editor's note-you can't transfer footnotes to blog postings. I assure you, the paper I handed in contained a-plenty.
Between Lightness and Weight; or, Why Some Historians Ignore Certain Victims of the Nazi Genocide, and Why We Should Stop Doing So.
Natalia Holstein
Remembering our past, carrying it with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds onto its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends.
-Milan Kundera
Only by means of the power to utilize the past for life and to reshape past events into a history once more—does the human being become a human being; but in an excess of history the human being ceases once again, and without that mantle of the ahistorical he would never have begun and would never have dared to being.
-Nietzsche
Reviewed Works:
Omer Bartov, ed., The Holocaust. Origins, Implementation, Aftermath (Routledge: London, New York, 2000)
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).
Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (New York: Harper Collins, 2007)
Raoul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: the Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945 (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).
Hanna Krall, Shielding the Flame: an Intimate conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (New York: Henry & Holt co., 1986)
Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: an Oral History of the Holocaust. The Complete Text of the Film (1985).
(Intro)
Milan Kundera opens the most beautiful twentieth-century novel with a rumination on Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return and the duality of lightness and weight. “Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.” Because history bows to Chronos in his linear form, the actions of man are light. If time were recurrent, on the other hand, “the weight of unbearable responsibility” would burden our every move. To illustrate the point, Kundera argues that history might be viewed differently if actions recurred:
If the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would be less proud of Robespierre. But because they deal with something that will not return, the bloody years of the Revolution have turned into mere words, theories, and discussions, have become lighter than feathers, frightening no one. There is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads.
Philosophy, though, is best appreciated when it influences fiction, not history; philosophy tells Kundera that “history is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow,” but those of us who have benefited from the scholastic outpouring of the “memory boom” in historical writing know this to be false. Robespierre did return to chop off French heads throughout the nineteenth century by way of French memory of his precedent. Memory of historical events gives them weight, and in the historical record, weight bestows legitimacy. Both individual and historical memory contain, necessarily, lightness and weight at different times, and the historian’s job is not to choose between the virtues of either, but to balance the scales.
Through all of Kundera’s adult life, memory of the Holocaust has structured international politics and international notions of human rights, and has given Europe a historical burden that she still struggles to carry. Memory has been a well-studied problem in the wake of the Second World War, after which the intellectual marketplace became saturated with individual remembrances, usually through its surviving victims. When given a public voice, these testimonies reveal the unbearable weight of experience; for those who survived the death camps while others, millions of others, were not so fortunate, telling their stories has indeed been “the heaviest of burdens.” In their voices, we can identify a past that recurs, a past that haunts. These survivors have bequeathed historians a copious record of witness-accounts of the experience of genocide. Historians, in turn, have honored their memories by tirelessly researching the death camps; the moral force of this work, and the fact that Israel has made the Holocaust central to its national identity, has ensured the continuing importance of this moment.
Most of these remembrances and thus the thrust of historical research has centered on the Jewish experience of genocide, and the anti-Semitic motivations of the perpetrators. Identifying weight, however, is the easy part; the historian’s duty is the rather trickier business of plumping the gaps in the historical record. As regards the Holocaust, this task is to be completed in a political minefield in which histories have been appropriated as nation-building, in which victimhood has legitimized otherwise inexcusable aggression, and threats to the premier and perhaps exclusive status of one kind of victim are met with hostility and reflexive defensiveness. Ideally, good historians are slaves to the truth as best it can be recovered, not to the more selective truths illuminated by nationalism. Thus, at risk of offending the Israeli interpretation of the Holocaust, I would like to point to a fundamental way in which it has been misunderstood. Others who suffered under the hatred of the Nazis and the indifference of their neighbors remain in a state of historical lightness. Non-Semitic victims of a genocide predicated on racial hierarchy are being forgotten by history. Since questions of agency and complicity are contingent on the kinds of victims generated by the Third Reich, and the consequent lessons drawn from the Holocaust are based on both considerations, the implications of this singular focus, of the discrepancy between the weight and lightness in the historiography of the genocide, is significant. In this review, I will point to the limitations of conceptualizing the Holocaust as a specifically Jewish story predicated on anti-Semitism by highlighting the story of the Roma and Sinti victims of the Nazis, and speculate what results change if the Gypsies were more readily included in Holocaust scholarship. The victim narrative has bequeathed the legacy of the Second World War its universalizing moral imperative. “Never Again,” it tells us; but as time has shown, this warning only applies to some.
Asking Better Questions (conclusion)
An overview of the trends in the historiography of the Final Solution will demonstrate the difficulty with which the present has been able to conceptualize its relationship to its not-so-distant past, and which classifications might change with a turn away from the anti-Semitic explanations for the Holocaust. The major problems that surround Nazi historiography stem from modes of classification—intentionalism, structuralism, totalitarianism, fascism, modernity, technology, bureaucratic politics, racial-biological thinking, anti-Semitism, German character, and so forth. Each of these trends has produced historical analyses with distinct political benefits or challenges. By focusing on the will of Hitler, intentionalsits were able to put the guilt for the atrocities on his shoulders. By focusing on bureaucratic structure, structuralists were able to weave a narrative of the Third Reich that seemed self-propelling and predestined. Scholars disagree about the centrality of Hitler in orchestrating the Final Solution, or the extent to which it evolved through what might perversely be called practical solutions to structural problems faced by the Nazis as the war unfolded. The latter view is supported by Raoul Hilberg in Perpetrators, Bystanders, Victims, in which his narrative, while underscoring the indispensability of Hitler, interprets the Final Solution as a response to the policies of relocating the Jews being limited with the outbreak of war and the economic strain of maintaining the Ghettos. Similarly, Michael Burleigh writes about the T4 program as germinating from the need to cut costs during war and to alleviate the racial burden on Germany by people in the medical profession.
The scale of the Final Solution demands answers that extend beyond the organizations that implemented it, which gets us into the abstract business of measuring attitudes of “ordinary Germans,” or bystanders. This is the problem that Christopher Browning tries to unravel in Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, in which he shifts the focus from the trained killers of the SS, to a more “ordinary” swath of the population that nonetheless killed brutally. His subjects are middle aged and working class men who were either ineligible for the army or chose to join to avoid the draft—though the extent to which his Germans were actually “ordinary” is debatable. This theme is also Bartov’s in “German soldiers and the holocaust: historiography, research and implications,” in which he debunks the purity of arms myth, just as Burleigh debunked the purity of science idea. Attitudes of bystanders are analyzed in relation to their victims, in hopes that in understanding their motivations we might prevent similar catastrophes.
Often, the complicity of bystanders where it can be traced is attributed to a culture of anti-Semitism; this begs the question: do scholars assume the logic of complicity in sending communists, homosexuals, and Gypsies to concentration camps publicly is self-evident? Though surely not the intention of any one scholar who writes on anti-Semitism, the silence in the historiography can be read to imply even some tacit approval of the desire to at least remove these groups from sight. Anti-Semitism is an insufficient explanation for the atrocities of the Third Reich, and in expanding the definition of victim, we might be able to do away with the totalizing arguments of anti-Semitic culture, in favor of an analysis that includes that factor along with others.
This view is supported by Henry Friedlander, whose essay in Bartov’s compilation, The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath, argues that the emphasis on the history of anti-Semitism to explain an event that hoped to eliminate non-Semitic groups is inadequate. Friedlander submits that the Nazi euthanasia program should be seen as part of the Holocaust because it was carried out by the same motivations; the definition of the Holocaust should therefore be expanded to include all groups of people who were killed under the banner of racial purity, including the handicapped and the Gypsies. Unlike Burleigh’s structural interpretation of T4, Friedlander interprets the euthanasia program as part of the history of genocide, motivated by the need to cleanse Germany of certain racially defined groups. Put differently, the same ideology motivated T4, the murder of Jews, Gypsies, and the handicapped alike, and to the same end. While conceding that anti-Semitism was a major element in Nazi ideology and that Jews were “high on the list of priorities,” Friedman argues that “anti-Semitism was only part of a larger worldview, which divided mankind into worthy and unworthy populations.” Enemies of the race were the “degenerates” and “alien races,” the un-assimilatable Jews and Gypsies. This observation should lead to a richer historiography that moves beyond “The usual interpretation [that] assigns the role of racial victim exclusively to the Jews, and sees anti-Semitism as the only ideological basis for mass murder.”
Friedlander’s was a convincing, well documented, and long-overdue intervention; yet, in his introduction to the piece, the only essay in his volume that strays from the topic of anti-Semitism, Omer Bartov feels the need to criticize it for leaving out an explanation for why the Nazis were especially obsessed with killing Jews, which theoretically elevates its importance above the kind of ideological commitment levied to do away with Gypsies. Friedlander suggests that it might not have been a special obsession, but a project that needed more public defense and justification than the removal of the Gypsies. While it is true that the anti-Semitic programs were legitimized differently, and the Jewish thread was conceived of differently than that posed by the other victims, characterizing these distinctions on a scale of strong or weak obsessions minimizes the contribution of Friedlander’s piece, and indeed the experience of the Gypsies, handicapped, asocial, communist, homosexual, and alcoholic victims. The insistence that the Jewish victims be the center of focus, always, in discussions of the Holocaust is ideological, not scholarly, and has impeded a comprehensive understanding of the Holocaust as a tragedy of human prejudice generally, not just of one sort.
