I'm hesitant to post any more of this. In the last decade, there has been a bursting open of literature and critical studies in Germany of the experience of average German citizens in the destruction of their homeland during the Second World War. It's not as though the German guilt has magically lifted, but certain brave and purposeful writers have forced past it, put it aside just far enough to consider the experience of the individual human being in that awful time. Sebald, Grass -- writers as hostile to Nazism as any you can name -- have gone into this necessary work.
And I suppose I have read enough of it now to be able to read the documents as simple human experiences -- like the tale of a Georgia family in the face of Sherman's March or a Hiroshima resident on that one August morning. They can be disconnected from the larger matter of collective guilt for the length of the examination, to ask and answer the question, "how did people behave during this experience?"
But I've learned that you still can't introduce this matter online without the comments instantly veering into questions of guilt and military justification. And more often than not I'll be called a Nazi apologist, or accused of violating the "no Hitler" rule in modern political discourse. So be it. I'm not talking about the present, or the political past. I am interested, journalistically, in the matter of how men and women behave under intense pressure. That is aside from my historical interest in conflicts and international relations.
I've already mentioned Nossack's "Der Untergang," a reflection written just months after the firebombing of Hamburg in 1943 (in which Nossack and his wife lost everything). Here is what he says (translated ably by Joel Agee) about refugees. It's a warning. Some things will be different -- the difference between Germany and America, between a deliberate military campaign of destruction and a blind natural calamity.
But read it, if you care to, with an eye for what may be the same, and what may lie ahead as the United States somehow arranges itself as a spare bedroom for a city of half a million.Already during the night and at daybreak the first refugees had arrived. Some of them barefoot and in their nightshirts, just as they had leapt from their beds and run into the streets. They brought with them an uncanny silence. No one dared to question these mute figures seated by the edge of the road. Just wanting to offer them help seemed too loud an action. Then trucks arrived. The people on top of them were crouched and remote. Where are we going? Why are we stopping? Why don't you let us sleep some more? Their hands clutched bundles of incomprehensible belongings like a final weight that kept them on the ground. No lamenting anywhere, no tears. Without a word they stepped off and let themselves be led away. Only a small ugly dog leapt cheerfully off its mistress's lap and ran yapping to the nearest tree.The people giving them shelter tried to be just as quiet and sparing in words. It must be said that the population's readiness to help was genuine beyond expectation. And not just near the city, but even further away. Not until reaching southern Germany did the refugees encounter open reluctance; at least that was the general rumor. But it may be that the people of Hamburg just didn't understand the different way of life there. I infer this from the sarcastic bitterness with which those who returned ridiculed the food, the living conditions, and the alien faith of the southerners.
But even where we were, the good relations changed in the course of a week. I am not speaking of cases where the refugees encroached on their hosts or made outrageous demands. There were those, to be sure, but many took this position: We have lost everything, now please give us half of what you have! and laid their hands in their laps. And on the opposite side there were enough people who thought: It's not our fault, so what business is it of ours? And when they gave anything, it was out of fear. This pitiful fact -- that those who were spared felt envied from the beginning -- may very well have lit and then fanned the spark of envy in the refugees. And though this may be hard to believe, a point was reached when the refugees were begrudged the few new things they had received as gifts or as allocations from the State. Or else -- but it is only now that I ask this question -- could there have been a deeper reason? Did those who had been forced to hazard the leap into nothingness become objects of envy because they had already gone through the ordeal that was awaiting everyone else?
There began a time without masks; the familiar disguises dropped off of their own accord, as had occurred to the two pine trees during the night. Greed and fear exposed themselves without shame and suppressed all tender feeling. We all had to recognize during those weeks that the scales we had used for weighing were no longer accurate. Those nearest to us or those whom we called friends either kept complete silence or evaded their duty with a few shabby words about the hard times that made it impossible for them to help. The concept of kinship completely broke down. Ask a hundred people today, regardless of their class and whether they suffered losses or not, ninety-nine will answer with a dismissive grimace: Better a stranger than a relative! It is a fact, so let it be stated as such, without bitterness and without drawing hasty conclusions. Instead, let us hold to the heartening experience of seeing those who had been most distant, sometimes the most fleeting acquaintances, or business associates, step into the breach without hesitation and with such kindness that one is shamed into asking oneself whether one would have done the same if the situation were reversed.
