John Boyne: setting back Holocaust education since 2006

"Literature"
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If my novel about the Holocaust resulted in such pig ignorant takes on it, I wouldn’t write a sequel, but John Boyne is made of sterner stuff.

Boyne protests that his work is “just a fable,” but this doesn’t detract from the views of children after reading the book, many of which are quoted in the study mentioned above. “We always think of the Nazis as the bad guys and this shows that the Holocaust didn’t just affect the Jews (…) but the problems that Nazi families might encounter and what their problems were,” said Dan, a year 9 student. “It is too easy to feel sorry for the Jews (…), I don’t mean that in a rude way, it is just like, everyone is always (…) going to sympathize with the Jews (…) when you see it from like Bruno or the mother’s perspective it seems a bit different because they had to live with that,” said Jack, year 12. The most egregious quote though is “they (the Nazis) couldn’t do anything about it because they (…) basically got killed off if they didn’t do what he (Hitler) said (…) it doesn’t matter who was the bigger victim, they (Nazis and Jews) were all still victims of Hitler’s control in some shape or form,” from Erica, year 11.

This is why I distrust Holocaust fiction. Or any fiction revolving around recent genocides written by the un-involved. Even when done with the best of intentions it’s disrespectful. You’r e turning a history that isn’t yours, with all the pain and suffering associated with it and turn it into a setting for what’s usually just a trite morality play, giving your story a grandour and seriousness that it hasn’t earned. In the process the actual victims — Jews, Roma, Poles, others — are reduced to background bit players in their own tragedy.

It is bad enough when it’s some fundamentalist Christian hack writer using Auschwitz as a background to showcase the moral struggles of the SS Kamp Kommandant as he converts to Christianity, but much more dangerous when it’s a renowned literary writer like John Boyne. As Ally Goldber writes in the Kveller article cited above shows, because it became a bestseller and because of the cachet given to it by who wrote it, the Boy in the Striped pyjamas is widely used to teach the Holocaust to children, therefore doing enormous damage to their understanding of what it was like. That’s what leads to ideas that both Jews and Nazis were victims, that Nazi pain is more interesting, somehow better or more real than the pain of their victims. It reduces the Holocaust to a nice tearjerker that doesn’t blame anybody and we don’t need to worry about because, as the last lines of the novel states: Of course, all of this happened a long time ago and nothing like that could ever happen again. Not in this day and age.

No wonder John Boyne ended up in a slagging match with the Auschwitz Museum on Twitter, who stated that “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas” should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the history of the Holocaust. The main problem with the book is well pointed out by Hannah May Randall writing for the Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre: Because the focus of the story remains on Bruno’s family, the book does not engage with the main tragedy of the Holocaust: that none of the people in the gas chamber should have been there. The lines between victims and perpetrators are blurred, the Holocaust is reduced to almost a natural disaster that nobody could really be blamed for. and while it’s sad what happened to the Jews, the real tragedy is when a real person like Bruno is caught up in it.

If you compare Boyne’s output with something like Art Spiegelman’s Mause, you really notice how anodyne and two-dimensional it is. Vladek, Spiegelman’s father and main character is not some cardboard saint, but a real person, somebody who comes across as a bit of an asshole to his son. Spiegelman himself is not an entirely sympathetic figure either, struggling with the heritage of his parents’ experiences as Holocaust survivors and how that fucked up his own life as well. It doesn’t pretend to let you understand the Holocaust, but rather an attempt by Spiegelman to understand his own personal history, imperfectly as it may be rendered in a comic. That appeals a lot more to me than the pretentions with which Boyne approaches the subject.

But the best way I’ve found to glimpse even an inkling of the true horrors of the Holocaust is by following the Auschwitz Museum on twitter. Each day they tweet out the biographies of some of the people that were sent to Auschwitz and their fate. The four quoted here were just the first four I saw today when looking at their timeline, but most of them read like this. Somebody is born, grows up, is sent to the camp and is murdered there. Jew, Roma, Pole, Russian, an endless stream of promising lives destroyed. That to me is more horrifying and enlightening than any fictional story could ever be.

Monsters and sore feet — Mushishi — Anime 2022 #011

Anime
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I was on a summer holiday in Austria with the family last year and the house we stayed in had a good enough internet connection I could watch anime from my Plex server in Amsterdam. So each day we went out to climb mountains and look for four leaf clovers and each evening I would spent a couple of hours watching stuff. One of the series I watched there was Mushishi and boy was its opening applicable to me:

Personal circumstances aside, Ally Kerr’s song is the perfect way to open this series with, as gentle and melancholic as Mushishi itself. Mushishi is on a manga by Urushibara Yuki. Set in a pre-modern, still closed off Japan that seems to consist of mostly mountains and forest with the occasional village in it, Mushishi follows Ginko on hsi travels through the country. Ginko is one of the few people able to see ‘Mushi’, primitive lifeforms that are neither plants, animals, fungi or bacteria, but which live almost unpercieved among us. Ginko can not only see them, but he attracts them, hence his travels. Too long in one place and it becomes infested with Mushi. And while most people cannot see them, that doesn’t mean Mushi cannot interact with them, for good or bad. When that happens, Ginko, as a Mushishi, is one of the few who can diagnose and cure those afflicted.

