examen

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught from year to year,
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear—
You’ve got to be carefully taught!

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a different shade—
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate—
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
You’ve got to be carefully taught!

Richard Rodgers, "South Pacific"

My 2023 Lenten discipline is reading books in an area of lifelong fascination to me, World War Two, especially the German experience and perspective. Something that I wonder about, uneasy that it may be racist, is that I am far less to not-at-all concerned about the Japanese experience; though my German focus has heightened in the years since my sister Gina uncovered and revealed to us that our heritage is not English as we were always taught growing up, but German from Andreas Wäller and his family, who emigrated to America in 1752.

Andreas, Anna Catherina and children were from Hamm, which, in the 20th century an important railway junction and manufacturer of cables and wires, was heavily bombed during the War. https://www.b24.net/MM100244.htm

My interest was reignited earlier this month by the "This Day In History" essay on the February 13, 1945 saturation bombing and firestorm destruction of Dresden, and the retrospective Monday morning quarterback furor that developed about that; and to a lesser extent about the similar horrific devastation of Hamburg the end of July 1943.

Intrigued again after years, I read some online, then ordered what turns out to have been eight books on the subject, including two that are autobiographical memoirs of Germans who were there, residents of Hamburg, one an eight year old boy at the Time, one a highly gifted forty-two year old author who wrote his book three months after the Hamburg bombing while it was still a horror in his mind; and a book that's interviews of a hundred-fifty-some Germans of all sorts and viewpoints including ordinary citizens, Jews, soldiers, men, women, and some who were children at the Time.

Day before yesterday I finished Dieter Rudolph's book "Farewell to Hamburg" and continued reading individual interviews in "Voices from the Third Reich" and also read halfway through "Inferno - The Fiery Destruction of Hamburg 1943" before nine o'clock bedtime. I finished "Inferno" yesterday just as the eighth book arrived with a FedEx knock at the door:

Maybe the image at the bottom of the dust jacket is Nossack's burned out and melted typewriter.

German translated into English as "The End", Nossack's title is "Der Untergang" which my limited German might see literally as "the under-going" and a German film about Hitler's last days brings into English subtitles as "Downfall". The sense of the word is total collapse. What I am learning, finding out, is ineffable, indescribably, unthinkably horrific beyond words. Eight thick books lined up, all started so as to get a feel of each one, two finished, one reading several interview essays each day, now well into Nossack, which I'll finish before bedtime this evening.

What have I given up for Lent, then? Time, that otherwise would have been spent, while this is for me an investment of Time; always mindful that "life is short, and we haven't much Time," which when you get to 87 nearing 88 you will be as increasingly aware of as I am here in 2023.

My ears are good if I've stuffed in the earphones and turned them on, and my eyes are surprisingly good for reading at this age, enhanced by two eyeglass prescriptions given to me by the capable folks at Eye Center. One prescription for reading glasses and another prescription for eyeglasses for pulpit/altar/computer. Don't need eyeglasses for driving or for usual daily life, so I wear them, sometimes both pairs, hanging down in front via a string around my neck. Be Prepared.

Today scanned email with early mug of hot and black. My Xmas mug in Blue Willow spoof holds my entire pot, which is three teacups of coffee. Along with that, four saltines with Duke's mayo and bits of chicken, white meat, and resumed reading "The End" until Linda came out for coffee with me.

Odd to you perhaps, but not to me, and although it was the 13 February reminder of the Dresden bombing that reignited my fascination and determination to read more, the books are proving suitable for Lent in all sorts of ways, which I review each morning as my daily Examen.

This blogpost can, and, like most sermons, probably should end here, but goes on. No matter, it's not for you anyway, it's what at this stage of life seems to be serving as my diary or journal. Read on, or stop, as you wish; I'm typing on.

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Lent for me needs to be a season in which each day begins with a personal examen that is not what one of my seminary professors would call "a taxonomy" of sins for the confessional - - I disobeyed my mother, I thought bad thoughts, I ate meat yesterday, I told a lie, I said bad words, I forgot to say the Shema this morning - - but a reflection on what about myself my Lenten reading is surfacing.

Just so, one of the interviews recorded in "Voices" is by Hanns Peter Herz, who describes himself as half-Jewish. His recollections include the day at school when his physical education teacher singled him out in swimming class, "Herz, step forward and stay there. We won't go into the pool with a half-Jew."

I remember being strongly affected by a scene in a film about the Nuremberg trials in which Hermann Goring severely lectures an American acquaintance about the outrageous hypocrisy of Americans judging Germans for their treatment of Jews in light of American treatment of Blacks. I grew up in an era when it would have been unthinkable for a Black person to be at the Beach, they wouldn't have dared, and Whites wouldn't have tolerated. Nor, surfacing pointedly from Herz's memory above, would Blacks have been tolerated in a swimming pool. Absolutely unthinkable. I guess you had to be there. Evil and inhuman, it was as right to White Southerners as Nazi doctrine was to Nazis.

As I condemn Germans in the books I'm reading, incidents like the experiences of Hanns Peter Herz are rattling my own memories, my confidence, my certainties, my very Being.

It seems to be an evil of human nature that everyone needs somebody to look down on and despise as inferior. The lower we get in the "class" order, the more vehement we are about it. White trash flying the CSA battle flag from the beds of their pickups. Me, a Southerner, a student at Cove Elementary School in the 1940s - - hating Germans as the Third Reich spread throughout Europe murdering Jews and Eastern European non-aryans - - being appalled when another student asked me, 'Are you for states rights or civil rights?" and I asked, "What's that?" and his answer, "Civil rights means Blacks (he used the N word) would go to school with us." In the South at the Time, it was as unthinkable as was, for Herz's swim teacher, the idea of going into a swimming pool with a Jew. Been there done that. In my Lenten examen I have a lot to think about. Instead of judging others, including my German cousins, an awful lot of self-examination and reflection about who I have been and am in my own Time.