But even the most generous hand can become tired of giving, and it is even more difficult to learn to let oneself be the recipient of gifts and to receive, always and only to receive, without thereby losing one's freedom. But does this sufficiently explain why such discord arose so quickly? No, I believe, rather, that people expected something entirely different of each other, something of which they were not capable. Who can blame the helpers for being disappointed when they had to realize that what they had offered -- shelter, food, and clothing -- basically didn't make any difference at all? Perhaps something like pleasure flitted across the recipients' faces, but it didn't linger. They would walk through the strange rooms, touch an object, hold it, and look at it absently. The host would follow them with his eyes and expect some statement like: We, too, once had something like this -- and perhaps then he would have given it to them. But instead, the stranger would put it aside, and the unspoken question would fill the room: What is the use of still having such things? It would have been easier to assuage loud lamentation. It is very probable that such laments were expected, or at least a forced self-composure indicative of suppressed tears. Those who were known to have experienced unimaginably frightful hours, who had run through fire with their clothes burning, stumbling over charred corpses; before whose eyes and in whose arms children had suffocated; who had seen their houses collapsing right after their father or husband had gone back inside to save something or other; all those who had spent months hoping for news from the missing and who at the very least had lost all their possessions in a matter of minutes -- why didn't they cry and lament? And why this indifferent tone of voice when they spoke of what they had left behind, their dispassionate manner of talking, as if telling about a terrible event from prehistoric times that would be impossible today, that is almost forgotten except for the shockwaves that still faintly agitate our dreams? And then this muffled voice, impervious to daylight, and so timid, the way one speaks at night, outside, when one doesn't know where there might be an ear secretly listening.
And what did the victims expect when they seemed to accept all the good that was done to them merely to please the givers? The instinct of the helpers rebelled; not only because their gift was robbed of its value, but because they themselves were robbed of all security and began to have doubts about their own possessions.
I now dare to give an answer to that question. We expected someone to call out to us: Wake up! It was just a bad dream! But we couldn't ask for that, the nightmare closed our mouths to the point of suffocation. And how could anyone have awakened us?
I have no idea what you are trying to say, and I wish you would say it in plainer language.
If you mean only to say that desperate people who have lost everything very quickly become dangerous people, then you don't need eloquence. You can just turn on the TV.
aaa-ight, I give it up. I'm going to give up trying to say something that might resonate with everyone, certainly give up reading anything written in Europe except maybe the London Times, and go make myself useful in a physical sense. Celebrim, why don't you ask for your money back?
celebrim,
Keep watching your television. I suspect it will come to you, in time, as events continue to unfold.
Some things are best transmitted by related experience.
The instinct of the helpers rebelled; not only because their gift was robbed of its value, but because they themselves were robbed of all security and began to have doubts about their own possessions.
I think you can hear that instinct starting to kick in all over the Gulf area.
Nossack is describing Germans helping Germans who were much like themselves - products of the same background and the same homogenous culture (Bavaria aside).
Face it, most of the people left behind in New Orleans, and now desperately in need of help, are the black urban underclass that the rest of society regards variously with fear, loathing, pity, guilt - anything but fellowship. Social policies (left and right) and racial politics (left and right) have assured them perpetual poverty, dependence, and separation in a kind of Apartheid by Mutual Consent.
It's easy to write a check, but not so easy for people in Texas and surrounding areas to take an uprooted inner city (an unprecendented thing) into their homes as Nossack describes. I'm not saying they won't do it, but it involves a confrontation that is hard to imagine.
Germany should be studied what the hell was wrong with those people!!
