If you ask any man a simple question you will get a pretty straight forward answer, “do you like beautiful women?,” you would be hard pressed to find someone out right rejecting beauty (In the case of homosexual men “do you like beautiful men”) even the ones who profess an attraction to untraditional beauty still are attached to the concept. The greatest laugh we can have at this joke is “there are no universal standards of physical beauty.”1 Everyone has a different picture in their head when they read Helen of Troy. There must be something to this universal acceptance of a appreciation for the term beauty, but a total disagreement on what it means.
In America our definition is one of the most outrageous. The market picture is a girl who looks like the victim of a famine, one that you feel could collapse from starvation any moment, than watching a show on the television about models it will cut to a commercial offering you buy one get one free “Big Macs”, and super sized French fries, and the next commercial is for a weight loss drug. Within a thirty minuet slot you will be barraged with this essential debate. Our culture is sick with contradiction, and confusion.
We are a country as my grandfather once said “You can sit down in New York to read, and on the same street corner that you see prostitutes, thugs, and beggars; you see Mercedes Bends driving by, and you wonder how they can be the same people.” 40 million people are starving today; “20 million Americans are hungry and poorly nourished largely because they lack sufficient money2”, but 20 million people are hungry because they are on the newest fad diet as well. How can these two worlds coexist in the same place?
Each class is personified by different ideals of the good life. What one group wants another discards. I work for a cooperate coffee company (Starbucks) I wonder, the amount of milk they throw away in a day, if they were not so wasteful how many people could live just a little better. There is something seriously wrong with this country. We are masters of excess, but only to some. The egalitarian experiment failed. Why is this? I think it failed because people are essentially different.
Standards of beauty can not be the same neither can the means of attaining them. Helen is different in every individual’s interpretation. (I use the term Helen to be my word concept for ideal woman, knowing full well the paradox I create choosing one cultures concept of beauty, and I use this as further evidence for my point that my choice of Helen proves my bias, and thus also proves intercultural variation.) When we each sit down to think of whom our Helen would be we see a much different person. I think my Helen would be Irish, a fiery woman full of pride. I know Helen wasn’t Irish, but to think of sending the largest naval fleet of my times after a woman I think she would have to be Irish.
What can one say to the world, when everyone can say they love beauty, but one man’s beauty is Helen, when the next man dreams of a Hassiba Ben Bouali (the Algerian resistance fighter)? I think that the problem of the world is far deeper than objectifying women into categories of beauty. Beauty categories are a symptom of modernity. We need to find the disease that pollutes the less extreme beliefs on beauty. I can honestly say I would prefer my culture not to be one of such extremes where people feel there are only two choices; the anorexic model, or the obese other. I think this is just another call for an end to social categorization and a call for unity, but not conformity.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Hett, Benjamin Cart. Death in the Tiergarten
Hett, Benjamin Cart. Death in the Tiergarten: Murder and Criminal Justice in the Kaiser’s Berlin. Harvard University Press. (Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2004)
In Benjamin Carter Hett’s Death in the Tiergarten: Murder and Criminal Justice in the Kaiser’s Berlin, He sets out to write “a subject that has no history.”(Hett, 1) What he means by a subject that has no history is that unlike the narratives of his contemporaries which rely on the old arguments of Klassenjustiz (class justice) and Weltfrenheit (being out of touch). Hett also tellingly mentions that a lot of his colleagues in the field who have taken up the subject frequently forget that the judges had come down fairly hard on the right. What Hett means here is that there actually exists a large political diversity in the Kaisereich. He has written a new history of criminal justice in Wilhelmine Germany. His new history is a micro-history modeled after the Ginzburg model. In other words this “history of everyday life” it is meant to turn the reader’s eyes away from sweeping generalities, and towards the human agents which on their own micro-scale make up the macro-organism of history.
Hett explains that his history of “culture of the criminal courtroom” will trace the change in the profession of law over time. Hett creates a list of the actors in which he considers to be relevant to the general culture of the courtroom. In this list Hett mentions “this book, then, is a study of how lawyers and judges, prosecutors and jurors, criminals and police officers, reporters and expert witnesses, met and interacted.”(Hett. 5) For this purpose he has chosen to cover the years 1891-1913. Hett further divided his period in two. The first period is exemplified by the birth of the defense, and the conflicting roles and understandings of honor. The second period is concerned more with the rise of the professional class, especially the experts (sociologists, psychologists, criminologists et al.) and the ever growing power of the press. Hett uses newspaper articles, and journals from the time to trace the attitudes of the actors involved in the courtroom. He is able to construct a vivid portrait of the period.
In the honor period Hett introduces us to Rieck. Superior Court Director Otto Rieck was one of the three judges assigned to the Heinze murder trial. The Heinzes stood accused of murdering a night watchman. Rieck is the typical Whilhelmine judge; he is a stanch conservative, and a legal positivist. Rieck feels that the defense lead by Cossman and Bailen had violated the honor of the court. Typical of the early period the violation of honor in the court was to be punished. Rieck has the two lawyers taken to honor court. They are lightly punished, and Rieck is not satisfied. The point of this scene however is the fact that the honor of the court is not being treated as some intangible justice as legal positivists would suggest. Hett’s critical evaluation of disobedience against honor shows that the very meaning of honor was going through changes, and as the meaning of honor was changing “the career of law” is actually born, in juxtaposition to its application in new ways in the courtroom.
