Hitler hated Jews, rich and poor alike. He also hated German poverty. And even in war, he managed to do something about it. That is the astonishing story here.

Götz Ali is a German historian whose research on the Third Reich and Second World War has made him a bit of a rock-star in the German-speaking world, to the degree that detractors have been known to protest his book signings. I doubt such a fate would await any American historian, in part because Americans are heirs to a centuries-old attempt to bury the past. To be a historian, in certain respects, is an un-American vocation.

But Germans and their neighbors live with the consequences of WWII, and as Ali points out in Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, there remain many untold stories of what happened and what remains for us, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the perpetrators.

Hitler managed to retain legitimacy in part, Ali argues, because of the material benefits he brought to German daily life. These came in a few forms. First was war-time spending, of which the greatest profits went to major industrial and financial institutions. This is a well-known story, and Ali finds it important to qualify it in the preface:

There is no question that many leading industrialists and financiers were complicit in Hitler’s regime. … And indeed many Germans had a stake in … [shifting] the burden of blame for Nazi barbarism to a handful of individuals.

This book was conceived as an attempt at redressing the balance, at redirecting public attention toward the potential advantages everyday Germans derived from the Nazi regime.

Nazis occupying much of Europe carefully plundered their victims infrastructure, returning untold prosperity to Germany. We’re not talking about crude pirate chests here. Noting old hearsay that the “American care packages that helped Germans survive the early years after the war were dismissed as mere chicken feed. … “

It was only when I began work on this book that the truth behind these stories became clear to me. The women of the Third Reich were accustomed to far better than chicken feed. The packages their husbands had constantly sent back from German-occupied countries between 1941 and 1944 contained staple and gourmet items that supplied well beyond the minimum calories necessary for human survival.

But it was more than a private criminal enterprise: local government was involved. The creepiest picture in the book is a propaganda poster proclaiming that Jüdisches vermögen wird volksgut, or Jewish wealth is becoming the people’s. They were carefully expropriating, for instance private Jewish libraries, and distributing the volumes to local public libraries around Germany.

In this and many other ways, the war didn’t hurt people at home. Chickens landed in people’s pots, and dissent dissipated.

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.

Last week, in preparation for a return to school after a decade in professional life, I went looking for a laptop-worthy bicycle-commuting bag. I'd never found anything adequate. But now I have. The salesperson explained to me that the last two years have seen a surging demand for professional bike-commuting materials. It's no longer students and trekkers who commute. The cost of driving to work has driven this change, rather than altruism.

Here is a bicycle parking lot in Austria. My question: have you begun commuting by bike? If so why? If not, why not?

I've just read a graphic novel of the immediate aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. Deogratias, a former employee of a Catholic mission station, is haunted, and tries to drown the memories in booze. But even this fragile crutch falls apart as he is forced to come to terms, not only with what he saw, but the decisions he made.

Written by Belgian J.P. Stassen, Deogratias is a difficult read for its intense imagery and storytelling. Alas, as is my usual experience with graphic novels, it left me wanting to get deeper into Deogratias’ mind. Oh well.

This is the place to go if you want a history of the events; to read the introduction is to get the sense that the editors assume readers have only encountered the Rwanda genocide through Hotel Rwanda.

That may be true, and if so it’s an insight into our human inhumanity: our refusal to remember the worst of ourselves.

I recently read an article about how while everyone wants to know if Islam and democracy are compatible, everybody was asking the same thing about Catholicism a century ago. The implication being, of course, that since Catholicism can obviously be harmonized with democracy, so too can Islam.

But after reading this (German Language) article by Yale philosopher Seyla Benhabib (left), Cosmopolitanism and Democracy, I’m not so sure we’ve made the right conclusions. Not about Islam, or even Catholicism, but Christianity at large. We’ve just assumed Protestant democracy to be coherent.

I’m beginning to wonder if Christian democracy is only possible with a bridled Christianity. Benhabib’s essay barely touches on religion. It’s a talk given on the 80th birthday of Jürgen Habermas, one of the most important theorists of European unity.

