This week's question: what is your emotional response to this picture? What memories immediately come to mind?

[photo credit: sxc.hu member mrgoose]

Quite coincidentally, I’ve come upon two different social twists on Adolf Hitler’s legacy, each of which is quite fascinating in its own right, but amazing when taken together.

And it really is coincidence: Hitler’s Beneficiaries, by Götz Ali—which I’ll review tomorrow—came to me by accident. I’d ordered from the library another book by the same scholar, and the wrong one came, which I read anyway. And Children of a Vanished World, a collection of photographs by Roman Vishniac, was handed to me on vacation by my mother, who in turn (I believe) had found it on some giveaway table.

The former discusses the German poverty ended by Hitler (via the Nazi welfare state); the latter the Eastern European Jewish poverty he murdered.

Children of a Vanished World is a collection of several dozen photographs of Jewish children from Poland to the Ukraine, in the late 1930s. The pictures are accompanied by Yiddish playground songs and their English translations.

The Dove

The dove flew
Over all the world
And saw a lovely land
But the land was locked
And the key was broken
One, two, three
Out you go.

Roman Vishniac was brought into the region 1935 by a Jewish charity, who was already worried about the future of the communities with the saber-rattling coming from Germany. And it was just in time: the negatives had to be smuggled out of the country, and starting in 1939, Nazis overran Eastern Europe, and would later initiate a genocide of these communities—hence this Vanished World.

The history is not new to me. What really sticks in the throat here is the quiet, and somewhat self-contained poverty of these communities. These were hardly the international conspirator bogeymen obsessed over by the Nazis and today’s anti-Semites.

The haunting question, and one pages through this book is: which of these children survived?

Again, these were impoverished communities. It’s a recurring human tendency to try to eliminate poverty by getting rid of the poor (or at least getting them out of sight), and the whole story makes me rethink the holocaust. Why were rank-and-file Germans willing to participate in this mass-murder? In part, people have argued over and over again, because of the dehumanizing anti-Jewish propaganda bubbling out of Nazi headquarters, depicting Jews as rats and similar.

I am certain that’s part of the truth. But what about the fact that the Jews they encountered in Eastern Europe were hungry, with shabby clothes and broken teeth? It’s easier to be hard toward the homeless—we all know that. So—and this is the question I’m left with—was Jewish poverty a part of the holocaust motivation?

Photo: credit the International Center for Photography.

It’s as if Rodney King had been beaten by Black Panthers inside the LAPD: a change in the perpetrator’s identity changes everything about our understanding of the incident.

It was forty-two years ago today, on June second 1967, in West Berlin. Unarmed, unthreatening literature student Benno Ohnesorg was participating in his first protest (against the Iranian Shah’s visit), and was shot dead by a West Berlin cop named Karl-Heinz Kurras.

Kurras was found innocent in court, but the case galvanized student protest in West Germany. An entire generation, born post-war and raised in the shadows of the Iron Curtain, suddenly came to view their own government as fascist and bad.

Last week, forty years later, archivists going through the files of the East German secret police, discovered that Kurras was a spy.

While further research has failed to demonstrate that he was acting on orders, the symbolism of the story is incredibly troubling. Ohnesorg has been canonized (to the right: see this monument to him, image from Wikipedia) by the left as an innocent victim (that much is certain, in any case) of an irreparably brutal government.

In the short run, the late sixties and seventies, the murder was fuel for significant protest (including leftist terror) and wide-ranging soul-searching in the West, to the point that Germany went on the path to becoming the popularly left-leaning place it is today, with a gut-level distrust of Western powers.

Meanwhile, the story begs the question of memory: for those for whom Ohnesorg's death was a cornerstone to much of their values and moral decisions for forty-two years. Now what?

Here’s a really interesting assessment of the difference between Paris’ and Prague’s 1968 upheavals, by French historian Jacques Rupnik.

The first half of 1968 was a remarkable season of youth rebellion around the world, from Mexico to the US, to Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain. But it was in France and Czechoslovakia that protesters came closest to overthrowing a government.

In France, the Paris movement was a leftist one, led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, opposed to various cultural and political (the two are inseparable in the minds of the Paris movement) developments post-WWII, most importantly the material culture, or the culture of commercialism.

The Czech movement was more political in nature and was focused on restoring various liberties (such as the press) that the Soviets had been suppressing.

Jacques Rupnik suggests that we have remembered the events falsely: the only quality they had in common was their simultaneity. More importantly, both movements were out to achieve what the other was trying to shake off: the Czechs trying to rid themselves of the very Marxism the French wanted; the French rejecting the democracy (“an illusion”) the Czechs wanted.

