10/28 Questions

• During WWII, it certainly would be rough to have been a German in the United States. I don't think it was equal to the animosity felt towards Japanese Americans, however. Germans were not sent to special concentration camps like the Japanese Americans, however, there was still a fair amount of paranoia against them during WWII. Part of this is possibly because there are so many people of Germanic descent in the United States, and possibly even the fact that Germans were white and it was easier for them to blend into the crowd and not be seen and consequently harassed.
• I don't know if "surprise" is the best word, but it was the first time that I've actually read accounts of mistreatment and harshness towards German people at all. So in a sense, I was surprised when I read that it happened, but the surprise really didn't last.
• I feel that Borchert's stories showed that post-war Germany was quiet. The story that really stuck with me was the first one, with the singing soldier. The sheer loneliness after so much of the population was killed or captured, mixed with the sudden quiet that came after the loud explosions and bombings near the end of the war would have made for a really gruesome sight. I also really liked The Kitchen Clock. The sense that time suddenly stopped and everything was quiet and surreal must have been what it felt like once the fighting suddenly ceased.
• I think they give quite a bit of insight into the lives and attitudes of the German citizens after the war. I'd certainly put it on-par with Maus in terms of insight on its respective time period because it really got into the minds of the people who lived there, as opposed to just drilling facts and information into the reader's head.
• As I said, I really liked the first story, Lots and Lots of Snow. The setting of it (the snow-covered ground) as well as its time setting (still relatively new in the year) made for a sense of a fresh start, and the fact that the snow covered the land is symbolic of how the Germans still had to live with what happened to them and what happened because of them underneath. I was also really impressed with the sergeant's reaction to his singing. Christmas is almost universally a time of piece in the Western world, and to finally hear peace after the occasional ringing gunshot brought him to laughter. He was happy the violence was over.

10/26 Questions

• Vladek performed many odd jobs, such as a tinsmith and a shoemaker. He also participates in the mass lineups, as shown on page 32 and 58 of Maus II, where the guards line the Jews up to see who they keep and who they kill. As bad as it was, it wouldn't compare to Dachau. After being forced to march there, the Jews were crammed into what little space was left at Dachau, where disease spread so much more quickly, as evidenced by pages 94-97,when Vladek gets Typhus. Dachau was also a "death camp," as opposed to Auschwitz being a "Work Camp." They were sent there to die, not to work.
• It seems very similar in the overall scope of most survivor's stories that I've heard. The Jews were mistreated, then attacked, then forced into hiding, and then forced into the concentration camps, where they encountered nearly unspeakable horrors. But this is a story of a Jew who never seemed to truly resign and accept his fate. I was constantly in awe of Vladek and his resourcefulness. Also, the way the story is told is very unique, because of two reasons: It is a graphic novel, a medium made to show more than tell, and the choice to make each race of people a different animal.
• To think of the Jews as mice is a pretty good metaphor in terms of storytelling, even more so than having the Nazis being portrayed as cats. Mice are considered vermin, as well as being small and unimportant. People put mousetraps up in their house all the time. We see them as pests and much less than our dogs and cats, which are also mammals and not quite so different. If this is how Jews were more or less always perceived, and one thinks of the death camps as mouse traps, it makes the holocaust seem almost inevitable.
• I don't really consider books and other works about the Holocaust to be in the same boat as World War II, mostly because so much of the rest of the war is portrayed as a glorious, exciting thing, even now in modern media such as movies or video games. The Holocaust is and always has been seen as the polar opposite of this and is rarely connected to the war, with the exception of soldiers liberating the camps. Even in a lot of famous World War II movies rarely portray anything involving the Holocaust, while Holocaust works rarely mention what's going on outside of the camps. So no. I don't consider these books to really be about World War II. The events happened in the same time and place, but the two events rarely came together.
  As to whether the books were fiction, I don't think so. I read a book in the Good Books class a couple years ago called The Things They Carried, also about the horrors experienced in a warzone. The horrors and the terrors and the feelings were real, even if the stories are fabricated or some actual events changed with memory. It doesn't seem fictitious to me.

10/19 Questions

• One of the reasons Vladek is so concerned with money is because he had to use everything he had to even survive in late 30s and early to mid 40s in Nazi Germany. I'm not sure from just Maus I why he had to fix the roof or why he distrusts Mala so much, but he may dislike her mostly because Anja and he had been through so much together and Mala, while she was also a survivor, did not go through that same experience as him. He possibly insists on doing things himself because he always has had to do things on his own. He developed a philosophy of self-reliance because of him having to go through the Holocaust.
• Mice are usually hunted by cats, so drawing the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats is pretty self-explanatory as a metaphor. The reason he chose the non-Jewish Poles to be portrayed as pigs was possibly because the Polish people in the story do a lot of "squealing" on the German Jews, usually to save their own skins. Pigs are pretty resourceful animals, as well, so the Poles doing what they can to survive in German-occupied Poland would naturally be drawn as pigs. I think it's a very effective metaphor that simplifies a lot of the complex political things that were happening at the time and lets the reader focus more on the storytelling as a whole.
• He calls his father a murderer because he destroyed all that was left of Anja after she died. It was so important for Art to find out about Auschwitz because he was telling the story, and his father destroying the books was sort of murdering Anja and who she was after the holocaust ended.
• I think that this book is a really effective way of teaching the material. It's easier to absorb the information in pictures as opposed to trying to make a picture with words. Sometimes it can even be more harrowing.

