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An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler av Peter…
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An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler (utgåvan 2016)

av Peter Fritzsche (Författare)

MedlemmarRecensionerPopularitetGenomsnittligt betygDiskussioner
1012267,214 (4)Ingen/inga
"Unlike World War I, when the horrors of battle were largely confined to the front, World War II reached into the lives of ordinary people in an unprecedented way. Entire countries were occupied, millions were mobilized for the war effort, and in the end, the vast majority of the war's dead were non-combatant men, women, and children. Inhabitants of German-occupied Europe--the war's deadliest killing ground--experienced forced labor, deportation, mass executions, and genocide. As direct targets of and witnesses to violence, rather than far-off bystanders, civilians were forced to face the war head on. Drawing on a wealth of diaries, letters, fiction, and other first-person accounts, award-winning historian Peter Fritzsche redefines our understanding of the civilian experience of war across the vast territory occupied and threatened by Nazi Germany. Amid accumulating horrors, ordinary people across Europe grappled with questions of faith and meaning, often reaching troubling conclusions. World War II exceeded the human capacity for understanding, and those men and women who lived through it suspected that language could not adequately register the horrors they saw and experienced. But it nevertheless prompted an outpouring of writing, as people labored to comprehend and piece thoughts into philosophy. Their broken words are all we have to reconstruct how contemporaries saw the war around them, how they failed to see its terrible violence in full, and how they attempted to translate the destruction into narratives. Carefully reading these testimonies as no historian has done before, Fritzsche's groundbreaking work sheds new light on the most violent conflict in human history, when war made words inadequate, and the inadequacy of words heightened the devastation of war"--… (mer)
Medlem:doomjesse
Titel:An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler
Författare:Peter Fritzsche (Författare)
Info:Basic Books (2016), Edition: 1, 376 pages
Samlingar:Ditt bibliotek
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Taggar:Ingen/inga

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An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler av Peter Fritzsche

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This is not another history of the second world war; in fact it is not really history at all. History may not always be unbiased, but - buttressed by the "20:20 vision" of hindsight, consideration of the "big picture", and above all, by the ability to rationalize, which time and distance from the events afford - it usually assumes an air of objectivity. This book deliberately enshrines the subjective point of view; using diaries, contemporary news stories, books and movies - it opens a window into how people living - and dieing - through it, perceived the war at the time it was happening.

This is an important distinction from the point of view of Holocaust literature too; unlike the testimonies of survivors, it resurrects the lived experiences of Jews who did not survive - before, during, and after deportation, and in the ghettos. In one of his many acutely poignant observations, the author says: "... in the most awful places in eastern Europe, surviving pages exceeded surviving people. They wrote with confidence that the words of the victims would overwrite the words of the murderers.. In this regard, Jewish writers felt a tenuous connection to a future humanity."

In some ways, the actual experience of the war was not as bad as people had anticipated; in others it was infinitely worse. During the years immediately before the war, when it was becoming clear that war - if not inevitable - was very likely, popular imagination dwelled on the horrors of aerial bombardment. Impressed by the new technologies of mass destruction that had emerged in Word War 1, delivered from the skies by the air power that had not existed then, the total obliteration of major cities like London or Paris was predicted. While the Blitz or the fire-bombing of Dresden did bring civilian populations majorly into the front line of the war, the destruction was more contained and episodic than had been imagined. In contrast, the inhumanity with which Hitler's war against the Jews was being waged, could not be believed even by its victims; the Holocaust took place at what one survivor described as "at the limits of the mind."

The author deals separately with the different parts of Europe occupied by the Nazis, and highlights the differences in their experience of occupation. Neither of the sections on Poland and France is likely to warm your hearts toward those countries. In France, the wartime literature and that immediately following the war - such as Jean Paul Sartre's "Republic of Silence" - emphasize the role of the French Resistance and minimize the level of collaboration with the Nazi occupiers. The persistence of this heroic "Gaullist" narrative has prevented France from coming to terms with the true extent of its active collusion with the Nazi persecution of Jews, right up to the present time. Unlike France, where there were no mass casualties as a result of the German invasion, Poland has always justifiably described its population as one of the major victims of the war. The author documents however how readily the general Polish population accepted as reasonable the distinction between Jew and Aryan, and therefore also rationalized the isolation, brutalization and eventual annihilation of the Jew, as a logical conclusion of that distinction. In fact it was that distinction that reassured most non-Jewish Poles and gave them a, generally misplaced, sense of security. Rather than resistance to the persecution or even just empathy with its victims, this sense of relief at not being Jewish, and of being safe as a consequence, was the most common sentiment in all of Nazi-occupied Europe.

