Dialog International

Review: After the Reich by Giles MacDonogh

Americans have a very benign view of the postwar occupation of Germany. In the conventional narrative, the US liberated the German people from Nazi tyranny, schooled them in Western-style democracy, brought them market-driven prosperity, and protected them from the evil Soviet empire.  But the historical truth is rather different, especially for the period from the Armistice in 1945 to the Berlin Airlift in 1948.  This is the period covered in Giles MacDonogh's book After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation.  With startling detail, MacDonogh tells a story of rape, ethnic cleansing, pillage, starvation and slavery that resulted in an estimated 3 million German deaths (1 million of which were POWs) after Germany surrendered. Of the two million civilians who perished, the vast majority were women, children and elderly Germans who fell victim to suicide, hunger, disease and mass murder.

The first chapters of the After the Reich are perhaps the most gruesome, since MacDonogh describes the fate of the women and girls in the Soviet occupied territories.  Hardly any - even as young as 8-years old or as old as 80 - escaped being brutally raped, sometimes as many as 25 times - 25 times a day.  This led to a wave of suicides, atrocious injuries of young girls, terrible venereal disease (when there were no antibiotics available) and pregnancies. Nor were the Russians entirely alone in their enthusiasm for rape: On April 17-18, 1945, French soldiers raped at least 600 women in the small Black Forest town of Freudenstadt, before going on to Stuttgart where they raped another 3,000 women and eight men.  American forces prohibited rape, but there were more than 600 courts-marshal involving rape charges against American soldiers.  Only the Brits come off better, since they preferred to barter cigarettes and chocolate for sex with the defeated enemy.

Then MacDonogh tells the largely untold story of the slaughter of more than 250,000 Sudeten Germans by Czech nationalists, as well as similar stories of ethnic cleansing in Poland, Silesia, and East Prussia - a predictable outcome from the Yalta Conference.  This sad chapter of postwar history deserves a great deal more study, and MacDonogh deserves much credit for bringing to the attention of American readers.

Elfriede Jelinek on Josef Fritzl

Last week there was some lively discussion around the post concerning the "Monster of Amstetten (Austria)" who fathered seven children with his own daughter.  It was only a matter of time before the Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek - the notorious Nestverschmutzerin of Austria - would weigh in on this horrible tragedy.  After all, everything she has written points to the possibility - or necessity - of something like this happening. Well, Elfriede has delivered with an essay on her Web site entitled Im Verlassenen (In the Abandoned - under Aktuelles on the site menu). The essay is a miniature masterpiece of invective against her countrymen (emphasis on men).

I can't think of any writer more difficult (impossible) to translate than Elfriede Jelinek: the myriad of puns, allusions to Rilke, Nazis and the Catholic Church, high sarcasm etc... only works in German. Besides, all quotations of her texts are strictly forbidden, as per the warning on her home page: Sämtliche         hier wiedergegebenen Texte sind urheberrechtlich geschützt und dürfen         ohne ausdrückliche Erlaubnis in keiner Form wiedergegeben oder zitiert         werden. ( "All texts here are protected by copyright and should not be reproduced or quoted in any form without permission"), However, the brave souls at Sign and Sight have translated and published a snippet, which I reproduce here:

"The performance by this grandfather-god-the-father who has constructed an idyll which he has artlessly built in the form of a female body, with its many niches and passages, where you can't look in at everything from everywhere, it is not art to use something as the female body, even if you don't have one, there are blow-up sex dolls, hollowed out apples, animals etc., but it is an art to build spaces as a woman might, and decorate them with pretty patterns, a temple, only built for the lust of the father."

Already the first sentence is classic, and sets the tone for the whole essay: Österreich         ist eine kleine Welt, in der die große ihre Probe hält. (Austria is a little world where the big world holds its rehearsals.)

Anyway, if you enjoy kind of thing and are hooked on Elfriede's dense style like I am, you can also read for free on her Web site a brand new novel she just finished:  Neid (Envy).  I will not undertake to read this anytime soon, since the novel is estimated to be 900 pages, and I can only read a few pages of Jelinek in one sitting before getting exhausted.  On the other hand, she has threatened to remove Neid from her site whenever she wants, so procrastination could be risky. Her German publisher - Rowohlt Verlag - insists the novel will never appear in a print edition.

A New Critical Edition of Mein Kampf?

Under an antiquated law, it is illegal to print Mein Kampf in Germany.  After the war, the Allied Forces granted the copyright of the book to the Bavarian Finance Ministry, which has prevented the printing of the book.  Now, of course, this looks silly, since any German kid can download the entire Mein Kampf in multiple languages on his home computer. 

