't read in other social histories of the Third Reich, and it stood out mostly because the author's intellectual quirks.
The Fritzsche, on the other hand, was both a social history and a determined, patient, compassionate, but unforgiving attempt to understand why the citizens of Germany went along with the Nazis. He used a lot of primary sources--diaries and letters--and while many of the diarists were people I'd encountered before, some of them weren't, and the way Fritzsche used his material offered me new insights about how and why the Third Reich happened.
Fritzsche, Peter. Life and Death in the Third Reich. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 2008. [library]
These were an interesting unintentional pairing. The Ayçoberry was exactly what it says on the tin: a social history of the Third Reich. It didn't tell me anything I hadn't read in other social histories of the Third Reich, and it stood out mostly because the author's intellectual quirks.
The Fritzsche, on the other hand, was both a social history and a determined, patient, compassionate, but unforgiving attempt to understand why the citizens of Germany went along with the Nazis. He used a lot of primary sources--diaries and letters--and while many of the diarists were people I'd encountered before, some of them weren't, and the way Fritzsche used his material offered me new insights about how and why the Third Reich happened.
UBC: Italo Balbo
Mar. 12th, 2011 12:26 amSegre*, Claudio G. Italo Balbo: A Fascist Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
After The Brutal Friendship, I wanted to read something that would tell me more about Italian fascism. This biography (which was required reading in one of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mirrorthaw's classes, many years ago) was what we had in the house, and mirrorthaw said enthusiastically, "It's very good." Which it is. And it did give me a better grasp of Italian fascism. (Short version: what a horrible mess.)
Italo Balbo was a contradictory man, although probably best summed up by the word "swashbuckler." I swung back and forth between admiring and loathing him--although at that, he fared better than Mussolini, whom I despise more intensely with every new thing I learn about him. Segre is very upfront about the flaws in Balbo's character; he spends a lot of time assessing Balbo against (a.) Balbo's own valuation, (b.) his contemporaries' valuations, (c.) the opinions of historians. Mostly, Segre concludes that Balbo wasn't as grand and glorious as he believed himself to be, but he was by and large a better and more competent man than his detractors claim--although still a corrupt cog in a corrupt machine, a tyrant who saw nothing wrong in social inequality so long as he was at the top of the heap and who delighted in using violence to get his own way.
---
*On the front cover, spine, title page, and copyright page, the author's name is rendered Segrè. On the back cover, it is rendered Segré. In the New York Times obituary, it is rendered Segre, with no accent at all. I apologize to the memory of Dr. Segre, but I cannot figure out the correct orthography of his name.
After The Brutal Friendship, I wanted to read something that would tell me more about Italian fascism. This biography (which was required reading in one of
mirrorthaw's classes, many years ago) was what we had in the house, and mirrorthaw said enthusiastically, "It's very good." Which it is. And it did give me a better grasp of Italian fascism. (Short version: what a horrible mess.)Italo Balbo was a contradictory man, although probably best summed up by the word "swashbuckler." I swung back and forth between admiring and loathing him--although at that, he fared better than Mussolini, whom I despise more intensely with every new thing I learn about him. Segre is very upfront about the flaws in Balbo's character; he spends a lot of time assessing Balbo against (a.) Balbo's own valuation, (b.) his contemporaries' valuations, (c.) the opinions of historians. Mostly, Segre concludes that Balbo wasn't as grand and glorious as he believed himself to be, but he was by and large a better and more competent man than his detractors claim--although still a corrupt cog in a corrupt machine, a tyrant who saw nothing wrong in social inequality so long as he was at the top of the heap and who delighted in using violence to get his own way.
---
*On the front cover, spine, title page, and copyright page, the author's name is rendered Segrè. On the back cover, it is rendered Segré. In the New York Times obituary, it is rendered Segre, with no accent at all. I apologize to the memory of Dr. Segre, but I cannot figure out the correct orthography of his name.
government by bullying
Mar. 10th, 2011 04:58 pmIt is not a good sign when your state government's act of colossal asshattery makes the Breaking News bar on cnn.com.
In case you were wondering, yes, I am directly affected by this reprehensible piece of union-busting on the part of Governor Walker (the same man who sabotaged Wisconsin's chance at high-speed rail BEFORE HE EVEN TOOK OFFICE) and the state Republicans.mirrorthaw is a union member and a state employee. If he weren't, I wouldn't be as anxious and stressed as I am right now, but I would still be just as fucking FURIOUS at what's currently passing for democratic government in the state of Wisconsin. My state of residence has elected a man who believes that he can do whatever he wants to, that he doesn't have to compromise or negotiate, and that unethical behavior is perfectly okay as long as it's he and his allies who benefit.
What makes me LIVID is that, thus far, Governor Walker has not been proven wrong on any of that.
When I was a teaching assistant, I was a union member, and I know exactly and in detail why collective bargaining is necessary. I also know that, no matter what Walker claims, this bill is not and never was about balancing the budget. (I also think that gutting the state infrastructure is a STUPID way to balance the budget, but then, I am a socialist.) The unions offered to take the pay cuts if Walker would drop the collective bargaining clause. Instead, Walker has dropped the pay cuts and rammed the collective bargaining clause through in a piece of legislative chicanery that I certainly hope gets the snot investigated out of it.
Because Walker believes that negotiation and compromise are for weaklings. Which, of course, is why he has to get rid of collective bargaining--collective bargaining levels the playing field between the "weaklings" and bullies like Governor Walker. Without it, state employees have no way to make the state government listen to them. And, no, it won't listen if it doesn't have to.
Governor Walker wants your lunch money.
So hand it over.