For Hett, the actual existence of an honor court is proof enough for the unique treatment of honor in Wilhelmine courtrooms. . In an honor court a lawyer or judge could actually be tried for crimes against honor. Hett explains that these courts enforced specific conduct expected from the members of the legal community. Lawyers were supposed to live “under a quasi-military regime of discipline and expectations of behavior.” (Hett, 105) Rieck had pursued Cossman and Bailen specifically because of this concept of codes of conduct. In Hett’s narrative, one lawyer feels his honor has been so slighted that he actually challenges his colleague to a duel.
For Hett the German Defense Attorneys and the Press clearly were not passive and quiet bystanders. The press would exercise its new power without a moments thought. The riots in Konitz were a great example of the presses new power. In March of 1900 a boy in the town of Konitz was murdered. The press caught wind of the story, and the police forces failure to bring any answers to the crime, and had a field day. Hett titles that section “the struggle against stupidity”. The army is eventually called in to calm the anti-Semitic riots that were becoming commonplace. The authorities had to engage in a battle with the press to control the situation. The Konitz riot itself makes a very interesting sub-argument in Hett’s text. The fact is that the so-called obedient Germans of the town of Konitz engaged in a riot based on the townsfolk’s perception that the authorities were being too sympathetic to the Jews of the town. Hett would argue that the mass was becoming active
Hett’s text adequately argues valid points to consider. Hett’s dialogue seems to be placed alongside the old scholarship of the obedient Germans. The Germans of Hett’s text are all from very different walks. Hett shows a range from the far right, the anti-Semitic journalists, and the far left the socialists. In his text he is able to convince the readers that Germany was not a uniformed nation before the First World War. Hett’s Germany was a complex web of different people moving towards different goals. Hett doesn’t have a loud answer as to why one side won out, and the other lost.
In Benjamin Carter Hett’s Death in the Tiergarten: Murder and Criminal Justice in the Kaiser’s Berlin, He sets out to write “a subject that has no history.”(Hett, 1) What he means by a subject that has no history is that unlike the narratives of his contemporaries which rely on the old arguments of Klassenjustiz (class justice) and Weltfrenheit (being out of touch). Hett also tellingly mentions that a lot of his colleagues in the field who have taken up the subject frequently forget that the judges had come down fairly hard on the right. What Hett means here is that there actually exists a large political diversity in the Kaisereich. He has written a new history of criminal justice in Wilhelmine Germany. His new history is a micro-history modeled after the Ginzburg model. In other words this “history of everyday life” it is meant to turn the reader’s eyes away from sweeping generalities, and towards the human agents which on their own micro-scale make up the macro-organism of history.
Hett explains that his history of “culture of the criminal courtroom” will trace the change in the profession of law over time. Hett creates a list of the actors in which he considers to be relevant to the general culture of the courtroom. In this list Hett mentions “this book, then, is a study of how lawyers and judges, prosecutors and jurors, criminals and police officers, reporters and expert witnesses, met and interacted.”(Hett. 5) For this purpose he has chosen to cover the years 1891-1913. Hett further divided his period in two. The first period is exemplified by the birth of the defense, and the conflicting roles and understandings of honor. The second period is concerned more with the rise of the professional class, especially the experts (sociologists, psychologists, criminologists et al.) and the ever growing power of the press. Hett uses newspaper articles, and journals from the time to trace the attitudes of the actors involved in the courtroom. He is able to construct a vivid portrait of the period.
In the honor period Hett introduces us to Rieck. Superior Court Director Otto Rieck was one of the three judges assigned to the Heinze murder trial. The Heinzes stood accused of murdering a night watchman. Rieck is the typical Whilhelmine judge; he is a stanch conservative, and a legal positivist. Rieck feels that the defense lead by Cossman and Bailen had violated the honor of the court. Typical of the early period the violation of honor in the court was to be punished. Rieck has the two lawyers taken to honor court. They are lightly punished, and Rieck is not satisfied. The point of this scene however is the fact that the honor of the court is not being treated as some intangible justice as legal positivists would suggest. Hett’s critical evaluation of disobedience against honor shows that the very meaning of honor was going through changes, and as the meaning of honor was changing “the career of law” is actually born, in juxtaposition to its application in new ways in the courtroom.
For Hett, the actual existence of an honor court is proof enough for the unique treatment of honor in Wilhelmine courtrooms. . In an honor court a lawyer or judge could actually be tried for crimes against honor. Hett explains that these courts enforced specific conduct expected from the members of the legal community. Lawyers were supposed to live “under a quasi-military regime of discipline and expectations of behavior.” (Hett, 105) Rieck had pursued Cossman and Bailen specifically because of this concept of codes of conduct. In Hett’s narrative, one lawyer feels his honor has been so slighted that he actually challenges his colleague to a duel.
For Hett the German Defense Attorneys and the Press clearly were not passive and quiet bystanders. The press would exercise its new power without a moments thought. The riots in Konitz were a great example of the presses new power. In March of 1900 a boy in the town of Konitz was murdered. The press caught wind of the story, and the police forces failure to bring any answers to the crime, and had a field day. Hett titles that section “the struggle against stupidity”. The army is eventually called in to calm the anti-Semitic riots that were becoming commonplace. The authorities had to engage in a battle with the press to control the situation. The Konitz riot itself makes a very interesting sub-argument in Hett’s text. The fact is that the so-called obedient Germans of the town of Konitz engaged in a riot based on the townsfolk’s perception that the authorities were being too sympathetic to the Jews of the town. Hett would argue that the mass was becoming active
Hett’s text adequately argues valid points to consider. Hett’s dialogue seems to be placed alongside the old scholarship of the obedient Germans. The Germans of Hett’s text are all from very different walks. Hett shows a range from the far right, the anti-Semitic journalists, and the far left the socialists. In his text he is able to convince the readers that Germany was not a uniformed nation before the First World War. Hett’s Germany was a complex web of different people moving towards different goals. Hett doesn’t have a loud answer as to why one side won out, and the other lost.
