Recently, I've stumbled across books about "good" Germans during WWII. Jenna Blum's Those Who Save Us is about the legacy of a German resistance fighter's silence regarding her war time activities. Anne Nelson's Red Orchestra (which I haven't read, but which was reviewed recently in The NY Times Book Review) is about a network of people not dissimilar to the protagonist in Those Who Save Us.
I am intrigued and heartened by this interest in the Germans who dissented from Nazism. The portrayal of WWII as a black-and-white battle of good against evil is one that is both tiresome and troublesome. It's tiresome because it's not true: among other reasons, Stalin's Russia also fought against Germany, and no one could class Stalin among the forces of good. It's troublesome because this myth of a "morally clean" war of good against evil has animated the war plans of administrations like W's.
Moreover, the examination of the people who resist (even futilely, perhaps especially those who resist futilely) is revealing of the most interesting aspects of human capacity. Such people are, by definition, acting within a scope of choice that is severely narrow and punishingly inhumane: as Denis Lehane wrote in a recent review of Tom Rob Smith's The Secret Speech, "What is the ordinary man to do when his very existence makes him an apparatchik of institutionalized sadism?"
These people who, existing in regimes that transform daily life into complicity with crimes against humanity, manage to muster the integrity and courage to fight back have so much to teach us. They have achieved an inspired disconnect from their societies that allows them to act in ways that are, from the perspective of survival, profoundly irrational and yet, from the vantage point of living, are deeply wise.
The beautiful woman pictured here, Libertas Schulze-Boysen, was beheaded by the Nazis for gathering photographs that documented their atrocities. Red Orchestra recounts that she died pleading, "Let me keep my young life!" The poignancy of her words derives from how manifestly she has miscalculated her audience. I'm no romantic, but I can't help but see a role model in her misguided example.
(Photo courtesy of The New York Times)
I am intrigued and heartened by this interest in the Germans who dissented from Nazism. The portrayal of WWII as a black-and-white battle of good against evil is one that is both tiresome and troublesome. It's tiresome because it's not true: among other reasons, Stalin's Russia also fought against Germany, and no one could class Stalin among the forces of good. It's troublesome because this myth of a "morally clean" war of good against evil has animated the war plans of administrations like W's.
Moreover, the examination of the people who resist (even futilely, perhaps especially those who resist futilely) is revealing of the most interesting aspects of human capacity. Such people are, by definition, acting within a scope of choice that is severely narrow and punishingly inhumane: as Denis Lehane wrote in a recent review of Tom Rob Smith's The Secret Speech, "What is the ordinary man to do when his very existence makes him an apparatchik of institutionalized sadism?"
These people who, existing in regimes that transform daily life into complicity with crimes against humanity, manage to muster the integrity and courage to fight back have so much to teach us. They have achieved an inspired disconnect from their societies that allows them to act in ways that are, from the perspective of survival, profoundly irrational and yet, from the vantage point of living, are deeply wise.
The beautiful woman pictured here, Libertas Schulze-Boysen, was beheaded by the Nazis for gathering photographs that documented their atrocities. Red Orchestra recounts that she died pleading, "Let me keep my young life!" The poignancy of her words derives from how manifestly she has miscalculated her audience. I'm no romantic, but I can't help but see a role model in her misguided example.
(Photo courtesy of The New York Times)
