Home
by boomer crook Sun Jun 04, 2017 11:33 pmja uopste nisam siguran da je osuda vermahta opsta i prihvacena.
Zločini nad Nemcima posle WWII
- Posts : 36796
Join date : 2014-10-27
_____
And Will's father stood up, stuffed his pipe with tobacco, rummaged his pockets for matches, brought out a battered harmonica, a penknife, a cigarette lighter that wouldn't work, and a memo pad he had always meant to write some great thoughts down on but never got around to, and lined up these weapons for a pygmy war that could be lost before it even started
- Posts : 713
Join date : 2015-08-30
Filipenko wrote:Anduril wrote:
Plus, Vermaht je odavno oznacen kao zlocinacka organizacija u samoj Nemackoj. O kakvom dakle revizionizmu pricas?
Pretpostavljam da bi ti principijalno odobrio, danas kada Rusija i Putin osuđuju boljševike i njihove politike, zahteve Rusa da se podignu spomenici svim sovjetskim vojnicima i obnove biste Staljinu, Lenjinu, Rokosovskom, Žukovu, "sovjetskom vojniku", od Smolenska do Beča?
Ovaj, nema sta da se obnavlja u Becu - na Schwarzenbergplatzu uredno stoji spomenik sovjetskom vojniku koji je napravljen od istopljenih bisti Hitlera. Austrijanci imaju sporazum o odrzavanju tog spomenika u beskonacnost i tako treba da bude. A biste tvojih idola su ipak nesto drugo i ne bi ih mesao sa poginulim vojnicima.
Ustvari, jel umes ti da napises bilo sta a da odgovara cinjenicama? Nemas pojma za pare iz Marsalovog plana, nemas pojma sta se zapravo placa iz EU budzeta, nemas pojma koji spomenici gde stoje, itd. Bar proveri osnovne cinjenice pre nego sto napises nesto glupo - boljsevicki propagandni komesari bi te vec streljali za los odradjen posao...
- Posts : 713
Join date : 2015-08-30
William Murderface wrote:Blabla, a ti ne razumes da nema nacija imunih na nacionalizam. Uostalom, citaj Habermasa, revizionisti su pobedili svuda, pa i u Nemackoj, by default, padom komunizma. Ama ti to ne razumes ne zato sto si glup, nego sta sto si kulturni esencijalista za kojeg je nemacka kultura supriorna u odnosu na jugoslovensku. I zato ti je primedba uvek - ko ste vi da prigovarate Nemcima bilo sta. Niko. Mi smo niko, bednici iz jedne inferiorne kulture. A sad slobodno nastavi da seres kvake.
Et anduril
Dobro i ne obracaj mi se vise...
- Posts : 81358
Join date : 2012-06-10
_____
"Oni kroz mene gledaju u vas! Oni kroz njega gledaju u vas! Oni kroz vas gledaju u mene... i u sve nas."
Dragoslav Bokan, Novi putevi oftalmologije
- Guest
The European Legacy, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 393–398, 2012
Reviews
Nazism, the Wehrmacht and Collective Memory
Discursive Construction of History:
Remembering the Wehrmacht’s War of
Annihilation. Edited by Hannes Heer, Walter
Manoschek, Alexander Pollak, and Ruth
Wodak (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan,
2008), xvi ţ 331 pp. Ł55.00 cloth.
Karl W. Schweizer
- Spoiler:
This thought provoking work explores the
complex process whereby democratic, pluralistic
societies cope with traumatic events in their
past—the diverse ways in which they reconstruct
their national histories throughout different
domains of life, via a multiplicity of
genres. The volume is given thematic unity
through its central focus on two major
exhibitions held in Austria and Germany
between 1985 and 1999. These displays, here
viewed as ‘‘a major intervention in the
construction of national historical images and
myths’’ (x), sparked widespread and frequently
heated, even acrimonious, debates in both
countries. These debates have vibrantly resonated
throughout Austro-German historical
circles to this day, leaving contentious the
traumatic issue of National Socialism, its
documented crimes and the onus of complicity,
be it among civilians or the regular German
army (Wehrmacht), which was widely and
mitigatingly portrayed after 1945 as untainted:
exonerated altogether given the nature of war,
ideologically indoctrinated, coerced by orders
from above or simply naı¨ve, depending on a
soldier’s age.
Aside from its central themes, the book is
also instructive as a taxonomy of historical
reinterpretation, demonstrating that characteristically
discursive narratives—the retrospective
attribution of ‘‘meaning,’’ values and ideals,
are invariably influenced by vested interests and
agendas. Ultimately, as is clearly shown, certain
versions of history come to dominate, achieve
hegemonic status, while others are marginalized,
though there always remain fluctuating,
sometimes uneasy tensions between them.
These tensions, strongest depending on how
polemical the issues being discussed are, form
an integral part of the primal struggle for
cultural hegemony, endemic to all later
reconstructions of historical events.1 As such,
techniques for dealing with the past should
not be seen as expressions of linear continuity
or homogeneous opinion.
The struggle unfolded here relates to
the history and changing images of the
Wehrmacht—specifically its attested crimes
(inter alia, Holocaust involvement)—for long
simply denied or rationalized, at best, as
minimal, particularly when compared to its
notorious counterpart, the amorphous SS.
In order to trace the evolving narratives
treating these themes, the authors present
longitudinal studies of three different data
clusters: (1) debates in the Austrian parliament
and cabinet; (2) discourses about the past in
print and cinematographic media; and (3) the
portrayal of the Wehrmacht in schoolbooks.