Completed with Brandon S., Kayley P.,  and Casey J.

10/14 Classwork: Propaganda and Weimar Republic PDF

These two posters are taken from the late 1920s. Earlier Nazi propaganda favored a muscular fist causing violence, similar to the violence the Nazi party caused in the streets. Both of these describe putting an end to Communism (and also capitalism in Tod der Lüge).

I chose these two from the first year of Hitler's Third Reich. All of these posters showed scenes of Germans returning home to their country, or even their country's former glory, with Hitler leading the way, sometimes even dressed as Joan of Arc (somewhat ironically a great French Hero).

Currently my PDF of the Weimar republic will not load, so I will update this later in the weekend.

10/14 Questions

• I feel like I understand a lot more about how Nazi Germany began its rise. With many factions and political parties fighting for supremacy, it's only natural that one or two would gain power, especially as aggressive as the Nazi Party was. As for how Hitler managed to use the system for his own will and personal gains, it's something that happens often-one look at a list of jokes about lawyers and you'll understand why.
• I think the biggest immediate parallel that I can think of is the issue regarding school shootings and gun control in America. While there still is a big debate on this issue constantly raging, it only seems to be brought to light when a school shooting occurs, and even then, our attention as a nation is quickly brought to something else because we're almost desensitized to these occurances. While it may not be a perfect parallel, these racist slogans slowly must have become white noise to the German people.
  
  Another immediate parallel is the American treatment of LGBTQ people, although the attitudes towards this community is slowly starting to change in their favor. It wasn't very long ago that people commonly used words like "Gay" or "faggot" in a derogatory form and it was, while somewhat offensive, still mostly accepted by society. However, now that we've seen the horrors of such racism and have such an extensive record of this, political groups such as the Westboro Baptist Church do not have nearly the effect as the Nazi party in the 1930s.
• I think that a lot of people chose to ignore it for multiple reasons. One was the reason that I mentioned above when I was talking about gun control. Another could have been their desire to see Germany viewed as the power it once was. A third reason was because they were just so desperate for something good to happen to them that when things started turning around economically once the NSDAP gained their power, they were so relieved and considered the ends outweighed by the means.

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The following is the list of events and people mentioned in the questions, as well as a brief description of how it fit into the Weimar Republic. Completed with Dalton Stemberg.

• Black Friday
• Black Friday is the German equivalent to Black Tuesday, the day when the New York Stock Exchange crashed. It occurred on Friday 13, 1927,  and it once again plunged Germany into a deep depression.
• Paul Hindenberg
• Paul von Hindenburg is the man who named Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany in 1933.
• Enabling Laws
• These laws were passed by Nazi Germany which made it legal to discriminate, and eventually, cause violence to the Jews living in the country.
• Unemployment
• Much like the rest of the world, Germany had a large portion of its working class unemployed at the height of the Great Depression. At its peak in 1932, Germany had over six million of its population unemployed.
• 1936 Olympic Games
• These Olympics were hosted in Berlin, and they provided a much-needed credibility boost to the Nazi party due to its massive amount of victory in events, and its organization.
• Autobahn
• This was the German equivalent to the modern US Highway. These projects were started under Hitler's reign as an effort to give more jobs to the German people.
• Nuremberg Laws
• These laws, basically the Enabling Laws, are laws put in place that severely limited Jewish rights in Germany.
• Kristallnacht
• Night of November 9/10, 1938. Nazis destroyed/set fire to a huge amount of Jewish establishments and shops.
• Brown Shirts
• The people who committed the crimes on Kristallnacht. Members of the Nazi party. More specifically, these people made up Hitler's Nazi militia that caused a lot of violence between them and the Communist party in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
• Mein Kampf
• Book written by Hitler when he was imprisoned in the 1920s. Literally translates to "My Struggle." Basically his manifesto.
• Mass Exodus
• Massive amount of emigration from Germany in the mid-30s. 
• Concentration Camps
• Camps built under Hitler's reign, soon to be known for housing, and eventually killing Jews during the Holocaust.
• Anschluss
• Joining between Germany and Austria in 1938.

