Taylor6644
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Rosenstrasse
editDear Taylor, thank you for your kind words, and it is good to know you. There is not community spirit around here, so it nice to have some friendly words instead. My apologies for my tardiness; sometimes I suffered from crippling attacks of shyness, and I have much to say. At the risk of sounding pompous, I have a theory that what happens in history happened for a particular reason, but what changes over time is the memory of events. Again, at the risk of sounding very pompous, I see myself as a bit of corrective agent for sloppy thinking, that the way that events are remembered in a particular way that is wrong. To give an example, look at the term Holocaust for the genocide of the Jews, which is problematic to say the least. A holocaust is a burnt offering to God, and as Walter Lacquer-whose parents were exterminated by the Nazis-has pointed it was not the intention of the Nazis to make a sacrifice of this sort to God, and nor did the victims see themselves as sacrifice victims. The term used in Israel Shoah, which means catastrophe in Hebrew is much better. The term Holocaust seems to suggest that the people murdered willing died as sacrifices to God, and He rewarded the Jewish people with the creation of Israel in 1948. This mystical political-religious reading of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" is morally and historically objectionable. Just imagine that somebody murdered your parents and then somebody else told you, it was all for the best, that they willing sacrificed themselves for a better future for everybody else. And on the historical plane, the people murdered did not want to be murdered or even accept the possibility of being murdered. They did not want that fate. My grandfather served as the ECM (Electronic Counter Measures) guy on a bomber that bombed Germany in 1943-44, whose job was to block the German radar that would had allowed the Luftwaffe to shoot down his bomber. He was lucky to have survived as the rules were that you to do 30 bombing missions as if you did more, you were going to die. Most of the airmen serving in 1943-44 did not complete their 30 missions, and most grandfather was very lucky. I only presume that grandfather had a hallowing time as he never talked about his war experiences. But had he been shot down and killed, it would had been a lesser tragedy because he volunteered for the Air Force, knowing full well he might be killed. The people gassed at Auschwitz did not volunteer for that fate.
And to use another example, look at how the Shoah become an American tragedy. Without the exception of Israel, it is undoubtedly that in the United States the Shoah is most remembered today, which is odd given it mostly ignored in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. One might say that Shoah is well remembered in the United States because of a large American Jewish population, but does not explain why the subject was ignored in the first place. Indeed, most American Jews refrained from talking about the Shoah until the Six Day War of 1967, apparently out of the fear that it was dangerous to remind people how easy it was to kill Jews, and it was a show of Jewish strength that the subject could be raised. It is true that 90% of the American war effort in World War II went against Germany and only 10% against Japan, but at the time, it is clear the American people regarded Japan as the greater enemy. During the war, there were a lot more films with the Japanese as villains, and there was considerably more venomous portrayal of the Japanese than the Germans. The same pattern held for least twenty years after 1945 as the Japanese were usually the villains in films with a WWII settling. Furthermore, the American media when it did came to discussing Nazi war crimes in the immediate post-war period usually focused on crimes where Americans were the victims, most notably the Malmedy massacre of 1944. Another factor was that after 1949, West Germany was an American ally in the Cold War, and in the 1950s there was a tendency if not to deny Nazi criminality, at very least to downplay it with the standard line being that everything bad that happened in Germany in 1933-45 was a the result of a small gang of criminals who all conveniently dead as there were a great many in West Germany in the 1950s whose pasts did not bear scrutiny. And there was the fact that what happened to the Jews just seemed to be too horrific to take in, and anymore most of the victims of the Final Solution were East European Jews, not Americans. Finally, the most important reason for ignoring the Shoah after the war was at the time the American people were savagely indifferent to the fate of the Jews. Public opinion polls in the 1930s show that the American people were overwhelming against accepting Jewish refugees from Germany out of the fear that they were going to "steal" American jobs and/or "cause crime". At the time, most Americans did not care about the fate of the Jews, and it was uncomfortable to be reminded about what happened to those Jews whom Americans did not want to see accepted because they might "steal" jobs or "cause crime". The memory of the Shoah only started to be embraced in America in the 1970s. After the Vietnam War, the oil shock of 1973-74, stagflation, a major recession and Watergate, many Americans were feeling uneasy about their place in the world. It was this context, when President Carter made a speech in 1978 saying that the Shoah was the ne plus ultra of evil, and the U.S by defeating Nazi Germany had ended it, thereby proving the goodness of America. And it was with that speech, that the memory of the Shoah was embraced in America. That is how the Shoah is remembered in modern America. Yes,it is remembered as a terrible tragedy, but also one that proves the goodness of America by ending it. It is striking how many Hollywood films dealing with the Shoah end with the survivors being liberated by American G.Is, to remind everybody that we had ended these horrors. And it also striking how often that the victims of the Shoah are portrayed as middle class, assimilated German Jews. Yes, German Jews were exterminated, but Jews were less than 1% of Germany's population in 1933, so the bulk of the 6 million Jews killed were not German. Most of the Jews killed came from Eastern Europe, not Germany. There is no doubt that it was the so-called Ostjuden (Eastern Jews) from Eastern Europe that the Nazis hated the most; a recurring theme of Nazi propaganda was that there were millions of millions of Ostjuden were poor, "dirty", supposedly prone to crime and terrorism, and were unwilling to assimilate who allegedly about to descend on Germany. I am not saying that situation of refugees and immigrants is the same as that of Jews in Europe during the Nazi era because there are not (nobody is planning on a genocide), but many of the prejudices seem to be the same. So much of the anti-immigrant hysteria today centers around the claim that immigrants are "dirty", poor, prone to crime and terrorism, and unwilling to assimilate. People don't like to be reminded of the similarities between prejudices then and now. Which explains why the Holocaust victims are usually portrayed as assimilated, law-abiding, clean, middle class and patriotic German Jews because prejudices against them are not like prejudices today.
