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

[Hubert Mania]

Dear Amara,

the subject of collective guilt was suppressed in public discussion til the
1980s when the us tv movie series "Holocaust" had a tremendous impact on the
german society. Since that event and after some better documentations - like
Claude Lanzmann's "Shoah" video - the complete horror of the holocaust
creeped into the public discussion. Reasonable persons tell you that there
is no such thing like a collective guilt, even holocaust survivors say it.
Instead, contemporary german citizens should play their individual role to
prevent this from ever happening again. Well, I guess everybody has to find
his own answer if he feels gulity being born into a society that has
permitted Ausschwitz to happen.

I think it is important to realize that my personal experiences as a boy and
adolescent (age 6 to 18) with WWII veterans in my home town I described
yesterday, have been edited by the knowledge and experience of the 50 year
old man I am today. When I made those experiences - veterans breaking down
and bursting out in tears while talking about their killings, drunken
boneheads remembering and raucously shouting their SS songs, letting the
nazi dog in themselves loose - were singular and tiny moments that only as a
compressed "story" like the one I told yesterday, make an impact at all.
Witnessing these events of veterans being careless about collective or even
personal guilt or being depressed, and endlessly persued with the horrible
scenes in their heads . . .was impressive, sure, but as a youngster I was
not able to see the historical or psychological dimensions, I can see today.
So, my recollections are far from being authentic, I'm afraid.

What you say about Modris Ekstein seems to give a broader and more realistic
picture. But it certainly depends on the
date these interviews were made. In the 1960s people were too busy earning
enough money for a volkswagen and making holidays in italy to get bothered
with any collective guilt question, while from the mid 80s on, you could get
better answers though many of the active perpetrators were already dead by
that time.

The best documentation about the holocaust, as far as I can remember, is the
9 hour video "Shoah" by Claude Lanzmann´, appr. 1985.

Herzliche Gruesse nach Roma

Hubert


----- Original Message -----
From: "Amara Graps" <Amara.Graps at ifsi.rm.cnr.it>
To: <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Cc: <amara at amara.com>
Sent: Sunday, January 30, 2005 11:12 PM
Subject: [extropy-chat] 'History' and the fulcrum of 1945


>
> Dear Hubert,
>
> I wish the author: Modris Eksteins of _Walking Since Daybreak_
> interviewed you for his historical vignettes. His stories
> displayed a little wider variation of German responses after the
> war, than your personal experiences (thank you so much for that).
> That is, the type of responses of which you wrote (Stunde Null,
> vacuum) plus negation and disbelief, anger, confusion. He said
> that he didn't see any kind of collective guilt, though, so I
> wonder if these differences depended on specific places where
> your family and he  (the author) were located in Germany, or
> maybe he went through Germany too quickly to know it well. The
> author  did a superb job showing the ironies, and the very gray
> (certainly not black-and-white), of the events, which sometimes
> made it impossible to know who was victim and perpetrator.
> I recommend this book to you.
>
> Amara
>
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