Nazism

May 8 2011

In the Mail: Lumen

Lumen (Captain Martin Bora) by Ben Pastor

Publishers Weekly

Mixing elements of a psychological thriller and an existential meditation, Pastor’s debut follows a German army captain and a Chicago priest as they investigate the death of a nun in Nazi-occupied Poland. Mother Kazimierza’s alleged power to see the future has brought her a devoted following; her motto, “Lumen Christi Adiuva Nos” (“light of Christ, succor us”), gives the novel its title. In October 1939, Captain Martin Bora discovers the abbess shot dead in her convent garden. Father Malecki has come to Cracow at the pope’s bidding, to investigate Mother Kazimierza’s powers. Now the Vatican orders him to stay and assist in the inquiry into her killing. Meanwhile, the Germans are consolidating their hold on their Polish territory, dispossessing farmers, beating civilians and forcing Jews into labor gangs. Though stunned by the violence of the occupation and by the ideology of his colleagues, Bora never deviates from his Prussian duty. After three months, two suicides, much detective work and some speculation about Catholicism and faith, choice and chance, good and evil, Bora and Malecki discover the true story of the abbess’s death, which implicates Bora’s fellow army officers. Pastor’s examination of Bora and his colleagues illuminates the many contradictions of life in the service of a criminal state.
The narrative’s explications of Catholic belief and theology defy readers to reconcile faith, or inner light (lumen) of any kind, with the realities of the Nazi regime. Pastor’s plot is well crafted, her prose sharp, but her novel is meant to be more than light entertainment. She raises again the questions recently posed by Bernhard Schlink‘s The Reader: how can art explore the human side of a victimizer without seeming to forgive the unforgivable? Pastor’s disturbing mix of detection and reflection is a provocative though not definitive answer.

By Kevin Holtsberry • In The Mail • 0 • Tags: , , , ,

Apr 12 2011

Hitler’s Master of the Dark Arts by Bill Yenne

When I think of pure Evil in this world, one of the groups of people that comes to mind is the Nazis.  This group of men and women took control of Germany and transformed the country.  The hate they preached was foul and disgusting.  Among the many who stood beside Hitler was his primary henchman – Heinrich Himmler – head of the SS.  In Hitler’s Master of the Dark Arts: Himmler’s Black Knights and the Occult Origins of the SS Bill Yenne chronicles Himmler’s rise to power and how Himmler led the Nazis into the Dark Arts.

Through Himmler’s rise to power, Yenne explores the bizarre world of the Nazis’ connection with the occult.  Since its creation, the Nazi Party was heavily influenced by the occult.  The Party leadership embraced the idea that the Aryan Race was far superior to the other races and they spent vast sums of money exploring the world and science to prove their warped view.  This exploration was influenced by an ancient pagan Norse religion combined with nineteenth-century spiritualism.  At the head of this exploration was Hitler’s “witch doctor,” Himmler and his SS.

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By Jeff Grim • Featured, Reviews • 0 • Tags: , , , ,

Dec 8 2009

Kindle and concentration camps

NEW YORK - FEBRUARY 09: Amazon.com founder an...
Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Hearing that the Amazon Kindle had been compared to an eight-track player Alan Kaufman decided he needed a real attention grabber analogy if he was to gather the eyeballs necessary to get Huntington Post readers to click away from pictures of the latest porn actress claiming to be Tiger Wood’s mistress.

Not content for hyperbole he went straight for ridiculous and offensive. That’s right, Kaufman decided to use the Holocaust to make his point:

When I hear the term Kindle I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit.

I believe my reaction is best expressed in the language of teenager texters everywhere: WTF?

Is Kaufman really insinuating that e-readers are akin to racial genocide? Even for the Huntington Post this is absurd (but its lack of logic is par for the course I am afraid).

Kaufman tendentiously connects Nazi policies with new technology and the process of putting books into digital form and decides that a literary holocaust is upon us.

The hi-tech campaign to relocate books to Google and replace books with Kindles is, in its essence, a deportation of the literary culture to a kind of easily monitored concentration camp of ideas, where every examination of a text leaves behind a trail, a record, so that curiosity is also tinged with a sense of disquieting fear that some day someone in authority will know that one had read a particular book or essay. This death of intellectual privacy was also a dream of the Nazis. And when I hear the term Kindle, I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit.

But his argument is made up of nothing more than his own lack of shame in using the Holocaust to comment on the Kindle and some stream of consciousness paragraphs about the history of the Holocaust, Nazi attitudes about technology and books and a tacked on conclusion that links this all to the Kindle.

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By Kevin Holtsberry • Views • 0 • Tags: , , , , ,