My particular favorite about how the memory of the past distorts our understanding of history is the way around here it keeps being repeated that the Treaty of Versailles "caused" Nazi Germany. A popular theory because it is very simple and easy to understand, but also a stupid one, for so many reasons. Just look at the page Origins of World War II, which makes the apologetic claim that the Treaty of Versailles was all the work of France, as to assure a presumably Anglo-American audience that their countries were not "responsible" for Nazi Germany. That claim is not true. If the French really did "dominate" the Paris peace conference, then the Rhineland would had been annexed to France, or at least severed from Germany, which is what the French wanted. The Treaty of Versailles was a compromise between France, the United Kingdom and the United States. It was not all the work of the French. Also, note how the article talks only of "France" and the "French", never mentioning any of the French leaders like Clemenceau by name, as if to assign responsibility to Versailles to the entire French nation, which suggests that somebody with an anti-French grudge wrote all that. More importantly, Versailles was not the "Carthaginian peace". For those who are cartographic-challenged as the authors of that page are, just look at the frontiers imposed by Versailles and compare them to the Oder-Neisse line. Germany lost far territory after 1945 than she did by Versailles. So the "territorial dismemberment" of Germany as that article rather hysterically calls the losses imposed by Versailles caused the Third Reich, why has the far greater territorial losses imposed by the Oder-Neisse line not caused a Fourth Reich as logic would dictate? A case in point; up to the 1970, West Germany claimed its eastern borders was those of 1 January 1937, i.e those imposed by Versailles, which can only be regarded as a belated German admission that the Versailles frontiers were not so bad after all. Furthermore, under Versailles the German minorities in Eastern Europe were allowed to stay and had their rights guaranteed, which albeit were often ignored in practice. But after 1945, all of the German minorities were killed or brutally expelled. Just if you were a volksdeutsch (ethnic German) from Eastern Europe; would you prefer the "Carthaginian" Versailles treaty that allowed you to stay where you were living or the "just" peace after 1945 that saw you expelled from your home? The nonsensical nature of that page could be easily proved by more examples. In 1928, the Treaty of Versailles was still in effect and in the Reichstag elections in May of that year, the Nazis won only 2% of the vote. If feelings against Versailles made Hitler a "hero" in Germany as that page idiotically asserts, then why such an abysmal showing at the polls in 1928? The Nazis did not make their electoral breakthrough until the September 1930 Reichstag elections, and what had changed between 1928 and 1930 was the coming of the Great Depression. That is what made the difference. Even then, what motivated middle class Protestant people people to vote the Nazis was the absurd claim that the Social Democrats and Communists were about to organize the millions of unemployed caused by the Great Depression to stage a Marxist revolution. That was an outrageous and silly thing to believe even in 1932, but that was the main reason why the Nazis won the largest share of the vote in the Reichstag election of 31 July 1932. It is true that everybody hated the Versailles treaty in Germany, but not everybody voted for the Nazis, so the two are not causally connected. The Nazis had much difficulty winning votes in Catholic areas (did Lutherans hate Versailles more than Catholics? No evidence for that) and in working class areas (again, did the middle class hate Versailles more than the working class? Again, no evidence). Nazi support came overwhelming from the Protestant middle class. If you look at voting returns from Protestant areas in Germany, you will see the higher the income level, the greater the support for the Nazis and the lower income level, the lesser the support for the Nazis. Finally, President Paul von Hindenburg did have a choice in 1933. He didn't have to appoint Hitler chancellor. In the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the Nazi villain disintegrates after drinking from the wrong cup, leading the old knight to drily remark "He chose poorly". Personally I think that should be put on Hindenburg's tomb. He had a choice, and he chose very poorly. To say as that page does that Hindenburg had no choice, but to appoint Hitler chancellor because of the Treaty of Versailles is to engage in the worse sort of apologetic argument. That lets Hindenburg off the hook for his responsibility for a gratuitous decision, for doing something that he didn't have to do and which had admitted twice before in 1932 was not a good idea.
