Greater America

Had dinner with my dear friend and librettist Jacobus Byssus Zanomensis and his lovely and talented wife V_M_ last night. As usual, talk turned to the German Question and how close our American Empire is keeling towards fascist imperialist disaster. On their last trip to the banks of the Meuse, one of his good German friends reminded him of the second stanza of the German National Hymn, which during the Great Hole of Modern Germany History was more or less the only stanza, topped off with a bit of this and that about shooting dead the enemies of the SA, but the section of interest runs as follows:

Von der Maas bis an die Memel,
Von der Etsch bis an den Belt.

meaning that the borders of the true Germany run from the Meuse River (more or less OK) to the Memel River (which, ahem, is way past Poland) to the Adige River (which would give Germany a nice warm water port in the Adriatic) to the strait of the Little Belt (which might require slaughtering a few troublesome people to the North who voted the wrong way in the Schleswig Plebiscites).

Of course, the concept of a border is a bit quaint in these days where the skies are filled with drones piloted by young brainwashed boys with close haircuts enforcing the limitless extent of the American Empire, part of a troubling stew into which we pour a bit of joblessness, hopelessness, rampant Fundamentalist and Patriotic pseudo religion, served up hot with Hellfire missiles, not to mention the heavy trod of the shock troops of the capitalist hordes, kevlar replaced by power tie.

Of nieces

I was eight years old when I first became an uncle, in this case to a niece, the scion of my brother and his wife, themselves begotten of so and so, the seemingly infinite regress of humanity, and I felt suddenly so much older, rushed into a maturity for which I was not quite ready. One of my first memories of the little tyke is a scene that would evoke a sense of responsibility in any parent: her standing still in the doorway to my bathroom, not quite making it to the goal, an outpouring of urochromic fluid rushing from under her skirt, not sure to go forward or back but stuck in place. But as she got to be an actual kid, I was more of a big brother than a parent, looked-up-to in that way, required to tease and frolic and rassle and horse about as kids do, a play preparation for one's true transition to adulthood through the wrestling which creates us all.

Two years after I achieved this coming-of-age, I discovered what, at that time, was called modern music, through the vehicle of Stanley Kubrick's 2001, and was taken up by it. Although Ligeti sued, and rightly so, as his music was irreparably damaged, turned to kitsch (as he pointed out), it led me to all his other music, to the music of his colleagues and others, burning much of my paper route money over the years on vinyl and leading me to my chosen profession. And, as I don't want to be misunderstood, I want to say that I loved the movie too. In fact, I went back to see it again and again, and each of Kubrick's films over the years held sway over me during their reign, and each was a revelation. I remember my poor preacher father, forced to escort me to A Clockwork Orange and, as we were late to the theater, walking in at the moment of the first rape, followed soon after by the dancing Jesus scene, but as I was so earnest and excited, he stayed with me, watching it all, even allowing me to stay to see the beginning again so I would not miss a moment. My original artistic desires, in fact, veered toward film, and that interest in the great film auteur and his gesamtkunstwerks is surely why I've chosen music-theater, a live synthesis of all the arts, akin to movies, cheaper and more ephemeral.

When I mentioned to a friend that I was working on a new piece, they asked whether it dealt with the Nazis. It's a sensible question given my interest, an interest that I also shared with Kubrick, as he tried a number of times to develop movies about the war and about the Holocaust, deciding eventually that the latter was uncapturable, and all this even more interesting given that his wife, Christiane, whose artworks appear in a number of his films, and whom he met while filming Paths of Glory (she plays the German girl who sings at the end and reduces the soldiers to tears), was born Christiane Susanne Harlan, the niece of Veit Harlan, most beloved of Joseph Goebbels, the maker of the infamous and notorious anti-Semitic propaganda vehicle Jud Süß. An aside from theauteurs.com website:

The pornographic element is apparent early on, when a cheering woman at the Duke's inaugural parade loses her top, to the Duke's leering satisfaction. One is reminded of all the women who bared their breasts at Hitler, a strange phenomenon hinting at the hidden psychosexual nature of fascism.

And this one, the most famous of them all, the younger Schicklgruber, carried his romantic fascination with his niece, the even younger Geli Raubal, much further, and so many stories have been floated about his complicity in her apparent suicide that it is hard to discriminate fact from fact. It is true that she was found dead in her room, locked from the inside, shot through the lung by his gun, a Walther, that she had been dead since the previous day; but it is not so clear that she was arguing with Hitler, that she was pregnant by a Jewish art teacher in Linz, that he was jealous, angry; but it again is clear that he was devastated by the death, that he threatened suicide, that he stopped eating animal flesh forever after, that he was in love.

