The Cultural Impact And Legacy Of World War Two

It is pointless to deny the horrific brutality of that bombardment, but foolish to rationalize it as equivalent to the crimes of Nazism. You will never hear the older citizens of European countries occupied by the Nazis saying the Germans suffered unjustly or the Allies were too brutal or inhumane.

if some country lucked into the exact # of ppl killed + buildings destroyed needed to accomplish war objectives, and didn't go over that calculation by even one, how would we even know? or does it not matter and all war is horrific brutality whether justified or not?

http://i.imgur.com/39570lm.jpg

Here we learn that a government that put some of its citizens in concentration camps shockingly committed the terrible injustice of depriving some soldiers of publicity.

I guess this is the general purpose WW2 thread?

im about halfway through Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" and it has re-kindled my boyhood fascination for WW2. it's difficult, however, to wade through the dross (soooo many bad documentaries) and find the quality stuff. I picked up Max Hasting's "Inferno: The World at War," and it looks pretty good but I'm interested in something perhaps more...academic? Or at least something that remains comprehensive while having a point of view. a friend also recommended Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands" which looks like the kind of thing I'm interested in.

Shirer book is a great read but tainted by prejudice and partisanship in the end i think

Bloodlands isn't really about WW2, it is purely concerned with the combined civilian genocide of Stalin/Hitler in the east. I just started The Maisky Diaries yesterday and have the Klemperer Diaries queued up. Max Hastings is a military fanboy wanker and completely untrustworthy imo.

The three volumes of Richard Evans' Third Reich trilogy is excellent, and heavily sourced in a way that's of the academy though these are not intended chiefly for an academic audience. I'm nearing the end of the third volume, focused on the war (the first two are on the rise of the Third Reich and its rule before the war, respectively).

I get the prejudice with Shirer (right or wrong I find it easy to ignore his obvious homophobia) and his slight digs at the nazis throughout (goering's "corpulence," hitler's tantrums) are really a relief in some ways. but maybe you mean something else with partisanship? too hard on chamberlain?

Max Hastings is a military fanboy wanker and completely untrustworthy imo.

shit. I liked the cover and it seemed like a decent refresher before tackling more in depth stuff.

Hastings does mention in the preface that gerhard weinberg's "the world at arms" is one of the best single volume histories of the war.

it's totally foolish to want to know what the single best literary/historical classic account of ww2 is, I know.

ignore me, it's probably best you come to your conclusions your own way. I got half way through his WW1 book and then ditched it for the way superior Christopher Clarke book and he decided MH definitely wasn't for me.

hethen

partisanship i was thinking specifically about crazy Hitler's tantrums tbh, they always read like he's unreflectively repeating Allied propaganda and become too cartoonified for me to take them seriously - i think in the context of a more rigorous historical approach i'd accept those stories more willingly

speaking of that sort of thing, Shirer is where the legendary "teppischfresser" thing originates, i believe.

quite possibly. even if all the details are true i think it undermines his credibility, but that's a personal foible probably.

Volker Ullrich's first volume of his Hitler biog is quite interesting. Although it seemed to be way too padded out with Goebbels diaries and I get the feeling way too many archives got reduced to ashes in the Nazi end days for there to be a flood of new information, like what came out of the Soviet archives in the 90's.

Bloodlands isn't really about WW2, it is purely concerned with the combined civilian genocide of Stalin/Hitler in the east.

this is true but still imo a tremendous work (and extraordinarily readable)

Absolutely. His account of the Babi Yar massacre is the probably the most harrowing depiction of real, pure evil I have ever read.

his more recent book, "Black Earth," also looks really good.

i think my problem is that im asking for two irreconcilable things at once: both a factual historical account (this happened, and then this happened), but also a kind of deep and sophisticated interpretive framework for *explaining* all this inexplicable carnage.

baba yar was one of the first events of the holocaust i learned about as a child (it was where my extended family who perished in the shoah were killed). i remember where i was when my parents told me about it - we were eating at a deli and i had just ordered a large dish of cole slaw for lunch (since that is all i wanted to eat at the time) and the restaurant made me a large dish of it despite it generally only being served as a side. i kept getting really confused because i thought they were talking about baba ganush.

Ordered both "Bloodlands" and "Black Earth" (the paperback, not out until September), very much looking forward to both of them. I'm particularly interested in the "lebensraum" stuff at the moment so I think Snyder is my guy for now.