In case you were wondering, yes, I am directly affected by this reprehensible piece of union-busting on the part of Governor Walker (the same man who sabotaged Wisconsin's chance at high-speed rail BEFORE HE EVEN TOOK OFFICE) and the state Republicans.
mirrorthaw is a union member and a state employee. If he weren't, I wouldn't be as anxious and stressed as I am right now, but I would still be just as fucking FURIOUS at what's currently passing for democratic government in the state of Wisconsin. My state of residence has elected a man who believes that he can do whatever he wants to, that he doesn't have to compromise or negotiate, and that unethical behavior is perfectly okay as long as it's he and his allies who benefit.What makes me LIVID is that, thus far, Governor Walker has not been proven wrong on any of that.
When I was a teaching assistant, I was a union member, and I know exactly and in detail why collective bargaining is necessary. I also know that, no matter what Walker claims, this bill is not and never was about balancing the budget. (I also think that gutting the state infrastructure is a STUPID way to balance the budget, but then, I am a socialist.) The unions offered to take the pay cuts if Walker would drop the collective bargaining clause. Instead, Walker has dropped the pay cuts and rammed the collective bargaining clause through in a piece of legislative chicanery that I certainly hope gets the snot investigated out of it.
Because Walker believes that negotiation and compromise are for weaklings. Which, of course, is why he has to get rid of collective bargaining--collective bargaining levels the playing field between the "weaklings" and bullies like Governor Walker. Without it, state employees have no way to make the state government listen to them. And, no, it won't listen if it doesn't have to.
Governor Walker wants your lunch money.
So hand it over.
Brustein, William. The Logic of Evil: The Social Origins of the Nazi Party, 1925-1933. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
For better transparency, that subtitle should read "The Sociological Origins of the Nazi Party," because that's what Brustein is doing. He's analyzing the data provided by NSDAP member cards, and doing so in a very narrowly sociological framework. His thesis is that the support of ordinary Germans for the Nazi Party can be explained entirely by rational economic self-interest. No need to talk about Hitler the demagogue or the German tradition of anti-Semitism--it all comes down to the Nazis' proposed economic programs.
Don't get me wrong: Brustein's data are fascinating, and I think his work does help explain why the Nazis did better among certain social groups. But I don't buy his thesis that the rise of the NSDAP can be satisfactorily explained by people making well-informed, rational, economically-motivated decisions.
Deakin, F. W. The Brutal Friendship: Mussolini, Hitler and the Fall of Italian Fascism. 1962. London: Phoenix Press, 2000.
Short version: No matter what he says, Hitler is not your friend.
Slightly longer version: This is a very top-down history of the Italian involvement in World War II. It deals only with Mussolini (and Hitler) and the ministers and generals and Party bigshots. One of the blurbs describes it as "impersonal," and I would agree. Deakin's interested in untangling the incredibly snarled political knot of the end of Italian fascism. He's not interested in any of the players as people, and he's certainly not interested in the Italian workers or soldiers (or, god forbid, women) whose lives were being destroyed by the machinations of these petty tin gods.
At the same time, as long as you're willing to go on the ride he wants to take you on, this is an excellent book. Deakin is painstaking and exhaustive; he makes no excuses for anyone; and although he does not discuss ideology or the reprehensible things that the Nazis were doing in other parts of Europe, he's not trying to make them look like anything but the toxic assholes that they were. And he does an excellent job of showing how Italy was doomed by the irrational, self-deluding decisions made by Mussolini, and by the really terrifying inability of anyone to say no to Hitler. (It's pathetic watching the German generals make puppy dog eyes at Mussolini in the hopes he can talk sense to Hitler about Russia.) It's frightening and appalling how much of World War II can be reduced to these two men, and the fact that they were both destroyed by it is very cold comfort.
Koch, H. W. Hitler Youth: The Duped Generation. Ballantine's Illustrated History of the Violent Century. New York: Ballantine Books, 1972.
I bought this book mostly for the pictures, which is not a decision I'm feeling bad about. Koch's other book about the Hitler Youth provides all the history and detail, and the pictures are fascinating, revealing, and OMG creepy. Koch also offers a few more tidbits about his own experiences in the HJ, such as this comment on induction into the Jungvolk:
Not great on its own, but fantastic as supplementary material.
Overy, Richard. Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945. New York: Viking-Penguin Books, 2001.
About half this massive book is transcripts of interrogations; the other half describes and explores the circumstances under which the interrogations were conducted in the run up to the Nuremberg trials. Fascinating particularly for the ways in and degrees to which the Nazi criminals avoided admitting their culpability (ranging from Ley's suicide to Hess' half-faked, half-genuine hysterical amnesia to Speer's calculated self-reinvention); fascinating (also infuriating and appalling) for the hypocrisy of the Allies, who were not only retroactively creating crimes to try the Nazis for, but were very carefully tailoring those crimes so as to avoid tarring themselves with the same brush. It's not that I think the Nazis shouldn't have been held accountable--because obviously I don't think that; it's the way in which the Allies deliberately rigged the game so as to hide their own questionable actions.
Both Hitler and Mussolini were convinced, near the end of World War II, that they could make a deal with England and America so as to turn and go after Stalin. And the problem is that there's a lot of ways in which that's what should have happened. Not the deal-making part, which was a bedtime story for frightened dictators, but the unconscionable double standard whereby England and America condemn the Nazis but ignore the exact same crimes being committed by the Soviets (not to mention turning over Russian POWs who are begging to be protected from their own government, Winston Churchill, I am looking at you) . . . I don't know what the right answer would have been, or if there even was one, but that wasn't it.
Roseman, Mark. The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution. London: Penguin Books, 2003.