Bletchley Park etc

As a former mathematician and reputed engineer, I've shared the recent nerdish interest in the true idea that World War II was really won by the boy and girl geeks who prodded and cajoled roomfuls of vacuum tubes and who lovingly sharpened their No. 2 pencils and who, on their long walks home, flirted and kissed furtively against romantic revival gingerbreaded walls, and that we Anglo-Americans, by our braininess alone, knew all the Axis powers' plans and played the war like a great chess game, not through the efforts of the poor filthy pawns who slogged through the mud and death and blood to capture and hold bits of land, captives of that distasteful space.

The reality is somewhere in between of course, although I did always wonder why it took so long for the engineers' roles to be understood. The truth was quite slow to arrive, and not until the 70s did the British government allow publication of Bletchley Park's breaking of the Enigma codes, for many reasons, my favorite of which is the fact that the Brits had sold the rotor machines to their former colonies throughout the world and hoped to continue to read all their diplomatic traffic. The secret business is a set of wheels within wheels, and there is great fascination in the work of statisticians deciding which bits of intelligence to follow and which to ignore, which will show the enemy too much knowledge of our knowledge and which can be safely hidden, possibly in other obfuscating and pointless missions, and who will be allowed to be killed by enemy attack, and who will be saved.

Outside of the rarified air of Bletchley Park there were also other, lower tech operations, some chronicled in the fascinating book Between Silk and Cyanide by Leo Marks, who tells stories of encryptions in the field, used by operatives behind enemy lines, some using bits of one-time pad sewed into bits of silk parachute material, others using memorized poems, the most famous of which is his own romance The Life That I Have, perhaps made more poignant by the context, where Nazi handlers may have beaten this poem and others like it from those they captured, turning them as agents to work against the land and people they loved:

The life that I have

Is all that I have

And the life that I have

Is yours

The love that I have

Of the life that I have

Is yours and yours and yours.

A sleep I shall have

A rest I shall have

Yet death will be but a pause

For the peace of my years

In the long green grass

Will be yours and yours and yours.

Serb Cutter

My beloved foreign correspondent sent me a note this morning reminding me of some of the more brutal of the brutalities of the last Great European war. He found it as he was researching a new novel which has something to do with the concentration camps in the Balkans, but it also reminded me of a story. Around the time when the event more recent troubles began in the region, my friend Mark Dippé was visiting some Serb friends in Sarajevo. At the moment they heard that their Serb brothers and sisters had launched a campaign of slaughter against their Croat brothers and sisters, he said that they, seemingly modern and reasonable people up to that point, literally jumped up with joy at the opportunity to grab their weapons and get to killing. It is of course hard for us, civilized with our mountains of McDonald's and hundreds of channels of TV, to understand such depth of hatred, but my correspondent's link did explain just a bit of it. It's just a small thing, the above device, a Srbosjek, or "Serb cutter," but it represents so much, and was invented by the Ustaše - Croatian Revolutionary Movement - as a way to efficiently slit the throats of captured Serbs, of which there were very very many, while engendering in the murderer as little fatigue as possible.

The Artist as a Young Whore

I was asked to participate this morning in a paid interview - in cash, in the form a single piece of currency: the bill with the drunken general and the corrupt president - by the San Francisco Foundation, and it got me to thinking about my whorish nature, a term I use with the ultimate in positive connotations, as many whores are counted among my best friends, and I can only aspire to such clear thinking and take-charged-ness.

Anywho, getting to the point, it's clear that artists have always been quick to leech onto whomever is in power, regardless of their goodness or badness, in order to live their lives of dissipation, shrouding their selfish wants in pseudo-mystical-art-feeds-the-soul bologna. I'm reminded how, in de imperio tertio, we find the same willingness to suck at the monied teat of the all-father to further one's career, although, in the case which came to mind, it may not have been the best choice career-wise. Heinrich Hoffman, who became more-or-less the official photographer of the Führer, took the photograph above and many others, note especially those Hitler suffering the little Aryan Children to come unto him, but who, after the war, was imprisoned for profiteering and who had all his photographs seized and put into the US National Archives, the images themselves consigned to the public domain.

Leni Riefenstahl, shown naked above, who also had all her work expropriated by the incoming GIs, was never quite able to lie her way out of the stigma of being infatuated with the Nazis and Nazi ideals and, even though she was clearly one of the greatest aestheticians in the early days of the new art form, she was rejected by the world she and her friends had abused, project after project denied after the war. But she saw the slaughter of the Kinsk civilians, she chose the particular slave Gypsies for her films, she allowed them to be shipped to Auschwitz, she knew what was to happen to them but she litigated against all who said so, indefatigably, during her long long life. And who can forget Albert Speer, the one who apologized, but who was also only to eager to be seduced by the power and the money and the evil structure of which he became a part.

