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

[Amara Graps]

Dear Hubert, 

I thought that I was/we were at a good stopping point on this topic,
but there is one more thing that I would like to add.

I  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.

Hubert wrote:
{humania at t-online.de  Wed Feb 2]
>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.
[...]
>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

This. 

Are the German women speaking now, or are others speaking for 
them?

The Soviet soldiers' instructions were:

"Follow the words of Comrade Stalin, and crush forever the Fascist
beast in its den. Break the racial pride of the German woman. Take
her as your legitimate booty. Kill, you brave soldiers of the
Victorious Soviet Army."

[from Michael R. Marrus, _The Unwanted: European Refugees in the
Twentieth Century_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985),
325-326.

In May this year, when Moscow holds its large celebration for the
'Liberation' from the Nazis, what exactly are we supposed to be
celebrating?

At least two million German women along with thousands of refugee
women were raped by the Soviet soldiers. At the end of the war, rape
became the Soviet army's hallmark. They would pillage every home for
food, alcohol and money, then they would rape every woman (age
didn't matter), usually multiple times, and usually gang style.

So then after the war, I wonder how many of those women committed
suicide? And how many new births ?

I don't know how 'common knowlege' is this facet of that war, but I
read about this in a Baltic story: _A Woman in Amber_ by Agate
Nesaule, 1995, Penguin books (*), in one particular chapter about a
seige on a safeway house of German women and Baltic refugees by
Soviet soldiers, who, for ten days, systematically raped (multiple
times) every woman in the house with the exception of the author,
who was five years old at the time. After one group of solders
finished with them, a 'fresh' group of soldiers arrived, and so it
continued. Women died in various ways, you hear about a torture
killing with an umbrella (don't think too hard), the pasteur of the
safehouse was shot by the old oak tree, too, while the rest were
forced to line up and watch.

I think that that little girl, the author, was probably traumatized
by what she witnessed, and I'm sure that the rest of the women were.

(*) This book is one of the most poignant books I have ever read. It
won some awards, as well. It might be considered a complement to the
book by Modris Eksteins. It follows one woman through her escape
from Latvia, and then through her life into later years, when she is
finally able to talk about what she experienced. Her stories are
revealed when her spouse (a kind of soulmate), plants a few
questions here and there, and she opens up. I was touched by his
method to get her to talk.

Hubert:
> 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.

This, and these kinds of stories are precious, I hope you know. 
Thank you, again.

Amara