Bloodlands and Selective Remembering
The much anticipated book by Timothy Snyder, Professor of History at Yale, has appeared. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is reviewed in the current issue of the New York Review of Books by Anne Applebaum (herself the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Gulag: A History).
She writes apropos the book’s title:
The title of this book, Bloodlands, is not a metaphor. Snyder’s “bloodlands,” which others have called “borderlands,” run from Poznan in the West to Smolensk in the East, encompassing modern Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, and the edge of western Russia. This is the region that experienced not one but two—and sometimes three—wartime occupations. This is also the region that suffered the most casualties and endured the worst physical destruction.
And continues:
This region was also the site of most of the politically motivated killing in Europe—killing that began not in 1939 with the invasion of Poland, but in 1933, with the famine in Ukraine. Between 1933 and 1945, fourteen million people died there, not in combat but because someone made a deliberate decision to murder them. These deaths took place in the bloodlands, and not accidentally so: “Hitler and Stalin rose to power in Berlin and Moscow,” writes Snyder, “but their visions of transformation concerned above all the lands between.”
And her conclusion is stark and unsettling:
If nothing else, a reassessment of what we know about Europe in the years between 1933 and 1953 could finally cure us of that “lack of imagination” that so appalled Czesław Miłosz almost sixty years ago. When considered in isolation, Auschwitz can be easily compartmentalized, characterized as belonging to a specific place and time, or explained away as the result of Germany’s unique history or particular culture. But if Auschwitz was not the only mass atrocity, if mass murder was simultaneously taking place across a multinational landscape and with the support of many different kinds of people, then it is not so easy to compartmentalize or explain away. The more we learn about the twentieth century, the harder it will be to draw easy lessons or make simple judgments about the people who lived through it—and the easier it will be to empathize with and understand them.
The whole review is here.
You beat me to it, Bob! I was going to draw attention to the piece, too. Terrifying numbers, terrifying evil.
I believe Snyder was friend and collaborator of Tony Judt. If I’m not mistaken he also wrote an appreciation of Judt for the “New York Review” after his death.
“” Because they hadn’t undergone such experiences, they couldn’t seem to fathom what they meant, and couldn’t seem to imagine how they had happened either. “Their resultant lack of imagination,” he concluded, “is appalling.”
It is a fundamental principle of developmental psychology that if a person cannot imagine another’s feelings he will not develop empathy, and if he has no empathy he will have no conscience. All will then be permitted.
We need images to empathize, and we get the civilizing kind from story telling — literature movies and TV. But, the latter two are full of violence without consequences so they serve only to make us tolerate and even want more and more violence.
The Humanities are under fire in the universities. They barely exist in the public high schools. Is it any wonder the center does not hold? Poetry is not trivial.
Here is Milosz’s Campo dei fieri, about the burning of the Warsaw ghetto, among other things.
In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori
Baskets of olives and lemons,
Cobbles spattered with wine
And the wreckage of flowers.
Vendors cover the trestles
With rose-pink fish;
Armfuls of dark grapes
Heaped on peach-down.
On this same square
They burned Giordano Bruno.
Henchmen kindled the pyre
Close-pressed by the mob.
Before the flames had died
The taverns were full again,
Baskets of olives and lemons
Again on the vendors’ shoulders.
I thought of the Campo dei Fiori
In Warsaw by the sky-carousel
One clear spring evening
To the strains of a carnival tune.
The bright melody drowned
The salvos from the ghetto wall,
And couples were flying
High in the cloudless sky.
At times wind from the burning
Would drift dark kites along
And riders on the carousel
Caught petals in midair.
That same hot wind
Blew open the skirts of the girls
And the crowds were laughing
On that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.
Someone will read as moral
That the people of Rome or Warsaw
Haggle, laugh, make love
As they pass by martyrs’ pyres.
Someone else will read
Of the passing of things human,
Of the oblivion
Born before the flames have died.
But that day I thought only
Of the loneliness of the dying,
Of how, when Giordano
Climbed to his burning
There were no words
In any human tongue
To be left for mankind,
Mankind who live on.