But I suppose the difference is that the artists of the US of today are happy to take the blood money and spend it biting the hand that fed them, and feeling entitled to the privilege all the same.

"But at least they dressed well"

As a young boy on the Great Plains, gorged on a constant diet of WWII war movies and television, my friends and I would get together with our BB guns and cherry-bombs to be mini-reënactors, and, in our innocence, who would we vie to be? The sloppy GI with perpetual cigarette hanging out of his mouth, unshaven? Hardly! No, we fought for the right to click our heels, to salute, to wear the smartly trimmed Hugo Boss designed and built SS uniforms, to carry an imaginary Feldmarschall's baton, and to speak in a clipped Germanesque pidgin, the hint of a saber cut on our cheek, the monocle, the goose-step.

As children, we could be forgiven, having no idea of the signification of our choice. But many elect to continue this into adulthood, as its very taboo nature titillates and appeals, from the Korean ad above (video here), to Nazi themed restaurants, to the Nazi Chic, to those too interested in the paraphernalia of the Reich. What to make of these fallen and so foolish fellow humans? Have they forgotten or merely never learned that the fascist path, while seeming to wander along an alpine meadow, dotted here and there with some wildflowers, leads to the cliff or to the bear or to both?

Geburtstag

My follower Milky chided me last evening at the Throbbing Gristle event here in San Francisco for somehow not paying proper obeisance to the event of A.H.'s birthday last Monday, but it's actually quite important for me that this set of notes on a particular cultural preoccupation doesn't become what it purports to analyze, a fetishistic love-fest of a brutal regime, ending in a place I can only just imagine: where the cleaning lady finds me one day, swinging by the neck, raised aloft by an elaborate pulley system, cold to the touch, wearing only a pair of vinyl briefs and a gas mask, surrounded by pornographic magazines open to their most German images. We'll leave that end to those who really do enjoy such things, the likes of Motor Racing Bosses and Princes of the Realm.

But, while on the topic, we find here:

A report by Ofsted, which expressed concern that secondary pupils were repeatedly studying Hitler is part of a wider debate about the nature of Britain's enduring obsession. Those concerned at the ubiquity of the Third Reich in the history classroom and beyond to the nation's bookshops and living rooms fear it stunts understanding of other periods and leads to an unhealthy personality cult.

On the opposite side of the argument there are those who point to the monstrosity of the Nazi regime and its leader, arguing that it is difficult to run out of important issues relating to Hitler to highlight to the wider population.

And to which I can add only that it is difficult to run out of unimportant issues as well.

Henry Ford

Stephen Ambrose, in his Citizen Soldiers, tells of how upset the GIs were to see the enemy coming toward them riding Ford trucks (and Opel trucks and planes, a wholly-owned subsidiary of GM). Henry Ford has a number of troubling connections with the Nazis, many of which have been well publicized, from the inclusion of excerpts of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the glove compartments of new cars to his outspoken admiration for Hitler to his acceptance of the Grand Cross of the German Eagle in July 1938, four months after the Austrian Anschluss.

As the Washington Post points out in a detailed article, worth reading, on the deep connections between the two, when one thinks of Ford, the image is of baseball and apple pie and not that Hitler had a portrait of Henry Ford on his office wall in Munich, which he did. Company documents found when the German Ford slave-labor factories were liberated spoke of the "genius of the Führer." The final insult, most amazing to consider, came after the war, when both GM and Ford petitioned the US Government for reparations for their German facilities due to Allied bombing. And, although one might simply think to laugh off such a ludicrous proposal, GM was in fact paid $32 million, a cool $380 million inflation adjusted.

Third Reich in Ruins

I came across a cornucopiæc website of photos then and now, comparing locations in Nazi Germany at the end of the war - the abovementioned 'in ruins' - to the same locations in our current and fully de-Nazified Germany. It reminded me of my first trip to Nürnberg in '95 at the 50th anniversary of VE day, when the city had placed billboard-sized photos of the urban landscape from early 1945, smoke still rising from the rubble, sited so as to duplicate the view I had standing in front of each: one view mere piles of debris, one the beautifully reconstructed Disneyland of the old city.

Soon after, I headed out to the Zeppelinfeld, site of many a Party rally, where my friend and sometime colleague Jon Jost had, standing near the dais, watched as an elderly German gentleman walked by, looked quickly from side to side, then made a small, furtive, but definite salute. Old habits die hard.

