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0241297001
| 9780241297001
| 0241297001
| 4.64
| 2,745
| Jan 26, 2017
| Jan 01, 2017
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it was amazing
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This is a great readable history of the attempt by the Nazis to kill every single Jewish person in Europe. There was a conference in 1942 where one SS
This is a great readable history of the attempt by the Nazis to kill every single Jewish person in Europe. There was a conference in 1942 where one SS guy presented his colleagues with a list of estimated numbers of Jews in each country – the countries listed included the ones the Nazis hadn’t conquered yet, like Britain and Ireland. They were going to get round to every Jew, once the war was won. You can’t do everything immediately, much as you might want to. I’ve quoted this before but it’s always worth quoting again. It’s by Primo Levi and he is imagining a conversation between an SS guard and a Jewish camp prisoner. The guard explains : However this war may end, we have won the war against you. None of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world would not believe him. There will be perhaps suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed – they will say they are the exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you. A QUICK SUMMARY The Nazis murdered between 5 and 6 million Jews which was one third of the total global Jewish population and two thirds of all European Jews. 75% of the murdered Jews were from Poland and the Soviet Union. 50% of all victims died in the 6 extermination camps Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau 25% died in shootings by the Einsatzgruppen 25% died in ghettos, and in concentration camps 50% of victims died in the year between March 1942 and March 1943. Treblinka was the second biggest extermination camp. It was about an hour away from Warsaw and operated between July 1942 and October 1943. During that period between 700,000 and 900,000 people were killed there. A steady 50,000 per month. Hard to believe. Not all victims of the Nazis were Jewish. The largest group of victims after the Jews were Soviet prisoners of war, around 3 million of those died. Another group that’s often mentioned is the Roma and Sinti (called Gypsies by the Nazis). They were hated too, and haphazardly shoved into camps here and there, but only in the case of the Jews was the idea that they would all be physically liquidated. Around 250,000 Roma and Sinti died. WAS THERE A PLAN RIGHT FROM THE START? NO People read Mein Kampf and listened to Hitler’s raving raging speeches promising the total destruction of the Jews and they concluded that he always intended to exterminate them physically, but this was not the case. At first he wanted to get rid of all Jews from Germany. And a lot of Jews agreed with him – once he came along, Germany was the last place they wanted to be. So there was a clamour, and in March 1938 Roosevelt proposed an international conference, to be held in Evian-le-Bains, a town on Lake Geneva in France. A committee was formed – the Intergovernmental Committee for Political Refugees. Quite right. Goodly hearted diplomats all turned up to the grand hotel there. But alas, not too much got done. Let Mackenzie King, PM of Canada, speak for them : A very difficult question has presented itself in Roosevelt’s appeal to different countries to unite with the USA in admitting refugees from Austria, Germany etc. That means, in a word, admitting numbers of Jews. My own feeling is that nothing is to be gained by creating an internal problem in an effort to meet an international one. There was a general feeling that well, if we admit these German and Austrian Jews, a lot of Eastern European countries will turn up the heat on their Jews and make a fuss for us to accept those too. And there are millions of these Jews. Rees adds : The British authorities must take responsibility for not allowing “the immense possibilities of Palestine as an outlet for Jewish immigration” to be discussed. But by the time of the Evian conference the British must have believed they had enough problems controlling Palestine without adding more potential conflict to the existing mix. Hitler was very disappointed in the attitude of the democracies, and called them some rude names, like hypocrite. So now what were the Nazis to do? They decided to round up the Jews and put them all in ghettos. And then deport them to distant lands, once they’d conquered those lands. There was a hot debate between members of the SS when the Jews were stuffed into the ghettos – some said why should we keep feeding them? Let them starve. And there was starvation in the ghettos. But some SS said no, we’ll keep them alive and make them work for us. So some SS did one thing, and some SS did another. After the invasion of Poland and then Russia, the Einsatzgruppen squads started shooting large numbers of Jews in occupied territory, but there was still not a plan to actually physically liquidate every Jewish man woman and child. It was just too outrageoud an idea, even for the likes of Himmler. But the Nazi regime was radically improvisational. When faced with a problem, you were not supposed to wait for orders, you were supposed to think “what would Hitler want me to do”. Think like a Fuhrer. So the Holocaust evolved – an initiative here, a bold move there, until finally, a plan did crystallise in late 1941, or early 1942, take your pick, historians argue about the details. USELESS MOUTHS The Nazis also wanted to eradicate all mentally and physically disabled people, they said why should we be keeping these “useless mouths” alive, they don’t deserve to live, and they set up six “euthanasia” centres. This is where they first experimented with gas (another local initiative), beginning with carbon monoxide, using the famous fake shower method. Rees gives the details of one of them, located in the grounds of Sonnenstein Castle, south of Dresden. From June 1940 to August 1941 an estimated 14,751 people were murdered in this way That’s just over 1000 disabled people per month being killed, and there were five other places doing the same thing. In total 70,273 disabled people were gassed at these six centres in 1940 and 1941. The euthanasia programme came to an end when the personnel were all transferred to various concentration camps to bring their expertise to bear there. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED This is the one stop book for anyone wanting to know about this dreadful period. I can understand why not everyone would want to read it. ...more |
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1400078636
| 9781400078639
| 1400078636
| 4.08
| 13,096
| 1975
| Dec 07, 2004
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liked it
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15 year old kid in Budapest gets used to wearing a yellow star, it’s no big deal until one day, out of the blue, on his way to work, his bus gets flag
15 year old kid in Budapest gets used to wearing a yellow star, it’s no big deal until one day, out of the blue, on his way to work, his bus gets flagged down by a cop. All Jews on board, off you get and wait here by the highway. The lads lark about, making fun of the Jews from the next bus that gets stopped, but it’s not a lark, because from that moment on they’re all bound for the concentration camps. Just like that. Criticising autofiction about the Holocaust is not a good look. If someone was in a car crash and you corrected their grammar when they were telling you about it, you might wish you hadn’t. But well, I have to report that this book is a strange experience, compulsive one moment, tedious, annoying and clogged for the next few pages, up and down like that. The style is so fussy and waffly. He stuffs his sentences with phrases like so to say, as I recall, after all, I suppose, at least in my eyes, all the same, at all events – like some tiresome old relative. But he’s talking all the time about ultimate ghastliness. Here’s a bad example. A previously unseen bigshot visits the hospital : I saw that the doctors perked up a lot, striving to please him, explaining everything, but noticed this was not so much in the way that was customary within the camp as somehow in accordance with the old and, as it were, instantly nostalgic custom back home, with the sort of discrimination, delight and social graces that one displays when given an opportunity to display how capitally one understands and speaks some cultured language like, as in this instance, French. How’s that for a sentence. What he does very deliberately is to consistently understate concentration camp life. There is no agony or horror here, or, there is, but only glimpsed out of the corner of your eye. And like other Holocaust writers he loves his pervasive lightly ironical humour. To clear up any misconceptions, he says that in Buchenwald the only prisoners who were sent to the crematory were those who had died naturally. All this has, it seems, led some people to mistake the tone as goofily optimistic, seeing the good in everything. Not at all. Time also went by in the hospital; if I happened not to be sleeping, then I would always be kept busy by hunger, thirst, the pain around the wound, the odd conversation, or the event of a treatment. And One further thing that I truly made the acquaintance of here was the vermin. I was quite unable to catch the fleas: they were nimbler than me, and for a very good reason too, after all, they were better nourished. And I have to quote the bit everyone else quotes – it’s just devastating : Despite all deliberation, sense, insight, and sober reason, I could not fail to recognise within myself the furtive and yet – ashamed as it might be, so to say, of its irrationality – increasingly insistent voice of some muffled craving of sorts : I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentration camp. Is it recommended? Kinda sort of, but not until you’ve read If This is a Man : Primo Levi Maus : Art Spiegelman This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen : Tadeusz Borowski Night : Elie Wiesel A Scrap of Time : Ida Fink ...more |
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0679729771
| 9780679729778
| 0679729771
| 4.43
| 156,421
| 1991
| Sep 1992
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it was amazing