Callimachus, don't give it up. FWIW it did resonate with me. Well worth sharing. Take courage from Glen:
Wherein Glen demonstrates how to make contact with the third rail: lustily, with both hands... ;)
"Apartheid by Mutual Consent" is a term I find challenging because it must be recognized that there is dysfunction in the community which Glen references. Nonetheless I'm disinclined to grant "Mutual Consent" claim on the totality of the narrative. Or, in plain English: IMHO while they had choices, and opportunities, they weren't exactly what the rest of us had. Or even close enough for us to be content with as a society.
Oh, and Jessica... are you a 'bot?
Thanks, Callimachus, resonance and depth give some dimensions lacking us when we're watching brazen acts in all directions, hearing of and watching unthinkable acts.
12 nations (including the Dominican Republic and Germany) are offering assistance to the US.
Jessica (#5): From 1946 right into the 1960s, large segments of scholarship in the free world, across multiple disciplines, were devoted to that very question.
for one of the more famous, well known, and chilling examples, Google "Stanley Milgram."
"Keep watching your television. I suspect it will come to you, in time, as events continue to unfold.
Some things are best transmitted by related experience."
Joe: Now that is just plain stupid. I haven't been able to watch television much for the past few days because my power was out for the first 4 days after Katrina. But, I didn't really need to watch the television for any of this to come to me, because I could watch and hear trees exploding in real time stereo around me. And I don't need resonating lectures about refugees to understand the situation, because I'm living in a city with 150,000 of them, some of which are housed in my place of business and some of which are housed in my apartment complex, and some of which are housed in my church, and I'm told that we should expect the refugee population to climb as high as 400,000. You don't have to tell me what this means, I' m already arranging to send my wife and kids out of town because I know what it means.
Now, who the hell is this lecture supposed to resonate with if it doesn't resonate with me? I'm in the related experience. If it's resonating with you, who aren't, maybe then its not me who isn't getting it.
I swear I hate modern literature theory. People read this stuff from thier ivory tower, and they say to themselves, "Ahh.. now I understand what it is like. Now, I empathize with the victim, the underclass, the minority. Now, I now what it is like to X." BS. Ask yourself, who the bloody hell actually talks like that? I don't even talk like that, and I'm a bombast! You aren't reading what he experienced. You are reading what he thought about what he experienced, massaged in such a way that the author thought it might be resonating to his audience. It's third thought gobbly-gook filtered through the conventions of literature and loaded with weighty metaphors for the sake of seeming deep and causing intellectuals in thier ivory towers to go, 'hmmm', so I'm sorry that I don't find it very 'resonating' here at ground level. Instead I find it the rather ridiculous ruminations of some limp wristed effete who can't summon muscular language suitable to the situation, and so writes about the horrors of war as one might relate an essay on Etruscan art at a cocktail party.
Damn it Joe, now you got me pissed.
My neighbor's mother and father and two nephews are with her in her two bedroom apartment. They are from the ninth ward, and there house is currently in 12 feet of water. She didn't have power for 4 days, and her two small children and everyone else stayed in the Lousiana heat (95 degrees with humidity at around 85%). She would have lost power for just 3 days, except some idiot with a generator miswired it and blew the stick fuse on the transformer, and the folks at Entergy understandably have better things to do than just push the fuses back together when people miswire thier generators. Where you there when she was screaming into the phone about how she couldn't take another day of this head, and she needed power for her kids, even though nothing but a recorded message was listening at the other end? Ask her whether this 'resonates'.
I've got two premature infants, my first. Did you listen to them scream in the 90 degree heat unable to do much of anything about it? Where you trying to sterlize bottles without power? Why are you sitting there high and mighty and telling me what should and shouldn't 'resonate' right now?
I'll be perfectly frank. I consider grasping for the easy analogy to be a sign of an infintile intellect. I have no idea what it was like to survive Dresden or Hamburg, and I sure as hell don't think I'll understand it by reading 'Der Untergang' or 'Slaughterhouse 5'. I also don't think that even if I did understand what it was like to survive Dresden or Hamburg, that I'd have any way of understanding what's going on in Louisiana right now, much less what my neighbor is going through, much less what those people still down in New Orleans are going through.