Through the contrastive study of different
‘‘public spheres’’—politics, media, and school
instruction—the authors sought ‘‘to identify for
each set of actors different ways of handling,
interpreting and constructing the past’’ (xiv).
Rightly recognizing that memory (and
commemoration) are individually as well as
collectively determined, the authors—a further
merit of their work—not only relied on official
arbiters of received knowledge but astutely
supplemented these with private recollections,
notably letters from front-line soldiers,
responses by army veterans, specially prepared
questionnaires, and the reminiscences of visitors
to the first Wehrmacht exhibition (that of 1995).
Equally enlightening is their exploration of
how the topic was taken up by the entertainment
industry, analyzing episodes of the
German crime series, Tatort (Crime Scene)
which used the Wehrmacht exhibition as its
central location. (chap. 9)
Respectively, the essays in this volume
demonstrate that the ways in which societies
come to terms with past realities (however
unpalatable) are not random or surreptitious,
but molded by situational tactics, and societal
structures which they help to sustain. Prevailing
discursive practices are an additional determinant.
2 Identifying and correctly applying these
variables clearly requires an interdisciplinary
approach—the discourse/historical method, as
used throughout, combining perspectives from
political science, semiotics, cultural studies,
prejudice research and more traditional historical
sources:3 systems of at times competing,
at times mutually supportive communicative
patterns. Deriving from the deconstructionist
theories of Foucault, the historical approach
in particular is uniquely valuable here as it
focuses on documentation itself as a reality
critical to the historian’s pursuit and so sensitizes
the reader to how discursive practices are not
mere reflections of attitudes but are constituent
elements of wider strategies designed to shape
them. Shifting the emphasis from the history
of ideas, seen as expressions of cultural values,
towards rhetorical forms used to construct
social identity, reveals underlying (subconscious?)
tensions between modalities and
content.4 These tensions are recognized
and imaginatively deployed in the volume
to demonstrate how discursive practices can
throw new light on the dynamics of human
culture.
Also important and factored in are institutions
of the state, empowered to address and
redress past injustices according to present laws,
and thus functioning as responsible political
agents for dealing with the past—termed by the
authors, Vergangenheitspolitik5—the goal of
which is to ensure ‘‘historical ruptures notwithstanding,
continuity in the collective selfimage,
integration of the most important
social groups and the projection of an acceptable
image to the outside world’’ (8).
This process is at no time unexacting or
facile but an ‘‘enduring and conflict ridden
affair’’ (8)—the tendency for suspect groups
being to legitimize their actions and self-image
by integrating positive memories and rejecting
negative ones—no matter what the abject
distortions of history involved. Viewing collective
memory as group remembrance that
provides continuity and confers identity of a
higher order, the essays show how social
entities symbolically preserve their coherence
and self-image by enshrining positive over
negative remembrances.6 The goal is to
produce a historical account around which
consensus can be constructed, a formulation
which can serve as ‘‘a unifying narrative’’ (8–9).
This process is explained, with ample
supporting data, in chapters 2, 3, and 5,
examining the mitigating notion, widespread
throughout Austria after World War II, that
Nazism was somehow imposed on the country
from the outside and that the nation had
been essentially victimized by deception,
subversion and ideological infiltration.7
Applied to the Wehrmacht, these assertions
fostered a legend ‘‘which made this victimology’’
compatible with the self-image and selfassessment
of the soldiers themselves—but a
legend ultimately possible only if the Wehrmacht
could be retroactively sanitized, depoliticized
and decriminalized in memory.8
German recollections of the Third Reich
in the 1950s and 1960s (if not beyond)
grudgingly recognized and incorporated the
crimes of the Holocaust but largely downplayed
the genocidal war of annihilation in
the East and its perpetrators—these being
subsumed under the nebulous umbrella of
‘‘state organizations’’ or agencies. The wars,
moreover, were presented as justified conflicts
with Communism/Stalinism and those
involved as ‘‘victims’’ of the crimes of others:
partisans, terror bombers, allied prison camps,
allied atrocities, etc.9
Evidence, however, of cooperation
between Wehrmacht, SS, SD and regular
police units, in the murder of Jews, both
at senior and staff levels, is clearly established as
are their preexisting anti-Semitic sentiments
(antedating National Socialism), which provided
the psychological raw materials for
future decision making, once faced with the
reality of war (28). Orders from higher
control centers and group dynamic processes,
converted existing mindsets into murderous
actions, within the realms of the Wehrmacht.
This conclusion is validated by the authors’
skillful exegesis of letters from the front and
diary entries—items of prime interpretational
significance—since these clearly reflect the
hostile and stereotypical perceptions by
Wehrmacht forces of the captive settlers (some
but not all Jewish) in the newly acquired areas
of the East.
Such perceptions prompted soldiers to
approve of and often participate in progroms,
especially those in Galicia, Lithuania, and the
Ukraine, all regions under German military
administration and thus (at least theoretically)
subject to martial law—a regulatory framework
with the power to protect all of the civilian
population. Even in the case of those who did
not personally commit acts of liquidation
‘‘there is evidence of implicit and in most
cases explicit approval of the murder of
Jews’’ (43). This tendency became intensified
after Stalingrad, intermingled with revenge and
punishment fantasies, amidst the prospect of
impending defeat, and resigned visions of the
future. Despite inevitable gaps in the surviving
evidence, the authors argue persuasively that
the National Socialist policy towards Jews not
only via propaganda and ideology, enlisted
much of German society but the practical
realization of the Nazi doctrine of hate
involved to a greater or lesser degree all the
institutions of the political system—a conclusion
with wide implications for the enduring
conflict between hegemonic and peripheral
interpretations of the responsibility for war
crimes in post-Nazi German and Austrian
society.10 After 1945, Austrian Wehrmacht
soldiers were conventionally portrayed as
dupes—constrained and exploited by Nazi
fanatics, in no way sympathetic to or identifying
with the war and its aims. This view was
readily adaptable to the wider, prevailing myth,
mostly fashioned in West Germany of
‘‘an apolitical Wehrmacht which had allegedly
maintained a distance from the regime’s crimes
and especially from the Holocaust’’ (53).
