stuff

Long time no blog, etc, etc.

I'm busy, though my version of busyness is fairly mild. I like to have time to do nothing - thinking time. More than like to have it, I need it. I had a small emotional wobble earlier this week, when all around me were tensions and people in conflict. I was more of an onlooker to these tensions than anything (though I felt a bit guilty for not committing to a position in one conflict, in a school organisation). Ever since my Big Drop-Out from a Big Job in the mid-90s, I've avoided public conflict like the plague, by which I mean conflict other than the private, domestic or friendship type (not that I enjoy that kind of conflict or seek it out, but you get my gist...)

Although I have zero belief in astrology, I've always quite liked the image of my star sign as a hermit crab. I'm quite a gregarious person, in some ways, but I have that inner shell that I mentally retreat into for a large proportion of the day and if I can't spend time in there, I begin to feel vaporous, almost invisible... (A psychoanalyst might look at it the other way round, as me having finally built up enough good internal substance (post Drop-Out) to be able to come out of my shell for longer and longer times.)

Anyhow ... I've been thinking about conflict, and about femininity, and conflict-and-femininity. And about the shape of lives, including, of course, my own. I've been reading a lot and living in all the books in quite an intense way. I'm not sure what that's about.

I read Wild Mary, a biography of Mary Wesley. I've never read any of her books but years ago did watch with fascination the tv serialisation of The Chamomile Lawn. And Mary Wesley led a fascinating and long (90 years) life. From this book I had no way of knowing whether I would have liked or loathed her or what kind of woman she really was, other than an attractive one. Of course she became famous as a woman who had a lot of sex during the war and that is intriguing. My own mother was in her late teens/early 20s during the war in Sydney and certainly didn't step outside the conventions. I know an English woman who's now in her late 80s who told me years ago that she also had some casual sex during the war, as everyone felt they could die tomorrow so the usual moral restrictions shouldn't apply. A close friend of mine's mother, a Catholic English woman, also was sexually active, resulting in a baby who she gave up for adoption, a secret she kept from her subsequent family until the 1990s.

Mary Wesley seems to have grown powerful through sex, which I think was very unusual for women of that generation.

Then I read The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, which is a few years old now and everybody else probably had this discussion ages ago. What discussion? - I'm not exactly sure what its effect on me was, other than that it had a strong effect. Bones is more about murder and death than about sexual violence. Although I think the latter part of the book became far too syrupy, the first half was compelling. For all I know, the book has been analysed (I could say 'to death') and Sebold has rejected this analysis, but it struck me that her story acts as a perfect emotional resolution of the violence she's experienced in her own life. I felt as if I was reading something very psychologically healthy and strong in response to something violently destructive - and Sebold wins.

Now I'm doing some study on the German resistance to nazism (what there was of it) and on the one hand it makes me think that the typical contemporary individualised response of 'what would I do in that sort of situation?' is almost irrelevant as the events of the 1930s in Germany were so specific to the time and place and culture and immediately preceding decade that they can't be abstracted into some kind of universal moral question or dilemma. On the other hand, of course they can.

Reading Martin Gilbert's Kristallnacht, with its many first hand accounts (often from Jewish children/teenagers who later escaped from Germany), I was struck by how many times someone standing up to a Nazi led to an amelioration of the immediate situation eg the SS might have stormed into a Jewish family's apartment and be wanting to take away all the men of the family. A mother insisting that her six foot 13 year old son was only a child resulted in the Nazis leaving him behind. I'm sure that, especially later during the war, there were many instances where to resist led to immediate retaliation/execution, but I can't help thinking that in those many small scenes, standing up to a bully can result in them backing down. I say that as someone who, per my earlier comments, isn't very good with public conflict, so I couldn't be confident that faced with such a situation, I'd be strong.

Slight tangent: in an article in the Good Weekend last weekend, an Australian woman who is only two years older than me said she hadn't heard about the Holocaust until she was 28. She went to a Catholic school. I find it almost inconceivable that anyone of my generation can have got to that age without knowing about something so momentous. Is she just a huge twit or was there a huge failure of the education system or public discourse in this country? (Possibly she's just a twit, as she was also a supporter of Pauline Hanson.)

The resistance in Germany during the war is something I knew hardly anything about until I began my research. I'm currently reading Alternatives to Hitler. I find that even though I've seen a zillion war films, watched multiple documentaries about the Holocaust, read many books either directly or tangentially about the war, I still find it very hard to imagine what life in that totalitarian world was like. It seems incredible that there was a communist-Jewish underground in Germany into the 1940s - but there was. It seems incredible that some people oppose and plot against Hitler and survive and become ministers in the post-war government, while others, many others, are executed on a whim. Life and death were so systematised and yet so random. (And isn't it the same now, just that it's a vastly different system we live within...)

Comments

[Jacinta]

How interesting. I have read all of WG Sebald's work (except the poetry) and find his exploration of the post-Nazi German mindset perplexing.
I wonder how much of the groupthink came from an (almost) homogeneous society (or is that a myth). Its difficult to imagine living somewhere where everyone is so alike. The power of Primo Levi derailed me for some years on the holocaust.
I have bought a few books for my children which they have enjoyed about the holocaust, 'Once' by Morris Gleitzman and 'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas' by John Boyne. My son, about 10 at the time loved 'Once' and didnt seem frightened. Just asked lots of questions.