Münchausen

Reports have been arriving at our editor's desk here that the current Global Economic Collapse is causing a major uptick in movie theater ticket sales. Disaster seems to arrive hand-in-hand with a desire for fantastic escapism, and the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany in Stalingrad coincided with the release by Universum Film AG of the spectacular - and spectacularly expensive - fantasy Münchausen, Herr Goebbels' answer to Gone with the Wind. In the contradiction-laden Germany of 1943, the stage was filled with Afrodeutsch extras, some forcibly recruited from the concentration camps; the star of the movie, Hans Albers, was supporting his Jewish lover Hansi Burg in London; and the screenplay was written by Berthold Bürger, a pseudonym for the officially banned Jewish writer Erich Kästner, who was somehow able to give Albers the line "Nicht meine Uhr ist kaputt, die Zeit ist kaputt," a politically insensitive line to say the least. In addition, the movie is filled with sexual decadence, from a nymphomaniac Catherine the Great to topless harem girls (clipped out of the clip above), to the smolderingly hypnotic eyes of Albers, all while Hollywood labored under the Hayes code, but the end was near and none of this immoderation went far enough to salve the growing fear of the German populace.

Ruining it for everyone

The Nazis did a lot of really bad things, and tainting the swastika in the West forever and always was one of them, leading even to the current attempts in the EU to ban the symbol, although it's really unclear how one actually bans a simple figure that has been in use for at least three millennia, spans cultures, is currently seen around the world, is part of ornamental borders and floors and temple columns, included in books on tessellations and origami, the logo of charitable organizations, etc. Lynne Rutter saw the lovely example of a decorative manji at the Sensoji Temple in Tokyo a few days ago. However, even there, the Nazi stigma still is felt as, since the war, all the new Buddhist manji in Japan are of the left-handed variety, not the right-handed isomer favored by the historical evil. Below, from a Tokyo shrine near Shibuya:

Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere

Here in Tokyo for a few weeks, capital of one of the signatories of the Tripartite Pact, meditating on the global nature of WWII and the support the Nazis had from a number of other militaristic and dangerously jingoist societies. Interesting to find that, even though the Japanese were similarly brutal to all their perceived-as-inferior neighbors, they didn't share the antisemitism of the Nazis, at least not in quite the same way. Although books repeating the canards of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion sold millions of copies in Japan, they had funded their earlier war with Russia with money from the prominent Jewish financier Jacob Schiff, and also allowed a number of Jewish refugees from Europe to settle in Japan for a curiously mixed-up set of reasons under the Fugu Plan. I've never quite understood how the Germans, in their search for a world dominated by perfect Aryan-ness, could settle into a marriage with the most un-Aryan Japan, a country which had even fought against Germany in the Great War that rankled Hitler so much. But it was a relationship that lasted until the end for both short-lived empires, from the outside at least warm and congenial, with none of the obvious cracks that threatened the Nazi's other marriages of convenience.

Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning

A popular and oft-parodied line from the play Schlageter by Hanns Johst, where the soon-to-be-martyred and immortalized Albert Leo Schlageter is exhorted by his comrade Friedrich Thiemann to fight:

I know all about that garbage from 1918 ... brotherhood, equality, and freedom ... Beauty and worthiness! Then, right in the middle of it, they say Hands Up! You're disarmed ... you're the voting swine of the Republic! -- No to hell with this whole ideological smorgasboard ... I shoot with live ammo! When I hear the word culture ... I release the safety on my Browning!

The last line is a good one, and Herr Schlageter did derail some trains and was executed by the French Occupation Forces between the wars and was taken up as a hero by the Nazis, who built many memorials all over Germany including the one pictured, shown as part of a Hitler Youth field trip. Some were destroyed and some erased as part of the Allied Denazification of Germany after the war.

der barney klingelt

I have been sent two important missives, in video form, from a deep-cover operative and thus, I present them here.

Episode 2? There’s another one of these out there?

And while we’re at it: Heil Honey I’m Home.

Die Welle

Once again Ron Jones's Third Wave experiment at Cubberly High School in Palo Alto has been dramatized, this time by the German director Dennis Gansel. There are some questions about the original story's veracity, as the main source is Ron Jones himself, but it is highly believable: that a few simple step-by-step manipulations of a group young people leads to their wholehearted acceptance of brutal authoritarianism: sitting in attention postures, starting all sentences with 'Mr. Jones,' answering all questions in three words or less, learning a simple salute. All the results included the usual harbingers of disaster: unquestioning adherence to the rules, xenophobia, the ratting out those who didn't measure up. But he also found improvements in academic skills and an excitement and motivation he had not seen before. Although some pro-fascists would focus on the latter as a justification of the former, I prefer to think that it's best to accept a little less perfection and a little more anarchy and more chaos and a little more joy.

Birthday

M. Josh aka fognozzle sent me the following greeting today for my birthday. I have not yet today received quite this level of adulation, nor a shovel-salute from a bevy of topless and tow-haired boys, seen near the end of the video, just before the windows open on the bright and glorious future of the Fatherland.