Chapters 4 and 5, however, argue persuasively
that Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers identified with
Nazism, in all its ideological and operational
aspects, to a much greater degree than the
official historical narratives of the postwar
period would suggest. These soldiers, in retrospect,
also emerge as entities whose objectives
visibly harmonized with the racist/anti-Semitic
agenda of the SS and the Nazi regime as a
whole. Particularly revealing here is the
documented fact that by 1944, the Wehrmacht,
not the SS, supplied more than half of the total
concentration camp security personnel.
Similar conclusions emerge from the interviews
conducted among attendees of the
Wehrmacht Exhibition in Vienna (1995),
recorded on video and subsequently adapted
to the methodology of oral history.11 Many
of the younger interviewees (born between
1925 and 1928) remembered directly witnessing
crimes against Jews even before the war
(primarily in Vienna), the shooting of POWs
and civilian prisoners, as well as indiscriminate
violence on the part of ordinary soldiers
towards racial minorities, suspected partisans,
communists and gypsies (76–77).
Others in this age group, by contrast,
pleaded extenuation: the nature of dictatorship,
their youth at the time, compulsion from
above, German not Austrian guilt—and
attacked the Exhibition for being too sweeping,
even defamatory. Those who had seen action
(birth dates: 1920–24) did not, for the most
part, deny the brutalities against war captives
and Jews, but as a majority, denied personal
involvement. A few claimed lack of recollection,
some admitted being troubled by their
memories, but a minority actually justified
all criminal acts on political, military or moral
grounds. Overall, those questioned, saw the
Austrian Wehrmacht in a positive light or at least
downplayed its complicity. Austrians were
simply doing their duty under Nazi rule,
‘‘idealists who were led astray’’ (100).
Austria’s postwar historical self-image—
ultimately embodied in ‘‘collective memory’’
was intricately enmeshed in and enshrined
by later political debates surrounding the
KOVG—War Victims Benefit Act—passed
in 1949—debates of a decidedly apologetic
kind relating to the nation’s connivance in Nazi
atrocities. This context, as demonstrated clearly,
gave birth to the resilient ‘‘idea of national
victim-hood as a dominant historiographical
construct’’ (127). This myth, in turn, explored
by Alexander Pollak (chap. 6) permeated
Austrian press activity after 1945. The exculpatory
discourse, constructed by the media, across
a wide spectrum, consistently relieved the
Wehrmacht and its members of any complicity
in the crimes of National Socialism, in the
process establishing historical ‘‘truths’’ that have
lingered to this day.12 Examining over 200
articles drawn from a broad range of Austrian
newspapers and periodicals, Pollak compellingly
argues that, influenced by the selfjustifying
writings of senior Wehrmacht leaders,
and widely circulated ‘‘soldier’’ novels, journalists
generally attempted to absolve their
‘‘regular’’ army from criminality. Media fabrication
produced an intricately layered version
of the Wehrmacht myth that deeply embedded
itself in the national psyche for decades. As
such, it reinforced the exonerating tendencies
of the viewpoints expressed during the War
Benefits negotiations that distanced Austria in
every way from German military institutions
and leadership (103). The dominant assumption
was that Austria served the Nazis reluctantly
and only under duress. The choice of perspective
and manner of linguistic exposition were
such as to construct a picture in which the
participation of the Wehrmacht ‘‘in criminal acts
were airbrushed out, pushed into the background
or at least watered down’’ (154). It was
preeminently the 1995 Wehrmacht exhibition
that began to cast lasting doubt on this image
and foster the quest for a more critical, open
discussion of societal involvement in National
Socialism.
Still, exculpatory tendencies persisted—
sustained not least by the texts used for the
teaching of history throughout the Austrian
school system well into the 1990s, thereby
institutionalizing a political culture based on
‘‘the flight from responsibility’’ (156) and, given
the officially controlled accreditation system,
one that endorsed and disseminated the state’s
preferred version of historical events. As
scrupulously documented in chapter 7, even
more current, revised texts deal with the
manifest crimes of the Wehrmacht and genocidal
character of the Nazi regime only cautiously, in
a rudimentary way (if at all) and then usually
attribute these to prominent functionaries
(i.e., Himmler, Heydrich, Goering, etc.) or
organizations like the Gestapo and the SS.
These school books, moreover, make no
discernible distinction between wars of aggression
and the reactive, military operations of the
Allies (thus sadly reflecting the currently
ubiquitous cultural trend of avoiding all overt
moral or value judgments). War crimes—so the
argument goes—are an inevitable feature of
wars anywhere, at anytime.13 Certainly these
books fail to incorporate the latest findings of
academic research, but here, by distorting
students’ perceptions of the past—and present—
they are able to shape the historical
interpretations passed down from one generation
to the next. Similarly the visual media
(television, documentaries, films, etc.), discussed
in chapter 8 provide not so much an
authentic evocation of the past, but rather
projects a sanitized, apologetic view of Austria’s
relations to National Socialism, reinforcing the
undifferentiated notion of ‘‘victim-hood’’ that
has dominated Austrian politics and historiography
for decades (196).