He Shouts Scrape Your Strings Darker You’ll Rise Then in Smoke to the Sky; Celan’s Todesfuge and Weisel’s Night, the Break with Humanity
Celan’s poem “Todesfuge” is a survivor’s account of the terrible tragedy of the Second World War. Weisel’s Night is a narrative filled with pain; it recounts the traumatic childhood of weasel, and the terror of his fight for survival in the new world invented by the Germans. They illustrate something essentially terrible within all of us; the loss of the self. For the two victims of the Nazi’s extermination campaign their humanity was robbed from them as they became the victims of the Nazi ideology of hate. When Weisel entered the camp he was symbolically stripped of his humanity by the removal of his name, “I became A-7713. From then on I had no other name.”1 This first gesture to move him from a person with a name to merely a number was a gesture of inhumanity. For Celan the experience has become almost an absurd footnote, two radically juxtaposed things could take place all at once for example when he says, “jab your spades deeper you lot there you others play on for the dancing.”2 Something once so very human and beautiful becomes a symbol of cruelty and inhumanity. Weisel tells the story of an almost trampled to death Pole violinist. He describes a new reality. The human action that once carried with it so much beauty had now been relegated to pain, and absurdity. The fact that humanity can exist while this goes on makes the thought crueler still. The tortured Celan goes on with, “play death more sweetly Death is a master from Deutschland”, he eludes to how they play with death as it would be a game, death, the greatest universality of humanity is made into a mockery by the Nazis.3 They have opened the door to a new reality. The Nazi world is one where thinks that had once been relegated to the category of nightmare could now be included in the everyday. Ordinary life became terror.
In the Felstiner version of Celan’s “Todesfuge”, we grapple with incoherence as it slowly switches back from German to English. I get the feeling I did from T.S. Elliot’s “The Wasteland” that the world is becoming more and more incoherent. It is an appeal to inter-nationalism to Elliot, but I feel the message Felsteiner conveys with his partial translation of “Todesfuge” may be something more. I think the choice to preserve it in partial German emphasize the culpability. The Nazis have recreated reality, in their world, death is not universality, and “death is a master from Germany”.4 Celan is full of contradictions as his memory unravels the torture and horror. “Black milk of daybreak” can come to mean so much, when Celan declares “we drink it at evening” he is appealing to the incoherence of there reality.5 Milk is essentially a life giving substance, and is something they would never receive in a camp. It would go to the front for the soldat gets. So the fact that it is something they can never have plays a part, and that it is black he states a contradiction this could even be taken to suppose it doesn’t exist, or at least that in the reality that the Nazis have engineered in the concentration camp, black milk is just as likely to exist as milk, because the world is descending into absurdity. As the world loses meaning (or worse falls into the new Nazi reality) the self is swallowed up. How can there in fact be any true self anymore, after Auschwitz.
The strict schedule of inhumanity became a calling card for life in these camps. Weisel recounts a beating that took place one day when he crossed the foreman, “Abruptly, he calmed down and sent me back to work as if nothing had happened. As if we had taken part in a game in which both parts were of equal importance.”6 The fact that actions once reserved for moments of rage were deemed as normal and were now committed as if life and death and all things betwixt were just games in the new world the Nazis had created. For Weisel it all had no meaning anyway reality just became a mass of contradiction, and absurdities, he affirmed himself as nothing, “now but ashes”, but since he was condemned to such misery and suffering his very sacrifice became a chance for radical discord. “But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without god, without men”, the reality of the impossible inhumanity has in Weisel’s mind destroyed the possibility of being human. He has ascended past the need to have a body anchored in reality since what was going on around exceeded reality then he no longer needed to acknowledge reality. His world became hollow, “without love or mercy”, and though he was “nothing but ashes now, he felt himself stronger than this almighty to whom his life had been bound for so long.” The almighty must have been impotent or absent to have abandoned him thus he had come to the conclusion he who survived this was stronger than the absentee or impotent almighty that allowed his chosen people to become ashes. He had freed himself since his body had become nothing, he began to transcend the suffering, but into a dark reality full of torment, and pain. When he realizes something in him has seriously changed the revelation makes him feel, “like a stranger.”7 What everyone was saying no longer seemed true to him he heard the prayer and retorted with his questions, “Blessed be thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to walk as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in furnaces? Praised by thy Holy Name, for having chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar?”8
Humanity and reality slowly disappeared for these two victims; their minds retreated and grew dark in exile. Celan acknowledges that they will just become smoke, just float away in the sky. Life has obtained a horrible surreal quality while it has become devoid of anything, but torment, “Black Milk”. Weisel is able to retrieve drops of humanity on the way as a few words of encouragement hold him together, and he pushes on, even when his father dies he is able to survive. Another Jew, a Pole gives him enough words to live on.
“Comrades, you are now in the concentration camp Auschwitz. Ahead of you lies a long road paved with suffering. Don’t lose hope. You have already eluded the worst danger: the selection. Therefore, muster your strength and keep you faith. We shall all see the day of liberation. Have faith in life, a thousand times faith. By driving out despair, you will move away from death. Hell does not last forever… And now here is a prayer, or rather a piece of advice: let there be camaraderie among you. We are all brothers and share the same fate. The same smoke hovers over all our heads. Help each other. That is the only way to survive. (…) Those were the first human words.”9
The Pole is able to give Weisel a precipice of humanity to hold onto. The fact that the entire Nazi campaign had sought to take every drop of humanity from him and his co-victims, one Pole, one survivor was able to breathe a few drops of humanity into him, a few pieces of self. Weisel lives always lost in dark thought of the hell his mind has receded in horror to escape; a different kind of terror to have experienced a new reality that forsakes life in every form and only destroys viciously and inhumanely. Celan and Weisel are alive, but the terror remains and no shred of dignity can ever totally repair the total horror of one of mankind’s darkest chapter, and that has come to be the greatest warning of the danger of human indifference in the 20th Century, a legacy we are heirs to in the 21st, and something we must always be vigil for.
