Indeed, NaziNuts, Eunice makes a lot of sense.
I, too, feel love for the folks here. This is a place where I feel safe and accepted. A place that just a few short months ago felt, in many ways, foreign to me.
I'll admit it, sometimes I've been fascinated by the Nazis too. I suspect it has something to do with how the transcendent and unbelievable cruelty can exist in the same society, even the same individuals.
I'm really getting off topic here because music, especially, but also literature and the visuals arts are cores parts of who I am. Much of what I'm doning in the Archive is revealing exactly who I am.
Maybe I can somehow tie these things into a new name! Since I will view any new name as an important statement of who I am, the following discussion may not be so off-topic after all.
I'm not a historian, let alone a musical historian, so I may not get all this exactly right, but I'm trying
I'm also not taking the time to check the details. The Germans at the time of WWII were the most educated people on Earth. They had a long history of achieving the sublimest heights in the arts, expecially music and literature/poetry.
Over a century before the WWII, there was the other-worldly Beethoven, who initially dedicated his third symphony, the 'Eroica' (that's for 'heroic, I believe, not erotic!), to Napoleon but later withdrew that as he came to realize that man's true nature. Beethoven used part of Friedrich Schiller's 'Ode tp Joy' as the basis of the last movement of his monumental Ninth Symphony, which speaks directly to the brotherhood of all. Beethoven refused to bow to royalty, unlike his friend the poet Goethe, saying they were no better than he.
Before Beethoven there was JSBach, who many in a position to know consider the greatest composer of all time. He wrote not only sublime sacred music but secular music of unsurpassed originality and energy.
Brahms, toward the end of his life in the late 1800's was writing of his concern over the rising anti-Semitism he was observing in his homeland.
His contemporary (although the two were diametrically opposed in compositional style and philosophy), the music-dramatist and German nationalist Richard Wagner, was blatantly anti-semitic. A section of one of my favorite Wagner operas, "Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg", was practically used as a Nazi national anthem.
So, long before the time of WWII, we've got these very well-educated, cultured Germans becoming increasingly anti-semitic and intolerant of those not viewed as fitting the Aryan ideal. If even the best educated people up to that time can tolerate and, in some cases, participate in such unimaginable cruelties of the Holocaust, I sometimes wonder what hope is there for real, lasting justice in the world.
I have a very recent European heritage. My father was from Germany. At times I've felt absolutely appalled that I've got this German heritage. A Jewish friend has told me I shouldn't feel this way because I was in no way involved. The things is, though, I don't know that any one of us can truly say we would have behaved much differently if we had lived in Germany at that time.
There are some outstanding examples of individuals standing by their principles during the war even if it meant prison. Dietrich Bonhoeffer comes to mind. A Lutheran clergyman, theologian and member of the resistance movement, he was killed by the Nazis as the Allies were in the process of liberated the country.
Of course, there were individuals who stood up to their countrymen in less dramatic, but still effective, ways. There were certainly many individuals whose names we will never know who never abandoned their principles and humanity for the sake of their own safety.
When I've watched TV specials on the horrors of the holocaust, I had to turn away and I was shamed that some of my German ancestors may very well have been involved in these atrocities.
Sorry, I'm getting way too serious here and I can't continue.
All I want to say is that I, too, despite my genuine horror at the German Holocaust and similar crimes against humanity at other times and in other places, can at times still find myself fascinated and feel a strange attraction for certain parts of the Nazis.
I can acknowledge, although I'm not at all happy about it, that I truly have no way of knowing what I would have done had I lived in Germany during that horrendous time.
My next post on this thread will list some names I'm considering for this new being I'm becoming.