Even with the appearance of cable and
satellite television in the 1980s and 1990s and
its potential for a more accurate retrospective,
the Second World War is not linked to the
Nazi policy of annihilation, but viewed simply
‘‘as a war in which all soldiers suffered in equal
measure’’ (196). The bizarre corollary is that
Wehrmacht soldiers (German and Austrian), as
‘‘victims’’ of military exigencies and the ruthlessness
of their superiors, are actually equated
with concentration camp casualties. The documentaries
produced therefore reinforce the
undifferentiated notion of victim-hood that
has governed Austrian politics for decades and
marginalize the claims of those who had truly
experienced racial persecution in all its appalling
facets. The result is a distortion of historical
reality that disregards ‘‘ongoing political debates
about the past’’ and simplistically filters out a
form of ‘‘positive consensus’’ (197).
The final chapters—9, 10, and 11—
describe the Wehrmacht exhibition itself and
record varying public reactions in both Austria
and Germany to the historical and political
issues associated with it. Showing how initial
reactions, whether hostile or sympathetic,
swiftly triggered political repercussions, the
authors skillfully trace this dimension of the
exhibition to its contrast with the selfcharacterization
of most Germans after
1945—an image shaped not only by objective
historical truths but also by the need to
reinforce present-day norms and experiences
in order to foster a positive self-image residing
in public consciousness since the war (233).
In other words, the view that the Wehrmacht
‘‘had rejected Hitler’s notion of a racial war
of annihilation in the Soviet Union and
had conducted the campaign nobly and
in the spirit of international law’’ (232).
This characterization had long been reinforced
by films, magazines, military autobiographies
and official policies at the federal level, such as
Adenauer’s Vergangenheitspolitik—essentially an
attempt to erect a protective wall of silence
around the critical aspects of German wartime
responsibility.14
It is the significant achievement of this
volume as a whole to confirm on the basis of
cutting-edge scholarship that the Wehrmacht
exhibitions are unique examples of sociopolitical
interventions whose combined effect
is to reshape the landscape of wartime memories,
correct official versions of history, and
broaden the dimension of complicity from its
conventional focus on Nazi guilt to include the
regular army, whether as spectators, accessories
after the fact or as accomplices. Perhaps even
more importantly, the exhibitions in their
visualized expansion of the perpetrator group
on a moral level brought into public consciousness
the perennial problem of human
evil—the culpability of Everyman—that needs
to be battled anew, in every possible way,
by each generation, using the spiritual/moral
resources at its command.
- Posts : 22555
Join date : 2014-12-01
Anduril wrote:Filipenko wrote:
Pretpostavljam da bi ti principijalno odobrio, danas kada Rusija i Putin osuđuju boljševike i njihove politike, zahteve Rusa da se podignu spomenici svim sovjetskim vojnicima i obnove biste Staljinu, Lenjinu, Rokosovskom, Žukovu, "sovjetskom vojniku", od Smolenska do Beča?
Ovaj, nema sta da se obnavlja u Becu - na Schwarzenbergplatzu uredno stoji spomenik sovjetskom vojniku koji je napravljen od istopljenih bisti Hitlera. Austrijanci imaju sporazum o odrzavanju tog spomenika u beskonacnost i tako treba da bude. A biste tvojih idola su ipak nesto drugo i ne bi ih mesao sa poginulim vojnicima.
Ustvari, jel umes ti da napises bilo sta a da odgovara cinjenicama? Nemas pojma za pare iz Marsalovog plana, nemas pojma sta se zapravo placa iz EU budzeta, nemas pojma koji spomenici gde stoje, itd. Bar proveri osnovne cinjenice pre nego sto napises nesto glupo - boljsevicki propagandni komesari bi te vec streljali za los odradjen posao...
Lutaš. Hajdemo onda konkretno - da li sada, kada Putin osuđuje boljševizam, Rusija ima pravo da traži da npr. u Poljskoj vrate spomenike i biste Konstantinu Rokosovskom, maršalu SSSRa i maršalu poljske armije (i de fakto prvoj osobi poljske države) širom zemlje, spomenik Bratstvu u Oružju u Varšavi, spomenike zahvalnosti Crvenoj Armiji širom zemlje (229 komada, po poslednjim popisima pre uklanjanja)...?
Pusti sada velike kipove u centru Beča ili Berlina. Njih imaju i najveći zločinci, poput npr. rimskih papa.
- Posts : 713
Join date : 2015-08-30
William Murderface wrote:
Sta je smesno? Sto uzivas u infantilnom lepljenju etiketa? Kad god napisem vise od dva posta ti se pojavis i prilepis neku nesto iako te niko nista nije pitao. Prvo sam bio manihejista, sad kultur esencijalista, cenim da je sledece fasista - to je taj niz. Nemam vremena za naporne likove poput tebe pa te zato lepo molim da mi se vise skines.
Gargantua wrote:The European Legacy, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 393–398, 2012
Reviews
Nazism, the Wehrmacht and Collective Memory
Discursive Construction of History:
Remembering the Wehrmacht’s War of
Annihilation. Edited by Hannes Heer, Walter
Manoschek, Alexander Pollak, and Ruth
Wodak (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan,
2008), xvi ţ 331 pp. Ł55.00 cloth.
