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

[Amara Graps]

A couple of years ago,  I read a brilliant book that successfully
conveyed what a complex arena is 'history'. The book _Walking
Since Daybreak_ by historian Modris Ekstein tells the story of
the Baltic countries before, during, and after World War II. He
chose Spring 1945 as the (obvious) climax of his story, and
through his book we jump in time, forward from the 1850s,
backward from the 1990s to reach that fulcrum of enormous
devastation and frenzy and the 'nothingness' of Spring 1945. He
used personal vignettes of his and other family's lives, to bring
our views to something we can understand, and he used particular
regions in the Baltics (and Germany) to pinpoint our
attention in physical space while the political landscape
constantly shifted with the major players in the second World
War.

When he presents his story, we see that the roles of victims and
perpetrators are not very clear at all, and representing
historical events, especially of the eye of the storm that was
1945, is ultimately impossible. He shows that to understand what
happened in Spring 1945, the story must be told from the
perspective of those who survived, resurrecting those who died,
so it is told 'from the borders' of a common home of humanity
today. The historical story(ies) then becomes an assemblage of
fragments, memory, reflection and narrative.

Of 'history', Ekstein says:

<begin quote>
We must accept a variety of histories, but we must also accept
variety within our history. It is not possible to write history
without preconception. It is possible, however, to write history
with layers of suggestion, so that history evokes, history
conjoins, it involves. History should provke, not dictate
meaning. It should be a vehicle rather than a terminus. Beware of
the terrible simplifiers.
<end quote>

Of the 1945 paradoxes, Silence and Frenzy, the author writes:

<begin quote>
Silence. Nothing. Emptiness at the heart of civilization. 'All
the poems that sustained me before are as rigid and dead as I am
myslf,' wrote a German mother to her children. All the rhymes,
all the metaphors, all the harmonies, they meant nothing, or they
were lies. Reflection, analysis,  and even language itself seemed
inadequate, indeed improper, when one was confronted by the
magnitude of the horror. The muses had been silenced. Only the
second-rate had the courage to speak. Only the mindless claimed
to understand. 'Everything was false,' wrote Charlotte Delbo,
'faces and books, everything showed me its falseness and I was in
despair at having lost the faculty of dreaming, or harboring
illlusions; I was no longer open to imagination, or explanation.'

However beyone the corpses, beneath the rubble, there _was_ life,
more intense than ever, a human anthill, mad with commotion. A
veritable bazaar. People going, coming, pushing, selling, sighing
- above all scurrying. Scurrying to survive. Never had so many
people been on the move at once. Millions upon millions.
Prisoners of war, slave laborers, concentration camp inmates,
ex-soldiers, Germans expelled from Eastern Europe, and refugees
who had fled the Russian advance - congeries of moving humanity.
A frenzy. Apt subjects for Hieronymus Bosch. Be he was nowhere to
be found.
<end quote>

Probably today what happened at that cataclysm in the middle of
the last century cannot be comprehended. The Russian deaths in
the 'Great Patriotic War' are thought to have exceeded 27
million. The Germans lost 3.8 million solders killed, and
probably an equal number of German civilians died. Another three
million solders were captured by the Russians, and of these about
one million did not survive. Six million Jews died, and several
hundred thousand French, English, American, Canadians, were killed, 
nd so the list goes on. In that cataclysm, the whole continent of
Europe was on the move, the roads of Europe were clogged. A State
Department report in June 1945 estimated the total number of
refugees in Europe at 33 to 43 million. The Allies faced an
enormous problem as hundreds of thousands of refugees fled
westward; so the Allies blew up bridges leading west in order to
stop the tidal wave of fleeing humanity. Germany became a
wasteland. Between 1943 and 1945, the Allies dropped about 1.25
million tons of bombs on German soil, most cities were
unrecognizable even to people who had lived there all of their
lives. A normalization of horror ensued. What the Allies rained
down from the sky invoking fear, the Soviet advance invoked
terror: rape, pillage, murder, burn, and rape again. 

Of the fulcrum of 1945, the author says:

<begin quote>
The number of human beings who died in this conflict was
staggering enough, but something else was gravely wounded: the
entire Enlightenment tradition. It could not, contrary to some
assertions, emerge from the war strengthened. As T.S. Eliot put
it, Germany and Japan, 'these two aggressive nations, ... did but
bring to a head a malady with which the world was already
infected; and their collapse only leaves the world with the
disease in every part of its body'. [...] 

Before we can move forward, we must come to some kind of terms
with 1945, with what it represents. A start would be the
recognition that 1945, with its devastation, displacement, and
horror, was the result not just of a few madmen and their
befuddled followers, not just of 'others,' but of humanity as a
whole and of our culture as a whole. Nineteen forty-five is not
our victory, as we often like to think; 1945 is our problem.
<end quote>


Amara