This is my very favorite kind of history, the kind that says, "here's a mysterious thing that happened, let's look at all the evidence we have and see if we can figure it out." Roseman's mysterious thing is the conference at Wannsee (notorious for being the one place where you can actually pin down Nazi leaders talking about exterminating the Jews), and he does a wonderful job of contextualizing it and analyzing the evidence we have, and ultimately situating it persuasively in the progress of the Final Solution and the dance in the upper echelons of the Nazi government between amassing as much power for yourself as you could and sharing out the culpability to as many patsies as possible. This book is concise and elegant and I'd love to be able to write history like this.
For better transparency, that subtitle should read "The Sociological Origins of the Nazi Party," because that's what Brustein is doing. He's analyzing the data provided by NSDAP member cards, and doing so in a very narrowly sociological framework. His thesis is that the support of ordinary Germans for the Nazi Party can be explained entirely by rational economic self-interest. No need to talk about Hitler the demagogue or the German tradition of anti-Semitism--it all comes down to the Nazis' proposed economic programs.
Don't get me wrong: Brustein's data are fascinating, and I think his work does help explain why the Nazis did better among certain social groups. But I don't buy his thesis that the rise of the NSDAP can be satisfactorily explained by people making well-informed, rational, economically-motivated decisions.
Deakin, F. W. The Brutal Friendship: Mussolini, Hitler and the Fall of Italian Fascism. 1962. London: Phoenix Press, 2000.
Short version: No matter what he says, Hitler is not your friend.
Slightly longer version: This is a very top-down history of the Italian involvement in World War II. It deals only with Mussolini (and Hitler) and the ministers and generals and Party bigshots. One of the blurbs describes it as "impersonal," and I would agree. Deakin's interested in untangling the incredibly snarled political knot of the end of Italian fascism. He's not interested in any of the players as people, and he's certainly not interested in the Italian workers or soldiers (or, god forbid, women) whose lives were being destroyed by the machinations of these petty tin gods.
At the same time, as long as you're willing to go on the ride he wants to take you on, this is an excellent book. Deakin is painstaking and exhaustive; he makes no excuses for anyone; and although he does not discuss ideology or the reprehensible things that the Nazis were doing in other parts of Europe, he's not trying to make them look like anything but the toxic assholes that they were. And he does an excellent job of showing how Italy was doomed by the irrational, self-deluding decisions made by Mussolini, and by the really terrifying inability of anyone to say no to Hitler. (It's pathetic watching the German generals make puppy dog eyes at Mussolini in the hopes he can talk sense to Hitler about Russia.) It's frightening and appalling how much of World War II can be reduced to these two men, and the fact that they were both destroyed by it is very cold comfort.
Koch, H. W. Hitler Youth: The Duped Generation. Ballantine's Illustrated History of the Violent Century. New York: Ballantine Books, 1972.
I bought this book mostly for the pictures, which is not a decision I'm feeling bad about. Koch's other book about the Hitler Youth provides all the history and detail, and the pictures are fascinating, revealing, and OMG creepy. Koch also offers a few more tidbits about his own experiences in the HJ, such as this comment on induction into the Jungvolk:
This [probationary] period was concluded with a special test, combining sport, close combat, and questions of an "ideological" nature (mainly a knowledge of the history of the NSDAP) and culminating in a "test of bravery" which (as in the author's case) could take the form of having to jump in full dress and boots from the window of a first floor [American second floor] block of flats.
(Koch 78)
Not great on its own, but fantastic as supplementary material.
Overy, Richard. Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945. New York: Viking-Penguin Books, 2001.
About half this massive book is transcripts of interrogations; the other half describes and explores the circumstances under which the interrogations were conducted in the run up to the Nuremberg trials. Fascinating particularly for the ways in and degrees to which the Nazi criminals avoided admitting their culpability (ranging from Ley's suicide to Hess' half-faked, half-genuine hysterical amnesia to Speer's calculated self-reinvention); fascinating (also infuriating and appalling) for the hypocrisy of the Allies, who were not only retroactively creating crimes to try the Nazis for, but were very carefully tailoring those crimes so as to avoid tarring themselves with the same brush. It's not that I think the Nazis shouldn't have been held accountable--because obviously I don't think that; it's the way in which the Allies deliberately rigged the game so as to hide their own questionable actions.
Both Hitler and Mussolini were convinced, near the end of World War II, that they could make a deal with England and America so as to turn and go after Stalin. And the problem is that there's a lot of ways in which that's what should have happened. Not the deal-making part, which was a bedtime story for frightened dictators, but the unconscionable double standard whereby England and America condemn the Nazis but ignore the exact same crimes being committed by the Soviets (not to mention turning over Russian POWs who are begging to be protected from their own government, Winston Churchill, I am looking at you) . . . I don't know what the right answer would have been, or if there even was one, but that wasn't it.
Roseman, Mark. The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution. London: Penguin Books, 2003.
This is my very favorite kind of history, the kind that says, "here's a mysterious thing that happened, let's look at all the evidence we have and see if we can figure it out." Roseman's mysterious thing is the conference at Wannsee (notorious for being the one place where you can actually pin down Nazi leaders talking about exterminating the Jews), and he does a wonderful job of contextualizing it and analyzing the evidence we have, and ultimately situating it persuasively in the progress of the Final Solution and the dance in the upper echelons of the Nazi government between amassing as much power for yourself as you could and sharing out the culpability to as many patsies as possible. This book is concise and elegant and I'd love to be able to write history like this.
words are weapons sharper than knives
Dec. 28th, 2010 10:04 pm[ETA: Disambiguation: the book I am talking about is Michael H. Kater, Hitler Youth, Harvard University Press, 2004. NOT Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow, Scholastic, 2005.]