Karl W. Schweizer
- Spoiler:
This thought provoking work explores the
complex process whereby democratic, pluralistic
societies cope with traumatic events in their
past—the diverse ways in which they reconstruct
their national histories throughout different
domains of life, via a multiplicity of
genres. The volume is given thematic unity
through its central focus on two major
exhibitions held in Austria and Germany
between 1985 and 1999. These displays, here
viewed as ‘‘a major intervention in the
construction of national historical images and
myths’’ (x), sparked widespread and frequently
heated, even acrimonious, debates in both
countries. These debates have vibrantly resonated
throughout Austro-German historical
circles to this day, leaving contentious the
traumatic issue of National Socialism, its
documented crimes and the onus of complicity,
be it among civilians or the regular German
army (Wehrmacht), which was widely and
mitigatingly portrayed after 1945 as untainted:
exonerated altogether given the nature of war,
ideologically indoctrinated, coerced by orders
from above or simply naı¨ve, depending on a
soldier’s age.
Aside from its central themes, the book is
also instructive as a taxonomy of historical
reinterpretation, demonstrating that characteristically
discursive narratives—the retrospective
attribution of ‘‘meaning,’’ values and ideals,
are invariably influenced by vested interests and
agendas. Ultimately, as is clearly shown, certain
versions of history come to dominate, achieve
hegemonic status, while others are marginalized,
though there always remain fluctuating,
sometimes uneasy tensions between them.
These tensions, strongest depending on how
polemical the issues being discussed are, form
an integral part of the primal struggle for
cultural hegemony, endemic to all later
reconstructions of historical events.1 As such,
techniques for dealing with the past should
not be seen as expressions of linear continuity
or homogeneous opinion.
The struggle unfolded here relates to
the history and changing images of the
Wehrmacht—specifically its attested crimes
(inter alia, Holocaust involvement)—for long
simply denied or rationalized, at best, as
minimal, particularly when compared to its
notorious counterpart, the amorphous SS.
In order to trace the evolving narratives
treating these themes, the authors present
longitudinal studies of three different data
clusters: (1) debates in the Austrian parliament
and cabinet; (2) discourses about the past in
print and cinematographic media; and (3) the
portrayal of the Wehrmacht in schoolbooks.
Through the contrastive study of different
‘‘public spheres’’—politics, media, and school
instruction—the authors sought ‘‘to identify for
each set of actors different ways of handling,
interpreting and constructing the past’’ (xiv).
Rightly recognizing that memory (and
commemoration) are individually as well as
collectively determined, the authors—a further
merit of their work—not only relied on official
arbiters of received knowledge but astutely
supplemented these with private recollections,
notably letters from front-line soldiers,
responses by army veterans, specially prepared
questionnaires, and the reminiscences of visitors
to the first Wehrmacht exhibition (that of 1995).
Equally enlightening is their exploration of
how the topic was taken up by the entertainment
industry, analyzing episodes of the
German crime series, Tatort (Crime Scene)
which used the Wehrmacht exhibition as its
central location. (chap. 9)
Respectively, the essays in this volume
demonstrate that the ways in which societies
come to terms with past realities (however
unpalatable) are not random or surreptitious,
but molded by situational tactics, and societal
structures which they help to sustain. Prevailing
discursive practices are an additional determinant.
2 Identifying and correctly applying these
variables clearly requires an interdisciplinary
approach—the discourse/historical method, as
used throughout, combining perspectives from
political science, semiotics, cultural studies,
prejudice research and more traditional historical
sources:3 systems of at times competing,
at times mutually supportive communicative
patterns. Deriving from the deconstructionist
theories of Foucault, the historical approach
in particular is uniquely valuable here as it
focuses on documentation itself as a reality
critical to the historian’s pursuit and so sensitizes
the reader to how discursive practices are not
mere reflections of attitudes but are constituent
elements of wider strategies designed to shape
them. Shifting the emphasis from the history
of ideas, seen as expressions of cultural values,
towards rhetorical forms used to construct
social identity, reveals underlying (subconscious?)
tensions between modalities and
content.4 These tensions are recognized
and imaginatively deployed in the volume
to demonstrate how discursive practices can
throw new light on the dynamics of human
culture.
Also important and factored in are institutions
of the state, empowered to address and
redress past injustices according to present laws,
and thus functioning as responsible political
agents for dealing with the past—termed by the
authors, Vergangenheitspolitik5—the goal of
which is to ensure ‘‘historical ruptures notwithstanding,
continuity in the collective selfimage,
integration of the most important
social groups and the projection of an acceptable
image to the outside world’’ (8).
This process is at no time unexacting or
facile but an ‘‘enduring and conflict ridden
affair’’ (8)—the tendency for suspect groups
being to legitimize their actions and self-image
by integrating positive memories and rejecting
negative ones—no matter what the abject
distortions of history involved. Viewing collective
memory as group remembrance that
provides continuity and confers identity of a
higher order, the essays show how social
entities symbolically preserve their coherence
and self-image by enshrining positive over
negative remembrances.6 The goal is to
produce a historical account around which
consensus can be constructed, a formulation
which can serve as ‘‘a unifying narrative’’ (8–9).