And if I was trying to get you to understand, I sure as hell wouldn't be quoting some overly wordy german fop.
I still put that reflex down to an irrational responce due to an inability to grasp the scale of what is going on.
Right about now, I wish I had Kim Du Toit's rhetorical bluntness, so I could kick your pansy ass.
celebrim,
You said you didn't get it. I replied that if you kept your eyes open for the next little while, you probably would.
Times change, technology changes, but humanity doesn't change very much. Patterns don't repeat exactly, but they do rhyme.
Callimachus shared a set of exeriences from human beings in a different disaster situation, in a different time, but with enough similarities to make it thought provoking for some. It offers zero comfort or help to you in your situation, and it wasn't meant to.
It may, however, offer food for thought to folks trying to figure out what the hell to do with about 1 million refugees, especially if these kinds of dynamics begin to repeat. See Glenn Wishard in comment #4.
Sorry you're in a tough spot and bent out of shape. It sucks. There's nothing Callimachus or myself can do about that in the immediate term.
What Callimachus did here is still a service, however. Which you are completely free to disagree with and not to like. It's a free country.
"You said you didn't get it. I replied that if you kept your eyes open for the next little while, you probably would."
BS. Now you are lying to yourself. You said if I kept watching television I'd get it.
To which I still say, "BS. You can't get it watching television or reading books about fleeing Hamburg written by some idiot that doesn't understand that narrative is often better, plainer, and clearer than abstraction because reality often can't be tied up in neat rhetorical packages." If I read one more sentence by this guy about what he thought about what he felt was happening, rather than what happened I think I'll toss my breakfast. Enough with the quotations. Tell me what you know, and plainly.
"Times change, technology changes, but humanity doesn't change very much."
Do you realize how trite you are being?
"Patterns don't repeat exactly, but they do rhyme."
I guess not.
"Callimachus shared a set of exeriences from human beings in a different disaster situation, in a different time, but with enough similarities to make it thought provoking for some."
I know what he did. But you haven't addressed the principle complaint. If the analogy he means to find thought provoking doesn't resonate with anyone actually in the situation, exactly what sort of understanding does he actually have? I would argue that it is a pretty damn shallow one, if his best thoughts leap to some remote analogy written by a German writer that makes the worst part of a refugee crisis sound like teenage angst.
"It offers zero comfort or help to you in your situation, and it wasn't meant to."
Good grief, I didn't think it was supposed to. I don't want comfort or help or I would have whined about my situation at greater length sooner and in more detail. I only mentioned it to point out how silly it was for you to be telling me that I don't get it, but that you presumably do.
"It may, however, offer food for thought to folks trying to figure out what the hell to do with about 1 million refugees, especially if these kinds of dynamics begin to repeat."
If? Begin? Begin??? For the love of God... which is it? Is this a refugee crisis analogous to past refugee crises or not? You are watching your little TV (or more like large TV) in the air conditioning and you think a refugee crisis may play itself out? Do you have to reach to Nossack in order to talk about the here and now? That would be like reaching to St. Augustine to try to get people understand what it was like to grow up in rural Arkansas. It's feeble and academic, and it shows that you probably don't get what it was like to grow up in rural Arkansas very well, even if you can make the analogy and quote the teacher about there being nothing new under the sun. What are you really demonstrating that you know, other than your classroom education?
"What Callimachus did here is still a service, however. Which you are completely free to disagree with and not to like. It's a free country."
More trite homilies, I see. Well, then what I'm doing is a service. You are completely free to disagree with me or not as you like. It's a free country.
lewy14: IMHO while they had choices, and opportunities, they weren't exactly what the rest of us had.
That's true. There was a choice, but politicians and demagogues (black and white, left and right) made it for them.
The culture of the black underclass is Christianity, and its hostile subculture is Crime. Our so-called "majority culture" ignores or derides the first and passively encourages the second.