Now The Documentation Center at the former Nazi party grounds in Nuremberg has appealed to the State of Bavaria for permission to print an annotated edition of Hitler's book. The Munich Institute of Contemporary History would likely be commissioned to publish the volume, which could take several years to complete. Time is of the essence, since the copyright expires in 2015, after which anyone - including right-wing extremist organizations - could print the book.  Thus far, Bavarian state minister Guenther Beckstein has signaled he will NOT grant permission for a new critical edition of Mein Kampf.  It is just too dangerous in view of the resurgent neo-Nazi groups, especially in the eastern German states.

Beckstein's attitude doesn't sit well with Matthias Brodkorb, a blogger writing on the anti-Nazi blog Störungsmelder:  "Ich möchte nicht durch Günther Beckstein vor Adolf Hitler beschützt werden." (I don't want Guenther Beckstein to protect me from Adolf Hitler.) In his blog post, Brodkorb tells the story of how a student at his high school brought in a leather-bound edition of Mein Kampf (probably something his grandparents had on their bookshelves). The students were thrilled with appearance of this taboo object in their classroom.

Was würde eigentlich passieren, wenn Sie Hitler im Buchhandel kaufen könnten? Tja, dann wäre es vorbei mit diesem Reiz des ja nur angeblich Verbotenen. (What would happen if they could buy Hitler in any bookstore? Well, then the thrill of the "forbidden" would vanish.)

Even though Beckstein is wrong in his attempt to suppress Mein Kampf, I can find some sympathy for his point of view.  The events on May 1 in Hamburg show that neo-Nazi violence is a real threat. The neo-Nazi Web site Altermedia is jubilant about the "civil war-like conditions" in Hamburg, has photos of neo-Nazis attacking journalists.  Would these thugs be influenced one way or another by a critical edition of Mein Kampf? Sadly, no.  There are plenty of outlets for unfiltered fascist propaganda.

Review: Robert Neumann's Die Kinder von Wien

My last post on the story from Austria of Josef F. who kept his own daughter hidden in his cellar along with the children he fathered with her has inspired me to write about the novel DIe Kinder von Wien (The Children of Vienna) about six children living in a bombed-out cellar in postwar Vienna.

The good people at Eichborn Verlag in Frankfurt have reissued this important document of the postwar era and were kind enough to send me a review copy. DIe Kinder von Wien is actually Robert Neumann's own 1974 translation of the original book in English: The Children of Vienna was published by Neumann in London in 1946.  I have been unsuccessful in locating a copy of the original English novel, but hopefully this reissue by Eichborn and renewed interest in Neumann will lead to a new edition.

It was Heinrich Böll who created the genre of Trümmerliteratur (literally Rubble Literature) - literature about the shattered lives and shattered illusions in the immediate postwar period, as Germany lay in ruins.  Die Kinder von Wien is a true example of Rubble Literature: the entire novel takes place in a ruined cellar, its entrance blocked by pile of rubble from the firebombing of Vienna.  But the novel is also one of the few contemporary works of fiction to deal directly with the occupation: American and Soviet military personnel make appearances. (The best Occupation Novel in German is Wolfgang Koeppen's  Tauben im Gras  which deals with the American occupation of Munich).

Murat Kurnaz on US Public Radio

National Public Radio's call-in program Talk of the Nation had an interview with Murat Kurnaz about his new book Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo. Kurnaz was interviewed by telephone from a studio in Bremen, since he is not permitted to travel to the country that tortured him and held him captive for five years without charges. You can listen to the interview and read an excerpt from his book here.

Kurnaz did a reasonably good job in the interview, although at times he had difficulty with English.  Most of the callers were respectful, and some even apologized for the actions of their government.  But of course there were others who had a different perspective.  One caller stated he "didn't believe one word"  of Murat and his book.  The whole story was fabricated to slam the United States and its struggle against "Islamofascism".  Actually, the caller seemed to imply that Kurnaz was never really at Guantanamo at all!

You can read similar comments on the Talk of the Nation Blog. One commenter - Donna Largent - also rejects Kurnaz's story, and condemns NPR for being a mouthpiece of anti-American propaganda:

We are fighting a heinous war and the enemy is bloodthirsty and does all kinds of gross things like beheading with dull blades. Why is it that almost every time I turn my radio to your shows, you are knocking our wonderful country? If we are so bad, why don't you all at our indicting public radio organization find other places to live? I am tired of hearing you constantly slam the United States.

This is the typical response of the Authoritarian Right in the US when it is confronted with inconvenient facts: attack the patriotism of the messenger and insist that it is nothing but a conspiracy of lies.