This process is explained, with ample
supporting data, in chapters 2, 3, and 5,
examining the mitigating notion, widespread
throughout Austria after World War II, that
Nazism was somehow imposed on the country
from the outside and that the nation had
been essentially victimized by deception,
subversion and ideological infiltration.7
Applied to the Wehrmacht, these assertions
fostered a legend ‘‘which made this victimology’’
compatible with the self-image and selfassessment
of the soldiers themselves—but a
legend ultimately possible only if the Wehrmacht
could be retroactively sanitized, depoliticized
and decriminalized in memory.8
German recollections of the Third Reich
in the 1950s and 1960s (if not beyond)
grudgingly recognized and incorporated the
crimes of the Holocaust but largely downplayed
the genocidal war of annihilation in
the East and its perpetrators—these being
subsumed under the nebulous umbrella of
‘‘state organizations’’ or agencies. The wars,
moreover, were presented as justified conflicts
with Communism/Stalinism and those
involved as ‘‘victims’’ of the crimes of others:
partisans, terror bombers, allied prison camps,
allied atrocities, etc.9
Evidence, however, of cooperation
between Wehrmacht, SS, SD and regular
police units, in the murder of Jews, both
at senior and staff levels, is clearly established as
are their preexisting anti-Semitic sentiments
(antedating National Socialism), which provided
the psychological raw materials for
future decision making, once faced with the
reality of war (28). Orders from higher
control centers and group dynamic processes,
converted existing mindsets into murderous
actions, within the realms of the Wehrmacht.
This conclusion is validated by the authors’
skillful exegesis of letters from the front and
diary entries—items of prime interpretational
significance—since these clearly reflect the
hostile and stereotypical perceptions by
Wehrmacht forces of the captive settlers (some
but not all Jewish) in the newly acquired areas
of the East.
Such perceptions prompted soldiers to
approve of and often participate in progroms,
especially those in Galicia, Lithuania, and the
Ukraine, all regions under German military
administration and thus (at least theoretically)
subject to martial law—a regulatory framework
with the power to protect all of the civilian
population. Even in the case of those who did
not personally commit acts of liquidation
‘‘there is evidence of implicit and in most
cases explicit approval of the murder of
Jews’’ (43). This tendency became intensified
after Stalingrad, intermingled with revenge and
punishment fantasies, amidst the prospect of
impending defeat, and resigned visions of the
future. Despite inevitable gaps in the surviving
evidence, the authors argue persuasively that
the National Socialist policy towards Jews not
only via propaganda and ideology, enlisted
much of German society but the practical
realization of the Nazi doctrine of hate
involved to a greater or lesser degree all the
institutions of the political system—a conclusion
with wide implications for the enduring
conflict between hegemonic and peripheral
interpretations of the responsibility for war
crimes in post-Nazi German and Austrian
society.10 After 1945, Austrian Wehrmacht
soldiers were conventionally portrayed as
dupes—constrained and exploited by Nazi
fanatics, in no way sympathetic to or identifying
with the war and its aims. This view was
readily adaptable to the wider, prevailing myth,
mostly fashioned in West Germany of
‘‘an apolitical Wehrmacht which had allegedly
maintained a distance from the regime’s crimes
and especially from the Holocaust’’ (53).
Chapters 4 and 5, however, argue persuasively
that Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers identified with
Nazism, in all its ideological and operational
aspects, to a much greater degree than the
official historical narratives of the postwar
period would suggest. These soldiers, in retrospect,
also emerge as entities whose objectives
visibly harmonized with the racist/anti-Semitic
agenda of the SS and the Nazi regime as a
whole. Particularly revealing here is the
documented fact that by 1944, the Wehrmacht,
not the SS, supplied more than half of the total
concentration camp security personnel.
Similar conclusions emerge from the interviews
conducted among attendees of the
Wehrmacht Exhibition in Vienna (1995),
recorded on video and subsequently adapted
to the methodology of oral history.11 Many
of the younger interviewees (born between
1925 and 1928) remembered directly witnessing
crimes against Jews even before the war
(primarily in Vienna), the shooting of POWs
and civilian prisoners, as well as indiscriminate
violence on the part of ordinary soldiers
towards racial minorities, suspected partisans,
communists and gypsies (76–77).
Others in this age group, by contrast,
pleaded extenuation: the nature of dictatorship,
their youth at the time, compulsion from
above, German not Austrian guilt—and
attacked the Exhibition for being too sweeping,
even defamatory. Those who had seen action
(birth dates: 1920–24) did not, for the most
part, deny the brutalities against war captives
and Jews, but as a majority, denied personal
involvement. A few claimed lack of recollection,
some admitted being troubled by their
memories, but a minority actually justified
all criminal acts on political, military or moral
grounds. Overall, those questioned, saw the
Austrian Wehrmacht in a positive light or at least
downplayed its complicity. Austrians were
simply doing their duty under Nazi rule,
‘‘idealists who were led astray’’ (100).