There's a curious phenomenon in historiography of the Nazis; I've mentioned it before: the insidious way in which, if you aren't very careful, you will find yourself reinscribing the terms of the very discourse you're supposed to be studying. Hitler's ignorance and therefore innocence of the genocide of the Jews is probably the creepiest of these memes. It was a popular defense of the Fuehrer during his reign, and then got picked up by Hitler apologist David Irving on his long descent from fire-eating muckraker to Holocaust denier. Another example is the idea of the "ethnic German" which historiographers have a distressing tendency to treat as unproblematic despite its clear ideological freight. And a third, brought again and forcibly to my attention tonight by Michael H. Kater's Hitler Youth, is "homosexuality."
In discussing the endemic problem of discipline in the Hitler-Jugend, Kater says:
And again, just down the page:
In both cases "homosexuality" is being vaguely lumped together with vandalism, rape, insubordination, theft, and joy-riding (the longer I look at these passages, the longer my list of problems gets), and Kater doesn't define either the Nazi use of the term or his own. He seems perfectly willing to accept homosexuality, like sadism, as nothing more nor less than a problem that crops up when discipline among teenagers is lax.
I know basically nothing at all about LGBTQ issues in Germany between the beginning of the twentieth century and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, but I do know, from reading about the Nazis, that there seems to have been a general association between thuggishness, love of (para)military social groups and structures, and what is referred to as homosexuality (also "perversion"), typified by Ernst Röhm, the SA leader murdered in the so-called "Röhm Putsch" of 1934. Röhm is invariably tagged as a "notorious homosexual" by historiographers of the Nazis; it's an epithet like rosy-fingered Dawn or ox-eyed Hera, and like those epithets, its meaning is actually kind of slippery. Certainly it is used, by both Röhm's contemporaries and historiographers of the Nazis, as code for "pervert" and "degenerate," a way to emphasize Röhm's bad character and general undesirability. I have no idea how Röhm understood his sexual identity, if he ever thought about it at all, but using the word "homosexual," as it was applied to Röhm by his contemporaries--or to these Hitler Youths--without stopping to interrogate it, unpack it, or even signal that it is a loaded term and neither transparent nor value-neutral, is sloppy scholarship, if nothing worse.
There's a curious phenomenon in historiography of the Nazis; I've mentioned it before: the insidious way in which, if you aren't very careful, you will find yourself reinscribing the terms of the very discourse you're supposed to be studying. Hitler's ignorance and therefore innocence of the genocide of the Jews is probably the creepiest of these memes. It was a popular defense of the Fuehrer during his reign, and then got picked up by Hitler apologist David Irving on his long descent from fire-eating muckraker to Holocaust denier. Another example is the idea of the "ethnic German" which historiographers have a distressing tendency to treat as unproblematic despite its clear ideological freight. And a third, brought again and forcibly to my attention tonight by Michael H. Kater's Hitler Youth, is "homosexuality."
In discussing the endemic problem of discipline in the Hitler-Jugend, Kater says:
As early as 1933, Hitler told Schirach that Reich President Paul von Hindenburg was cross with him because "the young people did not show the necessary respect to old officers, teachers, and ministers of the church." Later in the Third Reich, HJ miscreants in their early teens were known for committing petty theft, obstructing railroad tracks, and accosting civilians in the streets. As for the older ones, traffic violations such as racing with staff cars became a serious problem, sometimes resulting in the injury of innocent bystanders. HJ leaders were habitually driving their cars with such speed that often "they cannot be brought to a necessary stop," according to an official complaint. Homosexuality and sadism became rampant among HJ members. In one notorious case in the summer of 1938, a mid-level teenage leader inflicted long-lasting torture on his charges by tying their wrists and ankles during an outing and then beating them with his steel-studded belt.
(52-53)
And again, just down the page:
During the war years boys and girls continued to engage in crimes like theft, impersonation, or gross acts of vandalism. [...] Nazi character training notwithstanding, homosexuality could not be curbed, and more women were being sexually molested than had been the case in peace time.
(53)
In both cases "homosexuality" is being vaguely lumped together with vandalism, rape, insubordination, theft, and joy-riding (the longer I look at these passages, the longer my list of problems gets), and Kater doesn't define either the Nazi use of the term or his own. He seems perfectly willing to accept homosexuality, like sadism, as nothing more nor less than a problem that crops up when discipline among teenagers is lax.
I know basically nothing at all about LGBTQ issues in Germany between the beginning of the twentieth century and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, but I do know, from reading about the Nazis, that there seems to have been a general association between thuggishness, love of (para)military social groups and structures, and what is referred to as homosexuality (also "perversion"), typified by Ernst Röhm, the SA leader murdered in the so-called "Röhm Putsch" of 1934. Röhm is invariably tagged as a "notorious homosexual" by historiographers of the Nazis; it's an epithet like rosy-fingered Dawn or ox-eyed Hera, and like those epithets, its meaning is actually kind of slippery. Certainly it is used, by both Röhm's contemporaries and historiographers of the Nazis, as code for "pervert" and "degenerate," a way to emphasize Röhm's bad character and general undesirability. I have no idea how Röhm understood his sexual identity, if he ever thought about it at all, but using the word "homosexual," as it was applied to Röhm by his contemporaries--or to these Hitler Youths--without stopping to interrogate it, unpack it, or even signal that it is a loaded term and neither transparent nor value-neutral, is sloppy scholarship, if nothing worse.
UBC: The Case for Auschwitz
Feb. 9th, 2010 01:38 pmvan Pelt, Robert Jan. The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
with an assist from:
Rosenbaum, Ron. Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of his Evil. 1998. New York: HarperPerennial, 1999.
Long, ranting in parts, depressed in others.
( click )
with an assist from:
Rosenbaum, Ron. Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of his Evil. 1998. New York: HarperPerennial, 1999.
Long, ranting in parts, depressed in others.
( click )
UBC: The Gulag Archipelago
Jan. 4th, 2010 11:40 amSolzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, I-II. [Arkhipelag GULag.] Transl. Thomas P. Whitney. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1973.