I recently saw a documentary about the old "Blacksploitation" films, where they talked sort of dismissively about the NAACP's opposition to films about pimps and drug dealers. The NAACP was promoting an entirely different "narrative" in film, that of the great Sidney Portier.
Well, the NAACP definitely lost that fight. Even though In The Heat of the Night was better than all the Blacksploitation films put together. The victorious "narrative" of black urban life is rap music, gangsterism, and helpless rage. Any black who thinks otherwise is considered a fool or a traitor. Which makes the promoters of black dependency very happy, and a lot of white people very rich. Jan Christian Smuts himself couldn't have done a better job.
Soory, celebrim, the magical panopticon flux capacitator that shows the geographic location of all blog commenters on my Command Post's screen, and lets me see into the homes of all Winds blog readers so I know if their TV is working, isn't quite up to snuff today. We'll get right on it.
You're obvously torqued, and it isn't really about me, so I'm letting a lot of stuff pass. Bottom Line: You didn't like the post. I did - and I appreciate Callimachus' effort to bring this to folks because he thought it was meaningful. That takes work. Though surely it's the least we can expect, given how richly we pay him for his services.
You don't think this post has any relevance to your personal situation. I don't think it does either, in the immediate term. And I hope it doesn't in the longer term, either.
Meanwhile, good luck, and hang on. Those helicopters you're starting to hear (based on your other comments in other posts) are just a start.
"Meanwhile, good luck, and hang on. Those helicopters you're starting to hear (based on your other comments in other posts) are just a start."
Ahh, yes - the expertise of the remote. I'm not 'starting' to hear anything. I started to hear the helicopters last Friday, as the post you are referring to should have made clear. Anyway, thinks for your good wishes.
As for Calimachus's posts, it's pretty easy to track my responce to it. The initial post about the emotion attached to losing possessions went by almost without comment. It seemed sort of out of left field, but hey, maybe it floated someone's boat. My only comment was to point out how ridiculous it was to jump into a discussion of what constitutes just war from a post about a natural disaster. If I was critical of the initial post in any fashion, it was that the author might should have realized from the start that making analogies between WWII and a natural disaster would for most readers simply muddy the waters rather than shed any revealing light on the situation.
I, like the author whose invented language I take my psuedonym from, don't feel drawing an analogy is worth much of a damn for clarifying anything unless it has a one to one and onto relationship with the thing it stands for, precisely because instead of talking about the thing people end up discussing whether or not this thing is a good fit for the other thing, or start extending the analogy into realms that it doesn't apply. YMMV, but one of the lessons I've learned over the years of writing on the internet is that this is a particularly sage observation when it comes to posting in these sorts of forums, simply because of the number and diversity of readers you have.
But, be as that may, I didn't have much of a reaction to his topic one way or the other.
Then, we got the second post in which the author displayed his frustration that people just didn't 'get it', which seemed to me both pretentious and like beating a dead horse and which was even less clear than the first. Did you consider that maybe I did get it, and it was you that did not? What do you know about my history anyway? So I asked him to put in concrete terms what he was wanting to say, something that neither he nor you seem inclined to do. Instead, I get vague patronizations about how I might come to understand later, as if you were better positioned to see what was going on than I am; or, as if you were the one living as a refugee or you were the one living amongst refugees and I were somehow a blind observer unable to draw my own inferences.
Finally, now we have you claiming to be an expert on me, and telling me how much better you understand me than I myself do. After the failure of your assumption that I was some remote and uninformed witness to events, have you ever stopped to reconsider any of your other assumptions? Would you possibly consider that maybe I'm critical of this because I've got valid reasons for thinking that this doesn't really convey the problem to the readers well, or for that matter even to the author? Or, have you considered that maybe I am indeed 'torqued' about you?
I'm sorry that you are starved for information at the moment and are reduced to talking about German novelists relating their experiences as one intellectual to another. I wish I could help you, but no one has a good sense of exactly what is going on at the moment. But somehow I doubt that my neighbors would put thier feelings in terms of 'Untergang', and I sure as hell know that they don't think like German novelists and the experience of the now doesn't feel like a German novel; but, if my neighbors do get a chance to put thier feelings into words, I'll let you know what they say.
