The Cultural Impact And Legacy Of World War Two

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?

I listened to his Stalingrad audiobook a few years back and didn't feel like investigating any further, not that there was anything massively wrong with it - but he seems a bit of a dull writer. *disclaimer - some of my opinions are often bollocks.

In a way, I still think the holocaust is somewhat culturally 'taboo'. A certain coded cultural representation has become common, even clichéd, but actually probing what happened, as in taking a standpoint and saying something different about it, is still scoffed upon. When Son of Saul came out, a lot of the critique seemed angry that it was different, didn't work the way these films should work, and that the director passed judgment on his characters. Peter Labuza ended his takedown this way: 'What makes Son of Saul more troubling than the prestige films of its ilk is that the intellectualism that grounds the film ends up being just as simplistic as the melodrama that infuses Schindler’s List. Nemes has stunningly created the intensity of camps, but it is one of his own making — a product for his own pet theories, never exploring the real traumas of the past.' As if we ever had access to explore 'the real traumas of the past' (never mind that Nemes based his film on a trove of primary sources). Being 'intellectual' about the holocaust is still obscene.

and on the other end of the spectrum--The Day the Clown Cried, Life is Beautiful, even Schindler's List--you find the "real trauma" diminished by sentimentalizing it.

on terrain that's a bit more comfortable for me, in a lot of recent biopolitical philosophy (I'm thinking mainly of Agamben and Esposito), the camps are more or less posited as the central trauma of the 20th century and in some ways even modernity. but i think both are beholden to by some idea (right or wrong) that the holocaust touches on something essential or universal by the nature of its extremity.

incidentally i just realized it's been 77 years since 1939. will be interesting to see what goes on in 2019-2020 (let alone 2039-2045). i remember the 50th anniversary stuff being a big deal.

my grandfather was in Patton's 3rd Army, and he's still around (though he can barely speak these days).

Yeah, I'm uncomfortable with that as well, also because they reduce the holocaust to the 'camp' aspect, and not the genocidal aspects connected to Baba Yar, the gas chambers, etc. In a way, that's perhaps simply because most of the philosophy about it has surrounded the canonical testimonies from Levi, Kertesz, and other survivors, and more people survived the camps than the chambers, for obvious reasons. In Chelmno there were seven survivors total, it seems.

talking or thinking about the holocaust drains sanity points. i feel like in the west we talk about it way more than we talk about any other historic atrocities- rape of nanking or w/e- and that's due to continued concerted effort made by a number of people against our natural tendency to not think about such things.

i don't watch holocaust flicks any more for that reason. first i've seen (and read) enough to last me a lifetime but also it is really emotionally draining.

The Holocaust is also unfortunately the go-to event for young writers doing historical fiction who want to lend some unearned gravitas to their work

coughjonathansafronfoer

& if that wasn't enough he did 9/11 for his follow-up

might've been this?

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

This was a big part of my junior high school history/social studies class at the time (NBC produced an entire "Teaching The Holocaust" in school - maybe to offset the whole 'you're making money by running advertisements' criticism).

As for Shirer, I recall liking The Collapse of the Third Republic far more than Rise & Fall, but it's been at least 30 years since I read them.

I think it's hard for any current generation to grasp the magnitude of a war that deeply and directly affected every nation in Europe & North America, plus the USSR, China, Japan, India, Korea, Australia and large swathes of SE Asia, Africa and the Pacific island nations. Earlier today I was looking at the US flags once more flying at half-staff and thought, by today's loose standards of national mourning, the flag should have been lowered for five straight years during WWII.

on that note I think my current obsession is on some level an attempt to cope with what seems to me now a really violent and uncertain contemporary moment--ww2 has a way of putting things in perspective.

been pondering amateurishly an idea that ww2 represents in some way the last gasp of the nation state as a distinct ethno-cultural entity ("what is life? life is the nation"--hitler) and fascism in particular as a kind of third way between communism and capitalism (as explicitly stated by the nazis I believe). reading tony judt's "postwar" alongside shirer really brings this theme out. as sartre states, after the way you had to choose, in effect, between the competing universalisms of "Americanism" and communism.

also reading "HHhH" which strikes me so far as about that need to come back to this moment in history and come to grips with it on some personal level.

Maggie HabermanReporter
8:33 PM ET
Meanwhile, Trump is right now calling into Fox News, during his own convention, and providing additional programming, which is also unusual for a nominee.

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