Editor's aside: it seems to be impossible to use the word Fatherland, translated literally from Vaterland, without conjuring an image of the Nazis. The German word was used to innocuously mean homeland, although some in my country find an uncomfortable connotation in that word in the title of the US Department of suchsame Security. And there does seem to be a parent-gender-role association that colors Fatherland vs. Motherland: that of the stern dad who argues with his fists vs. the mom that coos and suckles at her teat. Although the Russian/Soviet use of Rodina-mat, translated to Motherland, still gives me a sense a hawkish xenophobia. I have to admit I come from a certain hippy-dippy-we-are-all-one background that bristles at the thought of God and the Kindly Ones choosing any particular people and/or country over any other and so may explain my overreaction. Homeland, motherland, fatherland, ancestral home and land of my birth. Creepy.

The Wehrmacht Pope Speaks

There are several circumstances that help fuel my Nazi-interest addiction: (1) the fulsome record-keeping, film-making, accounting and cataloguing of the Dritte-Reichists themselves (2) the dumping into the public domain of the above by the Allied conquerors (3) the hundreds of thousands of post WWII memoirs by and interviews with and trials of combatants and non-combatants. So we do really know what happened, OK?

And yes, they, the National Socialists really did kill a whole heck of a lot of people, Jews and Romanis and Slavs and Gays and Jehovah's Witnesses and the Infirm and Intellectual and Freethinking, and they really did run the exhaust into the back of the transport trucks and they really did slaughter them wholesale in gas chambers and they did machine gun them while standing in their self-dug graves and they did work them to death to build weapons and vengeance weapons and did inject them with diseases and decompressed and pickled and chopped up and tortured and starved and killed in every way imaginable. And such behavior naturally upsets those who remember or are related to those who remember.

And thus, the denial of the same is a reasonable symptom of a certain type of mental illness, a lack of willingness to accept reality, the real reality that is, i.e., our consensus hallucination of the way things actually are. I personally think that one needs to suffer from this particular illness to accept the Catholic Church's teachings and behaviors through the centuries, from the Assumption of Mary to the Cadaver synod, so maybe it isn't hard to understand that a Catholic bishop might believe that "the historical evidence" was hugely against the Holocaust, but still, for a Church and a Pope that suffer from too close a connection to the above, one would think they would be sensitive to the unbelievable awfulness of the whole situation, bending over backward to salve and soothe the wounds so recent and so deep.

But no, today we see that Benedict XVI doesn't get it, reinstating Richard Williamson and other right-wing bishops. The story in the NY Times here. Yes, these are "declarations that we don't share in any way," well, except that we have brought these declarations back into the Church. Gott im Himmel.

UPDATE: Richard Williamson's un-excommunication has now been made contingent on his recanting of his no-gas-chamber belief. zmjezhd sent me a link to the bishop's blog where I'm sure we will all be able to follow his crisis of faith.

Natzweiler

From Hitler's Death Camps: the sanity of madness, by Konnilyn Feig:

Today the hotel has recovered its prewar fame. Its dining room is in demand for fancy wedding parties by the elite of Strasbourg and surrounding towns. A visitor sees wedding parties drive up to the hotel and park in front of the gas chamber. The wedding guests walk into the hotel dining rooms, sparing not a glance for the gas chamber, clearly marked only a few feet away. And they dine and celebrate a new marriage - so very close, so very, very close to that spot where many human beings lost their lives. Hotel guests during the war had perhaps a more unnerving experience, because the men and women to be gassed stood nude outside that plain building across from the restaurant, in full view of the luncheon patrons and the visiting professors. The victims' screams in the gas chamber were easily heard in the hotel and provided the background noise for the diners and sleepers.

Once again we come fact to face with the great question: how were so many so easily inured to the sufferings of others? And well we might ask it of ourselves.

Seven of Nine

My enviably witty friend Dave Ginocchio of the Russian River Wine Co (highly recommended), upon hearing of all this during this last Xmas season, replied "Feliz Nazi Blog," a saying I wish I had invented, but also made me promise to, at some point, connect Seven of Nine to the Nazis, not actually that difficult since the Star Trek franchise is such a sprawling monstrosity that it has touched on just about everything, and the reference is already there, ripe for the picking, from the Voyager series (VOY to those in the know):

TUVOK

I don't recognize this program.

TOM PARIS

I do. He's wearing a Nazi uniform. We're on Earth, during the Second World War.

SEVEN OF NINE

Nazi?

TOM PARIS

Totalitarian fanatics bent on world conquest. The Borg of their day ... no offense.

SEVEN OF NINE

None taken.

All this being only one of many Nazi references throughout the various incarnations. The picture above being from the visit of Adolf in an alternate 1944 (one many alternate WWIIs where the Nazis prevail) to the occupied US of A, this from ENT, Storm Front Part II (again, to those in the know).

But, in both cases, 7 of 9 and the NS, the uniform is the thing.

