Postcards From A Sad Edge

If the Teabaggers think they have it tough, being called names, dissed, and otherwise, not taken seriously, it's a walk-in-the-park compared to others.

At least they are not being murdered for their opposition, for slandering the President, the government



Roger Cohen, in today's NYT Op-Ed page, has a great read - "The Banality of Good";

What was it like? I would ask myself, the years I lived in Berlin. What was it like in the leafy Grunewald neighborhood to watch your Jewish neighbors — lawyers, businessmen, dentists — trooping head bowed to the nearby train station for transport eastward to extinction?

With what measure of fear, denial, calculation, conscience and contempt did neighbors who had proved their Aryan stock to Hitler’s butchers make their accommodations with this Jewish exodus? How good did the schnapps taste and how effectively did it wash down the shame?

How's them apples for an opener?

Cohen quickly elucidates;

Now I know. Thanks to Hans Fallada’s extraordinary “Every Man Dies Alone,” just published in the United States more than 60 years after it first appeared in Germany, I know. What Irène Némirovsky’s “Suite Française” did for wartime France after six decades in obscurity, Fallada does for wartime Berlin. Like all great art, it transports, in this instance to a world where, “The Third Reich kept springing surprises on its antagonists: It was vile beyond all vileness.”

Fallada, born Rudolf Ditzen, wrote his novel in less than a month right after the war and just before his death in 1947 at the age of 53. The Nazi hell he evokes is not so much recalled as rendered, whole and alive. The prose is sinuous and gritty, like the city he describes. Dialogue often veers toward sadistic folly with a barbaric logic that takes the breath away.

"Vile beyond all vileness ..."

I don't know if you can even begin comprehending, processing such a magnitude of evil.

The book is based on the true story of Otto and Elise Hampel, whose postcard campaign — “Hitler’s war is the worker’s death!” — frustrated the Gestapo until the couple’s capture in October 1942 and subsequent beheading. Fallada, a sometime morphine addict who lived in and out of asylums, got hold of the Hampel police files through a friend in late 1945, wrote a journalistic account that year, and then, in a burst of creativity, the novel.

[snip]

The book pulses with the street life of a terrorized city, full of sleaze, suspicion, drunkenness, desperation and murder. It proclaims the bestial sadism of which man is capable and the enormous moral stature of decency. It has something of the horror of Conrad, the madness of Dostoyevsky and the chilling menace of Capote’s “In Cold Blood.”

Yikes!

From Elizabeth Bachner;

If Primo Levi told me to crawl underneath the Brooklyn bridge, naked, and read the graffiti there -- if he were here to suggest that -- I’d be swinging over the side of that bridge right now, even though it’s 30 degrees and the middle of rush hour.

[snip]

So when I heard that Primo Levi had declared Hans Fallada’s long-obscure Every Man Dies Alone to be “the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis,” I tucked into its 500 pages with a feeling of razor-sharp glee mixed with dread, worried and hopeful that it would make me unable to live in the same way anymore.

[snip]

Himmler planned on the Holocaust being an “unwritten page of glory.” Every unearthed manuscript or reprinted book like Every Man Dies Alone defeats that plan.

Go check out Cohn's entire article, it's a good one.


Bonus Links

Hans Fallada, From Wikipedia

Video of Anne Frank Surfaces on YouTube

Well, This Angel Earned Her Wings

Yesterday was the 65th Anniversary of D-Day, the epic battle in World War II.



President Obama, and the other Allied leaders paid tribute (See "Obama Hails D-Day Heroes at Normandy") and both the Denver Post, and Guardian UK, have great photo galleries posted.

However this is a post I started last week, getting set aside with the cumbersome week we had, however, as it appeared for Memorial Day, it isn't dated, thanks to the June 6th anniversary date.



While she had a sturdy career, most readers (I presume) know Donna Reed, from, ostensibly, three specific roles;

Mary Hatch, in the Frank Capra classic, "It's A Wonderful Life"

Alma 'Lorene' Burke, the dance club girl (an Oscar-winning role) in another WWII classic, "From Here To Eternity"

And, the all-American mother, Donna Stone, from televisions' "The Donna Reed Show"

But, as it turns out, she was also one of the most requested (or appreciated) "pin-up girls" of World War II

This, from a fascinating article that appeared in The New York Times, last week.

Dear Donna: A Pinup So Swell She Kept G.I. Mail

The United States military encouraged the pinup phenomenon as a way to maintain the morale of soldiers far from home. Most of the leading pinups were established stars known for their sex appeal, in particular Betty Grable, blond hair piled high, poured into a swimsuit and photographed from behind, her face turned toward the camera with a smile. There were others: images of Rita Hayworth, Ann Sheridan, Hedy Lamarr and Dorothy Lamour also adorned lockers, barracks walls and the noses of military aircraft.

