Sunday, October 18, 2015

A Somber Film

The ruins of Berlin in '45.



H/T: IOTW

6 comments:

  1. My mother's family was from Dresden, and her father's from Hamburg. She went to Germany in the '30s to visit with her cousins.

    She had an aunt who went back to Germany after the war; she returned to the US and told the rest of the family here - don't go back. Translated into the modern vernacular, she might have said: once you see it you cannot unsee it.

    My father's side of the family was, and is, very into genealogy. I know my ancestors on my fathers side many generations back.

    I asked my mother about her ancestry when I was a child. She said she hadn't looked. Why would I want to know? I'm afraid of what I might find. I understand this feeling now better as an adult than I did then.

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    1. This young German woman sure caught hell.

      She very well may have had it coming. Or perhaps she didn't. Either way, she was going to catch it.

      What's compelling about her is the uncanny stylish modernity. With that hair, and that black t-shirt, and military pants, she could have been an art student where I went to school in the 80s.

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    2. Are there are different levels of moral outrage? I looked at that link, lewy, of the woman who had obviously been raped andI felt terrible. It's horrendous what the Soviet army did to German women in WWII...what ISIS is doing as I type.
      That said, I assume most of the rape victims survived. 6 million Jews and 6 million political prisoners, POWs, gypsies, gays, mentally ill - did not. I believe most Germans knew what was going on. They put Hitler, with his evil message, in power. They lived next to the concentration and labor camps. They saw what happened to the German Jews, their neighbors. I personally could never step foot in Germany, I look at the bombed-out wreckage in the photos and think "they deserved it".

      I too have some German ancestry, my dad's mother was a Schroeder.

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    3. I travelled through in Austria and Bavaria in 1978. Perfectly normal place. Great beer. Great food, if you like grease and meat (I do). Smoking hot tour guides. Except at, you know, Dachau.

      It's the normality of it which informs. That the Holocaust was exceptional, that's self evident. Not your run of the mill pogrom or genocide. But that the Germans themselves are? Exceptionally evil, that is? Not so certain about that one.

      "We could never do something like that" is a test of fate which I believe to be unwise. The best course IMHO is to assume we could, and be on guard, both as potential perpetrators, and potential victims.

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    4. ""We could never do something like that" is a test of fate which I believe to be unwise. The best course IMHO is to assume we could, and be on guard, both as potential perpetrators, and potential victims."

      Words of wisdom.

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    5. "We could never do something like that" is a test of fate which I believe to be unwise. The best course IMHO is to assume we could, and be on guard, both as potential perpetrators, and potential victims."

      Maybe. Probably. I'm sure it's easier to hate (and assign blame) when one's children are starving.

      I'd like to think we're made of better stuff, but like you lewy and florrie, I too carry the German blood (although that side of the family was snatched up by the Mormons and whisked away from Heidelberg to Salt Lake in 1886. Quite the magic act; Catholic to LDS, presto!)

      Still, is there something genetic in the bloodline that predisposes a tribe to commit such atrocities?

      The girl in video, although obviously battered and probably raped, presented as stoic and warrior-like, both in garb and demeanor. It's a far cry from the Germans we read about today, so consumed by guilt that they're throwing the doors open to their own annihilation, and peeing all over themselves in supplication to the barbaric and savage Allah-ites.

      Well, not ALL of them. There are a few warriors left, and they're not happy campers.

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