Auf der Heide blüht ein kleines Blümelein

Flash: Miss Erika, one of our remote correspondents, has sent along this communiqué.

re: Nazi Blog

Are you aware of the nazi sweetheart march "Erika" ,1939, by composer Herms Neil (was the marching song of the Waffen SS)? I feel it needs a place in your blog as it has such a forceful & catchy refrain.

here are video links (montages, etc):

www.youtube.com/watch

www.truveo.com/Erika/id/2182569962

www.youtube.com/watch

German Military Composer Herms Neil blurb:

www.pzg.biz/herms_neil.htm

www.tomahawkfilms.com/herms.htm

Lyrics in English:

1. On the heath there grows a little flower

And its name is Erika

A hundred thousand little bees

Swarm around Erika

Because her heart is full of sweetness,

Her flowery dress gives off a tender scent

On the heath there grows a little flower

And its name is Erika

2. In the homeland lives a little farm maid

And her name is Erika

This girl is my true treasure

And my luck, Erika

When the flower on the heath blooms lilac red,

I sing her this song in greeting.

On the heath there grows a little flower

And its name is Erika

3. Another little flower blooms in my small room

And its name is Erika

In the first rays of the morning and in the twilight

It looks at me, Erika

And it seems to me it speaks aloud:

Are you still thinking of your little bride?

Back home a farm maid weeps for you

And her name is Erika

Name "Erika" had been derived from the heather plant (German: Heide, Erika; Latin: Erica). Vast heather-yards are one of the proud symbols of German natural heritage.

Just thought I'd bring this to your attention.

The small room of the third verse no doubt a prescient image of the small room his corpse will inhabit soon. It is in fact a fine example of the excessively sentimental and jingoistic Soldier Marching Song, like so many others, e.g., Just Before the Battle Mother ("Farewell, mother, you may never / Press me to your heart again"), with a tune that, although needing to be carried along with the heavy rucksack, lightens the load, and reminds the bit of cannon fodder why they are fighting and dying, romanticizing the blown apart bits of body and blood mixing with the bittersweet tears of the girl and/or mother left behind. Once heard, these tunes are hard to forget, and I have found myself since Erika Deer's dispatch humming the chorus as I have gone about my day-to-day.

And I find myself hoping that, in the new coed & don't-don't-ask-don't-tell army of the US of A, there will be both gender-neutral and gender-preference-neutral marching songs as stirring as this, sung by legions of men and women and all points in between, marching to their deaths filled with a heady and passionate joy.

Valkyrie

I had intended to discuss the new Tom Cruise epic in terms of its pro-Prussian nationalist blinders and its rather ridiculous implication that Claus von Stauffenberg was some kind of hero to the world for merely coming to the conclusion that, after six years of doing his darnedest for his beloved leader and his beloved leader's inestimable awfulness, that maybe the way things were going wasn't the best for the future of his beloved Deutschland and maybe he and some of his cronies better off the guy in charge before he did any more damage. Not to the world, mind you, but to Germany and especially to its officer corps. But Roger Friedman has already done it for me, better than I could have, in a beautifully lilting and scathing review, from which I quote a choice passage:

... in “Valkyrie” Singer opens the door to a dangerous new thought: that the Holocaust and all the other atrocities could be of secondary important to the cause of German patriotism. Not once in “Valkyrie” do any of there “heroes” mention what’s happening around them, that any of them is appalled by or against what they know is happening or has happened: Hitler has systemically killed millions in the most barbaric ways possible to imagine.

It’s kind of galling to allow now, in 2008, that von Stauffenberg et al were either totally unaware of this, or that they felt their mission superceded it. In “Valkyrie,” at the expense of making a joke, they are almost like Franz Liebkin, author of Mel Brooks’s fictitious “Springtime for Hitler.” His famous line in “The Producers” is: “War? What war? We vas in the back. We didn’t see a thing!”

A good list of Hitler assassination attempts is here, some by people less reprobate. Many involved in the German resistance were less bloody-handed than von Stauffenberg: for example the leader of the anti-anti-Semitic Confessing Church in Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, hanged with piano wire during the post-Valkyrie purges, and the Weisse Rose, all beheaded by the Gestapo in '43.

Stalags

Nazi exploitation films such as Ilse, She Wolf of the SS fueled my youthful groping endeavors, and similar imagery has tentacles throughout American culture, including the "Men's Adventure" pulp fiction post WWII, but the weirdest and most Freudian-ly complex conjunction is the immense popularity of the Stalag among Israelis of the second generation post Holocaust, a "peculiar Hebrew concoction of Nazism, sex and violence," no doubt bred in large part by the Israeli culture's repression of the horrors of recent past. In these books, the protagonists are typically Allied soldiers who act out a series of power exchange exercises with jackbooted female SS-Helferin, ending in a rape-snuff orgy where evil gets its due.

