What an interesting discussion this has been - I mean going right back to
Douglas's poem --
I wanted to say many things but in haste this:
1. Just in case people don't realize, while Pound and Haw-Haw were
composing and speaking their own Fascist propaganda, Wodehouse wrote a
humorous account of his capture and internment intended to reassure and
entertain his fans. It's one of the best things he wrote. But when the
nice American radio-operator passed him the mike and he started to deliver
his unassuming tale of courage under duress he entered a minefield, not as
a Nazi propagandist but as a naive witness to the extent that British
propaganda was currently demonizing Germans. The Nazis of course were well
aware of his potential.
2. Of "good Germans", many of the stayers (e.g. R Strauss) were old. I
think in our indignation it's hard to grasp the sense of detachment that
is part of being old, the sense of "we've made our mistakes forty years
ago, now you must make yours". Goldhagen is surely profoundly right in
emphasizing the absolute ordinariness that characterizes Germans at all
levels of involvement with the Final Solution. The danger is we misread
this as a kind of peculiarly seedy ultra-ordinariness that thank God we
don't share. But this reading subtly slips away from the power of
Goldhagen's thesis, namely that it was, on the contrary, pretty much the
same kind of ordinariness as what we see around us in daily life and what
we largely share.
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