It is difficult to pick out, in a book like this, a topic that is more distressing than others; but the chapter entitled "the Destruction of Humanity" is probably it. It starts with Elie Wiesel's retort to the question about belief in God after the Holocaust; "The question is how can one believe in man". As well as documenting the lack of empathy towards the fate of the Jews, it also describes the progressive breakdown of any sense of community under the pressure of Nazi brutality. In the Polish ghetto, Jewish policemen were feared and reviled as collaborators; the middle class Polish-speaking members of the Judenrat, the Jewish council, saw the poorer Yiddish speakers as different, perhaps more expendable. Polish Jews pitied, but were generally unwilling to help the German and other Jews from western Europe, who had been deported and dumped in the ghetto totally without any resources. Even family life broke down, with men and women putting their own needs ahead of those of spouses and children. In my reading, I have previously only ever come across this aspect of the Holocaust in the writings of Primo Levi.

As time takes its inevitable toll on the generation that experienced the war, and of the post-war generation too, a book like this is important in documenting - clouded as it is by "the fog of war" - what it actually felt like to be at war with Hitler. There are people, not too far away from where I write, who are experiencing the unspeakable and the unthinkable right now. We hear their voices and we see their images; we don't need to wait for future historians to tell us about their suffering. This book might just encourage us to do - or at least feel - more than sighing with relief “there, but for the grace of (our) God”. ( )
  maimonedes | Mar 15, 2018 |
Fritszche looks at how life continued—and didn’t—for those under Nazi control. French non-Jews crafted narratives of survival through cooperation or resistance as they dealt with the food shortages that dominated everyday life; German non-Jews were proud or conflicted or trying hard not to think about it; Polish non-Jews quickly realized that they were deemed completely expendable, though they were also often happy to take over abandoned Jewish property; Jews felt isolated, outside history, deprived of a narrative because a narrative indicates some control over outcomes. Frische emphasizes the ways in which non-Jews’ accounts of ordinary life created a vision in which Frenchness, or Polishness, or Germanness, did not include Jews. Jews left their own records; according to some estimates, one-third of Orthodox Jews lost their faith in the ghettos and camps. He recounts one story that told of the trial and execution of G-d, who was ultimately thrown into the gas chamber. ( )
2 rösta rivkat | May 1, 2017 |
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"Unlike World War I, when the horrors of battle were largely confined to the front, World War II reached into the lives of ordinary people in an unprecedented way. Entire countries were occupied, millions were mobilized for the war effort, and in the end, the vast majority of the war's dead were non-combatant men, women, and children. Inhabitants of German-occupied Europe--the war's deadliest killing ground--experienced forced labor, deportation, mass executions, and genocide. As direct targets of and witnesses to violence, rather than far-off bystanders, civilians were forced to face the war head on. Drawing on a wealth of diaries, letters, fiction, and other first-person accounts, award-winning historian Peter Fritzsche redefines our understanding of the civilian experience of war across the vast territory occupied and threatened by Nazi Germany. Amid accumulating horrors, ordinary people across Europe grappled with questions of faith and meaning, often reaching troubling conclusions. World War II exceeded the human capacity for understanding, and those men and women who lived through it suspected that language could not adequately register the horrors they saw and experienced. But it nevertheless prompted an outpouring of writing, as people labored to comprehend and piece thoughts into philosophy. Their broken words are all we have to reconstruct how contemporaries saw the war around them, how they failed to see its terrible violence in full, and how they attempted to translate the destruction into narratives. Carefully reading these testimonies as no historian has done before, Fritzsche's groundbreaking work sheds new light on the most violent conflict in human history, when war made words inadequate, and the inadequacy of words heightened the devastation of war"--

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