Already they were back at their wine
Or peddled their white starfish,
Baskets of olives and lemons
They had shouldered to the fair,
And he already distanced
As if centuries had passed
While they paused just a moment
For his flying in the fire.
Those dying here, the lonely
Forgotten by the world,
Our tongue becomes for them
The language of an ancient planet.
Until, when all is legend
And many years have passed,
On a great Campo dei Fiori
Rage will kindle at a poet’s word.
Warsaw, 1943
translated by Louis Iribarne
and David Brooks
Thank you, Ann — for both.
More years ago than I care to remember, I wrote a piece for “Commonweal” on the Resurrection. I wanted to quote a poem of Milosz that had just appeared in “The New Yorker.” Of course, the editors had to obtain permission. As I recall, he gave permission in exchange for a year’s subscription to the magazine.
Fr. Imbelli –
I wondered for a moment about copying the whole poem, but determined my decision using that old principle of epikieas (sp?). I think Milosz wouldn’t mind the advertisement and would want his moral to be seen.
It is a fundamental principle of developmental psychology that if a person cannot imagine another’s feelings he will not develop empathy, and if he has no empathy he will have no conscience. All will then be permitted.
Harry Lime, atop the giant Ferris wheel in Vienna’s Prater Park, speaks to Holly Martins:
Look down there…
Would you feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever.
If I offered you £20,000 for every dot that stopped – would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?…Free of Income Tax, old man…
Antonio –
Greene understood so much of the dark side of human nature I can see the appeal of Catholicism for him: the Catholic theology of grace. It wasn’t the War, apparently, that made him so pessimistic about human nature. Even Brighton Rock is a pre-war novel.
Thanks for posting this Father. This book is a very important contribution to the discussion concerning the middle of the twentieth century.
Snyder’s original contribution is to treat all of these episodes—the Ukrainian famine, the Holocaust, Stalin’s mass executions, the planned starvation of Soviet POWs, postwar ethnic cleansing—as different facets of the same phenomenon.
I hope that this approach is the one that finally holds sway among historians as this is one of the most important lesson we can learn from that period of history.
George,
how would you begin to characterize what you call “the same phenomenon?”
Despite high hopes for the 20th century, it quickly became one of the bloodiest in history. Good review!
http://historywasneverlikethat.blogspot.com/
HI Father:
I would characterize the phenomenon as the political, systematic, dehumanization of a collective of people for the purpose of ensuring the thriving of the stronger and more powerful collective.
The fact that so many countries and political leaders of different ideological persuasions and social and cultural histories were able to engage in this practice tells me that it is not so much an issue particular ideologies that are problematic (although these play a part) but a deeper problem of dominance and violence.
Once looked at in this fashion, it begins to beg deeper questions about the darkness of this period an the mythology of progress.
After reading Applebaum’s review (and several others of Snyder’s new book), I found myself in church this weekend thinking of Franz Jägerstätter, the ordinary Tyrolean farmer, who saw so clearly what practically no one else could see, and was executed for the clarity of vision that would not allow him to be a participant in the crimes of Germany and Austria. What an extraordinary man he must have been behind all that apparent ordinary-ness — why didn’t he just go along, looking the other way, if necessary, as almost everyone else did?
The scale of the crimes Snyder describes is enormous. And that this could happen in Christian Europe, on the borders between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, with a good dose of German Protestantism thrown in, must be all the more appalling to who call ourselves Christian. Ridding oneself of perceived enemies (Jews, Poles, Slavs, class enemies) in the interests of social engineering is nothing new — think of the massacre of the Huguenots or the crusade against the Albigensians, among countless other examples. But killing whole groups was more difficult back then. Today, modern technological progress has made mass murder much easier. Has it also made it cleaner, and thus easier to ignore? As dropping bombs from 30,000 feet is cleaner, at least for the bombers, than street fighting, pillaging, and burning a city? Why did Jägerstätter not look the other way, when everyone else around him did?