The first half of Bloodlands is concerned with Stalin's collectivisation induced famine in Ukraine and his genocidal terror campaigns of the 30's, it is unremittingly bleak but hard to put down.

im sure this is a bit of a naive question but im here to learn...

so when i was a kid first learning about all this (late 80s) i distinctly remember that most of the books i read treated the holocaust as more or less ancillary to the military heroism of the allies while also quite de-emphasized--it was something certainly worth mentioning (in a chapter, say) and then passed over. the principle image of the destruction and chaos of the war was always "the bomb." I don't know if this is a correct impression of the "cultural status" of the war at that time but it's what i experienced.

thinking on it, i get the impression that the bomb carried much more symbolic weight as the central image of the war on through the 50s/60s/70s than the holocaust did. it seems to me that this has changed, and possibly right around 1989? and is the collapse of the USSR, and the subsequent greater understanding of exactly what happened in easter Europe, responsible for this cultural shift (if indeed i am perceiving it accurately).

it could simply be that my own (white, american, texan) consciousness of the holocaust has simply grown, and i certainly remember reading Anne Frank in school and all that--although quite strangely i dont remember the teachers being too explicit about the context for that book!

i think for decades after the true scope of the holocaust wasn't truly understood or disseminated properly in the greater culture, plus i think its nature as something that was only really even reported on after the war ended led to the primary narrative of WW2 remaining the conflict and the exclamation point that officially ended it.

at least for awhile, i mean it's not as if the holocaust was unknown or the scope wasn't understood to a degree, but i think WW2 in culture was about battles and air raids and sieges and u-boats or whatever for a very long time. and i think pearl harbor also played a part in the A-bomb having a more central role, bc that was obv the greatest generation's 9/11 and once the trauma from that event faded i think people started to get a better perspective on the whole war.

during the Cold War people were really terrified of being nuked so ppl were pretty obsessed with the bomb

for a long time the holocaust was culturally a little - i don't know if radioactive is the word but ppl didn't really know how to deal w/ it and a lot of post-war media that touched on it did so obliquely. i think the big change was first when Shoah came out (1985) and then the really big one was schindler's list (1993) which opened up a lot of dialogue and i think made ppl more comfortable w/ discussing it. i wish i had more specific examples of early 'oblique' references but for example Crossfire + Gentleman's Agreement both came out in 1947 and neither mentioned the holocaust at all which you'd think would be a big oversight in a film about antisemitism.

it would be interesting to find the first hollywood film that even mentions it.

I am struggling to recall the TV miniseries from the 80s (which was def prior to Shoah if memory serves) that addressed the Holocaust - it featured some scenes that really stuck in my mind like Jewish kids fighting as partisans/resistance fighters as well as a scene with a mother going to the showers with her daughter, assuring her that it was "just a shower". Was on PBS... shit what was the name of that thing...

might've been this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_(miniseries)

Just started the third Richard Evans after a bit of a layoff from the second one. (Only so many 1000 page histories of the Third Reich that you can take in quick succession.)

They're fantastic and the insight into the inner workings of the Nazi state (rivalries, patronage, gangsterism) is something that a lot of WWII history doesn't cover (being military or often presenting the upper echelon Nazis as a united front under Hitler). The only thing I vaguely remember feeling was missing was the psychology of life under Nazism and of being a Nazi, but that's probably not something under the purview of a history.

orson welles' "the stranger" is about a nazi fugitive and actually features concentration camp footage. it's from 1946.

Does Maus predate Shoah?

Camp footage also floated around Hollywood for years. The basis for Reagan's heinous fiction that he helped liberate the camps ("I was there, you know") was the footage he helped edit during his wartime service in Hollywood.

shirer really brings home the"gangsterism" as well. i think once i recover from this i'll have to check out Evans too.

Maus began in 1980

1944

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/None_Shall_Escape

v interesting! didn't know about these early films.

Henry Travers and Alexander Knox! Talk about 1940s mainstream.

billy wilder, _death mills_, 1945.

Day of Wrath was actually filmed within the third reich in '43 and is indirectly a movie about Nazi repression (transplanted into 17th century witch-hunts) but it is probably a stretch to term it a holocaust movie, but it is a great movie.
https://fathersonholygore.com/2016/04/30/carl-th-dreyers-day-of-wrath/

the american gis got the vicious and brutal "your job in germany" (directed by frank capra, written by theodor geisel) which jack warner re-edited for the public as "hitler lives".

i'm speaking adjacent to all of this ^^, not having read anything at hand but: just fwiw, there's a long, stirring passage in farocki's images of the world and the inscription of war speaking to that tension between the holocaust & the military threat, wrt the allies' strategy, if you haven't seen it.

it would be interesting to find the first hollywood film that even mentions it.

― ryan, Monday, July 11, 2016 5:42 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

First hollywood film i can think of that mentions concentration camps...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Be_or_Not_to_Be_(1942_film)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Zpgjyn7dgk

Chaplin's Great Dictator (1940) predates the gas chambers, but it certainly portrays the persecution of the Jews. Of course his films were essentially "independent," tho distributed through United Artists, of which he was a founder.

wiki:

In his 1964 autobiography, Chaplin stated that he could not have made the film if he had known about the true extent of the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps at the time.

One of the very first is Mark Donskoi's The Unvanquished from 1945, which is actually shot on location at Baba Yar. I'm trying to find that one at the moment.

Feldstein and Krigstein's 'Master Race' comic strip - first published in 1955 - must be one of the earliest cultural artefacts to address the holocaust so directly:

https://spaceintext.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/master-race-bernard-krigstein/

I have a copy of Antony Beevor's single volume history of WW2 on my pending pile at home - anybody read it?