The Prague Spring was brutally put down by communist troops and tanks, while the Paris Spring simply ran out of gas. But the Soviet occupation of Prague, Rupnik argues, had a significant long-term impact on the French Left: it disburdened them of their delusions about the workers’ paradise USSR.

By making human rights, civil society, and European culture central to its activity, [Czech] dissent had an impact that was by no means negligible on the anti-totalitarian Left in France in a new political and intellectual context post-1968.

[…] The post-68 "new philosophers", when they asked themselves questions about the origins of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, of the Gulags and of "barbarism with a human face" (Bernard-Henri Lévy), traced the intellectual and political ancestry of Soviet Russian Bolshevism back to the German "master thinkers" (A. Glucksmann) and further back to the Enlightenment, discovering along the way some of the concerns of Czech dissenters including Jan Patocka and Vaclav Havel.

The Czechs were trying to turn (quoting a protester from the time) “From Asia and toward Europe;” to French ears “Europe” carried more than a whiff of imperialism. Thus is was significant for both movements that the Czech return to Europe after 1989 was marked by adsorption into the European Union (by which Rupnik means the common market).

It’s early spring in Wisconsin. The forest floor is beginning to show through the snow, and in the cities, the snow is almost entirely gone. Open water is appearing on the lakes. I heard a Sandhill Crane the other day.

Looks like we made it through another long winter. People in mild climates often have a hard time understanding the true spiritual weight of spring in the north. The nearest analogy I can think of is the onset of monsoon rains in the tropics: we’ve survived the harsh season—now comes the time for living.

I love the winter—probably more than most of my friends and neighbors. But in the north, long-term survival hinges on the return of spring. Which means the procession of the earth around the sun. It’s humbling. It’s a memento mori—a reminder of our mortality, our limits.

God has preserved us. Thanks be to God.

Last week, along the Ice Age National Scenic Trail in Cross Plains, Wisconsin (Right Here!)

One of the sorrows of life together—life in a multi-racial church, where, from arrivals of new babies, to divorces, unemployment, graduations, baptisms, and celebrations, life is lived intimately—comes exactly at those moments when limits to our life together become aparent.

For me, a white man who grew up loving the outdoors, from deserts to swamps, it is more than just frustrating that social and cultural barriers make it hard for my African American friends to join me in the woods—it’s lonely.

It took me years to appreciate these barriers: experiences with racists in the woods; unpleasant moments from mosquitoes to brambles not compensated for with corresponding life-giving moments; and so on. I’ve learned that love of the outdoors has to be taught and cultivated; and that a distaste for (or fear of) the outdoors is also taught.

In other words, for most of my friends, to share in my joy is to do me a favor. These are the bridge-builders who accompany their college friends to backcountry camps, risking scary encounters with local police.

Still, I believe that nature is objectively good and beautiful. It’s the social garbage we’ve added to this good that makes nature practically inaccessible to many of my friends.

Similarly, love of nature is a taught pleasure, one passed down from generations. It’s one of the greatest treasures white Americans have to offer the world. But it’ll take more than a few picnics and camping trips for this treasure to become valuable to the rest of America.

This is a story of healing from segregation and racism that will take more than a few years to accomplish. A few generations, most likely.

One complaint I have about Black History Month materials, in offices and schools, is that we always return to the same national figures—Abolitionists, Civil Rights leaders, etc.

What might be more valuable in the long run would be local black history months, in which colleges, universities, corporations, organizations, and neighborhoods explore Black History within their smaller bodies.

So … are there local histories you’d like more known for Black History Month?

For instance, looking at InterVarsity and Urbana: here is to my knowledge the first African-American speaker at an Urbana convention. It's Ruth Lewis, speaking at Urbana 64.

What about you? If you're not part of InterVarsity, what black histories are part of your network? Forget Rosa Parks: hers is an important national story, but also an important story in Montgomery, Alabama. But what about your city? What about really local stories to your town?

2009 is twenty years since the end of the cold war. Time, says Kurt Schlögel, writing in Eurozine, to take stock. It’s too early for history books, but early enough for historiography, the telling of history.

A narrative can never be ahead of the narrator, and there will only be a truly European narrative when something like a European horizon of experience has emerged. That is, not in the foreseeable future.

That being said, Schlögel traces some of the contours. In an attempt to separate from the USSR, East Bloc countries from Poland to Hungary insisted on a new identity as “Central Europe,” an assertion of belonging to the European horizon of experience in question.

1989 was the year of tearing down Lenin statues, but in 2009, Central Europe is solidly oriented toward Brussels. Negative identification (“we’re not Leninists”, or more ominously, "we're not Jews, or Africans") is the easy part. What has replaced it? That's too early to tell.