The same issue of the NYRB also carries a review by Jonathan Mirsky of a new book on the Red Guards of Beijing in the Cultural Revolution of the late 60s and early 70s. Obviously Mao is not part of Snyder’s story, nor should he be. But as we consider the place of Stalin’s and Hitler’s crimes in the bloody history of the past century, we might remember that in terms of the number of victims of social engineering, Mao exceeded both the German and the Soviet leaders.
“And that this could happen in Christian Europe, on the borders between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, with a good dose of German Protestantism thrown in, must be all the more appalling to all who call ourselves Christian.”
Nicholas,
I’ve had occasion to read John Henry Newman and Edith Stein/Teresa Benedicta of the Cross recently. I am struck that both, though separated by more than 50 years, and in different cultural settings, lamented how thin the Christian veneer of their respective societies was.
I don’t think that most people are so awful that they would approve the mass killing of people. I think the problem is that we are powerless to stop it when it happens because it happens in totalitarian countries where the government has all the physical poewr. Milosz talks about not responding when violence is obviously happening nearby. It’s not because he — and most others — approve of it or accept it. He just couldn’t stop it, though he did join in the resistance at some points, if I”m not mistaken.
Perhaps this belongs on a different thread, but I think the point being made by Graham Green’s Harry Lime is the ease by which we may become complicit in these crimes, like Adolf Eichmann.
I believe it is a mistake to view these horrors at a distance, as if they were perpetrated by aliens upon aliens.
This interview with curmudgeon and author Paul Fussell makes a similar point:
Hackney: You write in one of your essays — your essay “My War” in The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations, which is a wonderful collection — you say toward the end of that essay, “Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.”
Fussell: They have experienced secretly and privately their natural human impulse toward sadism and brutality. As I say in this new book of mine, not merely did I learn to kill with a noose of piano wire put around somebody’s neck from behind, but I learned to enjoy the prospect of killing that way. It’s those things that you learn about yourself that you never forget. You learn that you have much wider dimensions than you had imagined before you had to fight a war. That’s salutary. It’s well to know exactly who you are so you can conduct the rest of your life properly.
I don’t have anything really profound to add to this thread, but I like Ann’s idea that it’s the storytelling that helps people avoid the “Harry Lime effect,” if I can make up a term.
New Journalism and feature writing, I like to think, have contributed to that, though it’s sometimes hard to get students to stop calling feature stories “fluff.”
Certainly news photography has helped “personalize” suffering for over a century. Am thinking of the Civil War photos of Matthew Brady or photographers like Dorothea Lange who chronicled the faces of the Great Depression.
Jean –
Maybe if you started calling the feature stories “essays” the kids might take them more seriously. If they’re really essays then I suppose they need to include some opinion, but that’s fine with me considering that TV seems to have lost the distinction between hard-reporting and opinion entirely. At least Fox has. Let’s call camera stuff hard reporting and the rest essay.
Applebaum writes: “For all of these reasons, Miłosz explained, “the man of the East cannot take Americans [or other Westerners] seriously.”” I am reminded of a discussion I once had with a deacon from Eastern Europe, who complained of the American Church “activists” he had encountered, and their willful ignorance of the history of the Church in his part of the world. “The Church of Silence” it was sometimes called, when the silence, in fact, was on the part of people like those activists.
Ann, news features have an interesting history, which isn’t on topic here. But they’re not essays or opinion–rather, they spotlight an individual or small group of people and look at how events affect human lives.
I like to give students statistics on organ donations in the state of Michigan–numbers on waiting lists, numbers of recipients, average expected lifespant, anti-rejection meds. And then I bring my friend Al in for them to interview. He’s one of longest lived heart transplant patients in Michigan, and suddenly the story isn’t about a bunch of numbers and drugs.
Jean –
Thanks for the correction. I guess I thought news features were the sort of short investigations we see sometimes, or the not so short articles about current topics of interest. Unfortunately there are not too many of any of those sorts of stories anymore since the local paper has cut back on staff.
Speaking of the evils of the 20th century, Milosz somewhere quotes Martin Luther talking about the devil. Luther said that the devil is everywhere and is “king of the world”. Hmm. I wonder.
(Sorry, I cant’ find the direct quotation.)