Bartov’s criticism of Henry Friedlander raises the issue of distinguishing between motivations to exterminate, a distinction that is usually absent in most explorations of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, but which elevates the caliber of scholarly work when it is made. In The Years of Extermination, Saul Friedländer focuses exclusively on the Jewish victims of Nazism, though he is careful to qualify this choice: “While all other groups targeted by the Nazi regime (the mentally ill, ‘asocials’ and homosexuals, ‘inferior’ racial groups including Gypsies and Slavs) were essentially passive threats (as long as the Slavs, for example, were not led by the Jews), the Jews were the only group that, since its appearance in history, relentlessly plotted and maneuvered to subdue all of humanity.” In other words, the Nazis viewed the Jews as an active threat and mobilized them as a symbol in a way that was different from their public posturing relating to the other victims. This is a crucial distinction that indeed spells out why anti-Semitism needs to be studied to understand the Nazi state. Few historians, however, bother to make such a necessary point of contrast.
The specifically Jewish experience of genocide should be studied, and indeed can be studied without being subsumed in a general discussion of Nazi crimes. The problem is the un-contextualized focus on the Jewish victims, the tendency to talk about Jews as though they were the only group affected by genocide. This is not only distortion by omission, but affects the entirety of how we understand the Holocaust. We are left with a vision of a perpetrator with a single, explicit hatred that directed action. What we miss by leaving out non-Semitic victims of the Holocaust is the full lesson learned from tragedy. Rather than absorbing more Goldhagen-like arguments into the historiography, we can view the conflict as directed against humanity, not just the humanity of some. And if we really are to “never forget,” then the lesson from the war should include upholding the rights of man regardless of his racial or ethnic classifications. Strict insistence on racial distinctions culminated in the Holocaust—we should not perpetuate it in the record when the evidence calls for us to expand our field of vision.
Omer Bartov writes that the Holocaust, “one of whose most devastating consequences was a vast erasure of memory, accompanied by widespread trauma and repression, has now come to be seen as an event whose personal ramifications can be understood only by means of a sensitive and subtle analysis of survivors’ oral testimonies.” Like Kundera with the French Revolution, Bartov only gets it half right. It is true that part of the tragedy of the Holocaust includes a vast erasure of memory. However, this erasure cannot be rectified merely by analysis of survivor testimony—not all survivors have a voice. To understand the Holocaust, the record needs a more careful balance between lightness and weight, a challenge that commands the historian to write an inclusive, comprehensive history that may have to rely less on oral testimony and more on traditional tools of the trade. There are limitations to every man’s genius: Kundera underestimated the importance of memory. Most scholars of the Holocaust forget that what isn’t said is often as important as what is publicly remembered.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
things no one told me a year ago (I'm a better person than you are)
One year down (classes only, assignments pending). Here's what I learned.
1. You can speak more intelligently about a book that you've only read the introduction and conclusion of than one that you read closely, all the way through.
2. Professors don't write how they talk.
3. Professors know the people whose books they assign like 85% of the time, and they're friends with those people about half the time-so read the acknowledgments and make sure your professor isn't in it before you rip a book to shreds in class. Similarly, before tearing into a historical conceit, such as the phrase "the rebirth of europe," be sure the person you're talking to hasn't written a book called "europe reborn."
4. No one reads everything that's assigned, but bragging about how much work you didn't do is no longer cool.
5. Beware of students who think that they're actually doing important work. They're insane. Make friends that share your vices. And your gripes.
6. Understatement opens doors--when you say something small confidently, be it in class, or especially in a paper, people who are smarter than you tend to read in whatever they wanted to hear, and then you get credit for other people's ideas.
7. Presentations: I hate them. The strategy I've adopted involves taking the 5-15 minutes as a way to steer the conversation the way I want it to go--it's the only time people, even the professor, have to sit quietly and listen to your opinions. And half the goal is entertainment, so the bolder the opinions, the better. And, if you've established the reputation of having an ironic, self-deprecating sense of humor, if you say something completely incorrect, it's usually attributed to that, and not idiocy.
8. You will learn the most about everything any time you can catch a professor on like their second glass of wine.
9. Papers: no one does groundbreaking research in their first couple of years of grad school, especially in work for classes. It will not be brilliant, and given all the readers know about everything, it may even be trite. Therefore, it absolutely must be entertaining. It's not what you write, it's how you write it.
10. notable quotations from some of my classes forthcoming.
1. You can speak more intelligently about a book that you've only read the introduction and conclusion of than one that you read closely, all the way through.
2. Professors don't write how they talk.
3. Professors know the people whose books they assign like 85% of the time, and they're friends with those people about half the time-so read the acknowledgments and make sure your professor isn't in it before you rip a book to shreds in class. Similarly, before tearing into a historical conceit, such as the phrase "the rebirth of europe," be sure the person you're talking to hasn't written a book called "europe reborn."
4. No one reads everything that's assigned, but bragging about how much work you didn't do is no longer cool.
5. Beware of students who think that they're actually doing important work. They're insane. Make friends that share your vices. And your gripes.
6. Understatement opens doors--when you say something small confidently, be it in class, or especially in a paper, people who are smarter than you tend to read in whatever they wanted to hear, and then you get credit for other people's ideas.
7. Presentations: I hate them. The strategy I've adopted involves taking the 5-15 minutes as a way to steer the conversation the way I want it to go--it's the only time people, even the professor, have to sit quietly and listen to your opinions. And half the goal is entertainment, so the bolder the opinions, the better. And, if you've established the reputation of having an ironic, self-deprecating sense of humor, if you say something completely incorrect, it's usually attributed to that, and not idiocy.
8. You will learn the most about everything any time you can catch a professor on like their second glass of wine.
9. Papers: no one does groundbreaking research in their first couple of years of grad school, especially in work for classes. It will not be brilliant, and given all the readers know about everything, it may even be trite. Therefore, it absolutely must be entertaining. It's not what you write, it's how you write it.
10. notable quotations from some of my classes forthcoming.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
I <3 NY?
It's a sunny, colder-than-expected April Saturday. In New York, these factors alone would have determined how my day would be spent--it would be the kind of day for walking, and seeing what the city had in store. On good days, this would lead to an experience with the city in the spirit of Woody Allen's Manhattan, where everyone you meet is interesting, everyone you see is worth commenting on, and the city itself, that marvelous backdrop, deserves a love song at the end for having provided such bounty.
I'm convinced that this is all weather dependent; I've never had a bad day in the city when it's 60 degrees and sunny. Add twenty degrees, and you're likely to get the New York of the 25th Hour--that is, where every variation of crazy and ignorant seems to overtake that city, that breeding ground for bitterness and insanity. On those days, you get yelled at by beggars, propositioned by vulgar puerto rican teenagers, and find yourself wondering, "where are their parents?" On those days, the subway stops being an opportunity to people-watch, and becomes a potential death-trap, because on those days the strain under which most people spend most of their time becomes painfully visible, and you find yourself realizing that it might take something quite insignificant to make them snap and shove you on the subway tracks. Or, without braving the subway, you find yourself looking up as you walk past buildings, only to see about 15 window air conditioning units--having installed one yourself, you know how easily one of them could just fall from their place and squish you.
I miss my 60 degree dates with the city, though. There's no going out to seek your fortune in Princeton, no running into long lost friends, no days up in the air. Today, I'm going to the library. Usually I miss New York, and all that living there entailed. Some days, though, the creeping, insular comforts of suburbia find their way into my assessment of my lifestyle, and on those days, I like living in a place where I can see foxes, deer, bunnies, and groundhogs without going out of my way, where I can leave my bike unlocked in front of my house, and where I can take the dog running without worrying about running into an off-leash pitbull. My impression of Philly has been that it's a smaller, cleaner, New York City--we'll see whether that holds up on days like today.
I'm convinced that this is all weather dependent; I've never had a bad day in the city when it's 60 degrees and sunny. Add twenty degrees, and you're likely to get the New York of the 25th Hour--that is, where every variation of crazy and ignorant seems to overtake that city, that breeding ground for bitterness and insanity. On those days, you get yelled at by beggars, propositioned by vulgar puerto rican teenagers, and find yourself wondering, "where are their parents?" On those days, the subway stops being an opportunity to people-watch, and becomes a potential death-trap, because on those days the strain under which most people spend most of their time becomes painfully visible, and you find yourself realizing that it might take something quite insignificant to make them snap and shove you on the subway tracks. Or, without braving the subway, you find yourself looking up as you walk past buildings, only to see about 15 window air conditioning units--having installed one yourself, you know how easily one of them could just fall from their place and squish you.
I miss my 60 degree dates with the city, though. There's no going out to seek your fortune in Princeton, no running into long lost friends, no days up in the air. Today, I'm going to the library. Usually I miss New York, and all that living there entailed. Some days, though, the creeping, insular comforts of suburbia find their way into my assessment of my lifestyle, and on those days, I like living in a place where I can see foxes, deer, bunnies, and groundhogs without going out of my way, where I can leave my bike unlocked in front of my house, and where I can take the dog running without worrying about running into an off-leash pitbull. My impression of Philly has been that it's a smaller, cleaner, New York City--we'll see whether that holds up on days like today.
Friday, April 25, 2008
no, it's not new, but it's called the New School.
Someone asked me yesterday if I would send my (fictitious) children to the New School, which is where I got my BA. The answer is no, and here's why: The New School's heavy emphasis on deconstruction and post-modernism means that its students spend four years learning about what knowledge isn't, rather than what knowledge is. And, students like me (ones who think that the only thing more annoying than relativism is a gang of 18-year-olds convinced of its merits) develop the uncontrollable urge to roll their eyes at the mention of Foucault, et al. It's too much thoughtless counter-culture. My kids would probably go to Brown.
Monday, April 14, 2008
a story of two books; or, how I found profundity through pure superficiality
1.You were lying on a side-table at my father’s house, closed, no sleeve. I was 8; the height of that little table, near the front door, put your title at eye-level. “What’s this book?”
