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In Reply to: Re: Warning: this is as long & rambling as the weather is bad out posted by Farmer on January 09, 2005 at 15:03:20:
Farmer, you might find this interview with an author I came across last week interesting:
Who: Dr. Gerda Wever-Rabehl
What: Sessional instructor in the area of educational philosophy, currently teaching at Simon Fraser University. Author of the new book Inside the Parrot Cage, which tells the story of a German prisoner of war's life after the Nazis' defeat in WWII.
Roots: Originally from The Netherlands, Wever-Rabehl earned her Masters degree in the U.K., and her Ph.D. in B.C. before going on to study and teach around the world.
A book she didn't want to write: "This book started as a chapter for a Social Studies textbook. There's this man that I knew for quite some time, his story forms the structure of the it. It's based on his life story. I've augmented and changed things to preserve his anonymity, [but] the book is really based on him. When I first started to talk to him, I really wasn't interested in what he had to say. I myself come from Holland, and he's a German - he came to Canada a long time ago - but he was recruited for the German army at the age of 16, at the end of the war, when Hitler pretty much put everybody who could hold a gun in the war. Right when Hitler knew he was losing, everybody, - old men and young boys - had to fight."
Overcoming past conflicts: "He was shot down at his first mission. At first I wasn't really interested in hearing him, because the Dutch people suffered quite profoundly [at the hand of the Germans] and I was raised with a particular ideology around that too, which prevented me even from wanting to hear some of his stories. It was only until later, when I started talking to him a bit that I started to hear him."
Thinking beyond black and white: "The question became very interesting to me, like, what is that whole resistance we have to hearing about it? So many people were killed and displaced after the war. The post-war suffering in Germany was quite large in terms of civilians and children, yet that has left very little trace in collective consciousness. I became quite interested in that whole process, like, what does that do to people who've been traumatized? I mean, he was just as much a victim of Hitler as anyone else... how do we transcend those binaries? We tend to think in terms of Goodies and Baddies... I wanted to get into the themes of trauma, history and memory."
Learning her own history: "There's not a very good account history, or record, because the Dutch were actually quite bad to the Jews; they actually collaborated with the Germans quite a lot, yet this myth of resistance is kept alive in Holland. For a long time I was quite influenced by that, and not interested in hearing some of these stories."
Stories buried by shame: "I became interested in what it would take for me to transcend these stories, and what would it take for me to hear them. What does it do to a person like [the story's protagonist] who was really sent to war as a child, and then stuck in a Russian gulag for three years? When he came out his home was no longer there; it was given to Poland. Then he came to Canada, but he's still looked upon as a Nazi, and people are hostile to him. At the same time he was a victim.... What does that do to him? What does that do to us? I've really come to believe that trauma, if it doesn't have the possibility to transcend from the 'I' to the 'we', lives on in other ways. What does it do to his wife and his children and his grandchildren?"
More unbelievable in retrospect: "[Nazi Party beliefs] weren't what he was about at all. I never knew this. His family was part of the monarchy, and they were left alone by Hitler. He just went to school and the Holocaust and that never really entered his mind."
And of course, the backlash: "Some of the responses I've got so far are quite polarized. There's the Jewish academics, who feel that I'm 'trying to compare a toothache with a broken back', you know, like 'Why should we listen to a German?' On the other hand, there's the German community, who say 'Well, finally there's something about us.' These responses are so polarized...."
No comparison: "It's not about comparing. Not at all. My point is that any kind of grand scale persecution, whether it's of Germans or Jews or Dutch people or Canadians, needs to be acknowledged, otherwise these cycles of hatred will continue to live on."
- Elaine Corden