UPDATE: In the radio interview and in his book Kurnaz mentions that he personally witnessed the deaths of detainees.  For this he is accused of lying, for the US does not kill prisoners - even if they are only "enemy combatants" and not subject to the protections of the Geneva Conventions (according to the Bush administration).  I would refer those doubters to this autopsy report by the Armed Forces Medical Examiner (pdf)  about an "Iraqi Detainee who died while in US custody" (as written in the report itself).  This detainee - as per the report - was hung by his wrists (like Kurnaz), gagged, and then brutally beaten.  All of his ribs were fractured.

An unfortunate aberration by a few bad apples? There are 108 of such autopsy reports - that we know of so far...

Book Review: Five Years of My Life by Murat Kurnaz

Historians will look back on President Bush's War on Terror and marvel at how quickly the basic principles and values of America were violated and ignored. Many of the legal abuses have been documented by a few fearless journalists, some courageous and dedicated lawyers, and a handful of military officers who were angry and brave enough to blow the whistle on what they had heard and seen. But there are hardly any documents from the inside of the CIA Black Sites or the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay.  This week the book by the Turkish-German national Murat Kurnaz, who spent five years in Guantanamo, was released in the United States.  Five Years of My Life is the American translation of Fünf Jahre meines Lebens which was published in Germany last spring.

Americans were introduced to Murat Kurnaz this week on a 60 Minutes report.  Many were shocked by his story, even though there had been reports of Kurnaz in the US press for several years leading up to his release in August 2006. But hardly anyone cared.  After all, the Bush administration had been telling Americans that the most dangerous terrorists were being held at Guantanamo, so Kurnaz must be one of them.  And even today, reading the right-wing press reports and blog posts about Murat Kurnaz, many Americans dismiss the whole story as a giant fabrication: At best, they say,  it was an honest mistake by the US government. At worst, Kurnaz was an Islamist who deserved what happened to him. So the terrible story told in this book was not an aberration.  It will happen over and over again, and is happening now as you read this.

Lenten Reading: Pope Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth

I am very late to the table in commenting on this book, which was published last spring and is now an astonishing bestseller in Germany: over half a million copies sold in the "land of the empty churches".  Jesus of Nazareth is an elegantly written book - as we have have come to expect from Benedict/Ratzinger - which is at once eminently readable and intellectually challenging. (It would be nice to think that all of the people who bought the book actually read it, but I wonder.) It is a book that will delight not just Catholics (I am not Catholic) but any Christian, or anyone interested in understanding the Christian faith and the meaning of the Gospels.

In his preface, Benedict writes that his book "is in no way exercise of the magisterium, but is solely an expression of my personal search ... Everyone is free, then, to contradict me."  I will take him at his word, even though I note that any critics among the 1000 reader reviews on Amazon.com have been excoriated as hostile detractors of the Holy Father or even blasphemers.

The Problem with Local School Control

In her new book - The Age of American Unreason - Susan Jacoby grapples with the many causes of ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism in America.  I intend to write a complete review once i finish the book, but one issue she hits upon is the local control of schools in America. This is goes a long way to explaining why American elementary, middle, and high schools are inferior to schools in Europe:

“In Europe,the subject matter of science and history lessons taught to children in all publicly supported schools has always been determined by highly educated employees of central education ministries. In America the image of an educated elite laying down national guidelines for schools was and is a bête noire for those who consider local control of education a right almost as sacred as any of the rights enumerated in the Constitution.”

The result in America is drastically uneven quality and standards.  Then there are school boards who insist on introducing Creationism and Intelligence Design into the science curriculum. Local control is also financially inefficient: I live in a very poor, rural state - Maine - which has 300 school districts.  This means 300 school boards, three hundred district superintendents with the expensive bureaucracy, 300 school curricula and 300 transportation systems.  We are bankrupting ourselves without providing any discernible benefit to our school children.

Matt Miller discusses the issue in greater detail in his article First Kill All the School Boards.  Miller reminds us that the father of American public education, Horace Mann, was greatly influenced by his observations of the Prussian school system:

As Horace Mann sat in a Leipzig classroom in the summer of 1843, it was the entire Prussian system of schools that impressed him.[...]Mann also admired Prussia’s rigorous national curriculum and tests. The results spoke for themselves: illiteracy had been vanquished. To be sure, Prussian schools sought to create obedient subjects of the kaiser—hardly Mann’s aim. Yet the lessons were undeniable, and Mann returned home determined to share what he had seen. In the seventh of his legendary “Annual Reports” on education to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, he touted the benefits of a national system and cautioned against the “calamities which result … from leaving this most important of all the functions of a government to chance.”

Today, German education is the responsibility of the individual states.  Local control is limited to the maintenance of the physical school structure and the employment of janitorial and secretarial staff.  Still, the results of the Pisa rankings have exposed some weaknesses in the German system, and have renewed calls for more federal control on standards and the quality of teaching.

