![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI've long been interested in the ways in which people interpret their societies, especially the lacunae, the things that--to paraphrase Renan--the nation chooses to forget. How does this happen? What sorts of things get forgotten? Does everyone in a given society necessarily know of this? What, in short, are the mechanics by which people imagine their societies' past and present?
As if to satisfy this interest of mine, American Eric Johnson and German Karl-Heinz Reuband are the authors of the 2005 tome What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany.
The main thing that emerges from What We Know, with its interviews of German Jews and Christians alike, is that people operated highly selectively. Individuals had their own individual experiences: different relationships with others, different others to have relationships with, different local environments. Some German Jews experienced numerous kindnesses from their neighbours; others did not. Some German Christians were pleased with Nazi anti-Semitism; others accepted the Nazis on practical grounds, for their apparent solutions to the problems of the German economy and German power in Europe and the wider. And, most notably, some Germans did know about the Holocaust, thanks to the links of individuals with people serving on the Eastern Front or otherwise through rumours which managed to propagate through German society, but many of these people--including Jews--didn't believe that these things were happening. Fear was a major factor: some people seem authentically not to have known what was going on, because the fear of being caught transgressing through rumour-spreading by the Nazi regime was too great. Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, in other words, was a terribly fragmented society, where people in all kinds of different positions were simply unable to share experiences in common.
What We Knew is an essential contribution to the sociology and psychology of societies under totalitarian rule. Fragmentation, as Johnson and Reuband make clear, is the rule more often than not. I would have liked consideration as to how these experiences were assembled after totalitarianism's end, but then, that's a different subject indeed.
As if to satisfy this interest of mine, American Eric Johnson and German Karl-Heinz Reuband are the authors of the 2005 tome What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany.
The main thing that emerges from What We Know, with its interviews of German Jews and Christians alike, is that people operated highly selectively. Individuals had their own individual experiences: different relationships with others, different others to have relationships with, different local environments. Some German Jews experienced numerous kindnesses from their neighbours; others did not. Some German Christians were pleased with Nazi anti-Semitism; others accepted the Nazis on practical grounds, for their apparent solutions to the problems of the German economy and German power in Europe and the wider. And, most notably, some Germans did know about the Holocaust, thanks to the links of individuals with people serving on the Eastern Front or otherwise through rumours which managed to propagate through German society, but many of these people--including Jews--didn't believe that these things were happening. Fear was a major factor: some people seem authentically not to have known what was going on, because the fear of being caught transgressing through rumour-spreading by the Nazi regime was too great. Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, in other words, was a terribly fragmented society, where people in all kinds of different positions were simply unable to share experiences in common.
What We Knew is an essential contribution to the sociology and psychology of societies under totalitarian rule. Fragmentation, as Johnson and Reuband make clear, is the rule more often than not. I would have liked consideration as to how these experiences were assembled after totalitarianism's end, but then, that's a different subject indeed.