Ginko is a white haired man with green eyes, one eye hidden behind a lock of hair

Mushishi then is twentysix episodes of Ginko wandering across rural Japan getting involved with whoever is tangled up with Mushi this week, sometimes able to bring about a happy end, sometimes not. It’s clear throughout the series that the Mushi itself are not some kind of evil monster, just creatures living their own lives, with no real intelligence behind their actions other than instinct. Nor are most of their victims evil or bad; just unfortunate. At worst there’s the occasional person ignoring local superstitions and suffering the consequences. There’s little continuity in the series, it’s mostly a series of oneshot stories, but gradually a little bit does get revealed about Ginko and his past.

Mushishi represented with simple dotted lines and jellyfish like shapes floating across the screen as a child looks on

Ginko isn’t an action hero and the Mushishi themselves are not the sort of monsters that lend themselves to lavishly animated fight scenes. The pace is slow and scenes are drawn out, with lots of slow lazy pans of the scenery Ginko moves through. Lots of closeups of hands in motion as well, something I started to notice after the first few episodes. Conversation is slow too and the end result of all this is soporific. Not to be honest a series that you can easily binge. Two, maybe three episodes at a time is ideal. Very much a series to calm you down. If you liked Natsume’s Book of Friends, this is a series you’d enjoy as well.

American Tanks & AFVs of World War II — Michael Green

books and books review, Warfare & Military history
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Cover of American Tanks & AFVs of World War II


American Tanks & AFVs of World War II
Michael Green
376 pages including notes & index
published in 2014

It’s a fact of life that interest in World War II armour tends to focus on Nazi Germany, with Soviet vehicles perhaps a distant second. Understandable, considering how many interesting and downright strange types made it into production or had at least a prototype created. It’s always tempting to think about what if those potential wunderwaffen had made it into service, whereas the realities of western allied armour are always much more mundane. At least the French and to a lesser extend, the British, had some cool but impractical dead ends available in the early war, but American armour was just relentlessly pragmatic. the answer to any problem encountered seemed to be let’s build more Shermans, rather than creating some new exotic prototype.

American Tanks & AFVs of World War II does nothing to disabuse you of those preconceptions. Yes, there are some what ifs to be found, but in case after case what Michael Green documents here is the ruthless pragmaticism of the US army during world War II. It’s not just that the whole design and procurement process was much more centralised and efficient than that of Nazi Germany — but it certainly helped that there was no Hitler type mucking about on the US side. It’s also that the first instinct was always to look for solutions through modifying existing vehicles, rather than creating new ones. A determination not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good or even good enough. If it worked, why replace it just because there was a better option? That’s the attitude that comes across reading this book.

Read more…

Broodje kroket

Oh Those Crazy Cloggies
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Having an outsider look at your national cuisine can be enlightening, as is the case here as Talia Lavin examines the broodje kroket:
A classic broodje kroket

In fact, despite this irreverent and slightly louche introduction, the history of the broodje kroket is intertwined with the brutal history of its homeland. Most of the sandwich’s ingredients are bog-standard European, from the chopped beef to the béchamel to the spicy mustard. Today, the kroket can be filled with almost anything (stir-fried noodles, mashed potato, liver and rice, goulash.) But in the recipe I found, the glaring exception to the European-centric ingredients was the teaspoon or so of kecap manis, sweet soy sauce—the most popular condiment in Indonesia. Kecap manis is popular in the Netherlands because the Dutch East India Company conquered what is now Indonesia four centuries ago, and its parent nation held on to the so-called “Spice Islands” for more than three hundred years. That’s why kecap manis is in the broodje kroket, and other Dutch dishes, like zeeuws spek, a marinated bacon.

I didn’t actually know that we used ketjap in kroketten, but it’s not surprising. Indonesian food, often thoroughly altered to suit Dutch tastes, is one of the staples of our national diet and as Lavin notes, impossible to decouple from our violent colonial history. If there’s one thing the Dutch are good at though it’s ignoring painful realities. For decades after the liberation of Indonesia any debate about our colonial past was steeped in deep nostalgia for a world in which ‘we’ were still important. It took until February this year before the Dutch government officially acknowledged and apologised for the brutal attempts to suppress Indonesian liberation in 1948. Though, as Reza Kartosen-Wong notes in Het Parool, the excuses are limited purely to the “exceptional violence” used in the war, not for waging a war to re-enslave a nation itself, let alone for the Netherland’s wider colonial past. We still want to pretend our colonies just accidently happened to be ruled by us, that we did that out of the kindness of our own hearts and not that rape, murder and genocide are the foundations of our wealth.