In the Felstiner version of Celan’s “Todesfuge”, we grapple with incoherence as it slowly switches back from German to English. I get the feeling I did from T.S. Elliot’s “The Wasteland” that the world is becoming more and more incoherent. It is an appeal to inter-nationalism to Elliot, but I feel the message Felsteiner conveys with his partial translation of “Todesfuge” may be something more. I think the choice to preserve it in partial German emphasize the culpability. The Nazis have recreated reality, in their world, death is not universality, and “death is a master from Germany”.4 Celan is full of contradictions as his memory unravels the torture and horror. “Black milk of daybreak” can come to mean so much, when Celan declares “we drink it at evening” he is appealing to the incoherence of there reality.5 Milk is essentially a life giving substance, and is something they would never receive in a camp. It would go to the front for the soldat gets. So the fact that it is something they can never have plays a part, and that it is black he states a contradiction this could even be taken to suppose it doesn’t exist, or at least that in the reality that the Nazis have engineered in the concentration camp, black milk is just as likely to exist as milk, because the world is descending into absurdity. As the world loses meaning (or worse falls into the new Nazi reality) the self is swallowed up. How can there in fact be any true self anymore, after Auschwitz.
The strict schedule of inhumanity became a calling card for life in these camps. Weisel recounts a beating that took place one day when he crossed the foreman, “Abruptly, he calmed down and sent me back to work as if nothing had happened. As if we had taken part in a game in which both parts were of equal importance.”6 The fact that actions once reserved for moments of rage were deemed as normal and were now committed as if life and death and all things betwixt were just games in the new world the Nazis had created. For Weisel it all had no meaning anyway reality just became a mass of contradiction, and absurdities, he affirmed himself as nothing, “now but ashes”, but since he was condemned to such misery and suffering his very sacrifice became a chance for radical discord. “But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without god, without men”, the reality of the impossible inhumanity has in Weisel’s mind destroyed the possibility of being human. He has ascended past the need to have a body anchored in reality since what was going on around exceeded reality then he no longer needed to acknowledge reality. His world became hollow, “without love or mercy”, and though he was “nothing but ashes now, he felt himself stronger than this almighty to whom his life had been bound for so long.” The almighty must have been impotent or absent to have abandoned him thus he had come to the conclusion he who survived this was stronger than the absentee or impotent almighty that allowed his chosen people to become ashes. He had freed himself since his body had become nothing, he began to transcend the suffering, but into a dark reality full of torment, and pain. When he realizes something in him has seriously changed the revelation makes him feel, “like a stranger.”7 What everyone was saying no longer seemed true to him he heard the prayer and retorted with his questions, “Blessed be thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to walk as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in furnaces? Praised by thy Holy Name, for having chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar?”8
Humanity and reality slowly disappeared for these two victims; their minds retreated and grew dark in exile. Celan acknowledges that they will just become smoke, just float away in the sky. Life has obtained a horrible surreal quality while it has become devoid of anything, but torment, “Black Milk”. Weisel is able to retrieve drops of humanity on the way as a few words of encouragement hold him together, and he pushes on, even when his father dies he is able to survive. Another Jew, a Pole gives him enough words to live on.
“Comrades, you are now in the concentration camp Auschwitz. Ahead of you lies a long road paved with suffering. Don’t lose hope. You have already eluded the worst danger: the selection. Therefore, muster your strength and keep you faith. We shall all see the day of liberation. Have faith in life, a thousand times faith. By driving out despair, you will move away from death. Hell does not last forever… And now here is a prayer, or rather a piece of advice: let there be camaraderie among you. We are all brothers and share the same fate. The same smoke hovers over all our heads. Help each other. That is the only way to survive. (…) Those were the first human words.”9
The Pole is able to give Weisel a precipice of humanity to hold onto. The fact that the entire Nazi campaign had sought to take every drop of humanity from him and his co-victims, one Pole, one survivor was able to breathe a few drops of humanity into him, a few pieces of self. Weisel lives always lost in dark thought of the hell his mind has receded in horror to escape; a different kind of terror to have experienced a new reality that forsakes life in every form and only destroys viciously and inhumanely. Celan and Weisel are alive, but the terror remains and no shred of dignity can ever totally repair the total horror of one of mankind’s darkest chapter, and that has come to be the greatest warning of the danger of human indifference in the 20th Century, a legacy we are heirs to in the 21st, and something we must always be vigil for.
Happy Spaces & Gloomy Ones
Most modern medical setting provide a space that is the opposite of what the patient needs for recovery in fact the drab streamline sterile area may be a propagator of psychosis. Crowding can create a state of uneasiness, and also help spread the chance of both mental and physical disease. If you think of how a plague operates, it feeds off unsanitary conditions, attacks a weak, crowded, poor population, and kills with ease, because the population is in such condition which creates an impossibility of stopping the disease. Part of the historical psychological fear of crowding may even be routed in plagues that attacked our ancestors.
I think the problem of space is one of capitalism, began in the factories of the industrial revolution. People were to be streamlined. The goal was to make people into interchangeable parts. The former spaces of work, farms, small scale production centers such as smiths and bakeries, were to be replaced with mass streamlining. Open spaces were to be closed, and tightened. Factories function, by absorbing the people into a state of obscurity. So the first goal of the industrial revolution was to take the open space and close it.
