Holocaust (Re: NP: Not to bring up a shitstorm or anything...

[Otto Sell]

Can someone think of *that* war (and write novels about it) without thinking
of the Holocaust?

jbor wrote:
"many (both Germans and non-Germans) *didn't* know what was happening in the
Lagers, or they didn't *want* to know, and it is this which Pynchon does
represent in GR imo."

Right, it's more an "atmospherical" thing, this never ending oscillation
between knowing and not-knowing echoes the book like it echoes real postwar
discussions about the topic. Pynchon manages it to put us readers into an
anachronical position. What do we really known if we try to forget our
postwar knowledge?

What could they possibly have known?
There was a clearly expressed will to eliminate all Jewish "influence" on
Germany, Europe and elsewhere in the world. Hitler and many major and minor
nazis had repeated this several times, papers printed it and officials spoke
freely about it with foreigners. After 1938 every grown-up German knew
definitely what was going on *in* Germany - they saw the synagoges burn,
Jews moved out of the cities, beaten and killed on the streets.

Hitler himself had made the connection between the war and the fate of the
Jews repeatedly, and the program was obvious, at least to all of those who
were unhappy with the outcome of WW-I. Because the Jews could be blamed for
everything they could be blamed for this too, as for the economical
depression and the unemployment. The system could rely on the waves of
19th-century and medieval anti-Semitism which had put anti-Semitism deep
into the consiousness of many Germans of all social classes.

I think it's inevitable for us postwar born to read Hilberg, Lanzmann and
Goldhagen to get an "impression" what murderous consequences the officially
introduced anti-Semitism in Germany had and that there was a development
from separation to annihilation.
A word like "merely" in the context of a nazi-concentration camp is a little
strange in my eyes, is misjudging the historical dimension.

About Keith's question what all this has to do with GR - us and them - the
nazi-system was strictly binary. You were either "Volksgenosse" or not, and
if not you were deprived of all social and human rights, "vogelfrei" as the
old German word says but this "freedom" isn't positive at all - the meaning
of this originally beautiful word has been reversed to the contrary, meaning
"free to be killed" by anybody.

"Und willst du nicht mein Bruder sein so schlag ich dir den Schädel ein" as
the saying goes but this only went for arian Germans who were not pc. The
Jews could not choose because contrary to medieval, religious anti-Semitism
the German anti-Semitism of the 19th- and 20th century was rascist
anti-Semitism. And racism hasn't disappeared when Your fathers came over
here to sweep nazism away.

In this way I consider the postmodernism as taught by GR as an appropriate
way of reading many original sources about the Holocaust. The book altered
my perception and I can clearly differentiate between the words of victims
and perpetrators now. Don't forget that my first impressions weren't history
books but narratives - first oral, then movies, later books.

For those who haven't read Goldhagen yet: read the book - as far as I can
say it has the qualities to become a standard in Holocaust-research. Maybe
not "The Germans" were Hitler's willing executioners, but many of them (very
easy to write it this way) factually were, and many more knew.

"Chanting anti-Semitic songs and slogans is not the same as
being one of "Hitler's willing executioners", to quote Goldhagen's perhaps
unwarranted judgement on the matter, imo."

Definitely not, but there's a timespan between the singing and the the
beginning of the mass murder - letting the kids grow up in such an
atmosphere was foregrounding the later things we know.

Otto

----- Original Message -----
From: <KXX4493553 at aol.com>
To: <calbert at tiac.net>
Cc: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2001 12:04 AM
Subject: Re: Holocaust (Re: NP: Not to bring up a shitstorm or anything...


In einer eMail vom 29.01.01 23:41:27 (MEZ) Mitteleuropäische Zeit schreibt
calbert at tiac.net:

<<
 Dachau was merely a mass detention center for "political" prisoners
 at that time. The deportation of those whose only offense was their
 "jewishness" did not begin until after Kristallnacht (sp.?) in Nov. '38.
  >>
Sure. But the campaigns against the jews started already 34/35 ("Kauft nicht
bei Juden" - Don't buy at jews), the so called Rassegesetze were introduced
long before the war, and parents said to their children long before the war:
"Wenn du nicht spurst, kommst du ins Lager" - If you do not obey, you'll
come
into the lager. The people perhaps didn't exactly know what was going on
there but they knew the function of that lagers very exactly. During the war
a lot of German soldiers who had holidays at home told their families what
was going on in Russia, in Poland, in the Ucraine, whereever. There were a
lot of rumours and the people knew a lot about war crimes perhaps not the
dimensions of these crimes. This concerns the "normal" Nazi crimes as well
as
the Holocaust which took place after the Wannsee Conference 1941 - this is
right.
kwp