[extropy-chat] 'History' and the fulcrum of 1945

[Hubert Mania]

Amara wrote:

>[...] There's some
> interesting psychology studies that could be made here, that is, with
> how many decades a culture needs to bring a horror out in the public
> consiousness enough to talk about it.

This is absolutely true, Amara. It was only in the mid-eighties, that not
only those germans who lived through the war woke up to the
holocaust topic, but the shock wave splashed through the whole nation
and seized the younger generations, too.

Sure, there had been the suit against Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem 1960, a
major event on german tv, as I recall it. Eichmann organised the railroad
transports of jews from all over Europe to the death camps in poland.
In the collective consciousness of the german society, Eichmann is the
archetype of the "desk top perpetrator" who kills by perfecting the
logistics, by pouring oil into the transport machinery. By the late sixities
there had been some cases against Auschwitz perpetrators, which
served as an eye opener for post war kids like me, but the information
in those days were tiny bits compared to the huge loads of books, movies
and documentaries you can consume today.

TV shows in the style of history channel are very popular. Just to pick out
one example, there has been a "show" last night, where they found the
russian soldier who planted the red flag on the Reichstag in Berlin on May
1, 1945. This action had not been filmed by the Russians, because it was
late at night when it happened. So it was repeated in day light with other
soldiers than the original ones. So the TV managers got hold of the "true"
hero and flew him into Berlin again after 60 years. In front of the new
Reichstag (same building) this soldier met one of the german soldiers who
had defended the "Reichskanzlei" (Hitler's office) on May 1, 1945. And
certainly, it was a touching scene to see those two men in their
mid-eighties walking towards one another and embrace each other after 60
years.

To summarize it in a very populistic and simplicistic style - this topic is
so complex, that email style writing almost seems ridiculous to cover it:
In the mid-eighties, the germans woke up to full consciousness of the
victim's sorrows and the holocaust topic. While in the last seven years or
so, some taboos, that were suppressed for more than 60 years, are finally
discussed.

Interestingly enough, it is a discourse about the sorrows of the
perpetrators. Most prominently: sexual violence against german women by
soldiers of the red army and the british and us air raids against german
cities. 162 cities were destroyed by bombings, some of them completetly,
appr. 600.000 civilians died and a massive part of germany's historical
identity burned down.

> I typed in that passage (sorry for the typos) from the book in order
> to show that it is never black and white in war, the victors are
> absolutely never 'clean', but comparing 'degrees' of atrocity-behavior
> inevitably leads to treating human lives abstractly, which I think is
> wrong too. (Dead is dead, each one is another precious life gone.)

By the way, I can confirm the findings of Modris Ekstein, that defeated
germans exposed a strange kind of pride of having started the greatest
disaster the world had ever known. I stumbled across this hidden "pride"
quite a few times, spooky moments of disbelief and horror.

Yes, the behaviour of the victors. Discussions of these air raids against
german towns were absolutely un-PC from 1945 till 2000 because they
implicitely seemed to qualify and relativize the holocaust. This is an
extraordinarily difficult moral topic. Didn't "we" - the german nation -
deserve this fire from the skies, because of the inexplicable crimes we
committed? I cannot dive deeper into this topic now. It has so much to do
with supposed revanchism and putting Churchill and Roosevelt on the same
sadistic level as Hitler and his atrocities.

But I have read the book, that triggered the whole discussion.

                                 Joerg Friedrich. Der Brand.

I am sure it will be translated into English. I will refrain from talking
about it, but you should try to get a copy when it is released. But there is
this singular memory,  that flashed up when I read the book. You know, in
the 1960s there was this saying, which, translated literally, went like
this: "Oh, boy, you are completely in the bucket" and it meant you were
knocked out, severely punched, something in that direction. As a 6 or 7 year
old boy, I was asking my mother what that could mean. Why the bucket? She
did not know. One of her sisters had witnessed the most devastating air raid
against the city of Braunschweig (half way between Hamburg and Berlin, for
list readers, Amara knows it). And she once mentioned that after the raid
people were carrying their burned relatives to the cemetary in
10-litre-buckets, because they had been shrunk to a size that fit into the
very water buckets that were used to extinguish the fires. But as they were
phosphor bombs, the water only intensified the firestorm. Nobody believed
her that a burnt adult person could fit into a ten litre bucket. When I read
the book "Der Brand" (The fire) I found out it was true that adults were
shrunk to the size to fit into a bucket and that these bodies were carried
to the cemetaries in water buckets. The saying "Oh boy, you are completely
in the bucket", certainly derived from that special war memory.

Amara, maybe you remember the dinner we had in Braunschweig, 2 years ago.
This italian restaurant is located exactly on the edge of the destruction
epicenter of Braunschweig. Left from the restaurant you see all the pretty
houses  that were built around 1900. But walking in the right direction,
deeper into the city, you only see the dull and practical buildings that
were erected in the 1950s. The whole core, the middle age nucleus of the
town (wooden houses) was erased in the fire.

> Thanks for talking so openly and generously about your experiences.
> Sometime this summer or fall when the group I work in begins to write
> macros for the many-step sequencing commands for our Dawn instrument
> (*), I'll see if I can name one 'humania': maybe it will be the set of
> commands to clear the memory buffer ... ;-)
>
>
> Amara
> www.amara.com
>
> (*) http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/

Hey, you know, Hubert supposedly means: being able to store massive chunks
of memories. Complete bullshit, okay, but no kidding, I read this in a
popular book about names in the 1970. In this respect, part of my first name
combined with my familiy name which, I think, does not need any
interpretation, is a strange combination with the atmosphere of uniting
opposites, isn't it. Therefore humania as the name of a macro that erases
memory, would be fantastic, I love this kind of humour.

Cheers

Hubert