“You’re too young to read it, but it’s the story of your life.”
Stubborn, I took you with me, and barely made it through the first sentence before giving up. That was my little secret though, and you remained on my shelf for another decade, when I tried again. Dating an ostentatious intellectual can lead one to do things like carry around War and Peace, and eventually even read it. And it was my life, as it has been each time I’ve poured over the same pages (4 times in 7 years), carefully annotating what my older and wiser self has reflected on, but careful not to disrupt the little hearts and smiley-faces that first featured in the margins.
2. I bought you at half-price books in Houston, Tx, for between 2 and 5 dollars, I don’t remember. A friend of mine, the deep, cool, creative, smart one, had been carrying you around for days, and I wanted to be profound too. I didn’t read my life in you as I did with Tolstoy, but if there’s some lofty ideal for what life is like, if it’s possible to capture its music and poetry in a translated work of prose, and do it all in a story about sex and a dog, Monsieur Kundera, you have done it. I annotated you madly, quoted you in coffee houses.
A friend of mine, in turn, saw me carrying you around, and notes and all, I let her read my copy. Careless, she left you callously lying in the backseat of her convertible, which she left open through a storm. She talked about her ruined car; the real tragedy, though, I knew to be the destruction of the Unbearable Lightness of Being, complete with my seventeen-year old thoughts neatly penned in the margins, which inch-for-inch had been loved infinitely more than her car’s ugly upholstery (despite what her reputation might have had you believe--but that's a crass joke).
“You’re too young to read it, but it’s the story of your life.”
Stubborn, I took you with me, and barely made it through the first sentence before giving up. That was my little secret though, and you remained on my shelf for another decade, when I tried again. Dating an ostentatious intellectual can lead one to do things like carry around War and Peace, and eventually even read it. And it was my life, as it has been each time I’ve poured over the same pages (4 times in 7 years), carefully annotating what my older and wiser self has reflected on, but careful not to disrupt the little hearts and smiley-faces that first featured in the margins.
2. I bought you at half-price books in Houston, Tx, for between 2 and 5 dollars, I don’t remember. A friend of mine, the deep, cool, creative, smart one, had been carrying you around for days, and I wanted to be profound too. I didn’t read my life in you as I did with Tolstoy, but if there’s some lofty ideal for what life is like, if it’s possible to capture its music and poetry in a translated work of prose, and do it all in a story about sex and a dog, Monsieur Kundera, you have done it. I annotated you madly, quoted you in coffee houses.
A friend of mine, in turn, saw me carrying you around, and notes and all, I let her read my copy. Careless, she left you callously lying in the backseat of her convertible, which she left open through a storm. She talked about her ruined car; the real tragedy, though, I knew to be the destruction of the Unbearable Lightness of Being, complete with my seventeen-year old thoughts neatly penned in the margins, which inch-for-inch had been loved infinitely more than her car’s ugly upholstery (despite what her reputation might have had you believe--but that's a crass joke).
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Kundera ususally says most things best.
"Man cannot do without feelings, but the moment they are considered values in themselves, criteria of truth, justifications for kinds of behavior, they become frightening. The noblest of national sentiments stand ready to justify the greatest of horrors, and man, his breast swelling with lyric fervor, commits atrocities in the sacred name of love."
-Milan Kundera, The Introduction to a Variation, NYTBook Review, 6.I.1985
-Milan Kundera, The Introduction to a Variation, NYTBook Review, 6.I.1985
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Intro and Conclusion from my most bad-ass book review
Introduction
"A percentage! Nice little words they have, really: so reassuring, so scientific. A certain percentage, they say, meaning there's nothing to worry about. Now, if it was some other word . . . well, then maybe it would be more worrisome."
The quotation above was taken from a book published in 1866 in Russia, by an observer who, witnessing the growing hegemony of scientific knowledge and precision over all other ways of knowing the human condition, penned this portent of the pitfalls of over-calculation. It is a warning that echoes through time to the present, in which it seems particularly resonant given the tragic effects of social Darwinism and positivism run amok in the twentieth century. In studying the pinnacles of tragedy produced by such mentalities, historians would be advised to take care not to echo the coldness that attending singularly to the statistics generated by an event can perpetuate in the historical record. Joseph Stalin is said to have remarked that “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Stalin was no stranger to millions of deaths; if he indeed articulated this method of obscuring the visceral reality of violence, we should pay attention not to repeat his calculation.
The European “short twentieth-century” has been variously conceptualized into a coherent period as an age of ideology, a century of the nation-state for better or worse (and often for worse), and an unfortunate blip in the radar of nineteenth-century ideals. Another lens through which to understand it has been advanced by Jay Winter, who proposes the twentieth century as one of historical memory, in that historical memory became a chief characteristic of the self-understanding of societies. Winter writes of two generations of memory, corresponding to each of the World Wars. The first, spanning the 1890s to the 1920s, engaged memory to shape personal and national identity. The second came in the 1960s in response to the Second World War and the Holocaust, which introduced more subjective memories of witness and survivor to the field of remembrances as moral symbols.
All of the afore-mentioned approaches agree that the Second World War has been key to shaping the contours of post-war Europe, but Winter’s emphasis on legacy is critical. Whatever else we can say, each nation that emerged from the war crafted a narrative of it, defining themselves in the process—de Gaulle famously spoke of France as “a nation of resisters,” while the West conceptualized the conflict as a war for democracy, conveniently minimizing the role played by the USSR in enabling that success. German historians developed a Führer-centric interpretation of the Third Reich, thus mitigating whatever responsibility its citizens played in the most grisly elements of the war. Stalin made certain that the war was remembered as the great patriotic war, in which the sacrifices it demanded would be redeemed by the utopian vision offered by communism; a vision that was subsequently and magnanimously extended from the Soviet Union to Eastern Europe. The history of the Second World War has been a nation-building story, a factor which makes the historian’s imperative to remain as true to the record as possible all the more acute and difficult.
In processing the meaning of this period, numbers matter more than they used to—so much of what happened between 1933-45 seems to defy rational explanation, and in confronting the prospect of being unable to explain the most dramatic event of the century, some historians cling to what they can know for certain. Historical events can be made intelligible through the statistics they produce—and can sometimes become eclipsed by them. The scale of the war is often invoked in these terms--72 million dead. $288 Billion (in 1940s dollars) spent. While these factors are defining characteristics of the conflict, how much do they tell us about the war’s legacy, and of the way people then made their decisions? To what extent can a quantitative look at history tease out the qualitative significance of events?
The following review will demonstrate that the materialist and mathematic approach to big historical questions are critical—that cannot be emphasized enough—to establish the parameters of what was possible at a given time. Economic factors and indeed any statistical measurement available relating to the catastrophe of the Second World War (indeed, for any conflict) are absolutely necessary to any grounded historical understanding of a time. Yet, when relied upon exclusively to answer larger questions—why did the Allies win the war? How pervasive was the French Résistance? Who were the victims of this catastrophe?—this strictly quantifiable approach to history crumbles in the face of the untidiness of human affairs. Intangible factors—complicity or resistance of citizens without official affiliations, moral purpose of troops that fought, attitudes that permitted setting aside the humanity of various peoples are important. Scientific method will not give us all the answers.
Conclusions
Total War demands a comprehensive perspective, including decisions made by masses of people, not just organizations and institutions. While empiricism is invaluable to good history, great history moves beyond it when the sources cannot measure the scope of its subject. The legacy of the Second World War was moral; its moral aspects have structured politics and policies, and new nationalisms that emerged in its wake; while hard numbers and facts remain the best way to understand the scope of the war and the material constraints against which humans made choices, the political dynamic of the conflict cannot be understood in those terms.
In each examined work, scholars are locked into a debate about how much the statistics produced by society can reveal about its nature. The conclusion I wish to draw here is an argument for synthesis, for inclusion of a broad range of factors into any analysis of the War. Admittedly, this is a tall order. Scholars that focus on victims tend to ignore structural determinants; economic historians tend to ignore the victims. In the end, the Second World War was so complex, it may well be true that as Ian Kershaw has suggested in his survey of the field, one can only hope to contribute to an explanation of the event in scholarly writing, and all contributions should be welcomed regardless of what they are unable to include. Yet, we should listen to our elders. Raskolnikov tried to live by reason alone, and wound up in Siberia as a result; the dynamics of human life continue to defy strict calculation. Any appreciation of historical change absolutely must keep this in mind.
"A percentage! Nice little words they have, really: so reassuring, so scientific. A certain percentage, they say, meaning there's nothing to worry about. Now, if it was some other word . . . well, then maybe it would be more worrisome."
The quotation above was taken from a book published in 1866 in Russia, by an observer who, witnessing the growing hegemony of scientific knowledge and precision over all other ways of knowing the human condition, penned this portent of the pitfalls of over-calculation. It is a warning that echoes through time to the present, in which it seems particularly resonant given the tragic effects of social Darwinism and positivism run amok in the twentieth century. In studying the pinnacles of tragedy produced by such mentalities, historians would be advised to take care not to echo the coldness that attending singularly to the statistics generated by an event can perpetuate in the historical record. Joseph Stalin is said to have remarked that “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Stalin was no stranger to millions of deaths; if he indeed articulated this method of obscuring the visceral reality of violence, we should pay attention not to repeat his calculation.