This is only the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, meaning of course that vols. 2 & 3 have been added to my infinitely expanding book list. It is, in no particular order: massive, passionate, funny, bitter, astounding, appalling, fascinating, heart-breaking. Periodically, especially in the chapters about Soviet trials, my suspension of disbelief would break, which is a really weird thing to have happen when you're reading nonfiction.
The universe has been conspiring recently to make me wish I could read Russian, and Solzhenitsyn only makes it worse; there are places in The Gulag Archipelago where I can SEE that something beautiful and clever and subversive is happening in the language, but English doesn't flex in the right direction to convey it.
Also, although of course Gogol was a Tsarist author, something about reading Solzhenitsyn made me understand him better.
And this is the epigraph for something, although I don't know what yet: "if you live in a graveyard, you can't weep for everyone" (584).
I do have less scattershot ideas about this book, but they aren't articulatable yet, so for now, this will have to do.
This is only the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, meaning of course that vols. 2 & 3 have been added to my infinitely expanding book list. It is, in no particular order: massive, passionate, funny, bitter, astounding, appalling, fascinating, heart-breaking. Periodically, especially in the chapters about Soviet trials, my suspension of disbelief would break, which is a really weird thing to have happen when you're reading nonfiction.
The universe has been conspiring recently to make me wish I could read Russian, and Solzhenitsyn only makes it worse; there are places in The Gulag Archipelago where I can SEE that something beautiful and clever and subversive is happening in the language, but English doesn't flex in the right direction to convey it.
Also, although of course Gogol was a Tsarist author, something about reading Solzhenitsyn made me understand him better.
And this is the epigraph for something, although I don't know what yet: "if you live in a graveyard, you can't weep for everyone" (584).
I do have less scattershot ideas about this book, but they aren't articulatable yet, so for now, this will have to do.
Bartov, Omer. Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
This book is obviously influenced by the Historikerstreit (as Dr. Bartov is the first to point out), as it is in large part a refutation of the German-soldiers-as-Hitler's-noble-and-innocent-victims thesis, that thesis being what started the argument in the first place. Bartov disproves this thesis with primary source evidence, particularly the letters of the soldiers on the Eastern front, and his evidence is horribly convincing. Bartov also offers something I have been longing for without knowing it, a nuanced non-binary model of the relationship between the individual and an ideology. He's modifying the "primary group" theory of military success:
This formulation dovetails nicely with Kershaw's work on the "Hitler myth," for Bartov shows that fanatical devotion to the Führer was one of the pieces of the Nazi world-view most readily internalized by soldiers on the Eastern front, just as Kershaw showed its operations in the civilian populace. They didn't have to understand what Hitler wanted in order to unite in worship of him.
Bartov also shows the soldiers' belief in their own innate and immense superiority as Germans, and their belief that--as Hitler told them--the Jews had started the war; that if Germany hadn't attacked Russia, Russia would have attacked Germany; that the terrible slaughter of Jews and "commissars" and "partisans" was necessary and deserved; and that Germany was, in fact, heroically defending THE ENTIRE WORLD from the Judeo-Bolshevik menace which would otherwise destroy them all. The polar reversal characteristic of the Nazi worldview was in full operation on the Eastern front.
Books Read in 2009*
(as close as I'm going to come to a year-in-review type post)
---
*Not counting the two (three?) binge rereads of Heyer.
This book is obviously influenced by the Historikerstreit (as Dr. Bartov is the first to point out), as it is in large part a refutation of the German-soldiers-as-Hitler's-noble-and-innocent-victims thesis, that thesis being what started the argument in the first place. Bartov disproves this thesis with primary source evidence, particularly the letters of the soldiers on the Eastern front, and his evidence is horribly convincing. Bartov also offers something I have been longing for without knowing it, a nuanced non-binary model of the relationship between the individual and an ideology. He's modifying the "primary group" theory of military success:
[...] some insight into the relationship between the people and the regime may be derived from the notion that while real "primary groups" do not fully explain combat motivation due to their unfortunate tendency to disintegrate just when they are most needed, the idea of attachment to an ideal "primary group," composed of a certain category of human beings, clearly does have a powerful integrating potential. This kind of "primary group," however, is in some respects the precise opposite of the one presented in the original theory, for it is very much the product not merely of social ties, but of ideological internalization, whereby humanity is divided into opposing groups of "us" and "them." Indeed, the sense of identification with one group, and the abhorrence of the other, are in both cases dependent on an abstraction; personal familiarity may only weaken the individual's commitment by revealing the less than ideal aspects of his own side, and the human face of his opponents (which is why armies dislike fraternization). This kind of categorization is of course just as applicable to civilians, and in both cases does not necessitate any profound understanding of whatever world-view one believes oneself to be fighting or working for. Instead, it calls for internalizing only those aspects of the regime's ideology based on previously prevalent prejudices, and most needed to legitimize one's sufferings, elevate one's own status, and denigrate one's enemies, be they real or imaginary.
(Bartov 6)
This formulation dovetails nicely with Kershaw's work on the "Hitler myth," for Bartov shows that fanatical devotion to the Führer was one of the pieces of the Nazi world-view most readily internalized by soldiers on the Eastern front, just as Kershaw showed its operations in the civilian populace. They didn't have to understand what Hitler wanted in order to unite in worship of him.
Bartov also shows the soldiers' belief in their own innate and immense superiority as Germans, and their belief that--as Hitler told them--the Jews had started the war; that if Germany hadn't attacked Russia, Russia would have attacked Germany; that the terrible slaughter of Jews and "commissars" and "partisans" was necessary and deserved; and that Germany was, in fact, heroically defending THE ENTIRE WORLD from the Judeo-Bolshevik menace which would otherwise destroy them all. The polar reversal characteristic of the Nazi worldview was in full operation on the Eastern front.