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A TALE OF TWO VLADEKS Old Vladek Spiegelman is such a great character. He’s so annoying, cantankerous, irascible – he’s completely impossible! The idea A TALE OF TWO VLADEKS Old Vladek Spiegelman is such a great character. He’s so annoying, cantankerous, irascible – he’s completely impossible! The idea of living with the old man practically causes his son Art to have a nervous breakdown. His second wife leaves him, and by the end of this second Maus we totally understand why. Just as a small example, his extreme miserliness. He asks Art if he wants a cup of tea and says he has a teabag from breakfast he can use again, it’s dried up on the draining board but it will still be good; and he keeps a gas ring on the cooker in the holiday apartment on at all times because it will save him having to buy matches (the gas is already paid for in the apartment rent). And he tries to return unused groceries to the grocery store including a half box of cereal. On and on it goes. And his opinions can be contradictory. On page 56 he is commenting on how to survive in Auschwitz : “Don’t worry about friends. Believe me, they don’t worry about you. They just worry about getting a bigger share of your food!” Six pages later, he says “If you want to live, it’s good to be friendly.” But young Vladek Spiegelman is a different great character. He’s so smart, so capable. He knows how to get by even in the worst circumstances. Here are three very important things to remember next time you find yourself in a concentration camp – one : know four languages; and two : turn your hand to anything; be a tinsmith when they need tinsmiths, be a cobbler when they need boots mending. What do you know about tinsmithing and cobbling? Not so much, so be a very fast learner. And three : notice everything… One time a day they gave a soup from turnips. To stand near the first of the line was no good. You got only water. Near the end was better – solid things to the bottom floated. But too far to the end it was also no good because many times it could be no soup anymore. As well as being his father’s survival story, this is the story of Art’s difficult relationship with his father. He recorded all these memories in the early 70s and I would myself say that the late 60s and early 70s were the time of the greatest generation gap there has ever been. The generation that went through the war and experienced the cataclysmic horrors that bland phrase elides got married and had kids in the late 40s and early 50s; these kids grew up and turned into dope smoking hippies. The parents turned on the tv and watched Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire and John and Yoko having a bed-in for peace. Art was a typical rebellious longhaired young guy. It’s amazing he finally realised that his great project should be to record all his father’s memories and make them into this beautiful moving book. [image] ...more |
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Feb 04, 2025
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Feb 06, 2025
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0394541553
| 9780394541556
| 0394541553
| 4.39
| 367,137
| Aug 12, 1986
| Jan 01, 1991
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it was amazing
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A week ago it was the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the great and the goodly hearted were there to pay their respects, as they s
A week ago it was the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the great and the goodly hearted were there to pay their respects, as they should have been, but in my mind there was a terrific disconnection between those plump dignitaries and the terminal awfulness of why they were all there. And there were a few survivors, they must have been liberated when they were little children. The whole event struck a discordant note. Last year the Oscar for the best international feature film went to The Zone of Interest, which is about Auschwitz, from the point of view of Rudolf Hoss, the camp commandant, and his well-heeled family. It was a pretty good film, very chilling. You don’t get to see what goes on in the camp itself, it’s screened off by a high garden wall. But you hear the occasional gunshot and some wailing. It was based on a novel by none other than Martin Amis. Maybe I should read it. Then there are painful memoirs of survivors like Ida Fink, Tadeusz Borowski, Primo Levi, Eli Wiesel and many others, and there are the daunting histories, 6 or 700 pages long, by Leni Yahil, Martin Gilbert, Nikolaus Wachsmann and a zillion others. Something is missing in all of these approaches to Auschwitz. They’re all too huge, too painful, their terrible weight might easily squash you. And this is why Maus is so brilliant. With Art, we find our way gradually into this labyrinth of horror, step by step. Art Spiegelman finally gets round to sitting down with his 72 year old father, a classic cranky irritable must have things done his way annoying old buffer. Art’s there to download his life story. (Vladek speaks in a fractured English - “Again to the hairdresser? Only a week ago you went.”…..”But I didn’t feel safe here, it was too many ways somebody could find us out. I wanted to go better to Hungary” … “but I must finish quick to tell you the rest because we will come soon over to the bank”) This so personal history must have been hanging over Art’s head like a raincloud his whole life. Visit after visit, he gets Vladek to tell the whole awful story, keeps the chronology on track (old guys, they ramble) and turns it into …. What….a cartoon? No, a graphic novel. Well, a graphic memoir, in which the Jews are portrayed as mice, the Poles as pigs and the Germans as cats. That might be seen to be somewhat controversial, but it works well. The mice aren’t all hiding in fear from the cats, before the Nazis gradually cut them off from civilisation and hope they were stylish mice wearing nice clothes and buying new curtains and everything, just like normal people. So we are drawn into Art’s spiky relationship with his old dad, his dad’s quarrelsome relationship with his wife, and finally, Vladek’s hair raising story of life in Poland in the 1930s. This first book takes us through the appearance of the Gestapo, the corralling of the Jews in ghettos and the transportation of Jews “for resettlement”, all the way up to the gates of Auschwitz. The second book is called And Here my Troubles Began. ...more |
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0674985834
| 9780674985834
| B07FVKQQKM
| 4.32
| 153
| Oct 09, 2014
| Apr 02, 2018
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it was amazing
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REVIEW OF PAGES 121-415 This study was based on the conviction that it is necessary to take seriously the texts, the images and the words of the Nazis. REVIEW OF PAGES 121-415 This study was based on the conviction that it is necessary to take seriously the texts, the images and the words of the Nazis. This is not easy to do. While reading them, it may be difficult to believe that these authors could seriously have believed or subscribed to the things that they wrote, that their texts could ever have been read without unease, mockery or indignation. In Part One of this review we found out how profoundly anti-Christian the Nazis were (Jesus was an Aryan but Saul was a Jew and perverted the whole thing); [image] and we found that they sketched out a theology for themselves that – interestingly – was not a revival of some Wotan worship at all, but something quite different. Before I sketch in the rest of this very dense book I might say that potential readers might think of first reading Black Earth by Timothy Snyder. [image] This is another very dense book (sorry!) but it brilliantly describes the world-view set forth in Mein Kampf and of course Nazi thinking sprang forth from that. So, moving from the theological to more practical matters, we now deal with What Went Wrong and How to Fix It. The blood of a people flows from the soil of its farms like a bubbling, lively stream, while it drains away and runs dry in the cities. (Darre) The French Revolution threw out a set of pernicious ideas like democracy and civil liberty, and then the Industrial Revolution destroyed the purity of rural life by syphoning away all its workers. The Nazis were going to reverse all that. Their intention was to establish an agrarian utopia*, using all the rich land to the East which had been stolen away from them by a cabal of enemies who most cruelly crammed the great German people into the stifling cramped space in which they now eke out a living. To fulfil this dream of millions of Germans farming peacefully their vast Eastern lands, the Nazis needed to fix the German people itself, and then enslave the millions who were currently squatting on German eastern territories. [image] The German people were the greatest in the world but they had weaknesses. There were too many useless mouths, meaning, disabled people. So a law was passed on 14 July 1933 which said that “anyone with a hereditary illness may be rendered sterile by means of surgical intervention”. Which would be “carried out against the patient’s will when required”. Well, “what good was a pity that produced more objects of pity”? 400,000 people were sterilized over the 12 year Nazi period. They used the same argument over and over, when they talked about this issue or the Final Solution – yes, these look like harsh, brutal measures, but really, they are kindly – to the immediate families of the disabled people, to the Germans as a whole, and to humanity as a whole. Mistaken morality focuses on the individual. Superior Nazi morality focuses on the nation. Whatever is good for the German people is good. Eugenics was the name of the game here, and although it was taken to its logical extreme by the Nazis, it wasn’t original to them. The USA, Switzerland and Scandinavian countries has passed laws for “racial improvement”. But they didn’t go as far as to physically liquidate disabled people, as the Nazis did, beginning in October 1939. (That operation was called T4.) * In the final chapter Johann Chapoutot reaches the subject of the Nazis’ apocalyptic antisemitism and finally I had a feeling that I had read all that stuff before. And there is an undeniable feeling that some of the (penetrating) points he is making and some of the (hair-raising) examples he uses are being repeated. Some pruning might have made this less exhausting. I say this in the spirit of a mouse looking at the King and thinking his crown looks slightly crooked during the last couple of chapters, maybe. In conclusion: For anyone seriously interested in the Nazi period this is a must read. *We know another guy who wanted to do that : Pol Pot. ...more |
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0674660439
| 9780674660434
| 0674660439
| 4.32
| 153