The European “short twentieth-century” has been variously conceptualized into a coherent period as an age of ideology, a century of the nation-state for better or worse (and often for worse), and an unfortunate blip in the radar of nineteenth-century ideals. Another lens through which to understand it has been advanced by Jay Winter, who proposes the twentieth century as one of historical memory, in that historical memory became a chief characteristic of the self-understanding of societies. Winter writes of two generations of memory, corresponding to each of the World Wars. The first, spanning the 1890s to the 1920s, engaged memory to shape personal and national identity. The second came in the 1960s in response to the Second World War and the Holocaust, which introduced more subjective memories of witness and survivor to the field of remembrances as moral symbols.
All of the afore-mentioned approaches agree that the Second World War has been key to shaping the contours of post-war Europe, but Winter’s emphasis on legacy is critical. Whatever else we can say, each nation that emerged from the war crafted a narrative of it, defining themselves in the process—de Gaulle famously spoke of France as “a nation of resisters,” while the West conceptualized the conflict as a war for democracy, conveniently minimizing the role played by the USSR in enabling that success. German historians developed a Führer-centric interpretation of the Third Reich, thus mitigating whatever responsibility its citizens played in the most grisly elements of the war. Stalin made certain that the war was remembered as the great patriotic war, in which the sacrifices it demanded would be redeemed by the utopian vision offered by communism; a vision that was subsequently and magnanimously extended from the Soviet Union to Eastern Europe. The history of the Second World War has been a nation-building story, a factor which makes the historian’s imperative to remain as true to the record as possible all the more acute and difficult.
In processing the meaning of this period, numbers matter more than they used to—so much of what happened between 1933-45 seems to defy rational explanation, and in confronting the prospect of being unable to explain the most dramatic event of the century, some historians cling to what they can know for certain. Historical events can be made intelligible through the statistics they produce—and can sometimes become eclipsed by them. The scale of the war is often invoked in these terms--72 million dead. $288 Billion (in 1940s dollars) spent. While these factors are defining characteristics of the conflict, how much do they tell us about the war’s legacy, and of the way people then made their decisions? To what extent can a quantitative look at history tease out the qualitative significance of events?
The following review will demonstrate that the materialist and mathematic approach to big historical questions are critical—that cannot be emphasized enough—to establish the parameters of what was possible at a given time. Economic factors and indeed any statistical measurement available relating to the catastrophe of the Second World War (indeed, for any conflict) are absolutely necessary to any grounded historical understanding of a time. Yet, when relied upon exclusively to answer larger questions—why did the Allies win the war? How pervasive was the French Résistance? Who were the victims of this catastrophe?—this strictly quantifiable approach to history crumbles in the face of the untidiness of human affairs. Intangible factors—complicity or resistance of citizens without official affiliations, moral purpose of troops that fought, attitudes that permitted setting aside the humanity of various peoples are important. Scientific method will not give us all the answers.
Conclusions
Total War demands a comprehensive perspective, including decisions made by masses of people, not just organizations and institutions. While empiricism is invaluable to good history, great history moves beyond it when the sources cannot measure the scope of its subject. The legacy of the Second World War was moral; its moral aspects have structured politics and policies, and new nationalisms that emerged in its wake; while hard numbers and facts remain the best way to understand the scope of the war and the material constraints against which humans made choices, the political dynamic of the conflict cannot be understood in those terms.
In each examined work, scholars are locked into a debate about how much the statistics produced by society can reveal about its nature. The conclusion I wish to draw here is an argument for synthesis, for inclusion of a broad range of factors into any analysis of the War. Admittedly, this is a tall order. Scholars that focus on victims tend to ignore structural determinants; economic historians tend to ignore the victims. In the end, the Second World War was so complex, it may well be true that as Ian Kershaw has suggested in his survey of the field, one can only hope to contribute to an explanation of the event in scholarly writing, and all contributions should be welcomed regardless of what they are unable to include. Yet, we should listen to our elders. Raskolnikov tried to live by reason alone, and wound up in Siberia as a result; the dynamics of human life continue to defy strict calculation. Any appreciation of historical change absolutely must keep this in mind.
vocabulary
grad school changes the tone of acceptable quotidian discourse; here's a list of words I use now and wouldn't have a year ago:
prolegomena
epistemologically
discourse
metanarrative
revisionist
reductionist
as a corrective to
baudelairian
sui generis
ad hoc
ex post facto
historical and dialectical materialism
historical myopia
antinomy (twice found in books about France in the 20s!)
hermeneutic
intra-archipelagic
stochastic
fungible
somnolence
Braudelian
synecdochical
prolegomena
epistemologically
discourse
metanarrative
revisionist
reductionist
as a corrective to
baudelairian
sui generis
ad hoc
ex post facto
historical and dialectical materialism
historical myopia
antinomy (twice found in books about France in the 20s!)
hermeneutic
intra-archipelagic
stochastic
fungible
somnolence
Braudelian
synecdochical
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
learn from my mistakes. plus a few editorials.
Future graduate students:
1. One of the double-edged swords of being at an institution like Princeton has been the frequency with which I have completely accidentally and sometimes unknowingly interacted with really famous academics. There was a day-long conference hosted here on the topic of "Historical Memory of Violence and Catastrophe," with a changing panel of speakers throughout the day. During the lunch break, a few classmates and I found ourselves at a table with a man we didn't recognize, but who volunteered that he was teaching at the Woodrow Wilson School as a guest for the year. So we chatted about trivialities, comparing our experiences with Princeton undergraduates. The conference resumed, and we discovered that we'd wasted 30 minutes talking about 18 year-old New Jersey residents with a man who had been a human rights lawyer in Chile during the years of Pinochet, who had risen to be Chile's Foreign Minister after that regime was brought to an end, and who has been instrumental in instituting reconciliation after that particular catastrophe of human rights, but also has assisted in the rebuilding of other societies after traumatic changes, notably post-apartheid South Africa. Lesson Learned, and I'll share it with you: when attending a conference, a quick google-image search of the participants is strongly recommended.
2. Reading something you never wanted to read to begin with on the couch is a bad idea:
3. You will not make it through the year without cracking and using the phrase "a useful heuristic" at least once. Don't fight it.
4. I'm starting to think that Foucault is infinitely more irritating and problematic than Marx. Or maybe he's the Marx for post-modern history. Usually, you can know everything you need to know about an author's argument if they cite Foucault in the first three pages of their introduction, or worse, (and this happens a lot), if they thank him or dedicate their book to him. I'm happy to debate the point, but for now, Foucault is the new Marx, and he needs to simmer down in the historiography.
5. My adviser wrote the following in a published essay, and it's only one of many reasons why he's awesome: "Retarded France turns out not to have been so retarded after all..."
6. Getting the flu sucks, but in keeping with the theme of sleeping on the couch, and in appreciation for the magic of NyQuil, I'll show you what I looked like for most of last week (also to counter what you've undoubtedly been told, the lie that sleep stops when you get into grad school):
1. One of the double-edged swords of being at an institution like Princeton has been the frequency with which I have completely accidentally and sometimes unknowingly interacted with really famous academics. There was a day-long conference hosted here on the topic of "Historical Memory of Violence and Catastrophe," with a changing panel of speakers throughout the day. During the lunch break, a few classmates and I found ourselves at a table with a man we didn't recognize, but who volunteered that he was teaching at the Woodrow Wilson School as a guest for the year. So we chatted about trivialities, comparing our experiences with Princeton undergraduates. The conference resumed, and we discovered that we'd wasted 30 minutes talking about 18 year-old New Jersey residents with a man who had been a human rights lawyer in Chile during the years of Pinochet, who had risen to be Chile's Foreign Minister after that regime was brought to an end, and who has been instrumental in instituting reconciliation after that particular catastrophe of human rights, but also has assisted in the rebuilding of other societies after traumatic changes, notably post-apartheid South Africa. Lesson Learned, and I'll share it with you: when attending a conference, a quick google-image search of the participants is strongly recommended.
2. Reading something you never wanted to read to begin with on the couch is a bad idea:
3. You will not make it through the year without cracking and using the phrase "a useful heuristic" at least once. Don't fight it.
4. I'm starting to think that Foucault is infinitely more irritating and problematic than Marx. Or maybe he's the Marx for post-modern history. Usually, you can know everything you need to know about an author's argument if they cite Foucault in the first three pages of their introduction, or worse, (and this happens a lot), if they thank him or dedicate their book to him. I'm happy to debate the point, but for now, Foucault is the new Marx, and he needs to simmer down in the historiography.
5. My adviser wrote the following in a published essay, and it's only one of many reasons why he's awesome: "Retarded France turns out not to have been so retarded after all..."
6. Getting the flu sucks, but in keeping with the theme of sleeping on the couch, and in appreciation for the magic of NyQuil, I'll show you what I looked like for most of last week (also to counter what you've undoubtedly been told, the lie that sleep stops when you get into grad school):
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
nationalism hangover
A few years ago, while discussing his recently-published book (that he was gracious enough to assign the class), a professor of mine made an aside about how after writing the book, he realized that he'd been preoccupied with the same issue for his entire academic career, but not having named it as such, he didn't recognize his own theme until 20 years into it. His theme was the causes and results of freedom of speech. Mine, I've realized of late, is nationalism.
I have always been uncomfortable with nationalistic ritual, even before my distaste for religion had blossomed. By always, I mean ever since I was old enough to pledge allegiance to the flag, in my case, a flag that I knew, and was continuously made aware, was not my own. It was a ritual that I had to perform, like everyone else, but because I was aware that my flag had green and an eagle on it while this one did not, I learned a lesson really early on about ritual--that it is meant to engender certain feelings, rather than to confirm feelings that are there naturally. I didn't belong, but I watched my peers learn to. And watching the process of indoctrination is unsettling, even to a six year old who doesn't quite know what to call it.