Books Read in 2009*
(as close as I'm going to come to a year-in-review type post)
- Allert, Tillman. The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of a Gesture. 2005. Transl. Jefferson Chase. New York: Picador-Henry Holt & Co., 2008. (06/27)
- Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. 1963. 1965. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. (03/03)
- Bartov, Omer. Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. (12/31)
- Berkhoff, Karel C. Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004. (03/25)
- Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993. (01/24)
- Craig, William. Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad. 1973. New York: Penguin Books, 2001. (08/01)
- Demos, John. The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. (02/21)
- Downum, Amanda. The Drowning City. New York: Orbit Books, 2009. (03/11)
- Fox, Daniel. Dragon in Chains. New York: Del Rey-Ballantine, 2009. (03/11)
- Furet, Francçois, ed. Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews. [L'allemagne nazie et le génocide juif, 1985.] New York: Schocken Books, 1989. (01/05)
- Godbeer, Richard. Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. (12/17)
- Green, Anna Katharine. The Leavenworth Case. 1878. Teddington: Echo Library, 2008. (08/10)
- Heyer, Georgette. The Black Moth. 1929. N.p: HQN, n.d. (05/14)
- Heyer, Georgette. The Black Sheep 1966. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks Casablanca-Sourcebooks Inc., 2008. (05/14)
- Johnson, Alaya. Moonshine (in press). (05/30)
- Kershaw, Ian. The 'Hitler Myth': Image and Reality in the Third Reich. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. (12/22)
- Koch, H. W. The Hitler Youth: Origins and Development 1922-1945. New York: Dorset Press, 1975. (12/27)
- Kogon, Eugen. The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them. [Der SS-Staat, 1946.] Transl. Heinz Norden. 1950. Introd. Nikolaus Wachsmann. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. (01/28)
- Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 1986. (01/22)
- Miéville, China. The City & the City. New York: Del Rey-Ballantine Books, 2009. (07/16)
- Maier, Charles S. The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. (02/04)
- Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England. 1944. Revised and expanded. New York: Harper Torchbooks-Harper & Row, 1966. (06/27)
- Onions, Oliver. "The Beckoning Fair One." The Collected Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions. 1935. New York: Dover Publications, 1971. 3-70. (03/28)
- Reitlinger, Gerald. The SS: Alibi of a Nation, 1922-1945. 1956. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: 1981. (07/09)
- Stargardt, Nicholas. Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis. New York: Vintage Books: 2007. (01/16)
- Starkey, Marion L. The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials. 1949. New York: Anchor Books-Doubleday, 1989. (06/27)
- Vinogradov, V. K., Pogonyi, J. F., and N. V. Teptzov. Hitler's Death: Russia's Last Great Secret from the Files of the KGB. London: Chaucer Press, 2005. (06/27)
- Waite, Robert G. L. The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. 1977. New York: Da Capo Press, 1993. (06/27)
- Weiner, J. S. The Piltdown Forgery. 1953. Introd. Chris Stringer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. (09/20)
- Wistrich, Robert S. Hitler and the Holocaust: How and Why the Holocaust Happened. London: Phoenix Press, 2002. (02/05)
- Yoe, Craig. Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-Creator Joe Shuster. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2009. (06/27)
---
*Not counting the two (three?) binge rereads of Heyer.
UBC: The Hitler Youth
Dec. 27th, 2009 01:46 pmKoch, H. W. The Hitler Youth: Origins and Development 1922-1945. New York: Dorset Press, 1975.
In a nutshell, this book is about the way in which Hitler and the NSDAP exploited--and betrayed--the energy and idealism of German youth for their own benefit. Koch was himself a Hitler Youth--and a survivor of the Volkssturm--and his occasional, bitterly sarcastic, personal comments are some of the book's most enlightening moments on the thoughts and experience of the boys themselves. (I wish he had brought himself to talk a little more about his own experience, but that wasn't the book he was writing, and I respect that.) He shows very clearly how National Socialism, both vehemently anti-intellectual and lacking an ideology that was even coherent, much less capable of standing up to debate, substituted physical activity for thought. Although Koch never says so explicitly, it's clear that Führer-worship (which Kershaw showed to be endemic and pervasive in German culture under the Third Reich) made up the deficit. And although Koch argues that the Nazis' ideological programming of the Hitler Youth was less than successful, he does not omit the evidence that children absorbed the "correct" attitudes towards, for instance, Jews and Poles. And toward the necessity of fighting to the last "man."
I also wish that the BDM (Bund Deutscher Mädchen) and the experience of girls were not as clearly an afterthought to Koch's book as he admits they were to the Nazi regime. More reasons to try to find the (very few) books written about women in the Third Reich.
And I shall end with a Nazi word problem, as cited by Koch:
The Third Reich, in all its creepy anti-glory.
In a nutshell, this book is about the way in which Hitler and the NSDAP exploited--and betrayed--the energy and idealism of German youth for their own benefit. Koch was himself a Hitler Youth--and a survivor of the Volkssturm--and his occasional, bitterly sarcastic, personal comments are some of the book's most enlightening moments on the thoughts and experience of the boys themselves. (I wish he had brought himself to talk a little more about his own experience, but that wasn't the book he was writing, and I respect that.) He shows very clearly how National Socialism, both vehemently anti-intellectual and lacking an ideology that was even coherent, much less capable of standing up to debate, substituted physical activity for thought. Although Koch never says so explicitly, it's clear that Führer-worship (which Kershaw showed to be endemic and pervasive in German culture under the Third Reich) made up the deficit. And although Koch argues that the Nazis' ideological programming of the Hitler Youth was less than successful, he does not omit the evidence that children absorbed the "correct" attitudes towards, for instance, Jews and Poles. And toward the necessity of fighting to the last "man."