In reality, of course, female guards and the few women that formally made it into the SS did not wear leather Nazi-chic fetish uniforms and those that were most sadistic, such as the notorious Dorothea Binz, later hanged by the British, were of the typical 'banality of evil' type, enjoying the corruption of power over life and death that affected so many ordinary German maids and ticket-takers and accountants, and existing in a netherworld of horror and brutality and filth, hardly the supervillians of such masturbation fodder. But such tidy sexualization of horror is common, clearly the most common progenitor of the grindhouse genre. The best-selling Hebrew novella House of Dolls, linked by some to the rise of the Stalags, which purports to tell the true story of Jewish women forced into prostitution in the camps is marketed as an exposé, but veers dangerously close to pornography in its explicitness. And, maybe even more dangerous is that fact that such ill-supported notions, carried forward into other cultural objects including the Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling vehicle The Night Porter, tend to blame the survivor of the horrors, villifying them for their toady collaboration with evil.

Feliz Nazi Blog

My literate writing time recently has been spent primarily on the blog I started with my sometimes librettist and always friend Jim Bisso, the explanation for which is somewhat difficult but is revealed by the gestalt of the postings en masse. UPDATE: this blog is no more, but its core has been folded into the E.W. blog hierarchy.

But I'm now in the process of composing a new waltz for Lynne, a companion piece as it were to the old one, both of which will be presented by the orchestra in the most waning day of February. My visit to New York has imbued me with a deep piety for all things artistic and renewed appreciation for hard driving ambition and a work ethic that allows not for fiddle-faddle.

Conversation

Erling (explaining things to Bruce): I'm not actually pro-Nazi, I'm just fascinated by the Nazis.

Bruce (in simulated conversation, mockingly): voice 1: Oh, I don't actually like chocolate, I'm just fascinated by chocolate. voice 2: Oh, really, what is it that fascinates you? voice 1: The taste!

Erling: point.

Jim (in response): Oh, oh. I think we, and our age cohort, were inoculated with a dirty Axis needle. All those movies, TV shows, cartoons, and other ephemera. But I know what he means, whenever looking into any of this stuff online, I run across both ends of the spectrum (from Holocaust to Neo-Nazi sites), but it's the ones in the middle that usually give me pause. Those U-Boot, Axis military history, Waffen-SS, Iron Cross medal winners, that profess a fascination (phallic gazing) with but protesting an utter horror of Nazis.

Toothbrush with a Smile

The fact that Basil Fawlty can simply put his finger over his upper lip and flick his combover over his brow to evoke the greatest evil of all time shows the intensely iconic nature of these most simple of facial features, notably The Mustache, AKA the Chaplin, the Hitler, the Toothbrush. And in The Great Dictator, Mr. Chaplin exploited his aforementioned painted-on mustache in his excoriating portrayal of the title character, the familiarly fascist and anti-Jewish dictator of Tomainia, made to look so very terrible and ruthless but also somewhat funny and maybe even just a bit understandable, as don't we all just secretly want to be a little bit of a dictator ourselves, and not merely a tinpot one, but the next one up, like way up, because we agree with the following, one of my personal favorite quotes:

"The greatest happiness is to vanquish your enemies, to chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth, to see those dear to them bathed in tears, to clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters."

to quote Genghis Khan, an even greater megalomaniac than our dear and beloved Führer. And the cutesy-ness of the latter terrible and most evil evil brings us to the cutsily evil tees, marked by the infamous toothbrush, of the squeaky but not necessarily clean, but most prepubescent duo above, the notorious Prussian Blue, named after so many things:

Part of our heritage is Prussian German. Also our eyes are blue, and Prussian Blue is just a really pretty color. There is also the discussion of the lack of "Prussian Blue" coloring (Zyklon B residue) in the so-called gas chambers in the concentration camps. We think it might make people question some of the inaccuracies of the "Holocaust" myth.

Oh my oh my.

Propaganda

There is quite a wonderful archive of German propaganda from the Nazi years and beyond at the Calvin College website. Propaganda works quite well, and the average person basically accepts it either whole or half heartedly, and so it's worth a look to see something of the point of view of the Germans during the conflict. As an example, the cartoon on the right is quite enlightening. The context is the (from our point of view) accidental bombing of Switzerland, a 'neutral' country (more on that in a later post). The guilty airman is being questioned as to why he made the mistake and his response is that the flags of Switzerland and the Red Cross look so similar. To understand the humor of this cartoon, you have to know that it was a common belief in Germany that the Allies were deliberately bombing hospitals and Red Cross vehicles and facilities. Maybe we were, maybe we weren't. In Chunk Yeager's autobiography, he describes being given an order to go to a particular mile-square grid location in Germany and kill every living thing in it: person, animal, etc. He says he didn't feel too good about it, but he did it because that's what you did when you were given an order, the classic Nürnberg defense. Luckily for him, there are two major requirements for being a war criminal: one is committing the atrocity and the second is losing the war. Victors so write the history books as we know.