The way I grew up, I was neither Mexican nor American. I was born in Mexico City, yes, but my parents moved to the states in 1987. Both of them, come to think of it, had checkered pasts with the idea of the nation. My dad came from a long line of men who had attended Virginia Military Academy, and much to his father's chagrin, he refused to go. His ethnic background includes ancestors from Kansas, Ireland, Germany, Peru, and even San Martin, "liberator" of South America from Spain. Instead of going to VMI, he went to UNAM (in Mexico City), and when the Vietnam War came around, he made it a point to renounce his US citizenship. My mom's case is more straight-forward. She was born in Mexico to a fair-skinned mother and a VERY Indian (that is to say, native, indigenous, pick whichever is more tasteful) looking father. So her issue was never directly a conflict with patriotism, but was rather a class-conflict, which in Mexico can become an issue of patriotism.
I digress. We moved in the late 80s, just before I turned three years old. My parent's cosmopolitanism ensured that I spoke and understood english as well as spanish, and a little russian when we moved. I didn't have much trouble (compared with other immigrant studies) switching to just english for school, and reading was easy. Still, assimilation is hard when you know you're different. And school is almost entirely about assimilation.
One of the greatest joys of being a teenager is in finding creative ways to call your elders liars. Being able to claim moral high ground on your captors, as it were, never got old. And so it was that in high school, I began to look more critically at our history books for what was missing and what was there. It was obvious pretty quickly that what we were being told was not in fact history, but the national narrative from which our identities were to be formed. We associate with this country because it has done x, y, and z. We choose to forget the rest of the alphabet. This so profoundly offended my sensibilities as to guide my every intellectual interest since sophomore year, whether I knew it or not.
And in fact I couldn't quite put my finger on it until monday afternoon. Even as I wrote the following proposal for summer research, I didn't know quite what I was getting at:
"I am interested in the shaping of national identity through retellings of history. As the First World War is generally seen as a watershed event that ushered in the worst the twentieth century had to offer, a transformative moment in which the degree of change was visible on the ground at the time, I am interested in discovering the ways in which the War's significance and lessons were reprocessed for French and British children—both nations came out of the war nominally as victors, but both sustained immense human and economic losses. In this comparative approach, I am interested to find how the war fostered or reinforced their differing national identities—identities which, it has been argued, were forged in opposition to one another."
But Monday morning, I had my interview for citizenship, I was sworn in that afternoon, and spent the rest of the day in a profoundly ambivalent mood about what I had just done.
Here's my confession: After waiting in line at the Mexican consulate for 8 hours just to renew a passport, the conveniences of attaining citizenship in the place I'd always lived started to look practical, if not intellectually appealing. A few months later, it was announced that the cost to apply would almost double. My rational self prevailed, and I applied. This included swearing that I wasn't and am not a communist or a terrorist (that prompt is part of the same segment, implying that either association is equivalent to the other), that I would go to war for the country if required (I would certainly not), and that I swore I'd tell the truth "so help me god" (Clearly, I didn't, and anyway I'm an atheist.). I had my swearing in yesterday, which included more offensive questions and lies (are you mentally or physically disabled? Are you sure you're not a communist? Do you support the US foreign and domestic policy? Etc.), an announcement of "welcome" from "president" George W. Bush, and saying the oath, which I mouthed but didn't speak.
As a student of history, I find it deeply disturbing to have associated myself by choice, when I'm old enough to know better, with a country whose policies have generally been disgraceful for the last few centuries. On principle, I don't like answering a question about the virtues of the constitution with the words "freedom of speech," and then being asked to confine my worldview to "not communist." I don't like being shown a video for the army and being reminded that the men on the tape "died for my freedom," when this country hasn't fought a defensive war in over a hundred years (we can argue about wwii later). I don't like the way the government uses its past to draw the entirely wrong lessons. I sold out.
I have always been uncomfortable with nationalistic ritual, even before my distaste for religion had blossomed. By always, I mean ever since I was old enough to pledge allegiance to the flag, in my case, a flag that I knew, and was continuously made aware, was not my own. It was a ritual that I had to perform, like everyone else, but because I was aware that my flag had green and an eagle on it while this one did not, I learned a lesson really early on about ritual--that it is meant to engender certain feelings, rather than to confirm feelings that are there naturally. I didn't belong, but I watched my peers learn to. And watching the process of indoctrination is unsettling, even to a six year old who doesn't quite know what to call it.
The way I grew up, I was neither Mexican nor American. I was born in Mexico City, yes, but my parents moved to the states in 1987. Both of them, come to think of it, had checkered pasts with the idea of the nation. My dad came from a long line of men who had attended Virginia Military Academy, and much to his father's chagrin, he refused to go. His ethnic background includes ancestors from Kansas, Ireland, Germany, Peru, and even San Martin, "liberator" of South America from Spain. Instead of going to VMI, he went to UNAM (in Mexico City), and when the Vietnam War came around, he made it a point to renounce his US citizenship. My mom's case is more straight-forward. She was born in Mexico to a fair-skinned mother and a VERY Indian (that is to say, native, indigenous, pick whichever is more tasteful) looking father. So her issue was never directly a conflict with patriotism, but was rather a class-conflict, which in Mexico can become an issue of patriotism.
I digress. We moved in the late 80s, just before I turned three years old. My parent's cosmopolitanism ensured that I spoke and understood english as well as spanish, and a little russian when we moved. I didn't have much trouble (compared with other immigrant studies) switching to just english for school, and reading was easy. Still, assimilation is hard when you know you're different. And school is almost entirely about assimilation.
One of the greatest joys of being a teenager is in finding creative ways to call your elders liars. Being able to claim moral high ground on your captors, as it were, never got old. And so it was that in high school, I began to look more critically at our history books for what was missing and what was there. It was obvious pretty quickly that what we were being told was not in fact history, but the national narrative from which our identities were to be formed. We associate with this country because it has done x, y, and z. We choose to forget the rest of the alphabet. This so profoundly offended my sensibilities as to guide my every intellectual interest since sophomore year, whether I knew it or not.
And in fact I couldn't quite put my finger on it until monday afternoon. Even as I wrote the following proposal for summer research, I didn't know quite what I was getting at:
"I am interested in the shaping of national identity through retellings of history. As the First World War is generally seen as a watershed event that ushered in the worst the twentieth century had to offer, a transformative moment in which the degree of change was visible on the ground at the time, I am interested in discovering the ways in which the War's significance and lessons were reprocessed for French and British children—both nations came out of the war nominally as victors, but both sustained immense human and economic losses. In this comparative approach, I am interested to find how the war fostered or reinforced their differing national identities—identities which, it has been argued, were forged in opposition to one another."
But Monday morning, I had my interview for citizenship, I was sworn in that afternoon, and spent the rest of the day in a profoundly ambivalent mood about what I had just done.
Here's my confession: After waiting in line at the Mexican consulate for 8 hours just to renew a passport, the conveniences of attaining citizenship in the place I'd always lived started to look practical, if not intellectually appealing. A few months later, it was announced that the cost to apply would almost double. My rational self prevailed, and I applied. This included swearing that I wasn't and am not a communist or a terrorist (that prompt is part of the same segment, implying that either association is equivalent to the other), that I would go to war for the country if required (I would certainly not), and that I swore I'd tell the truth "so help me god" (Clearly, I didn't, and anyway I'm an atheist.). I had my swearing in yesterday, which included more offensive questions and lies (are you mentally or physically disabled? Are you sure you're not a communist? Do you support the US foreign and domestic policy? Etc.), an announcement of "welcome" from "president" George W. Bush, and saying the oath, which I mouthed but didn't speak.
As a student of history, I find it deeply disturbing to have associated myself by choice, when I'm old enough to know better, with a country whose policies have generally been disgraceful for the last few centuries. On principle, I don't like answering a question about the virtues of the constitution with the words "freedom of speech," and then being asked to confine my worldview to "not communist." I don't like being shown a video for the army and being reminded that the men on the tape "died for my freedom," when this country hasn't fought a defensive war in over a hundred years (we can argue about wwii later). I don't like the way the government uses its past to draw the entirely wrong lessons. I sold out.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
I like a bit of poetry in my politics.
Until recently, I was convinced that inspirational politics, in the sense of a leader rising up and inspiring citizens to aspire to greater heights, was the stuff of history, if it ever really existed at all. I find it hard to imagine generations past who actually had to fight to effect change--what could compel them to forget themselves for long enough to storm the Bastille? What nobility there must have been in the souls of the Mexican peasants who, at the dawn of the past century, decided that they'd had enough. Those who have been as fortunate as I grew up a bit jaded; we saw what happened to the generations of the '60s and '70s. We've watched them decay in suburbs. It never occurred to me that it might take a special kind of inspiration to act as a catalyst for self-investment in political life, or that that inspiration could come from a politician.
Barack Obama's candidacy has had me reflecting on a lot of different issues, but the theme that emerges the strongest, which my recent training may have given me the ability to see more easily than others might, is that some times are simply more able to effect change than others--Obama knows this; this is why he quotes Dr. King's masterfully phrased line: "the fierce urgency of now." He also knows that his candidacy is not entirely about himself, but largely about what hopes and aspirations people my age project onto the newness he offers. This feels like a turning point in history; those of us who are hopeful will either be vindicated, or disillusioned, and soon. Obviously, I hope for vindication; but even in disillusionment's, I will have learned something valuable about what it is like to be profoundly affected by the charisma of a time, place, and person, and if nothing else, my scholarship will be better for it.
Maybe it'll get you too, at least a little. Here's part of his concession speech from New Hampshire-- you'll see what i mean:
We know the battle ahead will be long. But always remember that, no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.
We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics. And they will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks and months to come.
We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.
For when we have faced down impossible odds, when we've been told we're not ready or that we shouldn't try or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Yes, we can.
It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can.
It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can.
It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness: Yes, we can.
It was the call of workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier, and a king who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land: Yes, we can, to justice and equality.
Yes, we can, to opportunity and prosperity. Yes, we can heal this nation. Yes, we can repair this world. Yes, we can.
...
Together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story, with three words that will ring from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea: Yes, we can.
Barack Obama's candidacy has had me reflecting on a lot of different issues, but the theme that emerges the strongest, which my recent training may have given me the ability to see more easily than others might, is that some times are simply more able to effect change than others--Obama knows this; this is why he quotes Dr. King's masterfully phrased line: "the fierce urgency of now." He also knows that his candidacy is not entirely about himself, but largely about what hopes and aspirations people my age project onto the newness he offers. This feels like a turning point in history; those of us who are hopeful will either be vindicated, or disillusioned, and soon. Obviously, I hope for vindication; but even in disillusionment's, I will have learned something valuable about what it is like to be profoundly affected by the charisma of a time, place, and person, and if nothing else, my scholarship will be better for it.
Maybe it'll get you too, at least a little. Here's part of his concession speech from New Hampshire-- you'll see what i mean:
We know the battle ahead will be long. But always remember that, no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.
We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics. And they will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks and months to come.
We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.
For when we have faced down impossible odds, when we've been told we're not ready or that we shouldn't try or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Yes, we can.
It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can.
It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can.
It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness: Yes, we can.
It was the call of workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier, and a king who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land: Yes, we can, to justice and equality.
Yes, we can, to opportunity and prosperity. Yes, we can heal this nation. Yes, we can repair this world. Yes, we can.
...
Together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story, with three words that will ring from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea: Yes, we can.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Hillary Clinton: irritating
On January 7th, Hillary Clinton said: “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.” Outstanding issues:
1. She's an idiot.
2. Even if we are to accept her logic, it only presents a more powerful argument to elect someone like Barack Obama--hope personified--into office. Here she argues about the futility of idealism, but the fact that her target is the idealism of a fellow presidential hopeful presents a powerful case to elect the MLK figure into office, and to leave the Lyndon Johnson figure behind.
1. She's an idiot.
2. Even if we are to accept her logic, it only presents a more powerful argument to elect someone like Barack Obama--hope personified--into office. Here she argues about the futility of idealism, but the fact that her target is the idealism of a fellow presidential hopeful presents a powerful case to elect the MLK figure into office, and to leave the Lyndon Johnson figure behind.
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
san antonio
I've survived another trip to the "alamo city," only a little scathed. I was greeted with a "welcome home" from my dad, but the words had something of an ominous effect. The unlikely Luddite has walled himself off in a house full of dusty books which he'll never read again, tied himself down with five dogs that provide him with an excuse not to change his life (a role I've come to realize that I once filled), and has stubbornly clung to eating habits that would be appropriate only for someone who didn't know when his next meal would be. Welcome home. Don't become this. Very unsettling.
I've decided that the transition to adulthood comes in unglamorous stages: the day you learn how expensive standard household items are (several HUNDRED dollars for a dresser? really? fifty for a cooler?); the day you look in your closet, find nothing that would look "appropriate" at any real job, and find that you have no idea where or how to buy "appropriate" clothing; the day you realize an unexpected pregnancy would no longer completely ruin your life; and, the day you visit home, survey the landscape, and decide to spring for a hotel room. check and mate.
My hotel, paid for by me, who can actually afford it, was a block away from the famous alamo, the pride and joy of san antonio, symbol of freedom--freedom to own slaves, that is. It's an appropriate metaphor. This town has a huge mexican population, visible everywhere, and a small white population that's very concerned with the borders. not that mexicans are quite slaves here, but people seem generally happy to pay them nothing to do their cleaning and other nasty work, while talking about them as being sub-human. freedom, indeed. This picture mostly captures the gist. Anyway, ignoring my better judgment, I thought I'd take a stroll through the shrine to freedomland, in the hopes that maybe this little historical nothing of a fact (the specificity of the freedoms sought) might make an appearance. No such luck. It's a shrine to self-righteous xenophobia now. I made a scene and got kicked out. fin.
I've decided that the transition to adulthood comes in unglamorous stages: the day you learn how expensive standard household items are (several HUNDRED dollars for a dresser? really? fifty for a cooler?); the day you look in your closet, find nothing that would look "appropriate" at any real job, and find that you have no idea where or how to buy "appropriate" clothing; the day you realize an unexpected pregnancy would no longer completely ruin your life; and, the day you visit home, survey the landscape, and decide to spring for a hotel room. check and mate.
My hotel, paid for by me, who can actually afford it, was a block away from the famous alamo, the pride and joy of san antonio, symbol of freedom--freedom to own slaves, that is. It's an appropriate metaphor. This town has a huge mexican population, visible everywhere, and a small white population that's very concerned with the borders. not that mexicans are quite slaves here, but people seem generally happy to pay them nothing to do their cleaning and other nasty work, while talking about them as being sub-human. freedom, indeed. This picture mostly captures the gist. Anyway, ignoring my better judgment, I thought I'd take a stroll through the shrine to freedomland, in the hopes that maybe this little historical nothing of a fact (the specificity of the freedoms sought) might make an appearance. No such luck. It's a shrine to self-righteous xenophobia now. I made a scene and got kicked out. fin.
Sunday, December 9, 2007
Sunday, November 11, 2007
what I've learned
1. Parties advertised as "Sleazy Grad Student Party" actually do contain a number of sleazy grad students. Most of them in finance.
2. It is important to gather the men in one's cohort BEFORE arriving at such a party, as our boys are more protective than they are sleazy.
2. It is important to gather the men in one's cohort BEFORE arriving at such a party, as our boys are more protective than they are sleazy.
Thursday, November 8, 2007
well rested and confused.
When I worked at Oren's, I used to have these terrible dreams in which I'd wake up, open the store, and work for a few hours, and then I'd actually wake up and have to go to work. Those were the worst. It seems that I've traded excruciatingly banal dreams for bizarre ones in switching jobs to student--in the past few weeks, I've had dreams about Hitler in a clown suit getting tackled by a classmate (Ronny) and a rogue band of squirrels, Herodotus making me pancakes in the morning, and the new version of the banal coffee dream, in which I check my email to find that professors have responded to my request for a readings course--this has happened several times. Steve Kotkin, in his dreamed email response, asked how my Russian was, Harold James (whom I didn't ask and have never met) responded that he'd love to run a class, but only if he can shout at us in German the whole time, and Phil Nord just said "no. there are too many cookies to be had." I've had dreams about searching for German nationalism in New Jersey, solving the problem of nationalism in general (it the religious way of thinking, stupid), finding a Russian gulag filled with disney characters (I was pissed when I woke up from that one), and about my dog killing Lenin's cat and how that might have changed history. I wonder if this will taper off at some point, or if I'll have to abandon my evening reading habits.
Sunday, November 4, 2007
research topic!
For the historian of the Twentieth Century, all roads lead back to August, 1914. If the French Revolution represented the best of our origins as the Modern West, The First World War is certainly emblematic of our worst beginnings, when the nineteenth century narrative of progress took a horribly, irreparably wrong turn.
The First World War was a transformative moment in history, a catalyst essential to the understanding of the twentieth century. Taken as a whole, it contrasts so sharply with the nineteenth century, that one forgets the slow trauma it must have involved for those who lived through it. In its naïve beginnings, the irreversible change brought on by WWI appeared rather as a continuation of nineteenth century trends. “Triggered by a nationalist assassination, World War I began as a war of nationalities, igniting the collective passions that had filled the preceding century.” Empires doomed their native sons to battle, and nationalism compelled them to go. Particularly for those on the home front, the horrors of war, and the fundamental break with the past, unfolded as a series of broken expectations, and not as a sudden blow.
The War transformed every part of society in Western Europe, ravaging the home front as dramatically (if by different means) as the wasteland. This conflict left deep psychological scars, and a profound feeling of disorientation in the generations that waged it. The narrative of progress so championed by nineteenth century thought was utterly demolished, leaving empty battle scars in its place. Adding to the chaos, the demographic composition in Europe, which experienced a drop in birthrate even before the war, was intensified by the conflict. According to Eric Hobsbawm’s calculations, “not much more than one in three French soldiers came through the war without harm…The British lost a generation.”
By the end, the full extent of the senselessness and brutality of the war was well known to all involved. “Military servitude had never appeared less noble than it did to the millions of transplanted men, so recently snatched from the moral world of citizenship.” (Furet, Passing of an Illusion, 49) In the face of such futile violence, on such a scale, one would expect feelings of disillusionment about the Great War to permeate cultural production. While still paying homage to the patriots that volunteered to fight and die, or return home maimed, without diminishing their sacrifice, one would expect the war not to be remembered fondly, to take on a new image than that which dominated the propaganda in the warring countries during the conflict. Oddly, this is not always the case.
François Furet rightly notes that, by virtue of the eschatological properties of twentieth century ideologies, a critical sense of contingency (that element that makes history interesting to begin with) has been absent from histories of this short century. Neither religion, nor historical law drive history—action, and ultimately responsibility, rests on the shoulders of human actors in their milieu. Nothing is preordained.
In many ways, the idea of “historical necessity” (another tally on the list of things that are Marx's fault) has obscured the historian’s view of the people who lived through the Great War as people, parents, spouses, instead of as political actors, or potential political actors, or victims of the killing fields in France. Espoused ideology aside, the generation of 1914 had to find ways to return to normalcy after the war, and those with children had to teach them what normalcy was. Narratives of this generation tend to emphasize ideology, or disorientation, themes that rightly dominate post-war studies. Yet, ideology and disorientation are not the dominant themes that were transmitted to the children of this generation about 14-18, the period of upheaval, in France and England, in their literature.
Societal changes wrought by the War have been well studied by historians, but they have largely ignored the children that grew up and came of age in this period, and importantly, the way these massive societal changes were represented to a generation that had never directly known what came before (but would go on to fight the second world war). The Great War was disorienting for adults, but as parents, they were still faced with orienting their children to a world that they themselves didn’t fully understand.
I propose to survey children’s literature produced in France and England in the interwar period in order to better understand the adult worldview as communicated to a younger generation, with specific attention to any commentary on the war, and positionings of self versus other. In Germany, “the private sector” and the media became matters of state interest and, shall we say, influence, especially after 1933;the same can be said of Bolshevik Russia from its inception in 1917. in France and Britain, publishing and "family life" in general remained out of reach of the state. Thus, by nature of the relative freedom of expression granted for more of the interwar period in France and England, I will review books for children produced in those countries. Moreover, while a survey of children’s literature produced in fascist/totalitarian states might make for interesting contrasts, they tend to illuminate more of what one would expect of state interests, and less about what the public at large held as a value. For example, a brief search quickly turned up a book called “The Tale of Red-haired Motele, Mr. Inspector, Rabbi Isaiah and Commissar Bloch,” by Yosif Utkin, written in the USSR in 1933. It is a story of Motele, a Jewish tailor who renounces Judaism to become a Soviet commissar. This book is a striking example of the reaches of Soviet Propaganda, and nothing more.
The scope of my work will be limited to the ways in which adults positioned children in the context of a changing world; in other words, I will focus on the act of narration, which can be factually ascertained by virtue of the books themselves, and not on how children might have interpreted the materials. Though the latter would make for the most interesting study, there are simply no sources readily available for how children understood what they were told. In many ways, researching the child’s worldview is much like reconstructing the mentalitésof the subaltern of a distant past—not something my experience to date has prepared me to do.
In the private sector (contrasted from schooling, with its obvious focus on generating young patriots), children’s stories produced in this period are more akin to those written before the war than with any sort of propaganda, or any reflection of the guilt and resentment that filled adult literature about the war in the same period, in France and Britain. War is mentioned, to be sure, but in a context of a noble fight, and a fresh start after it ended. Are we to assume that the generation of 1914 wished to impart none of the wisdom it had garnered through the long, bloody war, or that literature was an inappropriate place to discuss these lessons, or was didacticism to the young not a component of “never again,” as they saw it?
The facts and meaning of this paradox will be the topic of my first research paper.
The First World War was a transformative moment in history, a catalyst essential to the understanding of the twentieth century. Taken as a whole, it contrasts so sharply with the nineteenth century, that one forgets the slow trauma it must have involved for those who lived through it. In its naïve beginnings, the irreversible change brought on by WWI appeared rather as a continuation of nineteenth century trends. “Triggered by a nationalist assassination, World War I began as a war of nationalities, igniting the collective passions that had filled the preceding century.” Empires doomed their native sons to battle, and nationalism compelled them to go. Particularly for those on the home front, the horrors of war, and the fundamental break with the past, unfolded as a series of broken expectations, and not as a sudden blow.
The War transformed every part of society in Western Europe, ravaging the home front as dramatically (if by different means) as the wasteland. This conflict left deep psychological scars, and a profound feeling of disorientation in the generations that waged it. The narrative of progress so championed by nineteenth century thought was utterly demolished, leaving empty battle scars in its place. Adding to the chaos, the demographic composition in Europe, which experienced a drop in birthrate even before the war, was intensified by the conflict. According to Eric Hobsbawm’s calculations, “not much more than one in three French soldiers came through the war without harm…The British lost a generation.”
By the end, the full extent of the senselessness and brutality of the war was well known to all involved. “Military servitude had never appeared less noble than it did to the millions of transplanted men, so recently snatched from the moral world of citizenship.” (Furet, Passing of an Illusion, 49) In the face of such futile violence, on such a scale, one would expect feelings of disillusionment about the Great War to permeate cultural production. While still paying homage to the patriots that volunteered to fight and die, or return home maimed, without diminishing their sacrifice, one would expect the war not to be remembered fondly, to take on a new image than that which dominated the propaganda in the warring countries during the conflict. Oddly, this is not always the case.
François Furet rightly notes that, by virtue of the eschatological properties of twentieth century ideologies, a critical sense of contingency (that element that makes history interesting to begin with) has been absent from histories of this short century. Neither religion, nor historical law drive history—action, and ultimately responsibility, rests on the shoulders of human actors in their milieu. Nothing is preordained.
In many ways, the idea of “historical necessity” (another tally on the list of things that are Marx's fault) has obscured the historian’s view of the people who lived through the Great War as people, parents, spouses, instead of as political actors, or potential political actors, or victims of the killing fields in France. Espoused ideology aside, the generation of 1914 had to find ways to return to normalcy after the war, and those with children had to teach them what normalcy was. Narratives of this generation tend to emphasize ideology, or disorientation, themes that rightly dominate post-war studies. Yet, ideology and disorientation are not the dominant themes that were transmitted to the children of this generation about 14-18, the period of upheaval, in France and England, in their literature.
Societal changes wrought by the War have been well studied by historians, but they have largely ignored the children that grew up and came of age in this period, and importantly, the way these massive societal changes were represented to a generation that had never directly known what came before (but would go on to fight the second world war). The Great War was disorienting for adults, but as parents, they were still faced with orienting their children to a world that they themselves didn’t fully understand.
I propose to survey children’s literature produced in France and England in the interwar period in order to better understand the adult worldview as communicated to a younger generation, with specific attention to any commentary on the war, and positionings of self versus other. In Germany, “the private sector” and the media became matters of state interest and, shall we say, influence, especially after 1933;the same can be said of Bolshevik Russia from its inception in 1917. in France and Britain, publishing and "family life" in general remained out of reach of the state. Thus, by nature of the relative freedom of expression granted for more of the interwar period in France and England, I will review books for children produced in those countries. Moreover, while a survey of children’s literature produced in fascist/totalitarian states might make for interesting contrasts, they tend to illuminate more of what one would expect of state interests, and less about what the public at large held as a value. For example, a brief search quickly turned up a book called “The Tale of Red-haired Motele, Mr. Inspector, Rabbi Isaiah and Commissar Bloch,” by Yosif Utkin, written in the USSR in 1933. It is a story of Motele, a Jewish tailor who renounces Judaism to become a Soviet commissar. This book is a striking example of the reaches of Soviet Propaganda, and nothing more.
The scope of my work will be limited to the ways in which adults positioned children in the context of a changing world; in other words, I will focus on the act of narration, which can be factually ascertained by virtue of the books themselves, and not on how children might have interpreted the materials. Though the latter would make for the most interesting study, there are simply no sources readily available for how children understood what they were told. In many ways, researching the child’s worldview is much like reconstructing the mentalitésof the subaltern of a distant past—not something my experience to date has prepared me to do.
In the private sector (contrasted from schooling, with its obvious focus on generating young patriots), children’s stories produced in this period are more akin to those written before the war than with any sort of propaganda, or any reflection of the guilt and resentment that filled adult literature about the war in the same period, in France and Britain. War is mentioned, to be sure, but in a context of a noble fight, and a fresh start after it ended. Are we to assume that the generation of 1914 wished to impart none of the wisdom it had garnered through the long, bloody war, or that literature was an inappropriate place to discuss these lessons, or was didacticism to the young not a component of “never again,” as they saw it?
The facts and meaning of this paradox will be the topic of my first research paper.
for discussion
I wish I'd come up with the following myself, but the following quotation is an excerpt from Andrew Sullivan, in the Atlantic Monthly--the full article is well worth reading:
"Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can."
Andrew Sullivan, "Goodbye to All That," in The Atlantic Monthly, December 2007. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama.
I hadn't really considered the international implications of the primaries, but this guy just hit the nail on the head. Even the first female candidate incarnates "politics as usual," both at home and abroad, at a time when the credibility of the country demands a sharp contrast between the last administration and the next.
"Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can."
Andrew Sullivan, "Goodbye to All That," in The Atlantic Monthly, December 2007. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama.
I hadn't really considered the international implications of the primaries, but this guy just hit the nail on the head. Even the first female candidate incarnates "politics as usual," both at home and abroad, at a time when the credibility of the country demands a sharp contrast between the last administration and the next.
Friday, November 2, 2007
they should put me in charge
I have a few thoughts:
1. Affirmative action should be based on family income, and not on race. Poverty makes it difficult to succeed, no matter what skin color people are.
2. Food stamps should only be good for fresh produce and meat. Maybe that would cut down on the obesity epidemic, and give farmers a boost.
3. On immigration: maybe it's all the holocaust stuff I've been reading, but the idea that we can treat a group of people as less than us because they're not conceptualized as part of the nation strikes me as really disturbing. Especially because it seems to be a politically beneficial position to take, particularly the more extreme someone gets. I was watching the democrats (I'm disappointed in all of them) debate the issue of giving "illegal immigrants" (they objected to the term "undocumented workers" because it de-emphasized the crime) drivers licenses in New York. Hillary Clinton took the position that, while she would not have made the same decision, she understood the governor's impulse to issue licenses--the federal government certainly hasn't come up with any viable solutions, and it's better to know who's in the country than to ignore practical solutions to the problem in order to polemicise better. She was attacked from all sides for having a nuanced position (instead of yes or no, which is something the republicans do to the democrats, and the democrats shouldn't do to each other), and because "getting drivers licenses is a privilege that "these people" haven't earned. My god, you'd think we were talking about a gang of rapists. The only crime committed was crossing an imaginary line, to do a lot of shitty work. The politics surrounding the situation are disgusting to watch, and they echo the Nazi tactic of finding an enemy within to rally against and scapegoat. So lay off my people, jerks.
4. I learned something new today: obese people, when they're so far gone as to not fit into the CAT scan machine thingy, which apparently happens more often than is comfortable to think about, get sent to the zoo to use their machine.
1. Affirmative action should be based on family income, and not on race. Poverty makes it difficult to succeed, no matter what skin color people are.
2. Food stamps should only be good for fresh produce and meat. Maybe that would cut down on the obesity epidemic, and give farmers a boost.
3. On immigration: maybe it's all the holocaust stuff I've been reading, but the idea that we can treat a group of people as less than us because they're not conceptualized as part of the nation strikes me as really disturbing. Especially because it seems to be a politically beneficial position to take, particularly the more extreme someone gets. I was watching the democrats (I'm disappointed in all of them) debate the issue of giving "illegal immigrants" (they objected to the term "undocumented workers" because it de-emphasized the crime) drivers licenses in New York. Hillary Clinton took the position that, while she would not have made the same decision, she understood the governor's impulse to issue licenses--the federal government certainly hasn't come up with any viable solutions, and it's better to know who's in the country than to ignore practical solutions to the problem in order to polemicise better. She was attacked from all sides for having a nuanced position (instead of yes or no, which is something the republicans do to the democrats, and the democrats shouldn't do to each other), and because "getting drivers licenses is a privilege that "these people" haven't earned. My god, you'd think we were talking about a gang of rapists. The only crime committed was crossing an imaginary line, to do a lot of shitty work. The politics surrounding the situation are disgusting to watch, and they echo the Nazi tactic of finding an enemy within to rally against and scapegoat. So lay off my people, jerks.
4. I learned something new today: obese people, when they're so far gone as to not fit into the CAT scan machine thingy, which apparently happens more often than is comfortable to think about, get sent to the zoo to use their machine.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
a slight retraction, and thoughts on eugenics
I had dinner with four lovely colleagues a few nights ago, and after instating a "no talking about work" policy, I had a wonderful, non-maddening time. The German in me generally tends to think that rules can solve any problem (if people would only follow them!) but in this case, it worked. So, I like my classmates, I like it here, I just need breaks from work every now and again.
On to eugenics. Many of you will remember that I indulged myself a few months ago and got Nina's DNA tested for breed composition. The results are in...sort of. Of the 38 breeds they test for (listed below), they only found "significant levels (less than 50%)" of rottweiler, and golden retriever "in the mix." So, either Nina comes from a long line of mutts on both sides, or she's mostly a breed of dog that they don't test for. I was hoping for a more extensive list "in the mix," but it is interesting that they found nothing at all else on their list. No shepherd. No dobie. It feels a bit like we've been living with an impostor (golden retriever??).
They only test the breeds most common to the US, so we've decided that Nina's mostly beauceron, confirming our suspicions that she's French. Beaucerons usually get their ears cropped, but au naturalle, the look like this:
You can see it, right?
A list of what Nina isn't:
Afghan Hound,German Shepherd,Akita, German Shorthaired Pointer, Basenji, Golden Retriever, Basset Hound,Greyhounds, Beagle, Italian Greyhound, Belgian Tervuren, Labrador Retriever, Bernese Mountain Dog, Mastiff, Borzoi, Poodle, Boxer, Pug, Bulldog, Rottweiler,Chihuahua,Saluki, Chinese Shar-Pei,Samoyed, Chow Chow, Shetland Sheepdog, Cocker Spaniel, Shih-Tzu, Collie,Miniature Schnauzer, Siberian Husky, Dachshund, St. Bernard, Doberman Pinscher, Whippet, English Setter, Yorkshire Terrier, Border Collie
On to eugenics. Many of you will remember that I indulged myself a few months ago and got Nina's DNA tested for breed composition. The results are in...sort of. Of the 38 breeds they test for (listed below), they only found "significant levels (less than 50%)" of rottweiler, and golden retriever "in the mix." So, either Nina comes from a long line of mutts on both sides, or she's mostly a breed of dog that they don't test for. I was hoping for a more extensive list "in the mix," but it is interesting that they found nothing at all else on their list. No shepherd. No dobie. It feels a bit like we've been living with an impostor (golden retriever??).
They only test the breeds most common to the US, so we've decided that Nina's mostly beauceron, confirming our suspicions that she's French. Beaucerons usually get their ears cropped, but au naturalle, the look like this:You can see it, right?
A list of what Nina isn't:
Afghan Hound,German Shepherd,Akita, German Shorthaired Pointer, Basenji, Golden Retriever, Basset Hound,Greyhounds, Beagle, Italian Greyhound, Belgian Tervuren, Labrador Retriever, Bernese Mountain Dog, Mastiff, Borzoi, Poodle, Boxer, Pug, Bulldog, Rottweiler,Chihuahua,Saluki, Chinese Shar-Pei,Samoyed, Chow Chow, Shetland Sheepdog, Cocker Spaniel, Shih-Tzu, Collie,Miniature Schnauzer, Siberian Husky, Dachshund, St. Bernard, Doberman Pinscher, Whippet, English Setter, Yorkshire Terrier, Border Collie
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
the novelty is wearing off
the deer in the back yard was pretty cool, and seeing bunnies and groundhogs frolic about on a daily basis will probably never get old, but I think I totally underestimated the value of having friends around who aren't colleagues. Sometimes, I don't want to talk about work, or what paper might be due soon, or how much reading there is. These issues slowly become as irritating as the "do I look fat in this outfit" question is to a guy. I'm tired of the anxiety--especially because I'm not anxious about this stuff. People run around like they're curing cancer sometimes, and I'm kind of tired of hearing about this or that inconsequential paper or presentation or article they should have read but didn't. And there's no escape! Tony's out of town, and there's no one unconnected anywhere near me. Nina's been getting an earful.
Friday, October 19, 2007
Omer Bartov, Redux
A friend of mine from Tel Aviv pinpointed what irked me so about Bartov's talk: the complexities of public memory were never addressed. She said she'd wanted to ask him what he thought about there being no public memorials in Israel to the Arabs killed by the Israeli army. If you address the property stolen from the Jews int he 1940s, don't you also have to talk about the displacement of Palestinians in Israel today with the same sense of indignation?
She was working with some kids in Israel, and they did this thing where they brainstormed to think of possible solutions to the issues with Palestine. THey drew up a whole list. Some of their suggestions were deliberately outlandish (let's kill them all!), other proposed solutions were more subtle (limited citizenship under the one state). They voted on a final list, and when all was said and done, they were left, more or less, with the Nuremberg Laws. Food for thought.
She was working with some kids in Israel, and they did this thing where they brainstormed to think of possible solutions to the issues with Palestine. THey drew up a whole list. Some of their suggestions were deliberately outlandish (let's kill them all!), other proposed solutions were more subtle (limited citizenship under the one state). They voted on a final list, and when all was said and done, they were left, more or less, with the Nuremberg Laws. Food for thought.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Empathy and Scholars of Modern Europe
Today, I had class on Fascism and Nazism with the esteemed Professor Rabinbach. In one of our early classes, he chastised (nicely) a fellow student's impulse to kill a bug. He also talked about a colleague of his, another famous historian, who called for "the final solution to the squirrel question" after getting a squirrel infestation in his office; "we must wipe out their eggs!" Today, as an evil cockroach swooped in to terrorize our class, Professor Rabinbach chased it around with a napkin, in order to spare its puny little life and get it out of the room. Actually, he let it run around for a while before it became clear that the rest of us were more concerned with tracing its movements than focusing on discussion. I guess if you spend all your time studying killers, you think twice before squishing the life out of something because the idea of it is inconvenient. I'm impressed.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
omer bartov
I saw Omer Bartov give a talk the other day--it was underwhelming. He was talking about his new book, which, based on what I gathered from the talk, looks at public memory of the second world war in Gallacia (Western Present-day Ukraine) in the form of plaques on buildings, memorials, graveyards, and so forth. His point, over and over, seems to be that the testaments of memory are primarily to "Ukrainian" victims of the war, to the exclusion of Jewish memory. Fair enough, but (and he might do this in the book, I don't know) pointing out lingering traces of antisemitism isn't very interesting unless you explain it, which he didn't. The whole evening progressed like a city tour through that part of the world: I went to Lvuv, and they hid the Jewish past, and then I went to the next town, and they built a shopping mall where the synagogue used to be, and then...
...you get the idea. Lots of accusations, no effort to understand or explain. Needless to say, I won't be buying the book.
The night wasn't a total wash, though. As has often happened to me here at Princeton, I met someone whose work I'm completely in awe of, completely unexpectedly, without going out of my way at all. The post "girlcotting herstory" below, inspired by the book 14-18--one of the authors was there. She was lovely.
...you get the idea. Lots of accusations, no effort to understand or explain. Needless to say, I won't be buying the book.
The night wasn't a total wash, though. As has often happened to me here at Princeton, I met someone whose work I'm completely in awe of, completely unexpectedly, without going out of my way at all. The post "girlcotting herstory" below, inspired by the book 14-18--one of the authors was there. She was lovely.
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Nuremberg
Christian Delage just put together an excellent film on the Nuremberg trial, with truly remarkable original footage. It comes out this November. Go rent it. And when you do, answer me this: Why were some of the defendants wearing sunglasses during the trial?
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