Henny Vrienten 1948 — 2022

Music, Oh Those Crazy Cloggies, video
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Last Monday Henny Vrienten, frontman of the Dutch pop group Doe Maar, passed away and with him a little bit of my youth.

If you’re not Dutch, you’ll likely have never heard of him or Doe Maar, so it may be hard to understand how insanely popular the band was from 1981 to 1984. Every single was a hit, every album went paltinum and every concert had thousands of teenage girls screaming their heads of. Comparing it to Beatlemania would be an understatement. When the band announced they would stop it was the first item on the main television news broadcast that day. I was not even ten when they split up, but I had the buttons, the pink/green scarf and everything. Everybody in my primary school was a fan, not just the girls, the boys too. If you were a child in the early eighties, Doe Maar was the sound track to your youth.

In hindsight the popularity of Doe Maar is utterly bizarre. This wasn’t a manufactured hype, but something that sponteneously erupted at a time the band had almost decided to quit already. Doe Maar was founded in 1978 by a group of musicians in their late twenties, each with a history of playing in other bands; when Vrienten joined in 1980 he was already thirty. Their first hit with him as singer, sinds een Dag of Twee, was about him how strange it was to be falling in love again when you’re thirtytwo. Hardly the stuff that makes teenyboppers swoon. Furthermore their record company at the time had so little faith in them it had shelved their second album. It was only by accident that Dutch radio diskjockeys started playing the single and promoting the album, but it was enough to start the Doe Maar hype. From that point onwards they would become the most popular Dutch band of all times.

What made Doe Maar’s success even more improbable was that at the time, serious Dutch pop music was just not done. Sure, there were people singing in Dutch, but these tended to be either serious folk singer types, or people from the light entertainment world. But if you wanted to be taken seriously as a pop or rock musician, you had to sing in English. Doe Maar never did this. In fact, they’d made their debut on the legendary compilation album Uitholling Overdwars (1979), put out by the Stichting Popmuziek Nederland to promote Dutch language pop music, which also included several other groups that would make it big in the early eighties alongside Doe Maar. That may be Doe Maar’s biggest legacy, making Dutch language pop music respectable and relevant. What made Vrienten’s singing also important was the distinctive Brabant accent in his voice, rather than using the somewhat artificial standard Dutch of your usual light entertainment singer. ‘Provincial’ voices were rarely heard until then, unless in purely regional bands with little national appeal.

What made this small revolution possible was of course punk. The D.I.Y. aesthetic and attitude of punk rock meant there was space to break with the established traditions of ‘serious’ rock and all over Europe you saw bands move away from English towards their own language; most well known being the Neue Deutsche Welle movement of the same time. Nevertheless Doe Maar was never a punk rock group, even if some of the songs on their first eponymous were at least punk in style, like Wees Niet Bang Voor Mijn Lul. No, the secret sauce of Doe Maar’s success was something else entirely: ska and reggea. While on that first album it was all a bit Kinks’ Apeman style parody including dubious accents, from when Vrienten joined Doe Maar it was taken seriously. As a bass player Vrienten himself contributed a lot to the new Doe Maar sound. He even produced an actual dub version of their third album, Doe de Dub in 1982.

I can still remember the frustration and sadness of Doe Maar just deciding to stop at the height of their fame. It was the only thing we talked about on the playground next day: why did they have to stop, why now, why. It didn’t make sense to me then, but it was the best decision they could’ve made at the time. That popularity must’ve been incredibly scary, night after night seeing 13 and 14 year old girls screaming themselves hoarse at you to the point of fainting. Vrienten himself had said that he feared that one day it would all go horribly wrong and somebody would be killed in the crushes that happened during their concerts. The pressure of so much popularity didn’t help relationships within the band itself either and when Doe Maar realised they could just …stop, it must’ve come as a relief.

At the time Doe Maar quit, Vrienten had already brought out his first solo record. Post-Doe Maar he would not only record, but start a new career as a writer of movie music, having been one of the two composers within Doe Maar as well. Movies and musicals would be the main focus of his music, but he also featured in various side projects with other famous Dutch musicians over the years. Doe Maar itself would re-unite in 2000, just as the generation of teenyboppers that were their fans in the early eighties were now in their thirties themselves. It was never quite the same as before, but they did release a new studio album and held regular new tours ever since. In fact, Vrienten’s illness led to the cancellation of their last tour, which would’ve been held last year.

Dit was alles.