Pointing out that democracy has always implied boundaries, while cosmopolitanism has always resisted boundaries, Benhabib concludes:

In an age of globalization, the inclusion of the other becomes a world-citizen’s duty, a duty extending beyond national boundaries. (my translation)

What she’s getting at is that human rights are more important than democracy. This is a fancy way of saying that the mob shouldn’t have the last word.

But as Christians, don’t we believe the same? Don’t we also believe, with the humanists, that majority opinion does not make something right or wrong, but that there’s a higher law? The reason Catholics in the early 20th century found democracy wanting is precisely because democracy puts right and wrong on the line in the interest of electing wisely.

This is not to say that democracy is not the best way of containing tyranny—although history can challenge that one, too. Hamas was elected fair and square, as were the Nazis in the late 20s and early 30s (before they tired of Democracy).

Finally, of course, the Bible presents a decidedly non-democratic version of the future, a monarchical rule by Jesus. So the question becomes: is democracy a value for Christians at all?

It’s now twenty years since the Tiananmen Square massacre. While Tiananmen was hovering in the background to the 2008 Olympics, and all the calls for boycotts, many of today’s Chinese students were babies at the time, and have grown up in an entirely different environment.

Here’s a great interview Yu Hua, a Chinese novelist, gave with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of Switzerland. It’s in German, but signandsight.com has translated a key paragraph:

In an interview with Andreas Breitenstein, Chinese author Yu Hua, whose epic novel "Brothers" comes out in German in August, talks about how "sensitivities" in China have changed since 1989.

"You shouldn't forget that the freedom-loving students of the 80s had all lived through the catastrophes of the Cultural Revolution. They knew what a life of poverty meant, and they recognized that the lack of freedom in which they were forced to live was the reason for this poverty. Today's student generation has grown up in a boom era. They have no idea about poverty, and they delight in absolute personal freedom... China is a strange country. On one hand we are still living under the dictatorship of a party that can control everything with administrative measures. On the other, we are much more free than the West. We can bad-mouth anybody or anything to our heart's content and with impunity. You just can't criticize the government."

The NZZ accompanies the interview with the nice collage above right: the same street in 1989 and today: attacking tanks have been replaced with teeming personal automobiles—or: untold wealth driving upon the stones where a crushed democracy movement once marched. But, Yu claims, personal freedom in China is not lacking.

During a visit to Madison’s Juneteenth celebration on Saturday, I was left wondering, once again, where all the white people were, at least the ones like me.

Juneteenth is the celebration of African American emancipation from slavery, marked on the day when Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was finally enforced in Texas. It’s evolved in recent years to be a celebration of black life and history.

Juneteenth contrasts with Martin Luther King day in a few important ways: most Juneteenth celebrations are homegrown, and don’t take place with mayors and congressmen trying to look good. And for reasons probably more to do with summertime (vs. January’s MLK day), Juneteenth celebrations are a lot more fun.

Back to my question. There were indeed, as always, plenty of white people present; at least two percent, which in a big crowd, amounts to a decent number. But in a city with 85% white people, the disbalance still sticks out. The white people at Juneteenth generally fall into three categories: those somehow related to black people (spouses etc.); those left-leaning elite-ish types who fancy “solidarity”; and those with something to sell, like Obama t-shirts.

Notably absent are middle class white families, despite this being a terrific family event. I can only guess at why: people don’t think the celebration is for them; and most importantly, they don’t know anyone there. So it may be nothing more (or perhaps nothing less) than a segregation problem.

In recent years, evangelicals have begun reasserting their role in abolition, loudly talking about William Wilberforce and similar. So why not come and join in the fun? Well, perhaps folk don’t feel that the resolution of a moral evil is worth celebrating; that celebration seems somehow wrong next to all that suffering.

One of the best lessons I’ve learned during my decade-plus in a largely African-American church is the skill of celebrating in the midst of everything else being rough. Joy is an act of the will, and I don’t think I was taught much intentionality in joy while growing up in White Baptist circles.