But “Donna Reed probably came closer than any other actress to being the archetypal sweetheart, wife and mother,” said Jay Fultz, author of the 1998 biography “In Search of Donna Reed.” Since she was also slightly younger, newly graduated from ingénue roles and therefore closer in age to the average fighting man, they often wrote to her as if to a sister or the girl next door, confiding moments of homesickness, loneliness, privation and anxiety.

Reed's daughter, Mary Owen, after getting picked off in the Bear Stearns meltdown, started going through her mothers' possessions, and stumbled upon the letters, from the GI's, which Reed, astoundingly, kept (341 of them).

The soldiers wrote (some gushed) to Reed;

“Donna Reed probably came closer than any other actress to being the archetypal sweetheart, wife and mother,” said Jay Fultz, author of the 1998 biography “In Search of Donna Reed.” Since she was also slightly younger, newly graduated from ingénue roles and therefore closer in age to the average fighting man, they often wrote to her as if to a sister or the girl next door, confiding moments of homesickness, loneliness, privation and anxiety.

And, for all of her apple-pie image;

Later in life, however, Ms. Reed became an ardent antiwar campaigner, serving during the Vietnam era as co-chairwoman of a 285,000-member group called Another Mother for Peace and working for Senator Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 presidential race. In his biography, Mr. Fultz quotes her as saying that “she looked forward to a time when ‘19-year-old boys will no longer be taken away to fight in old men’s battles.’ ”

Check out Dear Donna: A Pinup So Swell She Kept G.I. Mail, for it speaks to an era that yesterday was all about.

Top Ten Cloves: Possible Problems Julia Child Had As An OSS Spy

News Item: Julia Child, spy? Records reveal Julia Child was a World War II-era spy

10. Called in often, asking if she could work from her kitchen

9. Whenever she was told of a need, Julia thought they meant "knead" and would go off on a tangent, for hours, about Tuscan breads

8. Kept annoying, making suggestions to, management, for a television show, introducing French spies to American audiences

7. Sending secret messages on cheese cloth made it difficult for her colleagues to read

6. Her super-secret code, if she was in trouble, was to serve fish for lunch, without the heads - which she loathed to do

5. Though she hid them well in her trench coat, Meat Tenderizer and Oven Thermometer were not approved OSS equipment

4. Didn't do well at stakeouts - noise and odor from cooking gave away her position

3. When running after suspects, wind would blow apron up over her face

2. Failed self-defense training - kept hitting instructor, simulating attack on her, over head with frying pan

1. When interrogating a suspect, spent inordinate amount of time grilling them for recipes


Bonus Bon Appetite Links

Celebrity spies revealed - new details of Julia Child's pre-chef career released

John Bennett: Declassified: Julie Child's OSS Cook Book

Sara Dickerman: How To Read Mastering the Art of French Cooking - Six recipes Julia Child would want you to make

Cookin' With Julia & Jacques

Egypt Protests New U.S. Use of Pyramids; Says Mocking Historic Culture and Islam; Call for American Food Boycott

Clinton Joins Food Pyramid Protest; Says Won't Deter Child Obesity; Poll Shows Public Prefers The Sphinx

Male Chefs To Join Crawford Protest; Will Demand Answers Why Female Named To Exec White House Position

Retro Garlic ... Food Fight!

Google Fires Executive Chef; Caught Searching Recipes On Yahoo, MSN

Good Post Alert: Shaun Mullen and The Legacy of Paul Tibbets,The Enola Gay & Separating the Warrior From the War

It was an obituary noted in the news last week, no big fanfare or outcry.

It was much more a typical, perfunctory, historical notation of a significant figure of another era who has passed away.

No editorials, or flaming rhetoric ... No tying him into our ongoing invasion and occupation of Iraq.

I learned of Paul Tibbits, and the Enola Gay, oh, back in the 5th or 6th grade and it was one of those things that stuck with me.

Much like Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa guide who peaked Mount Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary.

Just one of those esoteric, arcane facts absorbed as a youngster that managed to find safe haven in the depths of my memory (and to be pulled out to win bar bets, or gloat when coveting the Trivial Pursuit pie, the only one to know the answer)

But there was always a certain fascination with Tibbits.

He was a mystery man and the Enola Gay loomed larger than the Spruce Goose.

What was he like? How could he do it? The Enola Gay, where did that name come from? What was it like to release the bomb? What was it like to see the destruction it caused?

As I got older, every so often (typically around August 6th), I would dredge up those thoughts about Tibbits, more facts and info acquired about him, but the fascination and mystery, the youthful awe, remaining intact.

Shaun Mullen, over on his blog, Kiko's House (as well as cross-posted on The Moderate Voice, who we are encouraging you to vote for in the Weblog Awards), has a great account of Paul Tibbits today;

The Legacy of Paul Tibbets,The Enola Gay & Separating the Warrior From the War

Check it out, it's a good read.