A plaque won’t give you your life back

 

Boy, it’s cold and grey and raining here. One feels the urge to stay inside and drink tea. In this case, fennel-anise-caraway tea. But we went out anyway, and bought a new tea kettle. The rain makes the cobblestones shine and I like the sound car tires make going through puddles. Shhhhhööööjjj.

Walking back through the Nordend neighborhood we found some Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones.” There are dozens of these around Frankfurt; they mark the addresses where Jews who were deported during the holocaust lived. They’re subtle but also striking, with their minimal information. I keep an album of them on Facebook. 

These are for the Levi family, which lived on Oberweg. Issak, Katinka and their son Karl. They were deported to Majdenek concentration camp in Poland in 1942. According to the stones, the father and mother were murdered there, whereas their 17-year old son is simply described as having died (‘tot’). 

All the stories that must be behind those stones. I think it’s a good thing these are installed around the city. But a plaque won’t give you your life back.

There's a trick with a knife

I’m engaged in some magical thinking. If I stop here on page 518 of the Bonhoeffer biography, with 24 pages to go, he will not be killed by the Nazis. That’s all there is to it. The American troops are very close. The camp guards are unstable. Bonhoeffer is still alive and he will stay alive as long as I prevent his death by not reading about it. 

It’s funny how when reading a history book/novel or biography you might still feel a sense of suspense, even though you know at the outset what goes down. I knew in Wolf Hall, for example, that Henry VIII casts off Katherine and wins Anne Boleyn. And I knew before I started Bring Up the Bodies that Anne Boleyn would be a goner. Everybody knows that! But if a book is written well and the reader cares, the development still fills you with dread or anticipation. 

And, boy, do I care. I cannot let Bonhoeffer die. The world requires this small sacrifice of me - skipping his stupid, useless and deeply regrettable death for the sake of the greater good.

Before I read a book

I ask myself, am I in the mood for this book? 

Is this book in the mood for me? 

Are there any indications I might hate this book? 

Will I hate myself if I hate this book? 

Does this book have too much in common with the book I just finished? 

Does this book suffer insufferable blurbs? 

Am I simply in it for the plot?

If it requires a long list of characters at the start, am I up for such a book? 

Where did I get this book? 

How & why did it get into my to-read pile? 

Whom do I know who dis/liked this book? 

Are there Nazis in this book? 

Is this a miserable old Europe book? 

Is this a smarmy America book? 

Is this book too huge to take back and forth to work? 

Does this book have a cover I can live with? 

If the cover were translated into an outfit, what would it be?

Tactile Obituaries

"Like Sherlock Holmes, Heydrich plays the violin. (He plays it better than does the fictional detective, however.) Also like Sherlock Holmes, he conducts criminal inquiries. Except that where Holmes seeks the truth, Heydrich just makes it up." - Laurent Binet, HHhH

Yesterday was the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the day/night the nazis incited people in Germany to vandalize and burn Jewish shops and synagogues, and to attack Jews. The nazis were absolute maniacs, really. 

I wouldn’t have remembered the date (in fact I forgot) except this morning we went to take some photos of Frankfurt’s ‘Stolpersteine,’ and found a grouping with melted wax all around, and realized someone must have burned candles there yesterday in memory. Stolpersteine, which literally means stumbling stones, are somber, subtle plaques laid in sidewalks in front of houses of Jews who met their deaths at nazi hands. They’re tactile obituaries. You can see my small album of them here. 

As long as we’re on the topic, I finished the non-fiction novel HHhH and thought it was terrific. It’s hard to recommend to just anyone because it’s best to be a little familiar with the figure of Reinhard Heydrich and his assassination to appreciate. But even Wikipedia could equip a reader sufficiently. 

The story is horrible and serious, but the narrator/author navigates you through with a light touch. Believe me, I loved the book, but that would be my one complaint - while most of the time it worked well, the author occasionally erred on the side of the flip. 

As meta-fiction the author is very in the book, which pretty much goes ‘here’s this event I’ve been obsessed with my whole life, which happened in my favorite country on earth, and the two or three guys who are my heroes, who set off to kill Heydrich, the devil incarnate, and how they succeed, and it’s all worth it despite the horrendous consequences, and I’m going to try to tell the story while being extremely self-conscious about it.’ 