| Oct 09, 2014
| Apr 02, 2018
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it was amazing
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There are some books that are almost impossible to review because they are so crammed with large ideas on every other page, so many that by the end of
There are some books that are almost impossible to review because they are so crammed with large ideas on every other page, so many that by the end of the book you could only do it justice by writing a 30 page essay with footnotes; and this is not a Goodreads-friendly thing to do. The Law of Blood is one of these. (I’ve added a list of some other books in this category below.) As a way round this, I thought, what you could do is review the said problem books bit by bit. I never really thought of that before. But why not ? So…. THE LAW OF BLOOD : PAGES 1-120 Everyone knows what the Nazis did. And we have had a number of books which try to explain how they got people to do all this horrendous stuff (Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning, the enormously controversial Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen, and so on). But I haven’t before come across a book that tries to explain the totality of Nazi thought, their worldview, their belief system. It’s a truly unpleasant subject, like trying to reconstruct Ted Bundy’s attitude to women in forensic detail. But it’s well worth doing. We need to be able to recognise this world view wherever it raises its head (and it’s never far away) so we need to look the beast right in the eyes without flinching. Professor Johann Chapoutot does a fantastic job here, and he deserves whatever medals there are going for history books. THE THEOLOGY OF THE NAZIS This book opens with an investigation of what you have to call the Nazi religion. To call it a philosophy would be an insult to philosophy but yes, Nazis, bit by bit, did try to assemble a coherent theoretical framework, a setting out of their stall. In so doing, they had a problem, because they were operating within a fundamentally Christian country, and they were radically anti-Christian. So they had to proceed with caution – I know, Nazis proceeding with caution sounds oxymoronic, but in this area that’s what they did. They explained the various anti-Christian concepts to the SS but they didn’t let on how much they hated Christianity to the rest of the German population. The people, alas, would not have understood. The Nazis knew it would take some time. Their religion went like this : the monotheistic God conceptualised in Judaism and then Christianity was out there, above everything, creator and judge. But in the pre-Christian past, the German and Nordic races were pantheists, animists, revering Nature as the perfect expression of the divine. They were holistic, they lived with nature and didn’t exploit it. The Bible, in contradistinction, says that God condemned man and Nature as fallen, sinful. But this was a wicked lie. In truth there was a grand unity of all living things, man was an animal, part of and in no way superior to the natural world. It follows, therefore, that Nazis were strong on animal rights. Their Reich Animal Protection Act of 24.11.1933 was left on the statute books until 1972. So the Christian religion had alienated the Nordic races from their original nature. Shame of the physical, of the body, was intrinsic to this distortion. The Nazis were not ashamed of the human body, and they had no problem with art depicting nudes, and it’s well-known that they promoted nudism. [image] Christianity’s essential idea is salvation – the rescue of the individual from a sinful condition, and the passage of the individual soul into the next, infinitely superior world. In the Nazi theology, the individual, firstly, is not essentially sinful, and secondly, is wholly unimportant. The individual is fused with the race in its place in Nature and there is no requirement for any kind of priesthood. Relations with the divine should be companionable and confident, as opposed to the terror-stricken grovellings of the Bible, that monstrous slave/master relationship. Prof Chapoutot summarises : The youth of Germany had been subjected to the brainwashing of Judeo-Christian alienation, trussed and tied and handed over to priests who were nothing but rabbis in disguise. [image] A SLIGHT PROBLEM WITH JESUS But it was always going to be difficult to throw Jesus out, alas, the people seemed to hold him very dear, so the Nazi thinkers tried the next best thing. They founded the Institute for the Exploration and Elimination of the Jewish Influence in German Religious Life and they proclaimed that Jesus wasn’t a Jew. One of these Nazi theologians wrote We, the racists, are the only ones who revere Christ as he deserves They said that Jesus’ original preaching was perfectly Aryan, but the rabbi Saul (St Paul) had rewritten it and Judaised the whole project, turning it from a socially revolutionary religion into a mystical-conservative one venerating death and rejecting nature. All this in the first 120 pages. I’m taking a break from this fascinating but wearing book, reading the whole thing through might give a person some psychological issues. But this is what great history looks like. BOOKS TO MAKE YOUR BRAIN EXPLODE In the Freud Archives by Janet Malcolm Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X Kendi Malcolm X by Manning Marable Destiny Disrupted by Tamim Ansary The Good Soldiers by David Finkel The Honor Code by Anthony Appiah The Novel : a Biography by Michael Schmidt Shrinks by Jeffrey Lieberman A Terrible Beauty by Peter Watson Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum Black Earth by Timothy Snyder ...more |
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0710064969
| 9780710064967
| 0710064969
| 3.75
| 4
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| Jan 01, 1969
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This is largely based on the author's experiences as a camp prisoner. There is one point he makes in the chapter "Absolute Corruption" which I have no
This is largely based on the author's experiences as a camp prisoner. There is one point he makes in the chapter "Absolute Corruption" which I have not seen anywhere else so I will quote it for you : We can have little, or no, respect for those who escaped [from the camps]. Understanding and compassion, yes; but respect, never. Those who escaped knew that others would die simply because they had escaped. For every escapee, the SS executed five or more inmates. On occasions, retribution was visited on the family of the escapee and they were lucky if they were allowed to stay alive as inmates. For every escape, in addition to the executions, rations were cut and many more hours had to be stood on roll-call squares. Even those who escaped to warn their fellow Jews outside, or to inform the world of the atrocities being committed, can find little comforting palliative for the deaths their action caused, since the Jews remained disbelieving and the Allies did next to nothing to help halt or slow down the atrocities In books and movies like Escape from Sobibor or Auschwitz : The Great Escape we can see this clear-eyed view is junked for the usual patina of romantic heroism that humans like to spray over everything, up to and including the Holocaust. ...more |
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0300124279
| 9780300124279
| 0300124279
| 4.12
| 547
| unknown
| Jun 10, 2008
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In more than one way the intense scrutiny of Germany under Hitler is a search for things which aren’t there. As the Nazis intensified the pressure on
In more than one way the intense scrutiny of Germany under Hitler is a search for things which aren’t there. As the Nazis intensified the pressure on Jews (sacking them all from public jobs, forcing them to wear the star of David, etc etc) was there any protest from the non-Jewish population? No, there really wasn’t. So, does that mean the Germans were profoundly anti-Semitic? No, not really, they just didn’t care about the Jews. The Jews weren’t on their radar. It was the Nazis who were obsessed with the Jews, not the vast German population who weren’t Nazis. And even with the evil genius Goebbels and his propaganda machine, the Germans mostly remained indifferent. And even when the awful fate of the Jews started to trickle out (mass shootings, camps) there was no reaction. The Germans shrugged and went about their daily lives. Then we have the search for Hitler’s order to begin the Final Solution, the physical liquidation of the entire population of Jews in Europe. It’s not there to be found. It does not exist. There’s a neat psychological parallel here – biographers have tried earnestly to discover the origins of Hitler’s truly towering psychopathic hatred of the Jews and they have found… really nothing. What explains this lunacy? Nothing. How could the Final Solution (Endlosung) which involved construction of extermination camps (as opposed to concentration camps) and experimenting on methods of mass slaughter (shoot them all? No, too demoralising for the poor soldiers who have to do it…carbon monoxide? No, too time-consuming…. Xyklon B? Perfect!...yes, some Nazis had meetings upon meetings to figure out this stuff) and the massive transportation of millions of Jews from the ghettos to the camps (all done during the height of the war, which you might have thought would make the Nazis forget about the Jews until the war was won, but oh no, not at all) – all of this was undertaken without any word from Hitler? Isn’t that fairly strange? Well, it’s never been found. Historians debate the chaotic nature of the power struggles within the Nazi party; maybe Himmler decided to get the Final Solution organised by the SS as a power grab, and kind of slipped it into conversation with Adolf over dinner, and Adolf nodded and told Heinrich he was a real Trojan and keep up the good work and pass the salt, maybe these vast events are decided by a few casual sentences exchanged between ghastly men. I do not recommend this book, even though it’s written by one of the recognised authorities on German history. Prof Kershaw’s prose is deadly dull, his sentences strangle themselves in an attempt to make complex issues clear, he is very repetitive, and really, the issues dealt with here are better summed up in The Holocaust in History by Michael Marrus and Rethinking the Holocaust by Yehuda Bauer. ...more |
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1101903457
| 9781101903452
| 1101903457
| 4.29
| 4,262
| Sep 08, 2015
| Sep 08, 2015
