What Must Be Said

     When my father was in his forties, he weighed close to 300 pounds. The extra weight caused not unexpected health issues, so he went to our family physician.
     That man—weighing a good 400 pounds, if not 450—proceeded to lecture my father on diet and exercise. He wouldn’t consider running tests to diagnose my dad’s ailments. Essentially he told my father to go on a diet and to come back when he had lost weight.
     My dad knew that what that doctor said was true (although the doc really should have done a physical!). But it galled him that the man behind the stethoscope could be so judgmental, while he himself was more morbidly obese than my father.

"I am the son of Christoph Probst..."

The Legacy of the White Rose

     In 1976 when my Aunt Angelika died, I read my father’s letters for the first time. They had been in the estate of his sister. My father’s letters to my mother had burned in Lermoos, and the letters with political content had been destroyed out of fear of imprisonment under kinship laws in 1943.
     For the first time, my father became close to me. I appreciated him in his being, saw him live his short life. And now I recognized how many portrayals of the White Rose did him an injustice, yes, how

Calling all students of Omer Bartov

     Last week, the Shoah Foundation sponsored an "international academic forum" on the use of its visual history archive. As part of that conference, Dr. Omer Bartov (Brown University) lectured on reconstructing the Holocaust from below.
     Since this topic shares the same foundation as our own work, I took good notes!
     Bartov notes that generally, those who lived in Europe between 1933 and 1945 tend to be classified as victims, perpetrators, or bystanders. Black and white. Defined as one of the three, period.
     He argues that "testimonies" ~ such as those found in the Shoah Foundation's video archives ~ must be integrated into Holocaust history with validity equalling that of more traditional, "historical"

The new Sophie Scholl biography

     I have only seen "hype" surrounding the new Sophie bio. And remain terribly unimpressed.
     Above all else, I am truly tired of the money-making machine that is "Scholl" in Germany. From early postwar days, the Scholls learned how to turn their children, siblings, and cousins into Big Dollars, milking the McCloy/Marshall Fund for millions of dollars. Hiding behind Hans and Sophie Scholl to mask their own Nazi pasts.
     I will NOT be impressed with any Scholl biography - whether written by German, American, or Israeli, unless and until someone actually demands ~ and I mean DEMANDS ~ total, unfettered, complete access to the thousands of Scholl documents that remain censored and off limits at IfZ headquarters in Munich.
     And unless and until that same courageous biographer goes one step further and searches for archives that reveal the financial transactions involved when Scholls moved to the great house on Muensterplatz, where a Jewish family had lived prior to Kristallnacht.

Counterfactual history

     For the second time, I'm quoting Jon Meacham here. Funny in some ways, because often my world view diverges comfortably from his. Yet I find his editorials thought-provoking.
     His November 16 column - entitled Rethinking the Lessons of Vietnam - addresses the tendency of historians and journalists alike to repackage history into a form and format that best suits their conclusions.
     In other words, instead of digging for truth, a truth that is objective and as close to stark reality as possible, we who write tend to narrate the historical record subjectively, as seen through our own particular lenses. I know that I do so, although I try to clearly label opinions as such, and subjective discourse similarly as separate from cold, hard facts.
     Meacham's opening quote, attributed to Napoleon, asks, "What is history but a fable agreed-upon?"