After all these years of teaching I still can't always predict what will work with students. After being impressed with the students' insights yesterday on The Boy in Striped Pajamas, I was looking forward to more insights today. The assignment was an essay by Laurence Rees, "The Nazis" A Warning from History." Rees is also the director of one of the documentaries we've watched this term, Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State. If you're interested in understanding Rees and the team that put that documentary together, there's an excellent web site-- PBS, where you can see some of the passion that intrigued me in his essay.
One of his most interesting observations was what he himself describes as a "rather prosaic observation that the vast majority of people just want to get on with their lives and make the most of their situation." He goes on to note that Nazi Germany targeted certain groups, including "work-shy people, homosexuals, those on the political left, and Jews" and that people who didn't belong to those risk groups were able to ignore what was going on.
Pretty much the same thing that comes across in The Sorrow and the Pity and in Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise, a novel that I read last weekend. Nemirovsky, a Russian Jew whose family fled when the Bolsheviks took over, died at Auschwitz. (Although I had read of Suite Francaise what motivated me to read it was seeing it at the home of a member of my bell choir. She told me that her book club was reading it.) Both works demonstrate that the French bourgeoise tended to collaborate with the occupying forces because they had too much to lose.
It's an obvious point but probably a truthful one, and I wonder whether my students' lack of enthusiasm stems from their own political apathy. I've been reading their blogs today and am alternately impressed by their insights and occasionally by their blindspots. For example, one student commented on the beggars and the Ferrari dealerships in Rome, and I wondered whether he had ever been in Atlanta. Obviously he has been since Tech is downtown! He just hasn't been encouraged to look around much.
Ciao,
Carol
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The French always catch hell for being collaborators--and some of that is true, I think. But your point about having too much to lose is a good one, as is your other point about (student) apathy.
ReplyDeleteFrankly, we see that apathy every day in this country towards a lot of things we as citizens ought to be protesting/ mobilizing for (human rights, civil rights, Equal Rights, fair wages, true environmental change, corporate responsibility, etc., etc., etc.).
And if you will indulge me while I get on my soapbox, I have to say, it's pretty hard for most people to get out and be socially aware/ politically active (in other words, not to collaborate with the oppression of the Status Quo)in a Capitalist system.
The working class can't get time off or day care or transportation to support activism, and the middle class are so strung out on debt that they don't want to risk losing their job for supporting causes that are antithetical to their employers' interests. (And probably 98% of the rich, who actually thrive in a Capitalist system, don't care about anyone at all.)
I'd advocate overthrowing our Capitalist Regime because it's poisonous to us as a society, but I believe I signed a paper with my employer that said I would not do anything to foment any kind of revolution...