I also wish that the BDM (Bund Deutscher Mädchen) and the experience of girls were not as clearly an afterthought to Koch's book as he admits they were to the Nazi regime. More reasons to try to find the (very few) books written about women in the Third Reich.
And I shall end with a Nazi word problem, as cited by Koch:
"A mentally-handicapped person costs the public 4 Reichsmark per day, a cripple 5.50 Reichsmark and a convicted criminal 3 Reichsmark. Cautious estimates state that within the boundaries of the German Reich 300,000 persons are being cared for in public mental institutions. How many marriage loans at 1,000 Reichsmark per couple could annually be financed from the funds allocated to institutions?" (A. Dorner, ed., Mathematik im Dienst der nationalpolitischen Erziehung, Frankfurt 1936)
(Koch 174)
The Third Reich, in all its creepy anti-glory.
UBC: The 'Hitler Myth'
Dec. 22nd, 2009 02:54 pmKershaw, Ian. The 'Hitler Myth': Image and Reality in the Third Reich. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Oddly enough, I found an excellent one sentence summation of the thesis of this book in the next book I picked up, H. W. Koch's The Hitler Youth: Origins and Development 1922-1945 (1975): "Since he [Hitler] never said what he meant by 'nationalism' or by 'socialism' he could be, at least for a time, all things to all men" (p. 41). Kershaw's book is an examination of the public image of Hitler, particularly among non-Nazis, and how he managed to stay "all things to all men" for a phenomenally long time. The fundamental excuse which maintained Hitler's popularity, which Kershaw cites evidence for again and again and again, is that Hitler didn't know what his subordinates were doing (when in truth, of course, although the Nazi government was a wildly chaotic machine, no one with Hitler's paranoid and micromanaging character would have tolerated for a second the kind of ignorance people were attributing to him). Every time the Nazi government did something unpopular, Hitler was exculpated, so that Hitler and the NSDAP became widely separated in the minds of non-Nazis, while of course to members of the Nazi Party, Hitler was the NSDAP. Hitler's own very careful practice of speaking in generalities, and toning down his rabid fervor on certain subjects such as the "Jewish Question," and concealing his implacable determination to lead Germany into war, meant that people could project onto him whatever they needed to believe in and keep that quite separate from the dismal day to day realities of living in a fascist state. Kershaw also charts the decline and fall of Hitler's public image, starting with Stalingrad--Germany's first major defeat in WWII was also the first time that the Nazis' propaganda and lies were directly contradicted by inconvenient reality, and after that the chasm just kept getting wider and wider. Hitler's popularity, being built on lies and misdirection and--crucially--success after success, could not survive the truth of defeat.
I have one other creepily interesting observation, which is that the standard defense of "Hitler doesn't know what his subordinates are doing" would later be picked up by the Hitler apologist, David Irving, who used it in Hitler's War to argue that Hitler was not responsible for the genocide of the Jews.
Oddly enough, I found an excellent one sentence summation of the thesis of this book in the next book I picked up, H. W. Koch's The Hitler Youth: Origins and Development 1922-1945 (1975): "Since he [Hitler] never said what he meant by 'nationalism' or by 'socialism' he could be, at least for a time, all things to all men" (p. 41). Kershaw's book is an examination of the public image of Hitler, particularly among non-Nazis, and how he managed to stay "all things to all men" for a phenomenally long time. The fundamental excuse which maintained Hitler's popularity, which Kershaw cites evidence for again and again and again, is that Hitler didn't know what his subordinates were doing (when in truth, of course, although the Nazi government was a wildly chaotic machine, no one with Hitler's paranoid and micromanaging character would have tolerated for a second the kind of ignorance people were attributing to him). Every time the Nazi government did something unpopular, Hitler was exculpated, so that Hitler and the NSDAP became widely separated in the minds of non-Nazis, while of course to members of the Nazi Party, Hitler was the NSDAP. Hitler's own very careful practice of speaking in generalities, and toning down his rabid fervor on certain subjects such as the "Jewish Question," and concealing his implacable determination to lead Germany into war, meant that people could project onto him whatever they needed to believe in and keep that quite separate from the dismal day to day realities of living in a fascist state. Kershaw also charts the decline and fall of Hitler's public image, starting with Stalingrad--Germany's first major defeat in WWII was also the first time that the Nazis' propaganda and lies were directly contradicted by inconvenient reality, and after that the chasm just kept getting wider and wider. Hitler's popularity, being built on lies and misdirection and--crucially--success after success, could not survive the truth of defeat.
I have one other creepily interesting observation, which is that the standard defense of "Hitler doesn't know what his subordinates are doing" would later be picked up by the Hitler apologist, David Irving, who used it in Hitler's War to argue that Hitler was not responsible for the genocide of the Jews.
UBC: Harvest of Despair
Mar. 25th, 2009 01:06 pmBerkhoff, Karel C. Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004.
This is a very difficult and painful book to read because, to put it vulgarly, the people of Ukraine could not catch a fucking break. They go from Stalin and the Terror-Famine to the Nazis, who quite deliberately starved the urban population and generally behaved like, well, Nazis, and at the end of the war, of course, they are doomed to go right back to Stalin; in post-WWII Soviet Ukraine, people were persecuted for having survived the occupation:
Solzhenitsyn also has things to say about the treatment of survivors in the post-WWII USSR, none of them good.
And what makes the whole mess even worse, the part of the book where I kept wanting to shake something to make reality realign, is that the Ukrainian partisans were just as bad as the Nazis and the Stalinists. They started their own genocide against the Poles, and they followed exactly the same pattern of mass murder against civilians for helping "the enemy" (whoever "the enemy" was defined as by the murderers) or for being suspected of helping "the enemy" or because someone else helped "the enemy" or for not helping the murderers or not helping them enough or any other reason that came to them. Ukrainian partisans murdered people they suspected of supporting Soviet partisans and vice versa. It's like everyone in this patch of Europe suffered homicidal psychosis at the same time, and it is ghastly.
