Singing "Then we take Berlin" in the heart of Nazi territory

[Hartmut]

Greg Ross: 'A better world from sacrifice and loss'

'Then he was there, a little elderly, Jewish gnome, singing "First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin," in the very heart of Nazi territory.'

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/a-better- ... 2ifwz.html

[MaryB]

Hartmut,

Thank you so much for posting this poignant article by Greg!

Best regards,
Mary

[Hartmut]

Thank you, Mary.

[Rodin]

Thank you for thanking Mary for thanking you.

[holydove]

Thank you from me too, Hartmut - a very moving article.

It must be really amazing to experience the exhilaration of a Leonard Cohen concert in a place that has been the site of such unfathomable suffering. I know that you have had that remarkable experience & we can only hope that the power of Leonard Cohen's sublime music is contributing to the transmutation of the energy there & dissolving some of the suffering of the ghosts that may be lingering - I'm sure it is. . .

[lizzytysh]

So VERY well written, Greg!

Some very strong memories of your own family regarding war.

Someone postulated that In "Tell Me Again," Leonard's lyric that includes the portion " . . . the G~D DAMN horror . . . " so intensely delivered refers to the Holocaust. If they're not right in that, they could be and defensibly so. The horrors in the lyrics that follow lack the expletive. Very easy to believe that Leonard has made his own, very personal distinction when he wrote this song.

I wasn't aware of that train station 17. Next time I'm in Berlin, as I hope one day to be, I'll make it a point to see it. Have been to Auschwitz-Birkenau twice and you've described that experience well.

Thanks for sharing this, Hartmut.

[Maulwurf]

fascinating article indeed, greg!

it wasn't the russians alone who built up the wall.
recent studies of documents show that actually east germany's regime urged the soviet union to agree on building it up.

walter ulbricht's famous word "nobody has the intention to build a wall!" (two months before they started pulling it up) seems to be a dirty and cynical lie to many people. but in a sense, he was very honest, because infact east germany 's regime was highly depending on the soviet union's support and the soviets did not support the idea of a wall by that time.
walter ulbricht, by the way, was a leading member of the communist party in germany on the day hitler took over power.
he was an enemy of state for the nazis.
since he was a communist, calling him a resistance fighter against the nazis is an object of debate, but you can be sure that whatever his intentions were, he did not consider the wall another evil on top of an evil.
that's another strange view on german history.

[Tchocolatl]

I always feel that it is an injustice to call the final solution an holocaust or a sacrifice.

The better world did not came through it or because of it. The better world came from being against it. The better world came from finding better solutions.

People who suffered and died because of this demential utopia that was the nazi perfect race, the Jews, the homosexuals, the gypsies, and so on, did not do it for the generations to come to sit on their bottom and enjoy their sufferings and death for their own personal pleasure and comfort and good life while saying that it was worth it.

It is such a lack of respect for those individuals. Who certainly would not have choose to die for this, to begin with.

In my eyes, it is worst than having been in the German Army at the time, because at the time, the nazi horror was not known. It is even worst than having been a nazi, because by now we had a chance to have learn something out of this.

The nazi land is more still in the heart of too many all over the world, if you ask me.

An no sacrifice of people will do good to help getting rid of the nazi lands all over the world. It is the contrary.

[Maulwurf]

tchocolatl,

it's strange to read your words. i happened to think of the meaning of "sacrifice" the other day, but in a different context(i'm just reading homer's "iliad").
but it made me think of the word "sacrifice" in the context of the holocaust too.

the german word for "sacrifice" also means "victim".
the people who died from the nazis' hands as well as those who survived the camps, the terror and everything were victims, no doubt.
calling them victims is an objective point of view.

calling them a sacrifice would be a subjective point of view which requires the concept of mankind:
it was mankind committing the holocaust (not just the nazis or the germans - of course it's still them, but in this concept, they represent mankind in general), it was mankind creating an ideology of racial supremacy, it was manking fighting the war...and so on.
in this context, the jews, the gay, the disabled, the gypsy and all others who died from the nazi terror were a sacrifice.
the concept of a sacrifice is based on abandonment. you give something valuable now in order to get something more valuable in the future.
in a nutshell: it's something cultural.
so, for mankind the people who died in holocaust are a sacrifice, because it was mankind deciding to give them away and get something valuable.
you can call that value by the figurative "writing on the wall" - a sign, a symbol for the future, a warning.
as i said, this is pure subjectivism and has nothing to do with the people who died and suffered.

[Tchocolatl]

I prefer by far your point of view to what I said, subjectively. I can not share this point of view, though, just because it is made out of 1) sheer kindness and, 2) respect for the victims and I appreciate this so much, and it is more pleasant to think like that.

Because the facts are not subjectives.

The facts are that the nazi leaders were not doing holocausts, they were doing genocides as they did not value what they were destroying (giving so to speak in exchange) in order to have a better future. To the contrary, they believed, in their sick minds, that they were erasing the errors of the nature. For them those people were even not human beings, they were garbage to burn in order to make the world a healthy, sane (!!!!) place. Concerning the Jews particularly, this nazi subjectivity did grow like a tumor to the point of reaching the top of hatred. Call it human subjectivity, indeed. But not a sacrifice.

And I can not share the point of view that you exposed above, because no matter how hard is the reality, I find preferable to face it and to learn from it. This must not happen again. There is no such thing as "a better world" because of "sacrifice" and loss of this kind. The better world came from recognizing this thruth.

Nevrosis (a shell of protection by the negation of the too much hard truth) can be a necessary shelter to stay alive for a while, but at a certain point it does more harm than good. Because to pamper that nevrosis means that "sacrifices" (unleashed hatred, violence, ignorance and sadism) has to be part of the future of the mankind anytime that a problem has to be solved. Genocides are not a solution. Final or not.

[Maulwurf]

tchocolatl,


i didn't mean to convince you.

i was only pointing out different points of view.
no opinion included.

i'm sure the people who died from the nazis' hands would have prefered to live on peacefully, instead of becoming either victims or sacrifice or whatever you may call them.


"...you who built these altars now
to sacrifice our children,
you must not do it anymore!..."

~leonard cohen, "story of isaac"

[Tchocolatl]

I already knew this particular point of view. I appreciate your intervention.

Holocaust are things of the past. Nobody is doing holocaust nowadays. Nobody thinks that bloody sacrifices are dear to gods or to G-d and they will be rewarded.

What did happen was a genocide, not an holocaust.

Genocide is "the deliberate and systematic destruction of, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group",[1] though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars.[2] While a precise definition varies among genocide scholars, a legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). Article 2 of this convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."[3]

Raphael Lemkin, in his work Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), coined the term "genocide" by combining Greek genos (γένος; race, people) and Latin cīdere (to kill).[4]

Lemkin defined genocide as follows: "Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups." The preamble to the CPPCG states that instances of genocide have taken place throughout history,[3] but it was not until Raphael Lemkin coined the term and the prosecution of perpetrators of the Holocaust at the Nuremberg trials that the United Nations agreed to the CPPCG which defined the crime of genocide under international law.

Source : Wikipedia

Though not every concentration camps were death camp. I heard an old couple saying in a documentary that they met and fell in love in a nazi concentration camps, they had babies after the war, and lived happy together a long life, and they were saying "Thank you Mr. Hitler" ironically, but with more joy than bitterness. I like to think about this.

I also like the difference that you pointed out, the difference between being German and being nazi.