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UPDATE : PUTIN AND THE INVASION OF UKRAINE In October 2015 I reviewed this book very favourably except for the last chapter, in which the author makes UPDATE : PUTIN AND THE INVASION OF UKRAINE In October 2015 I reviewed this book very favourably except for the last chapter, in which the author makes some astonishingly harsh comments on the leaders of China and Russia. You just don't expect this viciousness in a scholarly book. There is a tirade about Putin. In my review I said that Timothy Snyder “goes off the rails” and I concluded “it does his book no credit at all and causes it to end on a distastefully catchpenny note.” GR friend Heather just posed the question how this final chapter reads now, in the light of the invasion of Ukraine. It’s a great question. Here’s what he says (p332): In a new Russian colonialism that began in 2013, Russian leaders and propagandists imagined neighbouring Ukrainians out of existence or presented them as sub-Russians. In characterisations that recall what Hitler said about Ukrainians, Russian leaders described Ukraine as an artificial entity with no history, culture and language, backed by some global agglomeration of Jews, gays, Europeans and Americans. …President Putin of Russia developed a foreign policy doctrine of ethnic war. This argument from language to invasion, whether pressed in Czechoslovakia by Hitler or in Ukraine by Putin, undoes the logics of sovereignty and rights and prepares the ground for the destruction of states…. Putin also placed himself at the head of populist, fascist and neo-Nazi forces in Europe. This seemed to me to border on hysteria. I confess to being unalarmed by the annexation of Crimea in 2014 – well, I said, it was part of Russia, then in 1954 Khruschev assigned it to the Ukrainian SSR by administrative fiat, now Russia has grabbed it back. It didn’t see it as the start of something big. Timothy Snyder sounded like a Russophobe to me. Now – not so much. Looking at the above quote, we see immediately that Putin has changed his preferred bogeymen from “Jews and gays” to “neo-Nazis”, who, he says, have captured the Ukrainian state. So wearily we note the irony involved in that rhetorical sleight of hand – Timothy Snyder talks of “Russian support of the European Far Right” but it turns out Putin invaded Ukraine to de-Nazify it. I thought this was a badly written yet brilliant book with a terrible concluding chapter. Now this last chapter seems like eerie accurate prophecy. I was wrong. ***** The original unedited review : Turgid, tiresome, tedious and inelegant, hammering metronomically away at three fundamental ideas, this book nevertheless gives the patient reader (you have to be very patient) some great perspectives on the Holocaust. BIOLOGICAL ANARCHY Prof Snyder kicks off with maybe the best part of the whole dense book which is an analysis of Mein Kampf and Hitler’s mental universe. Hitler was “a warmongering biological anarchist” and it’s a great mistake to think he was a German nationalist. He was way beyond what you might have thought he was. AH believed that all races on Earth must contend for its limited resources in ceaseless struggle. Ceaseless means ceaseless. If the Aryan race succeeds in colonising the vast lands occupied by Slavic subhumans to the East, then so be it. If they fail, as they did, then so be that too. (In the bunker in 1945 Hitler acknowledged Russian superiority and washed his hands of the rubbishy Germans before committing suicide.) Snyder presents Hitler as an apocalyptic radical. I never read an account of Hitler like this. Fantastic stuff. EMPTY TERRITORY After that comes the trudge east, through Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic states and into the USSR. The murder of Jews is hardly mentioned for entire chapters. The intricate politics of Poland, a mouse between two ravening tigers, and their deep involvement in the attempts to forge a Jewish state in Palestine are now our subject. It was Polish Jews – Irgun and Stern’s more violent group – who were bringing the argument to the British, who were controlling Palestine at the time. You see the complexities of it right here – the British declared war on Germany in support of Polish independence. Poland was supporting Jewish terrorists in Palestine against the British because if there was a Jewish state, Poland could ship its three million Jews off there. The British were fighting these Polish Jews because they wanted Arab support in North Africa. The snake eats its own tail. Other Holocaust histories begin in Germany with the Nazi state beginning to crush the Jews – excluding them from professions, expropriating their property, making them change their names to Abraham and Sarah, etc. The picture is one of ever-tightening screws applied by the State. Snyder’s big idea which he beats the reader over the head with all through the book was that it was the LACK of a state which killed Jews. Jews were killed where states had been destroyed. This is why the second section is all about how the Nazis destroyed the states of Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia. (In order to destroy the state of Poland the first mass killings were of 60,000 educated Polish elite.) According to Nazi logic, there was no occupation, but rather a colonisation of legally ‘empty’ territory. The Jews there were rendered stateless. Only at that point could the Nazis do what they wanted with them. He says that throughout the war, Jews with British or American passports were not killed. If that is true, it is a very remarkable thing which I have not read elsewhere. THE HOLOCAUST BEGAN IN LITHUANIA In these countries, the Nazi propaganda machine informed the people that they had been liberated from the evil of communism, that communism was a Jewish conspiracy and the USSR was a Jewish empire, and that it was now time for payback. Killing units were formed, which would travel in a bus from village to village, killing Jews and other undesirables like communists, Gypsies and disabled people. The commanders of these units had to improvise. They had to persuade their own men to kill women and children; and they had to find ways to generate local collaboration as the job became too large and difficult But it turned out this wasn’t too difficult. Because one of the ways you could prove you weren’t a communist was to kill Jews. The whole point of anti-Jewish violence, from a Lithuanian perspective, was to demonstrate loyalty before the Germans had time to figure out who had actually collaborated with the Soviets. The make-up of these Einsatzgruppen units was interesting – the majority were in the age range 16 to 21. So this means 16 and 17 year old boys were driving from village to village killing men, women and children day after day for months. This first phase of the Holocaust can be compared with the slaughter of the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. Here’s a sour comment from our author In other words, Ukrainians who spent the first two years of the war helping the local Soviet NKVD commander (who was Jewish) deport Poles, Jews and Ukrainians shifted to helping the SS kill Jews, Ukrainians and Poles whom they – actual Soviet collaborators – denounced as Soviet collaborators. HOLOCAUST SECOND PHASE : AUSCHWITZ Snyder finally crystallised a series of thoughts which had been nagging at my mind for a very long time. I think – and he thinks – that the looming symbol of ultimate awfulness which is Auschwitz is used, unwittingly, to conveniently block out a lot of what happened, to consign the first phase of the Holocaust to a footnote. I don’t mean that Auschwitz blocks out the knowledge of the hundreds of other concentration camps, but of the non-camp killing, which was in fact the greater part of the Holocaust. Auschwitz has been a relatively manageable symbol for Germany after the Second World War, significantly reducing the actual scale of the evil done. The conflation of Auschwitz with the Holocaust made plausible the grotesque claim that Germans did not know about the mass murder of European Jews while it was taking place. It is possible that some Germans did not know exactly what happened at Auschwitz. It is not possible that many Germans did not know about the mass murder of Jews… which was known and discussed in Germany, at least among families and friends, long before Auschwitz became a death facility. So if Auschwitz is a convenient symbol for post-war Germany, it was also convenient for the USSR: Auschwitz was one of the few parts of the Holocaust to which Soviet citizens did not contribute Auschwitz is useful for us all – it confines the evil behind the famous gates; we never have to open those gates if we do not wish. We can say well, the Nazis kept it all secret, maybe no one else knew. There would be rumours but no real knowledge. Auschwitz – bitterly ironically – helps us to keep the evil of the Holocaust mentally manageable. TWO RANDOM THOUGHTS How many eager participants in the slaughter of Jews were regular churchgoers? Given that almost no one in that time would have described himself as an atheist, we must assume that the murderers could reconcile their murders with their Christianity. Also : the massive theft of Jewish property in all these various countries would have been a guilty fact for decades after the war. Thousands of people must have ended up living in houses formerly owned by now dead Jews. What did they think of that? THE HOLOCAUST AS A WARNING In the last chapter Prof Snyder goes off the rails – he thinks the looming ecocatastrophe of global warming and shrinking resources might ignite Hitlerian lebensraum-style lunacy in the minds of some – and he fingers the Chinese and the Russians under Putin as ones to watch. It does his book no credit at all and causes it to end on a distastefully catchpenny note. ...more |
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0374118256
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| 4.55
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To relieve the camp, it is necessary to remove simpletons, idiots, cripples and sick people as quickly as possible through liquidation. - SS officer su To relieve the camp, it is necessary to remove simpletons, idiots, cripples and sick people as quickly as possible through liquidation. - SS officer summing up the purpose of selections in 1942. ***** A five star rating for a book I have decided not to read. This is a brilliant remarkably detailed enormous plainly-narrated history of the whole Nazi concentration camp phenomenon. I have read enough to say that, and to know that although it's scholarly (200 pages of notes at the back) it's fluently written and anybody with a desire for this melancholy knowledge will find it a compelling read. I realised, however, that I've already read enough about the Nazis and their millions of murders to last me a lifetime. There are probably dozens of existing books, some excellent, which are now replaced by this single volume. I read a lot of those. I don't need to know more. But this book, if you do need to know, is totally recommended. ...more |
