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No Exit
(2)From Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke (Simon & Schuster, 2008):
Victor Klemperer [a retired teacher in Dresden] listened as a loudspeaker radiated Hitler’s speech [on September 19, 1939, after invading Poland]. “Some of it is rhetorically very effective,” he thought. But it pointed to a long war. At his library, all the English books were withdrawn.
Klemperer’s heart was bothering him. “one of two things will happen,” he predicted. “Either Hitler will conclude victorious peace in a week — then we shall perish. Or the war only really starts now and lasts for a long time — in that case we shall also perish.” [p. 145]
Victor Klemperer, who died in 1960, kept a diary, including his experience of the firebombing of Dresden. These reflections are from that diary. The entries for years 1933-1941 were translated into English by Martin Chalmers and published by Random House as I Will Bear Witness in 1998. (At least the version in the Univ Ky library is dated 1998. Seems late to me.)
I must take this book back to the library today. I only made it through the first 200 pages, not because the book is dull but because it deals with painful subjects. You might guess that a book subtitled “The End of Civilization” might not be light reading. (WWII introduced, among other horrible things, the bombing of cities—and Winston Churchill was not totally innocent in escalating that tactic—and the word civilization derives from the Latin word civis, a citizen, a member of the city.)
The format also slows me down. It is sort of like a 475-page PowerPoint presentation. No narrative frame, just entries such as I’ve copied here over the last several days. In some ways it’s like reading a collection of poems. After reading an entry like the one above, it’s impossible just to turn the page and read the next one. I have to sit and stare out the window at the birds in the pine and mourn a bit.
In some ways, I think Human Smoke provides a balance for the nationalistic hype of The Greatest Generation. I have not read Brokaw’s book nor do I plan to read it so I’m not comparing the two books. I’m talking about the hype, the hunger for war heroes. As Mannion implies, heroism is value neutral. Human beings can be heroic for all kinds of causes, some good, some very wrong-headed.
And now somebody else wants to read this book, so I can’t renew it. No other library in the area has a copy, only Lexington Public.
May be time to 16 bucks for the paperback.
Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker, Victor Klemperer
2 Responses to “No Exit”
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I have become very tired of the World War 2 genre in video games. It seems to have picked up about the turn of the century — probably with the release of Saving Private Ryan and Spielberg’s other projects in his WWII rapture — and has proliferated with the Iraq War. I think it has something to do with anxiety over “just wars;” certainly it’s a reaching back to a time that’s perceived to be more innocent.
But these games are all the same — mow down the Nazis with an increasingly-ridiculous armory of weapons. The heroes are all square-jawed American paratroopers or suchlike. The games tend to ignore the realities of the war, and I haven’t seen one that addresses the Holocaust.
Ignoring such a major part of the war makes it a glamorous endeavour, one where there can be heroes.
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