So this is what I meant that I like to clear away the false ways of remembering the past, and to show things as they really were. So to answer your question about my interest in Rosenstrasse protests, I am trying to show es eigentlich gewesen. I don't deny that the Nazi regime was a monstrous dictatorship, but also don't buy that claim that people in Germany stopped thinking for the better part of 12 years. Hitler was an awful person, but the tendency to demonize him distorts our understanding of the past. The Nazi regime caused the deaths of about 12 million people, of 6 million were Jews exterminated. Through Hitler was ultimately responsible for all this carnage, to blame him alone lets off the hook all of the people who obeyed his orders, making the functionaries of the German state sound like robots having no choice, but to obey the Fuhrer's orders, instead of people making decisions. Of course, I am not trying to demonize the entire German nation. I don't believe in collective guilt; people are only responsible for their own actions. Having said that much, I do think that people in Nazi Germany did have choices, maybe limited choices, but nonetheless room to chose. It is not true that it was Hitler's "will to annihilate" the Jews that made the "Final Solution" an unstoppable tragedy. That is letting everybody else off the hook, as if to say there was one really crazy guy who wanted to kill the Jews and there was nothing to be done about it (which is indeed how some people do write about the "Final Solution"). It is interesting that when faced with popular protests by ordinary women in defense of their Jewish husbands, that the Nazi regime gave in, and that these women all seem to know what "Resettlement in the East" really meant. People don't like to remember that aspect of the "Final Solution". Not just in Germany, where predictably enough there are people willing to say that nobody knew about the "Final Solution" or couldn't stop it even if they did, but all over the world. Sir Ian Kershaw once wrote that "the road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference", meaning that most Germans were just indifferent to what their government was doing to the Jews. Only a minority hated the Jews, but the indifference of the majority allowed them to get their way. I am not anti-German because I don't think this is uniquely German failing. I think it is an universal failing. Most people all over the world are indifferent to the suffering of others, and they liked to remember the past in a way that justifies their indifference today. At the risk of sounding arrogant and pompous, I like to think that I am es eigentlich gewesen, challenging all those who implicitly promote the viewpoint that indifference is ok. I know that sounds pompous and ridiculous. I have some other books about the Rosenstrasse protests lying around somewhere the incredibly cluttered private library that is my apartment, which I will hopefully find soon. Thank you for your kind words. That article was in really bad shape, as it did not even tell you about what had happened, so I appreciate your kind words. It is nice when somebody thanks for your work. I am sorry for writing so much; sometimes I get carried away.:) Looking forward to working with you, and please have a wonderful day! --A.S. Brown (talk) 22:51, 12 March 2017 (UTC)
- Hi, A.S. Brown. I am very sorry about the amount of time it has taken me to get back to you, but I agree with pretty much everything you said. I started getting interested in Wikipedia this year because of a professor and am very intrigued by people's perceptions of history and the kind of perceptions they are voicing through editing pages related to history. My university is actually hosting an edit-a-thon soon, so hopefully the Rosenstrasse page can be worked on during that time. No problem for the kind words, I have found as a new editor who is weary of actually making changes to a page that Wikipedia is not as welcoming as I thought it would be! I also look forward to collaborating and will reach out if there's any relevant information that appears or I have a question when it comes to editing the Rosenstrasse Protest! Taylor6644 (talk) 02:59, 30 March 2017 (UTC)Taylor6644
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Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 10:26, 22 July 2017 (UTC)A page you started (Witten Women's Protest) has been reviewed!
editThanks for creating Witten Women's Protest, Taylor6644!
Wikipedia editor Edaham just reviewed your page, and wrote this note for you:
Hi - I volunteer as a new page checker and I've just had a look through this article. First thanks for the contribution. Wikipedia definitely needs an article on this subject. I do agree with the maintenance tags though. Most concerning is this article's lack of citations. It could really do with some more references. If there are any clickable online sources that would be a great addition. Secondly, parts of it need to be checked for tone so as not to appear too much like an academic paper. Good subject in general. Thanks very much indeed for your contribution. Edaham (talk) 17:16, 16 January 2018 (UTC)
To reply, leave a comment on Edaham's talk page.
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