I took it as more of glimpse into human nature. No analogy is perfect, but there are people opening their homes to refugees. This excerpt at least jumpstarts the thinking about how these people might interact over time. I thought it was interesting.
Perhaps Callimachus didn't have a point other than it seems to have some resonance. Everything that followed in the comments is the usual misunderstandings that seem peculiar to electronic text communcations. Sigh.
Celebrim, both my mother and my father went to LSU on scholarship that Huey Long originated for valedictorians of LA high schools. Since I learned that, I have learned that those scholarships were only attained if you were white in color.
My mom was a resettlement agent in the New Orleans area. Desperate people from the city were resettled in the rural areas, given the training to enable them to live on otherwise unutilized land.
My father ran a CCC camp in Tennessee after he was let go on Cloverley Plantation in the area south of NO. They hired LSU agronomical graduates, and used their recent training, then replaced them with newer graduates with more up-to-date knowledge.
That is a bit of background for you. Near me there are resettled people from NO. I have taken them clothes, shoes and toiletries, and I will be working with the MD telethon this weekend which will be contributing.
I do think resonance and depth is gained from looking to those who are trying, and succeeding and failing, to voice the many sufferings from the many disparate people who are suffering.
My aunt who is the only remaining of my father's siblings lost her assisted living facility in Metairie. All of her means are invested it it. Sure, we will help her out. But it's a problem for a 90 year old who likes what she's lost, doesn't know where she's going.
To your babies, I say, forgive us when we fail you, love us when you can.
Picture and prose. I am not one of those who understand much of that. I am and have been raised to be self contained, sufficient and proud of it.
Yet, in my long life I have been both on the giving and the recieving ends due to various circumstances.
From such a small thing as fixing an older persons flat tire on the side of the road to accepting a ride when I was stupid enough to run out of gas.
But those are small fleeting things. No muss, no fuss.
But at other times, I have been soaked and saturated in events that have shaken and stupefied my very soul.
I have came away (crawled, ran away or snuck away) from much, much worse and despiciable events. Such as has been discussed here.
The main reaction of most,including me is to try to either justify, excuse or forget the events.
Most never include the possibility of learning or having a personal benifit or gaining an advantage from the events. That seems too selfish or too unthinkable..
Yet, this is how humans and humankind evolve and have the ability to better themselves or help others.
Does that mean that when you have the chance you will become your brothers keeper? Will you put someone else who is a total stranger before yourslf? Will you be dismayed or disappointed or angry when the response is not what you expected or wanted.
Will you recognize the diffence between someone who needs and wants help and is gratful and not able to express it because of their shame. Will you become angered because you recognize someone who is used to always recieving and always wanting, without any shame, and if they don't get it blaming you and everyone else?
I'm tempted to say, you won't know, and will never understand unless and only if..you have been in both places, the one recieving or the one giving.
Which one, which was the hardest?
Papa Ray
West Texas
USA
I hope these comments aren't too far afield:
Callimachus mentions the collective guilt of the German people. Since my paternal grandmother was German, I have a certain interest in the subject.
The atheist, Arno Schmidt, one of the most eminent German writers of the 20th century, would attribute the Nazi madness to the actions of what he called Leviathan, the Creator of evil.
Interestingly, our very own Dave Winer is the great nephew of Arno Schmidt. Winer has written passionately and eloquently in his Scripting News about anti-semitism and his identity as a Jew. It seems that in the interest of full disclosure, he might have mentioned in that context that he is one quarter German. His case would be even more poignant if he had dealt with that twist.
Allen Ginsberg is not the only Jew who has pointed out the similarity between the Nazi ideal of "Aryan" racial superiority and the
Judaic dogma of the Jews being Yaweh's "Chosen Ones".
On a more jocular note, Brian Lennon's reference to Arno Schmidt's "hyperrealism- the meticulous moment-by-moment capture and transmission of experience", sounds like the inevitable movement of Winer's transmissions to near ubiquity.