Setting national standards, Miller concludes in his article, does not eliminate the need for local involvement:

Research in 46 countries by Ludger Woessmann of the University of Munich has shown that setting clear external standards while granting real discretion to schools in how to meet them is the most effective way to run a system. We need to give schools one set of national expectations, free educators and parents to collaborate locally in whatever ways work, and get everything else out of the way.

The Volga Germans of the Southern Plains

I just finished Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time, which won the National Book Award.  Egan writes about one of the most difficult periods in 20th century America: the Dustbowl (Staubschüssel) of the Great Depression. Egan tells the stories of different families who settled in the southern plains, prospered from wheat farming, but then lost everything during the prolonged drought and dust storms during the mid-1930s.

One of the groups that Egan follows is the Volga Germans, descendants of the 25,000 Germans who in 1763 settled Russia's Volga River Valley at the invitation of Catherine the Great.  There they cultivated rye, wheat and flax.  Fiercely pacifistic, many emigrated to America in the late 19th century after Czar Alexander II threatened them with conscription and tried to force them to speak Russian.

Egan writes:

"They were tough-minded pacifists, a migratory people whose defining characteristics was draft-dodging. The German Mennonites from the near the Black Sea, conscientious objectors from the the beginning, certainly were opposed to war on principle.  But many of the other Germans from Russia would kill without flinching, showing their warrior skills in American uniforms when they shot their own former countrymen during the two world wars in the twentieth century.  What thy would not do is fight for the Russian czar or - worse - fight for the Bolsheviks."

The Volga Germans finally arrived in Oklahoma in the first decade of the 20th century.  They brought with them the techniques of dry farming, which would prove invaluable in the arid new land:

"On this bewhiskered and blackened land, the Volga Germans would try to recreate what they had in Russia.  Te second day in Shattuck, a blizzard hit Oklahoma. It snowed for two days.  The Germans camped near the train station but their animals strayed into the storm.  They spent the next week collecting the beasts, but some died in the chill, with no grass to eat. Shopkeepers in Shattuck refused to sell to the Germans; others tried to pass an ordinance prohibiting the language from being spoken in the city limits.  It seem odd to the Anglo ranchers that these singing, beer-making, strangely dressed people hurried about their business as if predestined to the southern plains."

The Volga Germans would prosper as farmers on the south plains for two decades.  But their dreams were blown away in the "dusters" of the Dust Bowl;  like everyone else, they were ruined and scattered to the four winds.  Still, there are pockets of Volga German descendants to be found in the remaining small towns in Kansas and southeastern Colorado.

Their story is just one of the many stories of suffering and survival Egan tells in his wonderful book.

The Silent Woman

Today marks the 45th anniversary of the death of German-American poet Sylvia Plath's  in London at the age of 31.  Her poetry and the circumstances of her suicide continue to fascinate.  Critic A.N. Wilson has fallen under her spell:

"Today is the 45th anniversary of Sylvia Plath's terrible death, when she tucked up her children with bread and milk, went into the kitchen of her small flat, placed a cloth inside the gas oven, upon which she laid her head, and went to sleep.

Her most terrible poem is Daddy ("A man in black with a Meinkampf look"), which ends "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through", and which sees the only way out of her psychological torments as self-destruction.

It became the anthem of doomed 1960s feminists ("Every woman adores a Fascist,/The boot in the face, the brute"…). But Plath herself wasn't especially feminist.

To meet, as the many biographies reveal, she seemed like a typical young American housewife, the girl in a deodorant or detergent ad. The discrepancy between her manner and her poems is shocking: as if Lucille Ball had been cast as Medea."

To stay abreast of the "Sylvia Plath industry" - which shows no sign of recession - I recommend author Peter Steinberg's blog Sylvia Plath Info.  German readers have ample resources for accessing translations of Sylvia Plath and learning about her short life. The Sylvia Plath Page of Anja Beckmann in Ulm appears to be dormant, but she has some good links.  Poet Erich Fried's translation of Ariel is still in print by Suhrkamp Verlag, now in its 15th edition. Also indispensible is Sylvia Plath's only novel Die Glasglocke (The Bell Jar) , her Tagebücher (Journals) - "edited" (censored) by her husband, poet Ted Hughes - and Briefe nach Hause (Letters Home). There is one biography of Plath in German - So leicht verletzbar unser Herz - which I haven't read.  The best biography, by poet Anne Stevenson, is, thankfully, also translated into German. But the best book about Plath and her poetry, which takes us into to heart of the seduction, is Janet Malcolm's The Silent Woman (Die schweigende Frau).

Most of her poetry has been made available online. You can listen to a haunting recording of Sylvia Plath reading "Daddy" (mentioned above by A.N. Wilson). And for the full effect, visit her grave in Heptonstall, Yorkshire.