Berkoff's English is sometimes awkward; he is a native of the Netherlands, and by my best reckoning must read Russian, German, Ukrainian, and possibly Polish as well, so this is not in any way a denigration, just a fact about reading the book. One of the things I think is particularly useful about it is that Berkoff has chosen to present the experiences of the people who lived in Ukraine, rather than the Jews or the ethnic Germans or the Poles or the Russians or the Ukrainians (it's also very clear from what he writes that "Ukrainian" was a slippery term and not necessarily a useful one in talking about the people who lived in Ukraine). He's looking at what happened to people who lived in this particular place at this particular time and the suffering they went through for other people's ideologies.
This is a very difficult and painful book to read because, to put it vulgarly, the people of Ukraine could not catch a fucking break. They go from Stalin and the Terror-Famine to the Nazis, who quite deliberately starved the urban population and generally behaved like, well, Nazis, and at the end of the war, of course, they are doomed to go right back to Stalin; in post-WWII Soviet Ukraine, people were persecuted for having survived the occupation:
Red Army veterans, former partisans, and Soviet ideologists lost no time in developing their mythical interpretation of Ukraine under the "German fascist occupants." Like many historians of western European countries, they claimed that resistance had been massive. Official interpreters also, as during the war but in contrast to their Western peers, declared passivity under the Germans a virtual criminal offense. The myth reflected an apparent view that the people in Nazi-ruled Ukraine had been traitors, as a former Soviet partisan recalls being told in Moscow as early as 1942. In 1946, when Petro Vershyhora, a former partisan under Sydir Kovpak, defended those who had lived their lives under the Nazis against people who attacked them merely for that reason, official critics denounced him and censors modified subsequent editions of his book. The survivors of the Nazi regime received little understanding. Well into the 1980s, they had to mention on job applications and other forms whether they had "been in occupied territory" and a positive response resulted in discrimination. Only the collapse of the Soviet Union gave the survivors of the Holocaust and of forced labor the chance to accept a decades-old German offer of compensation; yet post-Soviet bureaucrats illegally appropriated part of the funds and kept applicants waiting for years.
(306)
Solzhenitsyn also has things to say about the treatment of survivors in the post-WWII USSR, none of them good.
And what makes the whole mess even worse, the part of the book where I kept wanting to shake something to make reality realign, is that the Ukrainian partisans were just as bad as the Nazis and the Stalinists. They started their own genocide against the Poles, and they followed exactly the same pattern of mass murder against civilians for helping "the enemy" (whoever "the enemy" was defined as by the murderers) or for being suspected of helping "the enemy" or because someone else helped "the enemy" or for not helping the murderers or not helping them enough or any other reason that came to them. Ukrainian partisans murdered people they suspected of supporting Soviet partisans and vice versa. It's like everyone in this patch of Europe suffered homicidal psychosis at the same time, and it is ghastly.
Berkoff's English is sometimes awkward; he is a native of the Netherlands, and by my best reckoning must read Russian, German, Ukrainian, and possibly Polish as well, so this is not in any way a denigration, just a fact about reading the book. One of the things I think is particularly useful about it is that Berkoff has chosen to present the experiences of the people who lived in Ukraine, rather than the Jews or the ethnic Germans or the Poles or the Russians or the Ukrainians (it's also very clear from what he writes that "Ukrainian" was a slippery term and not necessarily a useful one in talking about the people who lived in Ukraine). He's looking at what happened to people who lived in this particular place at this particular time and the suffering they went through for other people's ideologies.
UBC: The Theory and Practice of Hell
Jan. 28th, 2009 09:57 pmKogon, Eugen. The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them. [Der SS-Staat, 1946.] Transl. Heinz Norden. 1950. Introd. Nikolaus Wachsmann. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
But first, a sidenote:
( about Nazis and indirect discourse )
And while I'm throwing out tangents, here's another one:
( about the development of the Final Solution )
The Theory and Practice of Hell was written by an Austrian Catholic who survived Buchenwald from 1939 to the liberation of the camp in 1945. The book is based on the report he wrote for the Allies, explaining the system of concentration camps and extermination camps. It has the defects of its virtues: Kogon is clearly a child of his times, and you can see some of the same ideas about race and class and biology in his thinking that were distorted and exaggerated into monstrosity and genocide by the Nazis. But he is also doing his best to be clear, to explain. He doesn't try to write a hagiography of the prisoners, but instead does his best to explain the way the camp hierarchy and politics worked. And his book is a testament, not only to basic, brute survival (and reading it, you start to wonder how anyone, any single solitary human being, survived the concentration camps, much less survived for years on end), but to the survival of the things that make us more than brutes.
But first, a sidenote:
( about Nazis and indirect discourse )
And while I'm throwing out tangents, here's another one:
( about the development of the Final Solution )
The Theory and Practice of Hell was written by an Austrian Catholic who survived Buchenwald from 1939 to the liberation of the camp in 1945. The book is based on the report he wrote for the Allies, explaining the system of concentration camps and extermination camps. It has the defects of its virtues: Kogon is clearly a child of his times, and you can see some of the same ideas about race and class and biology in his thinking that were distorted and exaggerated into monstrosity and genocide by the Nazis. But he is also doing his best to be clear, to explain. He doesn't try to write a hagiography of the prisoners, but instead does his best to explain the way the camp hierarchy and politics worked. And his book is a testament, not only to basic, brute survival (and reading it, you start to wonder how anyone, any single solitary human being, survived the concentration camps, much less survived for years on end), but to the survival of the things that make us more than brutes.
