when i was young learning about the holocaust and then stalinism, i always felt tremendous sense of tragic horrible mistake. there were oppressed and oppressive, and it was obvious to me who was good and bad. what i could not understand was how millions of others were able to coexist with what was happening. how so many people could have been so wrong, how the world could have been different if they were voicing their thought and fears. i understood they were afraid to tell the others, but i could not understand why would they think the others were unlike them. i thought that the conversations could have caused a public riot, could have changed history. i could not understand how so many people could have been so wrong about human nature. i thought human nature was to be kind, to not kill, to be honest, to expect the same of others.
later i came to think that the human nature is to let to be brainwashed by the one with the most power or the most oratory skills. later i came to think that the human nature is to let others decide on important matters concerning others. later i came to think that the human nature is to avoid getting to extreme or dangerous situations. it is in your nature to want to stay away while you can in hopes to protect yourself if you are neither a humanity hater, nor a wannabe superhero.
i also realized the human nature is to adapt to any given situation regardless how far off it is. the more dehumanized a person gets, the more impossible it is for him to describe or mentally relive the experience. the more extreme, inhumane conditions are, the more similar oppressed and oppressive become. both act their best based on what they’ve got. something made the oppressive to take the job. he acts his best with being one. unless he is a true killer or incredibly brave, the best he got is blocking it out. something made the oppressed to be captured. he acts his best with being one. he acts his best to survive, he acts his best to block it out.
the reader movie is the inspiration for this post. an uneducated simpleminded 20 year old girl, probably an orphan, becomes ss guard. she is not a hero, she is not a killer, she just does her job well, she guards. here is another young girl – she is there because she is captured and she is jewish. she is not a hero, she is not a killer, she tries to survive. you see a sad lonely old woman in prison, and a successful park avenue bitch, and does it look like justice or does it look like a sequence of more or less random circumstances that can happen to anyone?
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what i liked about the movie was this decision to stay away from any sort of judgment...that's what made it interesting to me. it really drummed home the point that a lot of the people responsible for what happened weren't evil, just very very human. I also thought the generational stuff was interesting...the guilt of the new generations, the discovery that your teachers can disappoint you, that the childhood innocence you held up in your head was sort of a farce. the question of justice was interesting too. in real life i probably would have wanted that woman to burn, but in the context of the movie you don't really feel that way which makes you question a lot i think.
im reading a book set in germany during the war right now...the boko thief. its good so far.
i mean book thief
well, the new generation guilt is far from a new concept. my friend who lives in germany told me some stories about that. also even for myself reading about soviet repressions of the 20s and 30s in the 90s was very contradicting to what they were teaching us in the 80s.
the movie managed to portray things the way i saw them for long time on this subject, yet i don't think it portrayed it the same way for everyone. people see what they want to see.
for me, in real life, i am afraid i can be that woman.
well yes, even when i visited germany for a week, you could just feel the guilt. it was everywhere, right down to the fact that any reference to hitler...his grave, where his bunker was, etc., are nonexistant.
"for me, in real life, i am afraid i can be that woman."
but doesn't that imply that we don't learn from the past? isn't knowledge of what people let happen in the 40s enough to prevent it from happening again? but i do share that fear sometimes so i guess not.
i am not talking about what we as number of people learn from history. i am talking about behaving certain way when put into certain situation.
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