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May 20, 2015
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0140186247
| 9780140186246
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| 4.12
| 11,588
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| Aug 01, 1992
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it was amazing
| I found this book very difficult to read. Not like Joyce or Proust or Faulkner, but because – when exactly do you read this? In the evening after a go I found this book very difficult to read. Not like Joyce or Proust or Faulkner, but because – when exactly do you read this? In the evening after a good dinner? No! Well, at bedtime then? Not unless you want nightmares. I have read a few of these concentration camp memoirs, which, strangely insultingly, are classified as FICTION when they are, of course, the truth. But here, in the concentration camp world, reality reads like fiction, it is true. Tadeusz Borowski writes with a heavy black humour about Auschwitz, which some may find almost unbearable. I don’t have so much of a problem reading the cold histories of the theory and practice of hell, as it has been called. I now have a certain level of knowledge. I can distinguish between the wildcat camps of 1937-39, the political prisoner camps like Dachau, the work camps like Mauthausen, and the terminal points of the three extermination camps Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor, which really should be much more famous than they are. (But their fate was to exist very temporarily, for a year or 18 months, then to be bulldozed, and for the ground to be ploughed, and tilled, and for a farmhouse to be built and a family installed there who were to say they had farmed the land of Belzec for generations. Unlike the camps which were liberated, and therefore photographed. No photos of Belzec!) And I can compare all those to the empire that was Auschwitz. So the nuts and bolts of the holocaust have become well known to me over the years. Reading the stories of one who was there and was able to write after liberation, that’s another thing. It is jolting and upsetting. It’s someone real. The first jolt comes on the third page of the title story (and what a title, surely one of the greatest titles in literature). Here we have the bantering conversation of some of the men working on the “Canada” team. These were prisoners whose job was to get the Jews out of the cattle trucks, up the ramps and off to the crematoria. (“All these thousands flow along like water from an open tap” he says.) Once that was done they picked up all the luggage which the Jews could not, of course, take with them. In this luggage was a whole lot of food – good stuff too, wine, cured meat, sausage, cheese, you name it. The Canada team were able to “organise” some of this stuff back to their barracks, and there they dined well. They also had their pick of the clothes in the luggage, so they dressed pretty well too. Imagine, prisoners living well at Auschwitz! It is almost over. The dead are being cleared off the ramp and piled into the last truck. The Canada men, weighed down under a load of bread, marmalade and sugar, and smelling of perfume and fresh linen, line up to go. For several days the entire camp will live off this transport. For several days the entire camp will talk about “Sosnowiec-Bedzin”. “Sosnowiec-Bedzin” was a good, rich transport. So now we overhear a conversation between two of these prisoners. One worried. He appreciates the good things these transports of Jews are constantly bringing. But – how long can this go on? Surely, sooner or later, they’ll run out of people! And then what? No more sausages, for sure. Well, it was a worry. The stories here inhabit what Primo Levi calls the grey zone, the compromised, corrupted world where there is no innocence, only degrees of guilt. Borowski had a “good Auschwitz” in the way many people had a “good war”. They didn’t die, and it wasn’t all ghastly all the time. He describes the recreational facilities in Auschwitz. You’ve imagined the gas chambers and Sonderkommando and the ovens, now imagine this: Right after the boxing match I took in another show – I went to hear a concert. Over in Birkenau you could probably never imagine what feats of culture we are exposed to up here, just a few kilometres away from the smouldering chimneys. Just think – an orchestra playing the overture to Tancred, then something by Berlioz This book is overshadowed by the author’s suicide at the age of 29. This is a distraction, like other author suicides. The work always stands by itself, it is not placed by the grotesque act of suicide into a sphere beyond judgement. Readers encounter the reality inside these words, not outside. And inside these stories the atmosphere is oppressive, the fumes acrid, the stench is unbearable, the company not the best. When I finished this book I looked around. The room was quiet and warm, the fire was on (spring is here, but it’s still cold). One of the cats jumped onto the windowledge for another few hours of birdwatching. I remembered we’re out of marmalade and thanked Tadeusz Borowski for reminding me of that. Do I recommend this book? I can’t say that I do. 5 stars. [image] ...more |
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0452009537
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| 3.75
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it was amazing
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This was a reread, or really, a re-skim, to remind myself of a few facts. I do recommend this short book as a great introduction to the subject. It co
This was a reread, or really, a re-skim, to remind myself of a few facts. I do recommend this short book as a great introduction to the subject. It covers a lot of crucial aspects. I will mention a few here. 1. The Uniqueness of the Holocaust. You will know that there is a tendency nowadays to say that the Holocaust is comparable to other genocidal events, like the Rwanda massacres, and other mass killings which were not genocidal, like the Khmer Rouge's killing orgy 1975-77. The uniqueness proposed for the Holocaust is problematic. Sometimes to say the Holocaust is unique is a theological or a political statement, rather than a historical statement. There is a Jewish exclusivity in some historians which is dangerous, as millions of gentiles died too. But if uniqueness = unprecedented then historians can frame an answer. Marrus examines in detail the Armenian genocide by the Turkish government. He mentions that Armenians continued to live in Istanbul throughout the period, and at the end of it 140,000 Armenians were still living in Turkey, one tenth of the original population. The genocide lacked the totality of the Nazis and the ambition to exterminate every last Jew. In this respect the Jews’ fate was unique – the Holocaust included the old, the sick, women, babies. The Wannsee conference listed even the smallest Jewish communities, in Ireland and Albania (the SS carefully noted the existence of 200 Albanian Jews who were eventually to be rounded up and sent to the ovens) 2. The Final Solution: the Straight Path or the Twisted Road. There is huge division amongst historians: the intentionalists say it was always Hitler’s and others’ intention to physically liquidate the Jews; and the functionalists, who say the Final Solution arose bit by bit, in response to changing situations on the ground. The intentionalists' problem is that they have to rely on Hitler’s paranoid rhetoric in speeches and in Mein Kampf. Hitler’s speech on 20 January 1939 to the Reichstag: If the international Jewish financiers outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the bolshevisation of the earth, and thus the victory of the Jews, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. But historians can find no actual planning of the genocide before 1941. Functionalists, however, present a picture of the Third Reich as a maze of competing power groups, rival bureaucracies, forceful personalities and diametrically opposed interests engaged in ceaseless clashes with each other. They see Hitler as a brooding and sometimes distant leader, who intervened only spasmodically, sending orders crashing through the system like bolts of lightning. (I think that is a brilliant description of the Third Reich.) Was Hitler capable of long term planning on this or any other matter? The functionalists therefore say that the SS in the famous 1942 Wannsee conference take over a process which has already broken out in occupied Soviet areas. These historians ask why the Final Solution had to wait until 1942 to get going. Their answer is that competing Nazi agencies put forward one proposal after the next, proposals that continually shattered against practical obstacles. For instance, getting rid of the Jews by shipping the whole lot of them off to Madagascar! This was seriously considered at one point. There is general agreement that the decision on the Final Solution was taken between March and Autumn 1941. What finally precipitated the decision, however, is likely to remain a mystery says Marrus. The functionalists ask the question: what accounts for the widespread elimination of inhibitions to mass murder? They find antisemitic indoctrination plainly insufficient. They say: - There was an extensive division of labour associated with the entire process which helped perpetrators diffuse their own responsibility. - The perpetrators themselves had no special characteristics; the essential element was the structure into which they fit. (and see Christopher Browning's brilliant book Ordinary Men for harrowing confirmation of this.) - They thought of themselves as merely skilled technicians and often seemed genuinely surprised when, years later, they were branded as accomplices to mass murder. - The process began with euthanasia of the physically and mentally handicapped. 3. Hitler's Collaborators There is a very useful chapter surveying the degree of collaboration, and many surprising things are discovered. - French resistance or no, Marrus says the French collaborated to "a high degree". - In Denmark and Italy the governments were able to put significant legal obstacles in the way of anti-Jewish policies. The Danes smuggled 800 Jews to Sweden. - Croatia and Romania on the other hand were especially antisemitic - but Romania spared its own Jewish population. - and Bulgaria is unique – there were more Jews alive there after the war than before. - The tragedy of Hungary is hard to contemplate - there the Jews were not deported, and it looked like they would survive, until the Nazis invaded in March 1944. 4.Bystanders. Almost everyone who lived through the period of the Holocaust, observing it from either near or far, will readily testify that information concerning the Nazi murder of the Jews, when it first came out, seemed absolutely unbelievable – impossible (Jacob Katz). To some, news of the Holocaust was everywhere; to others, the truth remained hidden until after the war. By early 42 reports regularly reached England about widespread massacres in Poland and the USSR, but the presence of such information does not mean that it was known. Judge at Nuremburg: One reads these accounts again and again – and yet remains the instinct to disbelieve, to question, to doubt. (Of course, this tendency is still with us, and fuels the deniers'poisonous propaganda.) Martin Gilbert argues that until the escape of 4 Jews in mid-44 Auschwitz remained successfully hidden. Finally : 17 December 1942: a formal declaration by 12 national governments simultaneously declared in Washington, Moscow and London refers to "Hitler’s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe", a goal that the German authorities "are now carrying into effect". It could hardly have been clearer, yet from then on the story is full of occasions when people either forgot or rejected what they once knew or showed signs of not having absorbed fully what the declaration clearly stated. Even in Palestine, the Jewish community of 500,000 showed a reluctance to believe and a slowness to grasp – amazingly, since the 500,000 were 80% Eastern European. In January 1945 Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army. In May 45 a report on the camp was issued by the Soviets. The report did not contain the word Jew. * For anyone wanting a really good introduction to a complex subject, and doesn't want to read one of the 800 page monsters like Leni Yahil or Martin Gilbert, look no further. ...more |
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Aug 09, 2014
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Aug 11, 2014
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Aug 09, 2014
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0521641748
| 9780521641746
| 0521641748
| 3.99
| 162
| 1998
| Mar 28, 1999
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really liked it
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Gradually a feeling of reluctance came upon me as I read this book, a reluctance to continue. I hasten to say that these essays are excellent meditati
Gradually a feeling of reluctance came upon me as I read this book, a reluctance to continue. I hasten to say that these essays are excellent meditations on several crucial aspects of the Holocaust. But it was a question of when was it appropriate to pick this up and read? Not after a good dinner, that’s for sure. Not in the English spring sunshine, in my quiet garden. Not drowsing before sleep. Not in the middle a hectic office. Nowhere and at no time was it appropriate to continue reading about the Holocaust. Always, it felt hideously crass, in the poorest taste. And this was what the survivors got, when they tried to tell their stories. A turning away, a mass flinching, everyone saying to themselves it couldn’t have been as bad as that, it just couldn’t. The survivors told us the bleakest truths about human beings and what they can do, and who wants to know. It’s the same reason why child abuse victims can’t speak about their situation for years, or if they do are shut down and ignored – they’re bringers of the worst news. What does this mean? You can see how the Holocaust has gradually (it took 30 years at least) become sacred, venerated, revered, memorialized, enshrined and of course denied. Primo Levi put this imaginary speech into the mouth of an exultant and prescient SS officer talking to a Jew, some time in 1943 : “However this war may end, we have won the war against you. None of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world would not believe him. There will be perhaps suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed – they will say they are the exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you.” And this did nearly happen, and amongst the deniers, still does. I’ve read too much about this subject. I’m haunted by another imaginary conversation, this time between Hitler and his creepy, fawning, true-believer colleague Heinrich Himmler. It’s early 1941 and the Nazis bestride Europe, and they’re up at the Berghof, it’s late, they’re on about the Jews again, and Himmler is pointing out that all these plans to get rid of the lot of them to Madagascar (!) or Palestine or Argentina (!) or anywhere just aren’t practical in the middle of a war. So what are we going to do with them? He wonders aloud – so maybe we could just…. What? Maybe…. (he smiles timidly) … just get rid of them permanently. You know. What? Even Hitler hasn’t actually crystallised in his mind the idea of physical liquidation. But this is where it happens. Hitler is startled, amazed. Really? Do you think we could do that? Ah, if we could only do that. Himmler says slyly, Well... we can do anything we want to. And with this war raging all around, who would notice? The Jews would just… disappear. I imagine Hitler suddenly realises that – you know, yes, it could really be done! No more half measures. We will do this thing properly. This is what I was actually talking about when I said I’d destroy them… of course. Now it’s obvious…. Well, I think somewhere there was some kind of conversation like that, because I am a Functionalist, not an Intentionalist. This is one of the many debates historians conduct about the Third Reich. And should you steel yourself and soak up the details of this awful period, so you call tell the difference between a Dachau (work camp) and a Treblinka (extermination camp), and between 1941 (the wild Einsatzgruppen slaughters in occupied Poland and Russia) and 1942 (as the process became mechanised); and because of your now sophisticated knowledge of the complexities of Auschwitz you can explain why there was a brothel behind the barbed wire – what then? Has this knowledge prevented other outbreaks of genocidal fury, in Bosnia, Rwanda, South Sudan and will it prevent the next one, wherever it might be? Of course not. We are all like the Wedding Guest, and the Holocaust survivors and their historians are like a gang of Ancient Mariners IT is an ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three. 'By thy long beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp'st thou me? The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide, And I am next of kin; The guests are met, the feast is set: May'st hear the merry din.' I hear the merry din of my own life. But the old man’s glittering eye holds me spellbound, and I have to hear him out. ...more |
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May 10, 2014
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May 21, 2014
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May 10, 2014
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0805210415
| 9780805210415
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| 4.14
| 18,869
| Apr 12, 1975
| Apr 04, 1995
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really liked it
| Every suicide is like a nail bomb full of vicious questions and the questions don’t care where they land. Why didn’t somebody do something? – there’s Every suicide is like a nail bomb full of vicious questions and the questions don’t care where they land. Why didn’t somebody do something? – there’s one. Surely there must have been signs. Right there is a triple blow delivered to the bereaved partner and immediate family. They’re reeling from the event, then they have to conclude this depression, this malaise, was so acute it blotted out even thoughts of themselves in the suicide’s final minutes. And after that comes the unspoken accusations and avoidings by friends and associates. (Why didn’t they see and having seen taken steps?). Some suicides still hang like paradoxically visible black holes of misery up in our skies, Sylvia Plath, van Gogh, David Foster Wallace, Kurt Cobain, Ernest Hemingway, BS Johnson, Mark Rothko. Primo Levi committed suicide at the age of 67 in 1987. The repercussions were uniquely distressing. He had been the embodiment of an idea that is so cherished it’s nearly unbearable to think it may not be true. The idea that a person can go through the worst and most inhuman experiences, in his case Auschwitz, and survive not only in body but in spirit too, and not become corrupted, and not destroyed. Levi’s books were and are the clearest-eyed, most lucid, most carefully discerning, and most humane books about the Holocaust I have come across. The idea that Auschwitz finally got him, 42 years later, that Hitler had extracted one more posthumous victory, was horrible. And this final act now throws a long shadow over all his great writings, so that we loop round on ourselves and almost catch us yelling and denouncing Levi for doing such a thing, and then feel instant shame at such a thought. This suicide involves Levi’s readers inevitably in these psychological traps. Of course you can argue that the depression and anguish which led to the suicide might have a whole other aetiology of which we are completely ignorant. It’s possible, and it’s a comforting thought, were it not for the continuous theme in his various writings being Auschwitz and the Holocaust from If This is a man (1947) to The Drowned and the Saved (1986). Or - you can argue that it wasn’t a suicide at all, it was an accident – an old man fell over a balcony. There was no note. The concierge of the block of flats had spoken to him minutes before he died. He seemed okay. But both his biographers think it was suicide. We have to say that it doesn’t matter. The work is the thing. Rothko’s canvasses are not affected one way or another by his death just as Wuthering Heights would be just as great a novel if Emily Bronte had celebrated her 100th birthday on 30 July, 1918, as World War One was coming to an end. It doesn’t matter. The Periodic Table is a quirky memoir of a Jewish-Italian chemist. There are elements of cool humour throughout and hardly a trace of bitterness. ...more |
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Sep 22, 2013
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Oct 07, 2013
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Sep 22, 2013
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Paperback
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1894037480
| 9781894037488
| 1894037480
| 3.46
| 69
| Apr 15, 2011
| Apr 15, 2011
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liked it
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My heart sinks a little bit when I see the person who wrote the book I'm now reviewing is a "Goodreads Author". I think - hmm, maybe they will look at
My heart sinks a little bit when I see the person who wrote the book I'm now reviewing is a "Goodreads Author". I think - hmm, maybe they will look at this. And maybe they won't like the unnecessarily vicious shredding of their 5-years-in-the-making uber-tome which everyone else loves with bubbling putheringforths of adjectival glomp. So maybe I should tone it down a bit. Just for once, hey? Be a nice guy. It won't hurt me. Relax, be happy. Just a book. Nobody lost an eye. See? It's okay. No sudden movements. Gentle summer breeze. Nice. But. Aw, now, there really has to be a but? Really? Well. But. Hmmm..... Maybe you're right. Just this once? If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all. That right? Yeah, bout right. Okay, then. This once. ...more |
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Jun 18, 2013
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Jun 18, 2013
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Jun 18, 2013
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0349100470
| 9780349100470
| 0349100470
| 4.43
| 10,031
| 1986
| Feb 01, 1989
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really liked it
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An unrelentingly grim series of eight essays about the concentration camp experience, recommended only for true pessimists and those who think that Pr
An unrelentingly grim series of eight essays about the concentration camp experience, recommended only for true pessimists and those who think that Primo Levi is one of the very greatest writers about the Holocaust, which I do. One thing Primo Levi does for us is complicate things. He explains : Without profound simplification the world around us would be an infinite, undefined tangle that would defy our ability to orient ourselves and decide upon our actions. In short, we are compelled to reduce the knowable to a schema. However, you don’t have to go far to discover that what has been presented to you in the official rhetoric as being straightforward is not so – the war isn’t winnable, the peace isn’t with honour, the enemy aren’t terrorists, they had no weapons of mass destruction, they don’t hate us because we love freedom. These are simplifying, comforting untruths. In the first essay, “The Memory of the Offense”, he notes the optimistic self-generated rumours of the prisoners in the camps - the war will be over in two weeks, there will be no more selections, Polish partisans will liberate the camp soon – and sets them beside the similarly comforting lies of the surviving perpetrators – only following orders, we knew nothing about this, I was not a Nazi. For Levi, the simple statement is usually self-deluding. This is true for the prisoners of the Nazis as well as the Nazis. The network of human relationships inside the lagers (camps) was not simple – it could not be reduced to the two blocs of victims and perpetrators. … The privileged prisoners were a minority within the Lager population, but they represent a potent majority among the survivors And the “privileged” prisoners were ones who managed, by one means or another, to get better food rations than the others. Ordinary prisoners got 800 calories a day and died of malnutrition and disease. This is a shocking thing – most of the survivors, he is saying, were, in some way, compromised. Levi reminds us again that one of the central lessons of the Third Reich is the seemingly infinite compromisability of human beings. You can get them to do almost anything, just ask a sonderkommando. ...more |
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0141186976
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really liked it
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Primo Levi’s life was saved by these things [image] He was a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz but he was working as a chemist in the laboratory attached to Primo Levi’s life was saved by these things [image] He was a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz but he was working as a chemist in the laboratory attached to the huge chemical plant there. (They didn't pay him very well. In fact, they didn't pay him at all.) In January 1945 he was looking around for something, anything, he could steal from the lab to trade for bread. Like all other prisoners, he was starving. He saw a dozen pipettes. He had no idea if anyone would trade for them but what the hell. He went to see a Polish male nurse who worked in the infirmary. Although most prisoners in Auschwitz were killed, still many were kept alive to do essential work, so there was an infirmary. The male nurse wasn’t much interested in the pipettes but what the hell, they might come in useful. But it was late in the day, there was no bread left. So he offered half a bowl of soup. Who could have left half a bowl of soup in that reign of hunger? Almost certainly someone who had died half way through the meal. Primo takes the soup back to his barracks and shares it with his friend Alberto. The two Italian Jews discuss whether they can risk eating the soup. The person who’s soup this was had most likely died a couple of hours ago of scarlet fever, which was at the time the Auschwitz disease of the week. That would be why someone else hadn't already eaten it. It was infected, probably. Alberto wasn’t bothered, he’d had scarlet fever as a child, but Primo hadn’t. But the starving tend to bend the rules on such matters so Primo ate the soup too. And a couple of days later he got scarlet fever. So a week later, when the order came to destroy Auschwitz and move all prisoners back into Germany, Primo was in the infirmary. Now, the order was to liquidate all prisoners who couldn’t walk, but in the chaos of the last days of Auschwitz this order was overlooked or ignored – well, those in the infirmary, they’ll all be dead soon, let’s not waste bullets on them. Something like that. On the 18th January 1945 the SS herded about 60,000 prisoners out of the camp on one of the famous Death Marches. One of them was Alberto. Hardly any of them survived. On the 25th January the Red Army entered Auschwitz, and Primo, who had managed not to die in the preceding week, was rescued. Because of the pipettes. ...more |
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037542394X
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| 4.31
| 2,971
| Oct 04, 2011
| Oct 04, 2011
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it was amazing
| Maus I : My Father Bleeds History (1986) and Maus II : And Here My Troubles Began (1991) took Art Spiegelman 13 years to create and he had thought dur Maus I : My Father Bleeds History (1986) and Maus II : And Here My Troubles Began (1991) took Art Spiegelman 13 years to create and he had thought during the time that he would have to get the damned thing self-published. Who would want to bother with yet another Holocaust survivor tale – haven’t we had a million of those - and this one as a graphic novel – yes, a comic book, that’s right – with this jarring characterisation of Jews as mice, for God’s sake, and Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs – pigs, yet. What a nightmare. You can imagine what the publishers of the day thought. And yes, there is a nice two page spread in Metamaus of all the rejection letters he received. So anyway, he got the Pulitzer Prize for Maus in 1992. What we have in Metamaus is everything you wanted to know – and quite likely a whole lot more – about this great work. Most of this book is a long interview with Art, which ranges from the personal to the technical and back again. Art has a steady stream of great quotes. A couple of favourites: My father could only remember/understand a part of what he lived through. He could only tell a part of that. I, in turn, could only understand a part of what he was able to tell, and could only communicate a part of that. What remains are ghosts of ghosts. I saw a documentary about skinheads in Germany and one of them had a Maus bookstore poster in his bedroom – it was the only swastika he could get, poor fella. Interviewer : When did your father die? Art : Well, I’ll get back to you on that. Talking about his diffidence about being Jewish - When I was a kid I wasn’t sure being Jewish was such a great idea. I heard they killed people for that. And one from Francoise Mouly, his wife : Next to making Maus, your greatest achievement may have been not turning Maus into a movie. The long interview veers off into pages of artist technicalities, questions like “How did you decide to mess with the griddedness of the page and tilt certain panels out of the tiers?” – only comix geeks will need to read Art’s response. And there are pages of that stuff. But wait, there’s more. Lots more. There’s a cd rom. Well, this whole book is like the EXTRAS section of a movie dvd, and the cd rom is the EXTRAS of the EXTRAS, but it’s like the house in House of Leaves, the cd rom is bigger than the book, way bigger. You get the complete Maus, and you get for each page original sketches plus audio of Art and Art’s dad Vladek whose story this is. You get articles, you get more interviews, entire achives, you get a 45 minute home movie of Art visiting Auschwitz…. There’s a ton of stuff here. One stop shop for Maus fans. This got me thinking. Wouldn’t it be great if there were metaversions of all your favourite books? Metalolita! Metamezzanine! (Yes!) Metalastexittobrooklyn! Come on, do it! I'm classifying this as "read" but I'll be coming back to it for years, it's huge. ...more |
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0375701133
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| 0375701133
| 3.90
| 246
| 1997
| Nov 03, 1998
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liked it
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This is high-octane Hitlerology. But Mr Lukacs' vast learning is spat out like a series of aggravating orange pips you didn't expect to find in your m
This is high-octane Hitlerology. But Mr Lukacs' vast learning is spat out like a series of aggravating orange pips you didn't expect to find in your mouth. He swats historians like blowflies on a hot day in Alabama. Thwap! goes Toland. Splot! goes Irving. He regards the resulting mess with icy indifference. He surveys Alp after Alp of Hitler history with Olympian hauteur, and if you can't keep up with him, if you don't know your Hillgrubers from your Gorlitz-Quints, or your Intentionalists from your Functionalists, or indeed your schreibfests from your Joachim Fests, then you're in the wrong part of the train, second class is that way, move along please. This was a reread, but alas, I still felt that this book was well above my paygrade most of the time. He's so contemptuous about those who call Nazis fascists. Huh, of course they weren't! He thinks it's positively infantile to call the Third Reich totalitarian - no! it was authoritarian, idiot - now don't you forget it. Still, as the old adage has it, "A cat may look at a king" where cat = P Bryant and king = J Lukacs. So, frinstance, p176 : It was because of Hitler that anti-Semitism became unacceptable, if not unthinkable, intellectually as well as politically, after the war This book was published in 1998 and even so I say : really? Unacceptable to who? Not to Hamas, not to the Iranian revolutionists of the 1970s and 80s and not to the Nation of Islam, to name a few serious political organisations. He comes out with some ringing paragraphs every now and again – this is a typical thundering and slightly off-kilter example: It is not only that Hitler had very considerable intellectual talents. He was also courageous, self-assured, on many occasions steadfast, loyal to his friends and those working for him, self-disciplined and modest in his physical wants. What this suggests ought not to be misconstrued, mistaken or misread. It does not mean : lo and behold! Hitler was only 50% bad. Human nature is not like that. A half-truth is worse than a lie, because a half-truth is not a 50% truth, it is a 100% truth and a 100% untruth mixed together. In mathematics, with its rigidly fixed and immobile numbers, 100 plus 100 equals 200; in human life 100 plus 100 makes another kind of 100. So this is not a history of Hitler, and it's not even a history of the history of Hitler, although that's what Mr Lukacs says it is. It's actually a series of grumpy, irritable, densely-packed, often oblique notes and opinions and apercus about the history of Hitler which are footnoted half to death on every page. ...more |
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0520234693
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| 4.02
| 529
| 2000
| May 03, 2002
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really liked it
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Okay, listen up, we're serious historical revisionists and this is how we roll. Let's say a survivor of Majdanak talks about how it was well known tha Okay, listen up, we're serious historical revisionists and this is how we roll. Let's say a survivor of Majdanak talks about how it was well known that they were gassing Jews there. We point out an inaccuracy in this old guy's testimony – there are always inaccuracies, he's probably got Alzheimers by now - and we add that survivors are always exaggerating ( can give examples if you're interested). Okay, so another survivor backs up the first. We say well, what these guys are doing is retailing rumours, incorporating camp rumours into their testimony as fact. That happens a lot. Then an SS guard confesses after the war that he actually saw people being gassed and cremated. Oh well, that's a dunker – we say he was tortured by the whiter-than-white Allies. You think they didn't torture people? Guess again. So then, they'll wheel out the camp commandant who gives all the details of the transports, all those numbers, he coughs the lot. Well, we say he was currying favour, telling the Americans what they wanted to hear. You can't give this stuff any credibility. Ah but look – they'll tell you - he wrote down all that stuff in his autobiography after he'd been given his death sentence. He had nothing to lose! He was telling the truth! This is where we use the Henry Lee Lucas argument. Look at that guy, we say, what was his name, Henry Lee Lucas – supposed to be the most monstrous serial killer ever – turned out he made it all up just to look like some big shot for a few weeks. People confess to all kind of stuff they didn't do. Oh but what about these blueprints and photos? Doctored. Fakes. Propaganda. There was no six million. Then we lean forward and we say Look, let me tell you what really happened. HOW TO MAKE A MISTAKE IN PUBLIC You can't get past these deniers. They have an answer for everything. Phil Donahue devoted a tv show to an attempt to nail these bastards in public. He had Bradley Smith and David Cole on there, and he had two actual survivors of Auschwitz there. The results were wretched, horrible. You can see it on youtube. The deniers were pleasant enough, reasonable, they were saying oh no, we don't deny the Holocaust at all, Phil, it just wasn't like what you think it was. The survivors were getting outraged and mentioning human soap – this is something that scholars now think is probably a myth – and the deniers were scoring sharp points right and left even over the survivors, who were getting more and more wound up. Donahue was flailing around out of his depth, the deniers had all the facts at their fingertips. They were good. THREE LITTLE LIES What the deniers deny is several things at once. Their main platform is – 1. It wasn't 6 million, it was approximately 600,000. 2. There were gas chambers all right, but strictly for delousing purposes. 3. There was no genocidal intention. There was chaos of war and there was barbarity on both sides (at which point they launch into descriptions of Dresden and the bombing campaign, Hiroshima, Katyn, and so forth). They also deny another big thing – what Shermer and Grobman call convergence of evidence. Where's the one irrefutable photograph, or the written order from Hitler for the Final Solution? That's what they demand. What they deny is that every testimony, every statistic, every list of prisoners, all of the actual evidence, points towards one conclusion, the physical liquidation of millions of people. This book gets into the fine forensic detail of refuting the deniers' allegations. It's exhausting. I can't think that you'll ever need this information, but we should be very glad it's right here. Okay, so WHY on EARTH would anyone risk their livelihoods, jobs, relationships, and so on, in order to foist Holocaust denial on the world? It's a strange thing, it really is. Well, the question divides into two. In the WEST it's a strange thing, but in the EAST it's pretty normal. WESTERN DENIERS There's a tangle of motives. Some of them want to rehabilitate Hitler and the Third Reich – look, he was actually a bastion against the Communists who were the real enemy of civilisation! They're true fans and they don't like their idol being slandered by those official historians. Some of them want to expose Zionism – look at this creation Israel, look at how the Jews hype up the Holocaust and try to make it impossible to oppose their vicious policies… etc etc. (I don't know if this is still true but you used to get a lot of "I'm not anti-Jewish, I'm anti-Zionist " on the left here in Britain and then a lot of these types were actually anti-Jewish.) Some of them want to weave their "historical revisionism" into various of the symphonies of persecution we call the Grand Conspiracy Theories. You know, The Protocols of the Elders of Walmart. Mostly, what comes through to me, though, is the old reliable solid dependable antisemitism, the mental roofbeam of paranoid men for the last 500 years. You can always count on that. It's remarkably ironic really – they have to downgrade the Nazis' genocide of the Jews in order to peddle their own antisemitism more reasonably. EASTERN DENIERS This is the giant bellowing elephant in the room which this book does not touch at all. I cannot believe that the authors were ignorant of all the propaganda from organisations like Hamas, who are explicit deniers. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, now famous for his Holocaust denial speeches, became president of Iran in 2005, five years after this book was published. Under his aegis conferences are organised which seek to expose the Holocaust as a hoax. Western observers recoil in horror but the word goes out to the many young uneducated kids. If there is a future edition of this book, and I bet there is, because denial isn't going away soon, S & G will have to add a chapter about Islamic denial - I think this is where denial is becoming entrenched. And what a sorry state of affairs. If you survey the history of the Jews from their expulsion by Vespasian in 70 AD to the Enlightenment you see clearly that the Jews had a much better time of it in Muslim countries than they did in Christian countries – this is a very sweeping generalisation of course. Jews and Moslems lived together in Persia, in the Ottoman Empire, all over the Islamic world, and occasionally they were persecuted but not like they were in Russia or Spain – the Inquisition was set up to discover Jews who were passing as Christians, for example. But now, because of what the Muslim world regards as the crusader state of Israel, many Islamic organisations automatically join in with a kneejerk Holocaust denial, as if it's impossible to accept that your political enemy might also have been the victim of crimes or as if to accept the Holocaust's horrible reality would be in some way to undermine the catastrophe which happened to the Palestinians in 1947-8. HISTORICAL REVISIONISM This book makes excellent points about what historians do – they revise their views. After WW2 it was thought that most Nazi concentration camps had gas chambers. Turned out to be untrue, three of them did, and a further three extermination camps operated which were not concentration camps. The human soap story turned out not to be true, very probably. There was also an idea that the great majority of Jewish victims were gassed – this was not correct. There was also a concentration on the Jewish Holocaust, not surprisingly, which shoved to one side the other homicidal activities of the Nazis (against the Roma, against Poles, against Russian POWs). All these wrong views have been revised, and revision continues all the time. There is a difference between that and denial which is the difference between day and night. CONCLUSION Another great book about a pretty depressing subject - honestly, I feel I should apologise to my GR friends, I've been reading a steady stream of stuff like this recently. But books like this are ESSENTIAL. ...more |
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