My old mum, who was 5 or 6 when war broke out, used to tell me how much fun she'd had - kids being kids. Running about wild, getting the old gas mask on and spending the night at the bottom of the garden in the back court in the pathetically inadequate bomb shelter, cheering Uncle Joe Stalin in the newsreels at the pictures etc.

... I meant to leave out the word 'garden' there, she's didn't have a garden, of course, the very thought!

i guess this is a fair place to ask it: what are the non-shitty documentaries about WW2? i thought about watching the world at war a while back but doesn't seem to be streaming anywhere.

it's on You Tube innit?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0b4g4ZZNC1E

d'oh! yeah, should've looked there -- thanks! i assume that's one of the best ones? still seems to be highly regarded.

Have you seen the late 90's bbc series The Nazis A Warning From History? It's more about the holocaust and not the theaters of war and all that. but it is very powerful and the brahms requiem music in the title is appropriate. And someone who dobbed a gay neighbour to the gestapo get's ruthlessly shamed 40 years later.

yeah my mum also always said she enjoyed the war, she was 4 when it began

Unforgettable image courtesy the magisterial World at War. British soldier on the weather in Burma: "It was the only place I know, you'd open up a tin of corned beef, you could pour it out like liquid." Mmmm, gimme dat cawm beef smoothie! Kids these days are too damn picky...

— Ian Penman (@pawboy2) May 12, 2019

my favourite bit of World at War is always when it sets up the topic of the next ep, and sir larry's reading of the final line "Nemesis would come… from the SEA!"

i've posted this before, but I was working in a bookstore when the brokaw GREATEST GENERATION book was huge and we sold a lotta copies to people 21 and younger intending it for their parents. I guess the idea could have been that they figured their parents, as the kids of said generation, might dig it, but idk. Was that the final nail in the boomers' imagining themselves as rebels against the crusty old establishment generation that spawned them?

So...the erasure of Russia and the Eastern front from American accounts of the war is the source of no great mystery...it's obviously a relic of the Cold War and just general jingoism...however, I'd be curious if at any point this was a planned or systematic thing. Were textbooks edited, etc? Was there an actual propaganda campaign to claim the US "won the war against fascism" more or less on its own (with, of course, the help of the plucky British, whose ass we proverbially saved)?

like the interviewer I was quite surprised by how largely backwards and poor the late 30's German economy was revealed to be in Wages of Destruction. They were miles behind Britain and France in GDP, electrification, motorisation and hamstrung with stagnant growth and a bigger population to feed. Despite having a huge army they were a bit of a basket case really and their expanding reich brought as many new problems as short term benefits.

i also the remember the book mentioning some of the social housing built by the nazis was barely just 19th century standard with no power supply circuits nor toilets.

Enjoying that Vichy book by Julian Jackson. On Jacques Doriot who went full fash after getting booted out of the communist party (might be a warning from history to Tommy Yack Yack!):

Doriot's image of heroic, working-class virility made him attractive to self-hating middle-class fascist intellectuals. Until he became rather fat, Doriot looked the part of the fascist leader (except for his glasses).

sorry rushomancy , didn't catch your post at the time: no, I don't think that's what Putin's take is, and am somewhat baffled as to what Putin has to do with anything I said?

my favourite bit of World at War is always when it sets up the topic of the next ep, and sir larry's reading of the final line "Nemesis would come… from the SEA!"

― mark s, Wednesday, 12 June 2019 21:45 (yesterday) Bookmark

lol! been re-watching this tonight and my fave portentous epilogue by lazza was " the sun had set on one imperial power... on another.. the sun was still rising". if only Redd Pepper's voice had broken in them days..

Dan Carlin did a like 70 hour series on the Eastern Front a few years back, and I imagine a lot of people heard it

I mean more than will read a 500 page book about it

Just reading this review of Alexiviech's book, collected oral testimonies of people who were children during WWII. Love the two books of hers that I've read, but they are tough (especially Chernobyl Prayer)

https://www.bookforum.com/print/2602/last-witnesses-an-oral-history-of-the-children-of-world-war-ii-by-svetlana-alexievich-22005

Yeah, the concentrated child misery means I think I will have to skip this one.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/597751/stalingrad-by-vasily-grossman-translated-from-the-russian-by-robert-chandler-and-elizabeth-chandler/9781681373270/

this sounds interesting.

i think this is the first year that i haven't heard a single peep about pearl harbor from any person or news organization.

As we remember Japan’s aggression in the Pacific, we need to ask ourselves this question: is the remilitarization of Japan, which is presently underway, truly a good idea? We need to be careful that shortsighted, self-serving leaders do not end up bringing us again face-to-face…

— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) December 7, 2023

xp. Seems reasonable. Pearl Harbor was 82 years ago. The national trauma du jour is now Sept. 11, 2001. You'll be hearing about that one until the day you die.

my annual report: hawaii still knows it’s pearl harbor day

lol @ that tulsi tweet. god she's a kook