Austria’s postwar historical self-image—
ultimately embodied in ‘‘collective memory’’
was intricately enmeshed in and enshrined
by later political debates surrounding the
KOVG—War Victims Benefit Act—passed
in 1949—debates of a decidedly apologetic
kind relating to the nation’s connivance in Nazi
atrocities. This context, as demonstrated clearly,
gave birth to the resilient ‘‘idea of national
victim-hood as a dominant historiographical
construct’’ (127). This myth, in turn, explored
by Alexander Pollak (chap. 6) permeated
Austrian press activity after 1945. The exculpatory
discourse, constructed by the media, across
a wide spectrum, consistently relieved the
Wehrmacht and its members of any complicity
in the crimes of National Socialism, in the
process establishing historical ‘‘truths’’ that have
lingered to this day.12 Examining over 200
articles drawn from a broad range of Austrian
newspapers and periodicals, Pollak compellingly
argues that, influenced by the selfjustifying
writings of senior Wehrmacht leaders,
and widely circulated ‘‘soldier’’ novels, journalists
generally attempted to absolve their
‘‘regular’’ army from criminality. Media fabrication
produced an intricately layered version
of the Wehrmacht myth that deeply embedded
itself in the national psyche for decades. As
such, it reinforced the exonerating tendencies
of the viewpoints expressed during the War
Benefits negotiations that distanced Austria in
every way from German military institutions
and leadership (103). The dominant assumption
was that Austria served the Nazis reluctantly
and only under duress. The choice of perspective
and manner of linguistic exposition were
such as to construct a picture in which the
participation of the Wehrmacht ‘‘in criminal acts
were airbrushed out, pushed into the background
or at least watered down’’ (154). It was
preeminently the 1995 Wehrmacht exhibition
that began to cast lasting doubt on this image
and foster the quest for a more critical, open
discussion of societal involvement in National
Socialism.
Still, exculpatory tendencies persisted—
sustained not least by the texts used for the
teaching of history throughout the Austrian
school system well into the 1990s, thereby
institutionalizing a political culture based on
‘‘the flight from responsibility’’ (156) and, given
the officially controlled accreditation system,
one that endorsed and disseminated the state’s
preferred version of historical events. As
scrupulously documented in chapter 7, even
more current, revised texts deal with the
manifest crimes of the Wehrmacht and genocidal
character of the Nazi regime only cautiously, in
a rudimentary way (if at all) and then usually
attribute these to prominent functionaries
(i.e., Himmler, Heydrich, Goering, etc.) or
organizations like the Gestapo and the SS.
These school books, moreover, make no
discernible distinction between wars of aggression
and the reactive, military operations of the
Allies (thus sadly reflecting the currently
ubiquitous cultural trend of avoiding all overt
moral or value judgments). War crimes—so the
argument goes—are an inevitable feature of
wars anywhere, at anytime.13 Certainly these
books fail to incorporate the latest findings of
academic research, but here, by distorting
students’ perceptions of the past—and present—
they are able to shape the historical
interpretations passed down from one generation
to the next. Similarly the visual media
(television, documentaries, films, etc.), discussed
in chapter 8 provide not so much an
authentic evocation of the past, but rather
projects a sanitized, apologetic view of Austria’s
relations to National Socialism, reinforcing the
undifferentiated notion of ‘‘victim-hood’’ that
has dominated Austrian politics and historiography
for decades (196).
Even with the appearance of cable and
satellite television in the 1980s and 1990s and
its potential for a more accurate retrospective,
the Second World War is not linked to the
Nazi policy of annihilation, but viewed simply
‘‘as a war in which all soldiers suffered in equal
measure’’ (196). The bizarre corollary is that
Wehrmacht soldiers (German and Austrian), as
‘‘victims’’ of military exigencies and the ruthlessness
of their superiors, are actually equated
with concentration camp casualties. The documentaries
produced therefore reinforce the
undifferentiated notion of victim-hood that
has governed Austrian politics for decades and
marginalize the claims of those who had truly
experienced racial persecution in all its appalling
facets. The result is a distortion of historical
reality that disregards ‘‘ongoing political debates
about the past’’ and simplistically filters out a
form of ‘‘positive consensus’’ (197).
The final chapters—9, 10, and 11—
describe the Wehrmacht exhibition itself and
record varying public reactions in both Austria
and Germany to the historical and political
issues associated with it. Showing how initial
reactions, whether hostile or sympathetic,
swiftly triggered political repercussions, the
authors skillfully trace this dimension of the
exhibition to its contrast with the selfcharacterization
of most Germans after
1945—an image shaped not only by objective
historical truths but also by the need to
reinforce present-day norms and experiences
in order to foster a positive self-image residing
in public consciousness since the war (233).
In other words, the view that the Wehrmacht
‘‘had rejected Hitler’s notion of a racial war
of annihilation in the Soviet Union and
had conducted the campaign nobly and
in the spirit of international law’’ (232).
This characterization had long been reinforced
by films, magazines, military autobiographies
and official policies at the federal level, such as
Adenauer’s Vergangenheitspolitik—essentially an
attempt to erect a protective wall of silence
around the critical aspects of German wartime
responsibility.14
It is the significant achievement of this
volume as a whole to confirm on the basis of
cutting-edge scholarship that the Wehrmacht
exhibitions are unique examples of sociopolitical
interventions whose combined effect
is to reshape the landscape of wartime memories,
correct official versions of history, and
broaden the dimension of complicity from its
conventional focus on Nazi guilt to include the
regular army, whether as spectators, accessories
after the fact or as accomplices. Perhaps even
more importantly, the exhibitions in their
visualized expansion of the perpetrator group
on a moral level brought into public consciousness
the perennial problem of human
evil—the culpability of Everyman—that needs
to be battled anew, in every possible way,
by each generation, using the spiritual/moral
resources at its command.
Ovaj, ne moras da kopas po pojedinacnim knjigama da bi ilustrovao sta se dogadjalo posle 2. Svetskog rata pa do osamdesetih. Za nasu raspravu je mnogo relevantnije kako se to dalje odvijalo sve do danas - recimo ovo:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrmachtsausstellung
@ Filipenko
Ne vidim u cemu bi bio problem da se vrate ti spomenici ako se istovremeno prizna i obelezi recimo Katin.
- Posts : 22555
Join date : 2014-12-01
Dakle, uslovljavaš vraćanje porušenih spomenika - i to ne poraženoj, već osloboditeljskoj strani u WW2?