It’s surely hard to find balance with the meta-fiction approach, but there were times I thought he hit the wrong note. Like he didn’t know when to stop yapping. Anyway, I’ve probably just turned any potential readers off to this book. Oh well, it was great, and I’m happy to keep it all to myself anyway.

Passive Aggressive Anticipatory Schadenfreude Post

I’m reading a book about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the blond SS monster with his hook nose and disturbingly feminine hips, who strove to be one of Hitler’s inner circle, if not Hitler himself, and maneuvered to become the Führer of Czechoslovakia, plotting the deaths of many, mass deaths and slavery, and squelching the culture and national identity, and this reading is a prelude to reading another book about the same assassination, meta-fictionalized (HHhH, it’s called), that I picked up at the book fair, and the more I read about the vanity and self-promotion and political posturing, the bragging, the putdowns, the boasts and merciless determination the more I realize if you want prestige it is best to find a way to get invited to events attended by those with power and to continually TALK ABOUT YOURSELF IN CAPITAL LETTERS & bring the conversation back to your supposed accomplishments and ambitions whenever possible, and I think of some people I have known, and I look forward to (twice experiencing through reading) Heydrich’s assassination.

My Cup Runneth Over

I am not a sports buff but I do enjoy the World Cup because it takes my husband and kids off my hands. In fact it takes the whole world off my hands. Despite being a news agency, for example, my office has made arrangements so folks can watch during work hours if it’s an important game (read: Germany is playing).

There was another payoff this morning with a linguistic controversy. Following a goal by Miroslav Klose for the German team, a tv commentator said that for Klose the goal must be an “innere Reichsparteitag.” I thought, “Reichsparteitag? As in huge Nazi gathering in Nuremberg with hyperexcitement and populist adrenaline?”

Yup, the very one. It turns out that an inner Reichsparteitag is when this event seems to take place inside you. It’s a euphoric feeling, a good thing – as long as you don’t say so in public. Because any reference to anything Nazi is a no-no, especially in a way that could be construed as positive. Ok, I get it, but I do enjoy the image of having a crowd whoop it up inside you.

The unfortunate choice of expression was all over the papers and web this morning. I talked to a few colleagues about it, two of whom were shocked to hear it used on tv, another who herself wasn’t sure what it meant. I thought it was both funny ha-ha and funny peculiar, because of that image, and the phrase’s origin and construction.

But it doesn’t matter what I think. What did the Central Council of German Jews have to say? Although they said such expressions rightfully beg examination, they also advised those who were offended “against over-exaggeration and hysteria,” and suggested instead enjoying the German team’s win.

disaster tourism

I’m reading Every Man Dies Alone, a story set in Nazi Germany. It’s about a couple that launches a show of anonymous defiance after their son is killed in the war. I know many people who love WWII and holocaust stories. Because they’re so dramatic. Because they’re so good guy/bad guy. Because they’re so goddamned sad.

Still, my colleague F. says this book sounds depressing. Most Germans don’t like to read WWII books because they’ve had the moral lesson pounded into their brains at school. They prefer someone else’s disaster, like Vietnam, and here she tells me about the Vietnam vets who weren’t allowed to return to America because they were addicted to heroin. I said I didn’t know that, that seemed odd to me. But apparently her husband reads eagerly on this topic. So whether or not it’s true, I guess most people would rather not have to identify too closely with dishonor. Except Americans don’t avoid VN books, digrace or not, do they? The genre is lively and literary and Tim O’Brien is its King.

Germans are just weary of being the Nazi nation. They’d rather be something else now. I get that, but it doesn’t snuff the fascination. Sometimes when reading a WWII book in the UBahn I hide the cover because I feel I’m insulting everyone. And then I think, you know, you worry too much about this stuff and you’ll never have any fun.

Not that the lovely cover of Every Man Dies Alone gives away anything. When the book came out it was heralded as a literary event. Honestly, it reads more to me like a B-Movie, but not in a negative way. It’s very dramatic, and the good and bad guys are easy to identify.

As an end note, on this day in 1945, Hitler committed suicide. After all that, nothing like dying a coward.

song of the day: picnic