The German Problem

In the afterword to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William Shirer looks back at the unexpectedly overwhelming response to his book, positive in the former Allied countries and decidedly defensive in the former Axis. In recalling the attack on the book by the then-chancellor Konrad Adenauer, he points out that the Germans simply could not face up to their past, i.e., rampant adventurous conquest and slaughter. It is in this context that he discusses, as he calls it, 'The German Problem:"

And now, as the thirtieth-anniversary edition of The Rise and Fall goes to press, the world is suddenly confronted with a new reunification of Germany. Soon, united, Germany will be strong again economically and, if it wishes, militarily, as it was in the time of Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler. And Europe will be faced again with the German problem. If the past is any guide, the outlook is not very promising for Germany's neighbors, who twice in my lifetime have been invaded by the Teutonic armies. The last time, under Hitler, as the readers of this book are reminded, the German behavior was a horror in its barbarism.

This raises the curious question: is there really something different about the Germans, different from the rest of us? If we say, yes, that there is inherent evil in the German People, then aren't we faced with an issue similar to that hallucinated by the Nazis, i.e., the alleged "Jewish Problem?" Or was Hitler somehow irresistibly charismatic and is there something inherently evil in all of us, although a difficult and bitter cup to drink, possibly true, and, as we face the current descent into economic chaos and the decline of the American Empire, maybe a glimpse into our own future?

I remember, after the wall came down, the raised hands of the nervous peoples of Europe, asking the obvious question, to wit: What are your intentions toward our sons and daughters?" and the hesitation of Germany, just a beat, but a hesitation nonetheless, to promise they wouldn't try to rebuild Grossdeutschland or maybe even just a bit more. As the Wikipedia article says:

To facilitate this process and to reassure other countries, some changes were made to the "Basic Law" (constitution). Article 146 was amended so that Article 23 of the current constitution could be used for reunification. After the five "New Länder" of East Germany had joined, the constitution was amended again to indicate that all parts of Germany are now unified. Article 23 was rewritten as keeping it could be understood as an invitation to e.g. Austria to join. However, the constitution can be amended again at some future date and it still permits the adoption of another constitution by the German people at some time in the future.

The final line is, of course, the kicker, and shows the apprehension of the encyclopedist, but I guess, if I had to choose, gun held to my head, that there is a little German in each of us, that given the proper confluence of economic misery and jingoist propaganda, we could find ourselves swept away, wondering why the bombs are now falling on us. No, wait, I'm wrong, it really is just them - the evil others - and now I may sleep a bit more soundly.

Polish Anti-Nazi Art

I had a lovely visit with my Art History Teacher Aimée Brown Price, whom I hadn't seen in a dog's age, today and noticed some Polish and Polish-Soviet War and Nazi Resistance art sitting about. Created soon after the war, they show a somewhat romanticized view of the Soviet involvement in the liberation.

Too Big

My fellow new music blogger Kyle Gann recently wrote a discussion of a discussion of the Nazis and the Republican Party, but the truth is you can't really compare anything to the Nazis. They are just too big. As Godwin's Law implies, they are the super-ultra-end of all comparisons, off the charts. Hollywood and the Video Gaming industries have always plucked them out of the bag when they need some Unrepentant Evil that requires no character development, no softness, no compassion, no other side to the argument that is their malevolence incarnate. I remember reading that Kubrick always wanted to make a film on the Holocaust but decided that it could never be done, that Schindler's List isn't really about the Holocaust, it's actually about the opposite of the Holocaust, hope in the face of hopelessness, but the reality of the Holocaust is really the all-encompassing horror of horror and hopelessness without end, with no escape, an abyss and a void, even the concerted disremembering of its own existence in the fall of the Reich. Even The Producers, which so wonderfully skewers the Prussians, doesn't mention the Shoah; its inconceivable savagery would overwhelm. The Fox News-ites who paint Obama as a Messianic Charismatic Hitlerian figure who will lead us into a Götterdämmerung are simply idiotic, simply haven't read their histories. There is no way to again be as big as he was, as big as they were.

Die Aktphotographie

I've always been fascinated by the utterly insane and so, toward that end, I present a feast of Scientific Racism, the perfectly sculpted Aryan Master Race Corpus:

and let's not forget Leni, who tried so hard later in life to find absolution for her early sins, namely and once again, the perfectly sculpted Aryan Athletes in their many and womanly almost-nakedness, putting the shot and throwing the javelin and in general prancing about: