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madupont
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« Reply #788 on: February 03, 2009, 09:44:36 PM » |
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Continuing from #793 An ad hominem reply to an ad hominem attack.
Anyway, I will bring this up again because it was criticized in the only open forums for political discussion (which means two out of three) but I think this belongs in here, in any case, since other materials that I sent to the same person were originally placed here and were apparently not used as it was obvious that they taught her nothing. This is not unusual.
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re: #9712 Obama or Bush(?) administrations
"As to attempts to breed "pure Aryan" children, I suspect that what they got were a bunch of nice kids with no extraordinary features. Since such kids would now be in their sixties or more, and we have heard nothing about their extraordinary lives..."
This was in reply to a post in which I had designated three types of children who were survivors of WW 2 in Europe.
The first group was a British effort, who moved their own young people inland from areas likely to take the brunt of shelling; and, previously, also to bring Jewish children to be raised by foster parents. We had a fellow poster at nytimes.com, born at Manchester and claiming to be working in Germany at the start of the Iraq war, who may or may not have been a transported child. Today she lives in the US. (I can only go along with what she herself had said at various times during the two years that I interacted with her in posting to Western Europe forum and National Security. She often drifted into Meander which was renamed the Lounge, as well as the book forums where she wrote poetry, had an amazing knowledge of British women's writing, and was discouraged by being made fun of by the men in Shakespeare forum and other forums in which they bantered re: literature. It was a somewhat humiliating experience that was allowed to take place under moderated nytimes.com forums. We knew her by at least two pseudonyms in Western Europe forum.
The second group, I brought up in regard to German writers whose fathers were not at home when they were born. W.G.Sebald died at age 57, about three months after 9/11, in a car crash. His academic teaching career began in 1966 as assistant lecturer at Manchester (where our above fellow-poster was raised. I can only suggest that she picked up her literary education somewhere). It was apparently through his post-war contacts among the British that "Max", as his friends called Sebald,picked up his awareness that something was off and that he psychically lived in two contrasting realities. Things just didn't add up, once you were aware of the British experience of the war,you found the unspoken or commentless feedback from your German relatives puzzling. Writing allowed Sebald to heal himself with each novel an exploration of what had been unspoken, what it might imply, deconstructing it; which is why he has been suggested for a posthumous Nobel Prize in good company with the possible candidacy of Jacques Derrida.
Because neither of these intellectuals are alive to continue to explore what language we use to form our opinions of our involvement in war at this time, I also mentioned Peter Handke who is now 66 years of age and shares some similiarities with Sebald in real life experience although Sebald is a Bavarian, and Handke is an Austrian. Peter as poet, screenwriter, novelist, writer of polemics is able to continue to explore the question and write about our involvement in war, the responses of the other combatants on the spot where the war is fought, and the complaints of the victims of wars that continue to breed discontent or that fester in Europe, even as we deploy to the Middle East and request former combatants to be our allies.
Lastly, I mentioned those who were purposefully bred in occupied countries, to sustain the thousand year Reich, and were left behind by both their parents when the capitulation of the Germans brought an end to the Third Reich. The communities once formerly occupied did not accept them and thus often they were abandoned by their mothers and fell into the care of institutions of the state that employed caregivers who expressed a real distaste . It has been years since I read any of the accounts in their own words but they obviously have some things in common with the Germans who discovered the psychological split in their own experience and managed to integrate their personalities. The sometimes adopted but often disdained, however, do not exhibit that ability as readily because they are unwanted people.
x x x
This is what was originally written:
I think the finest story of the kindertransport is the film: The Man who Cried. It gets better each time you watch it (Obviously, because the first time that you see it, you can't make up your mind whether it was Johnny Depp,again(!), or Christina Ricci's father, Oleg Yankovskiy, that is the man who cried?
(It's a well known saying that Johnny Depp ought to be forbidden to play another Romany for at least a couple of years if not more, since Depp is not only Cesar but is a book-end in a matched set comparing his role in, Chocolat, opposite Juliette Binoche who has the very chocolaty name of Vianne Rocher to his Roux.)
But there is the other kind of story, the kinder who stayed behind in Germany. First of all the children who were produced by a breeding program to achieve the proper Nordic type, in the Aryanization of a future Germany. Secondly, Kinder born so late in the war, or after, who had trouble understanding the peculiar "blind spots", as they began to realize there was something that they were not aware of that motivated the particular empty places they experience in the lives of their families, and were often fully adults before realizing what had been going on. W.G. Sebald said it was photographs of his father in uniform that he first saw in 1947 which, "hinted at the meaning of the destroyed buildings, silences and absence of memory around him."
While teaching at the Univ. of Manchester,England, he had begun to write an unusual series of novels that convey this atmosphere of mystery and surrealism. Another young fellow and quite a good poet whom I knew a little about in the 1960s and then discovered still more about in the Eighties is Peter Handke also displayed this something-is-absent-that-I-cannot-put-my-finger-on mentality. (It is unfortunate that this murky environment was left out of the film,The Reader: but perhaps it was found hopeless to convey the absence of something.)
As I recall, the first poems stress Why? and What? And I did not know that by the Eighties this psychology had provoked a fairly perverse perception of things as they are, a personality that was dumbfoundingly persistent at displaying two sides of a personality at once, artistically acute on the one hand while alarmingly stereotypically Germanic about politics. Or was it vice versa. I guess Wim Wenders understands it, because by now I have realized that the beautiful poetic German script of his film,Wings of Desire, that just wowed me as it came off the screen, in the same way that Hiroshima, Mon Amour, had done in Marguerite Duras' French many years earlier, was because Wim Wenders film had a scriptwriter named Peter Handke
"In 1996 his travelogue Eine winterliche Reise zu den Flüssen Donau, Save, Morawa und Drina oder Gerechtigkeit für Serbien (A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia) created considerable controversy, as Handke portrayed Serbia among the victims of the Balkan War. In the same essay, Handke also frontally attacked Western media for misrepresenting the causes and consequences of the war. This controversy still rages. Former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Miloševi? asked that Handke be summoned as witness for the defense before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, but the writer declined. He did, however, visit the tribunal as a spectator, and later published his observations in Die Tablas von Daimiel, (The Tablas of Daimiel)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Handke
Does that name ring a bell?
(The German name for: Wings of Desire, is Der Himmel uber Berlin, and Bruno Ganz is Damiel)
http://www.signandsight.com/features/809.html/
The Peter Handke affair
A chronicle of the debate in the German-language press
http://www.michaelparenti.org/Milosevic.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/kosovo/interviews/walker.html
This is the Ambassador William Walker referred to in the Michael Parenti article on Milosevic. I have not yet read this last pbs article but let me know how it all turns out. I found all of the above material shed light on an era in which we were thoroughly distracted by other developments in combo with keeping my head above water so I found all this quite revealing as well as revisiting a poet from my past concerns:
"Peter Handke exemplifies the complexity of writing as an Austrian in the post WW2 period'
"While studying, he established himself as writer, linking up with the Grazer Gruppe (the Graz Authors' Assembly), an association of young writers. The group published the literary digest manuskripte. Both Elfriede Jelinek and Barbara Frischmuth were among its members."
"He gained popular attention after a spectacular appearance at a meeting of avant garde artists belonging to the Gruppe 47 in Princeton, New Jersey, U.S., where he presented his play Publikumsbeschimpfung (Offending the Audience)."
"When Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004, she stated that she considered Peter Handke a more worthy recipient than herself and that she had been awarded the prize merely because she is female." wiki
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