An essay by Ethan A. Bayer
Three of the most poignant accounts of Hitler's Germany that we have covered each originate in a unique perspective and are delivered in a style and format corresponding to that perspective. Though each narrator tells a distinct story, Cordelia Evardson, Thomas Mann, and Walter Benjamin reconstruct facets of the same horrific tragedy.
In Edvardson's Burned Child Seeks the Fire, we get a rare look into the Holocaust from a child's eyes. For Cordelia, suffering in the concentration camps doesn't mar her soul-it is her soul. During her time in the squirrel nest, she never completely accepts who she is, and so makes multiple attempts to change her person. Only in the camps is reality so unrelenting that it swallows her whole and forces her to acknowledge herself. Her experiences, presented sometimes with gruesome listlessness, carve themselves into her tiny, vulnerable self. As an adult, she has to tell this tale in a detached voice, for to relive this piece of her childhood in all its gore would destroy her emotionally.
Cordelia loses any sense of social structure or normalcy that she once understood, because her surroundings become her world and give her a new code of conduct. The Holocaust was perhaps the most tragic for children, because we witness pure innocence being tainted beyond repair. Even after she gains freedom, she reveals her fear of leaving her past behind, for her past comprises who she is. Over and over, Cordelia fights the urge to below, "Here I am!" For the first time in her life, her "self" has substance and volume; although she is filled with the emotional rot and sickness of the camps, she rejoices in it, because at least she exists.
Thomas Mann chronicles his time in prewar Germany with a vivid analogy in Mario and the
Magician. Unlike the other authors here, he says nothing about concentration camps or the Nazi regime explicitly. Rather, in order to comprehend the disastrous decades in his country's history he focuses on the psychological roots of the situation. Mann looks into the mind of a demagogue, and finds the motivations for unspeakable acts, and how power corrupts. He achieves this by showing a rather ugly, disabled man assuming the character of a magician to compensate for his shortcomings. The magician is fed by the unwavering attention of his audience, but to quench this hunger he must continually increase the awe-factor of his experiments.
By exploring the mind of a dictator, Mann finds understanding for the questions that pervade his mind. He changes the focus that is usually taken during tragedy-blaming the perpetrator-and twists it so as to appreciate the underlying motivations and roots of the disaster. Once he has these missing pieces of the puzzle he can examine the picture as a whole and come to more complete conclusions.
In Berlin Childhood around 1900, Walter Benjamin attempts to make sense of his own German experience by taking select experiences and delving into every one of their facets. By looking at such externally simple events, like sitting for a portrait, he reveals the bases for his happiness as a child. As a kid, he was encompassed by imagination, and that imagination drove much of his livelihood. It was in the slide shows he watched and the errands he ran with his mother. However, this mystical fascination was not inherent in these objects, but rather resulted when he was able to transcend the two-dimensional reality he was faced with.
Though what Benjamin is really criticizing in his narrative is the murder of imagination by an industrial and progressive mindset, he is indirectly lamenting the coldness and blatant absoluteness imposed by the conditions of the Holocaust. The concentration camps as well as the orders for exile marred the fantasies that surrounded the minds of children and vehemently ripped off their rose-colored glasses. He finds understanding by recalling his own childhood bliss, but also by realizing where it went askew and the forces that drove it to this end.
These three authors each take a different route to explain their journeys, and each finds different levels of closure. The one certain thing is that none are done questioning.