- Posts : 713
Join date : 2015-08-30
Filipenko wrote:Dakle, uslovljavaš vraćanje porušenih spomenika - i to ne poraženoj, već osloboditeljskoj strani u WW2?
Koliko je meni poznato, i poljska armija je na kraju bila pobednicka. Nema to veze sa uslovljavanjem nego sa prostim priznanjem cinjenica koje bi u velikoj meri poboljsalo sadasnje rusko-poljske odnose iako su bili na istoj strani.
- Posts : 6735
Join date : 2012-02-11
Nisam do sada video ubedljive argumente u prilog tezi da je u Nemackoj posle ujedinjenja doslo do jacanja revizionizma. Dva zanimljiva teksta:
https://books.google.be/books?hl=fr&lr=&id=SE9nLVoEWjIC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=germany+memory+war&ots=OmZHcqM6tZ&sig=Pr96YcdJaFH09aFBrAwEz3DifiU#v=onepage&q=germany%20memory%20war&f=false (procitati uvod)
klik
Poenta oba teksta u kontekstu ove rasprave je da je revizionizam, ako pod njim racunamo isticanje stradanja nemackih vojnika i civila u WW2, ako ista bio snazan, mislim i mnogo snazniji, prvih decenija nakon zavrsetka rata nego danas, ukljucujuci i u Istocnoj Nemackoj.
Sve ostalo sto sam cuo i citao o nemackoj istoriji ide u tom smeru. Indikativno je, naprimer, kako su se kretale procene broja nemackih civila stradalih u etnickom ciscenju u istocnoevropskim zemljama: revizionisticke tendencije reflektovale bi se tipicno u konstatno rastucem brojem "nasih" zrtava, dok se kod Nemaca taj broj progresivno spustio do deset puta manje cifre nego sto je bila incijalna procena.
https://books.google.be/books?hl=fr&lr=&id=SE9nLVoEWjIC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=germany+memory+war&ots=OmZHcqM6tZ&sig=Pr96YcdJaFH09aFBrAwEz3DifiU#v=onepage&q=germany%20memory%20war&f=false (procitati uvod)
klik
Poenta oba teksta u kontekstu ove rasprave je da je revizionizam, ako pod njim racunamo isticanje stradanja nemackih vojnika i civila u WW2, ako ista bio snazan, mislim i mnogo snazniji, prvih decenija nakon zavrsetka rata nego danas, ukljucujuci i u Istocnoj Nemackoj.
Sve ostalo sto sam cuo i citao o nemackoj istoriji ide u tom smeru. Indikativno je, naprimer, kako su se kretale procene broja nemackih civila stradalih u etnickom ciscenju u istocnoevropskim zemljama: revizionisticke tendencije reflektovale bi se tipicno u konstatno rastucem brojem "nasih" zrtava, dok se kod Nemaca taj broj progresivno spustio do deset puta manje cifre nego sto je bila incijalna procena.
_____
"Ne morate krenuti odavde da biste dosli tamo. Moguce je krenuti odavde i vratiti se ponovo tu, ali preko onoga tamo."
Aca Seltik, Sabrana razmisljanja o topologiji, tom cetvrti.
My Moon Che Gavara.
- Posts : 713
Join date : 2015-08-30
Radagast wrote:Nisam do sada video ubedljive argumente u prilog tezi da je u Nemackoj posle ujedinjenja doslo do jacanja revizionizma. Dva zanimljiva teksta:
https://books.google.be/books?hl=fr&lr=&id=SE9nLVoEWjIC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=germany+memory+war&ots=OmZHcqM6tZ&sig=Pr96YcdJaFH09aFBrAwEz3DifiU#v=onepage&q=germany%20memory%20war&f=false (procitati uvod)
klik
Poenta oba teksta u kontekstu ove rasprave je da je revizionizam, ako pod njim racunamo isticanje stradanja nemackih vojnika i civila u WW2, ako ista bio snazan, mislim i mnogo snazniji, prvih decenija nakon zavrsetka rata nego danas, ukljucujuci i u Istocnoj Nemackoj.
Sve ostalo sto sam cuo i citao o nemackoj istoriji ide u tom smeru. Indikativno je, naprimer, kako su se kretale procene broja nemackih civila stradalih u etnickom ciscenju u istocnoevropskim zemljama: revizionisticke tendencije reflektovale bi se tipicno u konstatno rastucem brojem "nasih" zrtava, dok se kod Nemaca taj broj progresivno spustio do deset puta manje cifre nego sto je bila incijalna procena.
Upravo to - te tendencije su bile mnogo jace dok je drustvo bilo jos puno bivsih nacista i o tome govori i onsj Prosperov tekst. Nemacki istoricarski mejnstrim je od 60-tih do negde 90-tih sakupio ogromnu gradju o pravoj ulozi Vermahta, a ta zlocinacka uloga (posebno u Poljskoj, Belorusiji i Ukrajini), je zatim nasiroko diskutovana i prihvacena u javnosti devedesetih. I danas se to nastavlja a revizionisti koji su jos pre 15g bili mejnstrim (recimo, Erika Stajnbach, predsednik udruzenja prognanih), su recimo fakticki iskljuceni iz CDU-a. Sav taj revizionisticki deo je mnogo vise marginalizovan nego jos pre 20g (Afd kao i desnica CSUa, kao i njihovo marginalizovanje tokom izbeglicke diskusije su dalji primeri). O ulozi Kola da ne pricam...
|
|
|