Flitting about on intertubes, I happen apon this petrified tragedy from that century just gone, a hundred years crammed with such example. Here is just one.
"Born Dorothea Gerson in Berlin.....Gerson began her career as a touring singer and actress in the Holtorf Tournee Truppe alongside actor Mathias Wieman.....where she met and married her first husband, film director Veit. The couple married in 1922 and divorced in 1924. Harlan would eventually direct the highly anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda film Jud Süß (1940) by request of Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels.
In 1920, Dora Gerson was cast to appear in the successful film adaptation of the Karl May penned novel Auf den Trümmern des Paradieses (On the Brink of Paradise) and later followed that same year in another May adaptation entitled Die Todeskarawane (Caravan of Death). Both films included Hungarian actor Béla Lugosi in the cast. However, both films are now considered lost films.
Gerson continued to perform as a popular cabaret singer throughout the 1920s as well as acting in films. By 1933 however, when the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, the German-Jewish population was systematically stripped of rights and Gerson's career slowed dramatically. Blacklisted from performing in "Aryan" films, Gerson began recording music for a small Jewish record company. Dora Gerson also began recording in the Yiddish language during this time, and the 1936 song "Der Rebe Hot Geheysn Freylekh Zayn" became highly regarded by the Jews of Europe in the 1930s. Her best remembered recordings from this era were the songs "Backbord und Steuerbord" and "Vorbei" (Beyond Recall), which was an emotional ballad, subtlety memorializing a Germany before the rise of the Nazi Party.
In 1936 Dora Gerson relocated with relatives to the Netherlands fleeing Nazi persecution. On May 10, 1940, however, Germany invaded the Netherlands. Soon, the Jews of the Netherlands were subject to the same anti-Semitic laws and restrictions as in Germany. After several years of living under oppressive Nazi occupation, the Gerson family began to plan to escape. In 1942 Gerson and her family were seized trying to flee to Switzerland....The family were sent by railroad car to transit camp Westerbork bound for the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland. Dora Gerson was murdered at Auschwitz on February 14, 1943 at the age of 43."
"Born Dorothea Gerson in Berlin.....Gerson began her career as a touring singer and actress in the Holtorf Tournee Truppe alongside actor Mathias Wieman.....where she met and married her first husband, film director Veit. The couple married in 1922 and divorced in 1924. Harlan would eventually direct the highly anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda film Jud Süß (1940) by request of Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels.
In 1920, Dora Gerson was cast to appear in the successful film adaptation of the Karl May penned novel Auf den Trümmern des Paradieses (On the Brink of Paradise) and later followed that same year in another May adaptation entitled Die Todeskarawane (Caravan of Death). Both films included Hungarian actor Béla Lugosi in the cast. However, both films are now considered lost films.
Gerson continued to perform as a popular cabaret singer throughout the 1920s as well as acting in films. By 1933 however, when the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, the German-Jewish population was systematically stripped of rights and Gerson's career slowed dramatically. Blacklisted from performing in "Aryan" films, Gerson began recording music for a small Jewish record company. Dora Gerson also began recording in the Yiddish language during this time, and the 1936 song "Der Rebe Hot Geheysn Freylekh Zayn" became highly regarded by the Jews of Europe in the 1930s. Her best remembered recordings from this era were the songs "Backbord und Steuerbord" and "Vorbei" (Beyond Recall), which was an emotional ballad, subtlety memorializing a Germany before the rise of the Nazi Party.
In 1936 Dora Gerson relocated with relatives to the Netherlands fleeing Nazi persecution. On May 10, 1940, however, Germany invaded the Netherlands. Soon, the Jews of the Netherlands were subject to the same anti-Semitic laws and restrictions as in Germany. After several years of living under oppressive Nazi occupation, the Gerson family began to plan to escape. In 1942 Gerson and her family were seized trying to flee to Switzerland....The family were sent by railroad car to transit camp Westerbork bound for the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland. Dora Gerson was murdered at Auschwitz on February 14, 1943 at the age of 43."
For some reason, these fragments evoke in me the memory of reading the brutal calvary of Sofya in Life and Fate. A child of the century, destroyed by a cruelty, seemly woven into every second
3 comments:
Good post. I've been reading your blog for a while, and have to say I really enjoy it. I wish you luck with your continuing studies. I've just started a blog myself and just wrote a piece on revolutionary violence you might like on my blog.
One thing I might add with regards to your review of "Liberal Fascism" - while I couldn't get myself to actually read Goldberg's book (I have too many books on the list that I actually want to read), I read in another review that he engages in historical revisionism by claiming that the Nazis weren't really that anti-gay. This is, of course, nonsense, I did a historical research project on the status and persecution of lesbians under the Third Reich are hallmarks of the anti-feminist and anti-gay politics that are synonymous with fascism. Goldberg likely knows this (I can't imagine him being that ignorant), which makes him all the more dishonest.
Many thanks, Luke. Your piece is excellent, great prose as well. Make me ever so slightly envious :)
One related thread to your pertinant 'midwife' point and one we see deeply entrenched in today's anti-Imperialism is the nihilist impulse. The 'burn it all down' instinct of Necheav and Chernyshevsky or Roux or Marat or Fouche rested fundamentally on the caveat of extra-ordinary morality. By which I mean, only by assuming the forgiveness of the future and that 'understanding' inevitably gifted by history, could action diametrically opposed to their telos be sanctioned in the here and now.
This nihilism was abnormal and frankly abhorent in both the moral universes of the dying old world and the shiny new one. It was a seperate moral universe founded, sculpted and excused by the interim 'temporality' of a revolutionary period. Thus one can imagine how the further leap or revolution beyond this exception and into the goldern age was so difficult.
This differs from the pseudo-religious eschaton found in fascist violence where struggle is not only the only route to the telos but an inherent, virtuous and ongoing part of it. Stanley Payne mentions the 'threaputic' nature of violence and its instrinsic palce in the moral universe of the national revolution as being a distinguishing feature of fascist brutality.
Whilst Jihadists see violence as a glorious means, once the world is all Dar es Islam, it becomes 'impossible' within their understanding. Greater Romania, Hungarian Turania or the 1000 year Reich were not to be peaceful nirvanas, but powerful, warlike and constantly struggling utopias.
As for Goldberg, I am not surprised. I only read the chapters dealing with Fascism and Nazism, but given his shameless hackery in those, it would not surprise me. I'll have a look, but of the top of my head, it probably comes down to 'well Roehm was a gay, thus Nazis were exactly like Stonewall'. Probably made the Women's bund out to be the ideological forefathers of NOW or some such.
I'm going to suggest your post to be included in Stroppyblog's Carnival of Socialism non-Iran round up for later in the week if you don't mind. It deserves a wider reading
thanks for the additional info on the midwife motif. The-ends-justify-the-means seems to always appear once one travels a bit far down any ideological path, then the question only becomes how big the ends should be, which is what is so frightening about choosing any political persuasion.
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