And so, few white Christians come out to celebrate Juneteenth. The solution, I imagine, would be more interracial church socializing, and a mindset shift among white Christians that interracial anything is anything more than a downer. Come out and celebrate! Have some pie, enjoy some music, and celebrate life!

I’d love your opinions.

Credit: flickr user arasmus
 

The trouble with visiting places you’ve long dreamed about is the inevitable arrival of reality. The dream is so often sweeter than the truth.

So it was with Viroqua. The closest thing to a city in the Kickapoo Area, it’s a center of commerce and cultural life for a densely inhabited surrounding farmland.

In keeping with the large numbers of dropouts, hippies and back-to-earthers in the area, Viroqua is home to a bewildering array of alternative medicines, shamanists, and other counterculture types. A friend told me that nearly all his friends are pot smokers; a walk around town feels far more urbane than most big cities in the Midwest, what with the punks, the artists, organic food co-ops, counterculture book stores, coffee roasters, pet therapists and random wandering lost souls.

My friend further told me of a significant cultural divide between the churches in town, and the “Ridgers” as the counterculture folk are called. It’s not exactly animosity; it’s people living in different worlds and speaking different languages, even as they live on top of each other.

For years now, whenever we’ve gotten fed up with city life, Becca and I have dreamed of some day living in Viroqua. The dream was not fully based on real experiences. After a day in town, on the drive back to Madison, Becca asked: “are we ready to talk about Viroqua?” Because we both knew. There was an unfriendly feel.

Rather than finding a utopia, we found a real place. The only utopia lived in our heads, in the original, Latin sense of the word: Utopia means Nowhere.

Viroqua is not nowhere. So my first response to her question was: “Is there anywhere that we belong?”

The slap in the face of a real town, with real, rude people, culture gaps, and so on—it reveals a deeper need: this is a spiritual question more than anything else: Where will we find our rest?

There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; 10for anyone who enters God's rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from his. Hebrews 4:9-10

Continuing yesterday's story:

The Kickapoo Valley has always been a highly diverse country. Originally Ho-Chunk country, it was also a crossroads of Sauk and Dakota peoples. It was a battlefield in the Blackhawk War of the 1830s, and a real melting pot of migrants from all over: Cornish, Irish, German, and above all, Norwegian immigrants; Yankee settlers and free blacks.

It was, actually, one of two settlements of black farmers in Wisconsin. There are few blacks there today—but not because of relocation to cities: they melted into the dominant white population. This in itself is a remarkable story. There are precious few stories of racial intermarriage in the rural north of the US.

During the Dust Bowl, Lynne Healy explains in A Thousand Pieces of Paradise: Landscape and Property in the Kickapoo Valley farmers here pioneered the technique of controlling erosion by plowing along the contours of hills, leaving an incredible pattern when viewed from the sky: see the book cover on the left.

Amish farmers started showing up after WW2, relocating from parts of Pennsylvania subject to suburban sprawl; and Hippie farmers began moving in during the sixties. The Amish and the Hippies, not natural allies, found a common interest in what would later be called organic farming.

Everybody, the dairy farmers included, worked so hard to preserve the land that the area became attractive for vacation homes starting in the 80s.

These mixtures of people did not always come effortlessly: a lot of legal fighting took place. The Amish have been accused of tearing up the blacktop roads with studded horseshoes; the dairy farmers have been accused of reckless erosion by grazing their cattle on steep hillsides; the organic farmers have been accused of holier-than-thou attitudes, and so on.

Meanwhile, the Ho-Chunk have returned. Once removed by treaty, they have lived as plain old US citizens back in their homeland for many years. But recent years have seen an enormous infusion of money, thanks to a casino in Wisconsin’s biggest resort area. The Ho-Chunk have acquired large tracts from a cancelled dam project, and have bought other land outright.

The story is not about to resolve, because the area is firmly integrated into American society, with all its contradictory forces. And yet, in a day in which voluntary, de facto segregation is becoming the norm, this quiet—though hardly gentle—story of integration is remarkable.