Industrialism and especially its supersedent fordism are the definers of modern capitalist space. I think the train is a great metaphor. If you think of the face of the train it changes along with industrialism. It begins as a cargo hauler. Then slowly becomes a passenger vehicle, and then it enters a strange phase. If you have been on a luxury train or a European train it is an open space, made to travel comfortably, they have waiters, and drinks. The entire experience is comfort while you travel. The dark side of trains is where I was raised, the Boston trains. In Boston trains are made in a very streamline fashion. There are no nice seating arrangements, no curtains, and no beverages served, you just sit forward in a very uncomfortable seat, and look forward. The Boston train is a gloomy space. Everyone from the outlying slums and suburbs of Massachusetts commutes into the city for the day to work. No one talks to each other most sit either typing on their laptop, reading, or phoning. The idea is that they are all going to work, and will not even acknowledge each others presence.
Boston proxemics is something totally different. I met a man who had gone to the same elementary school as me the other day. We both grew up in one of Boston’s outlying slums, Brockton. We went to St. Edwards Catholic Elementary School, because most if not all of the poor white families living in the slums at that time where Irish. We struck up a conversation on the odd proxemics of Missouri, and how this strange place violates the norms we were raised by. He told me that the fact people walking by wave to you stop and say hello, really confused and unsettled him at first. We laughed over what our parents back home in Massachusetts had always advised when walking in a bad neighborhood especially. We were always told, keep your head down, hands in your pocket, and you never wanted to make eye contact with anyone it may start a fight. He told me the further west he went this action became read oppositely. He said in California when you behave like that it signifies the exact opposite, that rather than you just want to stay out of trouble, you must be up to something.
I think the problem of space is one of capitalism, began in the factories of the industrial revolution. People were to be streamlined. The goal was to make people into interchangeable parts. The former spaces of work, farms, small scale production centers such as smiths and bakeries, were to be replaced with mass streamlining. Open spaces were to be closed, and tightened. Factories function, by absorbing the people into a state of obscurity. So the first goal of the industrial revolution was to take the open space and close it.
Industrialism and especially its supersedent fordism are the definers of modern capitalist space. I think the train is a great metaphor. If you think of the face of the train it changes along with industrialism. It begins as a cargo hauler. Then slowly becomes a passenger vehicle, and then it enters a strange phase. If you have been on a luxury train or a European train it is an open space, made to travel comfortably, they have waiters, and drinks. The entire experience is comfort while you travel. The dark side of trains is where I was raised, the Boston trains. In Boston trains are made in a very streamline fashion. There are no nice seating arrangements, no curtains, and no beverages served, you just sit forward in a very uncomfortable seat, and look forward. The Boston train is a gloomy space. Everyone from the outlying slums and suburbs of Massachusetts commutes into the city for the day to work. No one talks to each other most sit either typing on their laptop, reading, or phoning. The idea is that they are all going to work, and will not even acknowledge each others presence.
Boston proxemics is something totally different. I met a man who had gone to the same elementary school as me the other day. We both grew up in one of Boston’s outlying slums, Brockton. We went to St. Edwards Catholic Elementary School, because most if not all of the poor white families living in the slums at that time where Irish. We struck up a conversation on the odd proxemics of Missouri, and how this strange place violates the norms we were raised by. He told me that the fact people walking by wave to you stop and say hello, really confused and unsettled him at first. We laughed over what our parents back home in Massachusetts had always advised when walking in a bad neighborhood especially. We were always told, keep your head down, hands in your pocket, and you never wanted to make eye contact with anyone it may start a fight. He told me the further west he went this action became read oppositely. He said in California when you behave like that it signifies the exact opposite, that rather than you just want to stay out of trouble, you must be up to something.
Hamlet Africana
The concept of something being universal is always some sort of vain comfort in a world devoid of all meanings, but the ones we impose upon it. In “Shakespeare in the Bush” we see an ethnologists attempt to take a “timeless” classic of our culture and bring it to another. The struggles she has in trying to present it to them are immense. This was fascinating as one could easily repeat this experiment a thousand times in a thousand more cultures. “Anthropological Study of Literature; a Study of the Timeless Classics of Our Culture, as Applied to Another.” It seems like it would be a good book title.
I wonder how applicable classics of another culture really would be to try as well, Camus’ The Fall, a story of a lost lawyer turned ‘judge’ in Amsterdam, may have certain themes we can all mostly recognize, but as our culture drifts farther away we wonder if even common occidental literature could remain timeless among each small group. I think this misinterpretation of the term timeless is the route cause of the problem. Themes and motifs are only as good as the circumstances they are structured around. Well we may enjoy an ancient literature we know little of the circumstances that it was structured around. The need to study the actual goings on to properly picture the text of that moment is crucial to understanding the meaning of that literature.
I feel the article was entertaining and roused a lot of really interesting questions I would love to find the answers to. The scene of the anthropologist stopping in the middle of the story to take notes on madness was particularly funny. If the experiment had been tried with another one of Shakespeare’s plays like “The Merchant of Venice” or “Richard III” would the same reaction come about? Especially since each play had certain subtle motives. Like Richard III, a propaganda play to reinforce the current monarchy’s position against its former opponent.
I wonder how applicable classics of another culture really would be to try as well, Camus’ The Fall, a story of a lost lawyer turned ‘judge’ in Amsterdam, may have certain themes we can all mostly recognize, but as our culture drifts farther away we wonder if even common occidental literature could remain timeless among each small group. I think this misinterpretation of the term timeless is the route cause of the problem. Themes and motifs are only as good as the circumstances they are structured around. Well we may enjoy an ancient literature we know little of the circumstances that it was structured around. The need to study the actual goings on to properly picture the text of that moment is crucial to understanding the meaning of that literature.
I feel the article was entertaining and roused a lot of really interesting questions I would love to find the answers to. The scene of the anthropologist stopping in the middle of the story to take notes on madness was particularly funny. If the experiment had been tried with another one of Shakespeare’s plays like “The Merchant of Venice” or “Richard III” would the same reaction come about? Especially since each play had certain subtle motives. Like Richard III, a propaganda play to reinforce the current monarchy’s position against its former opponent.
Gilbert’s Kritalnacht & Gellately’s Backing Hitler
Gilbert’s Kritalnacht & Gellately’s Backing Hitler: Martin Gilbert. Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction. Harper Perennial 2006. Robert Gellatately. Backing Hitler: Consent & Coercion in Nazi Germany. Oxford University Press 2002.
In the later part of the 1930s the National Socialist Government of Hitler and his associates stepped up their campaign of anti-Semitism through a system of trial and error. Among these trials were the events of November 10th, 1938. On this night Germans from all over the Reich joined in with only few exceptions in the vandalizing and destruction of Jewish homes, businesses, and places of worship. This night was referred to as Kristallnacht. It was named such since the smashing of shop windows left broken glass in the streets. According to Martin Gilbert, author of the authoritative text on the subject, “no event in the history of the fate of the German Jews between 1933 and 1945 was so widely covered”.1 The two authors Gellately and Gilbert both outline the events of the day.
In Gellately’s book Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, he sets out to discuss “the social and political sides of the dictatorship rather than what went on behind closed doors”.2 He hopes his book can provide answers as to how “the rationalizations the Nazis provided (...) were an integral and essential part of the discrimination and persecution.”3 Gellately, due to the scope of his book does not too deeply delve into the matter of Kristallnacht, but is willing to briefly discuss it.
In his sixth chapter, Gellately addresses the causes of Kristallnacht. The Nazi government had begun a policy of expulsion of Polish Jews who had not obtained German citizenship. Most of the refuges were trapped at the border since Poland would not admit them because of a new law requiring that passports be renewed with a government stamp. The son of a family of these refuges was living in Paris at the time. He received an urgent letter from his sister concerning the events. The seventeen year old boy, Herschel Grynszpan, shot a minor German official at the German embassy. The official, Ernst vom Rath died shortly after of his wounds. For Gellately, the assassination of vom Rath marked “the beginning of a new German attitude on the Jewish question.”4 The “new question” would usher in alarmingly new trials in which the Nazi government would push the limits of the public’s perception of anti-Semitism.
When the news of vom Rath’s death reached the Nazis, they were celebrating the anniversary of the failed Beer Hall Putsch. The orders were given that the police were not to disturb the demonstrations, and the Gestapo should expect to arrest around 20,000 Jewish men.5 Furthermore, Gellately goes on to say, the Gestapo was to coordinate local actions, and where there was not enough party support, trucks of traveling Nazis would be employed to sow destruction on Jewish property.6 Added to that order, Gellately adds that the Gestapo made sure that “no warrants of arrest would be issued” on that night against Germans who participated in the pogrom.7 He adds that the three reasons the pogrom was able to succeed was that “the Jews were socially isolated, unarmed, and easy targets”.8 The pogrom had succeeded in proving that the German people would, will relatively little coaxing engage in or at least witness large scale violence, with very little dissent.
The aftermath of the pogrom was catastrophic for the Jews that remained in Germany. Gellately says that historians put the figures at around 30,000 arrested (all men, over the age of 16), over 100 killed, and at least 300 took their own lives. The Jews who were arrested were sent to Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen. On top of all that Gellately notes that the Reich fined the Jews that remained in Germany around 1 billion marks for all the destruction of that night.9 The aftermath of the pogrom left a general sense of confusion and fear in Germany. Gellately closes his section on Kristallnacht by saying “for the fist time, non-Jews sensed a real danger of being the next victim of Nazi terror.”10
In Martin Gilbert’s authoritative text on the subject, Kritallnacht: Prelude to Destruction, he uses interviews, records, and newspapers from the time to document the events that took place on that night. As his sources Gilbert goes on to cite some of the hundreds of foreign journalists who witnessed the night. Gilbert argues that according to the way diplomats and journalists, of other countries responded to the events of November 10th, 1938, caused a dramatic upheaval in the way the west would view Nazism.11
The first half of Gilbert’s book is devoted to eye-witness accounts of the brutality of Kristallnacht. The initial shock of the veterans of the 1914-1918 War was intense. According to Gilbert 12,000 Jews had died for Germany in that war and many Jews were feverishly patriotic Germans.12 In Berlin eleven synagogues were burnt. Gilbert argues the premeditation of the attack in two places. The first he explains that the government had passed a law shortly before the pogrom requiring Jewish businesses to mark the outside of their shops as such. Later an eye-witness reports “we could not give a description of the vandals since they were all strangers to us, probably not even citizens of our town, and the argument the pogrom been spontaneous was negated by this fact.”13 The witnesses were caught off guard by the sudden and coordinated movements of the attack on the Jewish community. Another witness says, predicting the fire bombing of Dresden, as he watches a synagogue burn in that city, “this fire will return! It will make a long curve and then come down to us.”14 Though not all Germans participated, or even agreed with the pogrom, Gilbert in the next part of the book goes into depth about the foreigners who resisted the anti-Semitism, and did everything they could to save as many lives as possible.
In the second part of his book Gilbert addresses the refuges who seeing the terror of Kristallnacht, and knowing it was only going to get worse, desperately tried anything to escape the Reich. All the consulates of the world were packed with Jews trying to flee Germany. The United States allowed 200,000 German Jews to immigrate to America as a result of Nazi policy.15 Turkey opened its doors to Jewish scholars. Even China allowed Jews to escape Germany, even with the flimsiest fake passports. Dr. Feng Shan Ho, was a member of the Chinese consulate in Vienna, and he allowed many Jews to emigrate to Shanghai.16 In Gilbert’s account of British Secret Agent Captain Frank Foley, he was estimated to have helped around 10,000 Jews escape for Palestine.17 The combined efforts of selfless foreigners saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews, but many could not escape.
Those who could not escape by the start of the war became victims of the German mechanisms for death. In Gellately and Gilberts work a common thread is seen. Both authors definitely see Kristallnacht as a watershed in Germany’s policy. The terrible violence, the obvious biases of the police, and the citizens allowing it to go on, all foreshadow the events to come. Gilbert venerates the few people who were willing to risk so much to save the victims of this persecution, but it was never enough. It is very fitting that Gilbert’s book begins with a critique of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous quote, “peace in our time.”18 Both works give a nice well researched account of the events that occurred. Gellately’s book does lack on giving more concrete reasons and results, but since the scope of the text is so large it might be excusable. Gilbert’s book is strong in factual assertions, but the text again only presents the case with little regard to the whys, and whats. Together the two books provide a deeply factual, by shallowly analytical account of the events of November 10th, 1938.
In the later part of the 1930s the National Socialist Government of Hitler and his associates stepped up their campaign of anti-Semitism through a system of trial and error. Among these trials were the events of November 10th, 1938. On this night Germans from all over the Reich joined in with only few exceptions in the vandalizing and destruction of Jewish homes, businesses, and places of worship. This night was referred to as Kristallnacht. It was named such since the smashing of shop windows left broken glass in the streets. According to Martin Gilbert, author of the authoritative text on the subject, “no event in the history of the fate of the German Jews between 1933 and 1945 was so widely covered”.1 The two authors Gellately and Gilbert both outline the events of the day.
In Gellately’s book Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, he sets out to discuss “the social and political sides of the dictatorship rather than what went on behind closed doors”.2 He hopes his book can provide answers as to how “the rationalizations the Nazis provided (...) were an integral and essential part of the discrimination and persecution.”3 Gellately, due to the scope of his book does not too deeply delve into the matter of Kristallnacht, but is willing to briefly discuss it.
In his sixth chapter, Gellately addresses the causes of Kristallnacht. The Nazi government had begun a policy of expulsion of Polish Jews who had not obtained German citizenship. Most of the refuges were trapped at the border since Poland would not admit them because of a new law requiring that passports be renewed with a government stamp. The son of a family of these refuges was living in Paris at the time. He received an urgent letter from his sister concerning the events. The seventeen year old boy, Herschel Grynszpan, shot a minor German official at the German embassy. The official, Ernst vom Rath died shortly after of his wounds. For Gellately, the assassination of vom Rath marked “the beginning of a new German attitude on the Jewish question.”4 The “new question” would usher in alarmingly new trials in which the Nazi government would push the limits of the public’s perception of anti-Semitism.
When the news of vom Rath’s death reached the Nazis, they were celebrating the anniversary of the failed Beer Hall Putsch. The orders were given that the police were not to disturb the demonstrations, and the Gestapo should expect to arrest around 20,000 Jewish men.5 Furthermore, Gellately goes on to say, the Gestapo was to coordinate local actions, and where there was not enough party support, trucks of traveling Nazis would be employed to sow destruction on Jewish property.6 Added to that order, Gellately adds that the Gestapo made sure that “no warrants of arrest would be issued” on that night against Germans who participated in the pogrom.7 He adds that the three reasons the pogrom was able to succeed was that “the Jews were socially isolated, unarmed, and easy targets”.8 The pogrom had succeeded in proving that the German people would, will relatively little coaxing engage in or at least witness large scale violence, with very little dissent.
The aftermath of the pogrom was catastrophic for the Jews that remained in Germany. Gellately says that historians put the figures at around 30,000 arrested (all men, over the age of 16), over 100 killed, and at least 300 took their own lives. The Jews who were arrested were sent to Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen. On top of all that Gellately notes that the Reich fined the Jews that remained in Germany around 1 billion marks for all the destruction of that night.9 The aftermath of the pogrom left a general sense of confusion and fear in Germany. Gellately closes his section on Kristallnacht by saying “for the fist time, non-Jews sensed a real danger of being the next victim of Nazi terror.”10
In Martin Gilbert’s authoritative text on the subject, Kritallnacht: Prelude to Destruction, he uses interviews, records, and newspapers from the time to document the events that took place on that night. As his sources Gilbert goes on to cite some of the hundreds of foreign journalists who witnessed the night. Gilbert argues that according to the way diplomats and journalists, of other countries responded to the events of November 10th, 1938, caused a dramatic upheaval in the way the west would view Nazism.11
The first half of Gilbert’s book is devoted to eye-witness accounts of the brutality of Kristallnacht. The initial shock of the veterans of the 1914-1918 War was intense. According to Gilbert 12,000 Jews had died for Germany in that war and many Jews were feverishly patriotic Germans.12 In Berlin eleven synagogues were burnt. Gilbert argues the premeditation of the attack in two places. The first he explains that the government had passed a law shortly before the pogrom requiring Jewish businesses to mark the outside of their shops as such. Later an eye-witness reports “we could not give a description of the vandals since they were all strangers to us, probably not even citizens of our town, and the argument the pogrom been spontaneous was negated by this fact.”13 The witnesses were caught off guard by the sudden and coordinated movements of the attack on the Jewish community. Another witness says, predicting the fire bombing of Dresden, as he watches a synagogue burn in that city, “this fire will return! It will make a long curve and then come down to us.”14 Though not all Germans participated, or even agreed with the pogrom, Gilbert in the next part of the book goes into depth about the foreigners who resisted the anti-Semitism, and did everything they could to save as many lives as possible.
In the second part of his book Gilbert addresses the refuges who seeing the terror of Kristallnacht, and knowing it was only going to get worse, desperately tried anything to escape the Reich. All the consulates of the world were packed with Jews trying to flee Germany. The United States allowed 200,000 German Jews to immigrate to America as a result of Nazi policy.15 Turkey opened its doors to Jewish scholars. Even China allowed Jews to escape Germany, even with the flimsiest fake passports. Dr. Feng Shan Ho, was a member of the Chinese consulate in Vienna, and he allowed many Jews to emigrate to Shanghai.16 In Gilbert’s account of British Secret Agent Captain Frank Foley, he was estimated to have helped around 10,000 Jews escape for Palestine.17 The combined efforts of selfless foreigners saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews, but many could not escape.
Those who could not escape by the start of the war became victims of the German mechanisms for death. In Gellately and Gilberts work a common thread is seen. Both authors definitely see Kristallnacht as a watershed in Germany’s policy. The terrible violence, the obvious biases of the police, and the citizens allowing it to go on, all foreshadow the events to come. Gilbert venerates the few people who were willing to risk so much to save the victims of this persecution, but it was never enough. It is very fitting that Gilbert’s book begins with a critique of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous quote, “peace in our time.”18 Both works give a nice well researched account of the events that occurred. Gellately’s book does lack on giving more concrete reasons and results, but since the scope of the text is so large it might be excusable. Gilbert’s book is strong in factual assertions, but the text again only presents the case with little regard to the whys, and whats. Together the two books provide a deeply factual, by shallowly analytical account of the events of November 10th, 1938.
Einsatz
During the Second World War, there was a particular group in the east that engaged in “the deliberate slaughter of more than a million innocent and defenseless men, women, and children.”1 This group was called the Einsatzgruppen. According to Botwinick, the author of the text A History of the holocaust what made them all the more savage and evil is that “their work was not abstract, their own eyes met those of their victims, their hands held the guns that killed an estimated 1.5 million Jews.”2 The Einsatzgruppen lead a campaign of murder in the East that executed civilians for no other reason than the nazi ideology of hate. What great irony that the leaders of the mobile killing squads of the Einsatzgruppen, the Einsatzkommandos were not mindless barbarians, but “professional men with many academic degrees, who were quite at home among Germany’s cultural elite.”3 The Einsatzgruppen became an institution of death in total violation of “man’s right to live in peace and dignity regardless of his race or creed.”4
In the opening statements by the prosecution at the Einsatzgruppen trial the first task was to set out that the Einsatzgruppen under the Nazi doctrine of hate was responsible for crimes against humanity. The Nazis were responsible for “the methodical and long-range plans to destroy ethnic, national, political, and religious groups which stood condemned in the Nazi mind.”5 The Einsatz groups even went into the prisoner of war camps “selecting men for execution, denying them their right to live.”6 So in the crimes against humanity the Nazi doctrine of hate violated all international laws and treaties.
The key argument of the opening statements is that the “Nazi doctrine of a master race-an arrogance blended from tribal conceit and a boundless contempt for man himself” and it is an “idea whose toleration endangers all men.”7 The Nazi doctrine of hate then is a crime against mankind and even deeper than just a crime against humanity National Socialism becomes the new nihilism. It seeks only separation and destruction. It is ironic that a doctrine that began on a platform of law and order ends up as the doctrine of universal negation of mankind.
The Einsatzgruppen was a dark and vicious piece of the Nazi machinery of death. What they had tried to accomplish was the destruction of a part of humanity through direct murder. The victims were “arrayed, kneeling or standing near the pit to face a deadly hail of fire.”8 This was not just genocide but this became even deeper as individual murder as part of genocide. The question of shared culpability by Einsatz men is easy because the killing were done on so individual a level.
In the opening statements by the prosecution at the Einsatzgruppen trial the first task was to set out that the Einsatzgruppen under the Nazi doctrine of hate was responsible for crimes against humanity. The Nazis were responsible for “the methodical and long-range plans to destroy ethnic, national, political, and religious groups which stood condemned in the Nazi mind.”5 The Einsatz groups even went into the prisoner of war camps “selecting men for execution, denying them their right to live.”6 So in the crimes against humanity the Nazi doctrine of hate violated all international laws and treaties.
The key argument of the opening statements is that the “Nazi doctrine of a master race-an arrogance blended from tribal conceit and a boundless contempt for man himself” and it is an “idea whose toleration endangers all men.”7 The Nazi doctrine of hate then is a crime against mankind and even deeper than just a crime against humanity National Socialism becomes the new nihilism. It seeks only separation and destruction. It is ironic that a doctrine that began on a platform of law and order ends up as the doctrine of universal negation of mankind.
The Einsatzgruppen was a dark and vicious piece of the Nazi machinery of death. What they had tried to accomplish was the destruction of a part of humanity through direct murder. The victims were “arrayed, kneeling or standing near the pit to face a deadly hail of fire.”8 This was not just genocide but this became even deeper as individual murder as part of genocide. The question of shared culpability by Einsatz men is easy because the killing were done on so individual a level.
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