10/14 Questions/Homework

• An eduction system built under a monarchial rule probably led children to learn that authority is always in the right and can never be wrong. It may not have allowed them to learn to think for themselves.
• In the photograph, I see two children playing and making a house out of stacks of German Marks.
• It's interesting seeing a society where their own money was useless. To even think that something would be marked up multiple million marks just from the time it took to enter the store and get something is something you'd expect to find in fiction, yet, while this may be a bit hyperbolic of a statement, it was almost a reality.
• In Metropolis, I see a triptych that depicts the cultural life of 1920s Germany. It's very pixilated and hard to make out, but for sure the middle picture depicts some sort of dance hall. A man plays a saxophone (probably Jazz, noting the time period) and multiple couples dance happily. I would guess that the scene on the left is of a poor group of people on the streets and the scene on the right is one showing a lavish lifestyle Germany was not really living.
• It suggests that while culturally rich, monetarily, Germany was very very poor.
• In the "Fatherland" cartoon, it seemed to represent the German family as one that looks forward, explores, and is civilized, while it seems to portray the Jewish businessmen as greedy and dirty.
• In the following picture, if not provided context, I would have assumed it was a picture taken during our own Great Depression. It even seems to be taken at about the same time. I feel that, at least in the early 1930s, living in Germany was also an experience shared by a good amount of the entire world.
• 
  

10/12 Questions

• I chose to watch Metropolis because it was the one film out of the three that I had heard of, and had been meaning to watch the movie as it was. I felt I could kill two birds with one stone.
• The film begins in the upper class area of the titular city. Freder, the son of the ruler of the city, is minding his own business when he spots a woman who is showing Children of the lower class how his class lives. He is instantly smitten and wants to find her. He follows her down to the workers' area of Metropolis and sees one of the giant machines explode.
  When Freder tells his father about the explosion, and Grot, the head of the workers finds a bunch of plans in the pockets of dead workers, his father fires Josaphat, his right-hand man. Seeing this, Freder runs off. His father gets suspicious and sends a character named "The Thin Man' to follow him.
  Freder's father then finds a man named Rotwang to help him decode plans and finds out about a robot that Rotwang had been building to resurrect Hel, the woman he used to love. Meanwhile, Freder finds the woman again, and learns she is a prophet of sorts named Maria, who preaches that one day someone will come who can help the poor class communicate their problems to the rich class. Freder knows that it is him. Rotwang and Freder's father eavesdrop and then decide to make the robot's likeness into that of Maria's so that Freder's father can destroy the potentially budding rebellion. That robot then goes to convince all of the people to rise up, which will eventually lead to their demise.
  The workers rush to destroy the machines where they had been working, leaving behind their children. When the machines are destroyed, much at the dismay of Grot, their living quarters are slowly flooded, endangering the lives of the children. Fortunately, Freder and Maria manage to save the children and once everything is fixed, Freder becomes the man who can help both classes get along, stating that the mediator between head and hands must be the heart.
• This film is incredible. From design, story, and some special effects, you can see how it has influenced genres of movie and literature. A lot of the plot points and story elements in this movie are also in so many other dystopian works of film and literature. The highly stylized machines clearly inspired the Star Wars franchise (notably C-3PO and the planet Coruscant, which is a planet that is one giant city, a Metropolis of its own right), as well as many other futuristic, steampunk, and expressionist movies seen for the nearly 90 years since its initial release. You can clearly see its effect in countless movies and books that pay homage to it, much more than just the ones I mentioned.
• I think that this is a reflection on the Weimar republic in the sense that the governing class and the working class really were as separated from each other as in that movie. It was more or less begging for its own "heart" to come between the "hands" of the working class and the "Head" that was the government of the Weimar republic.
• While looking into the "Notes on Metropolis" reading, I read that the film may have helped Hitler out, as he probably saw himself getting the power he wanted by putting himself in Freder's role. I thought that that made a lot of sense, and that people could be easily convinced that he was the "heart."

Response Essay: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

I love film. One of my favorite things to do is just sit and talk about movies that I like or that I have seen. I feel like a have a unique vantage point in comparison to other people my age, as I tend to look at the artistic setup of the shot. That being said, I still have yet to see a lot of silent films, and I have never seen a German Expressionist film, or any film that is similar to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Watching this movie was really interesting, to say the least. On one hand, some of the visuals were really striking, but on the other hand, the format of a silent movie is not one that has necessarily aged well. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is no exception. Perhaps it’s just because I’m used to the newer, fast-paced, crisper sounds and visuals, but the first few minutes were a little hard to get into. But once the movie hit the ten-minute mark, the slightly-off visuals, distorted sound, and eerie faster-paced movements actually made the film seem creepier, possibly more creepy than originally intended.

As for the visuals in the film, my first thoughts were that the movie took place in a black-and-white version of Whoville. I really liked the visuals though. The jagged lines of the set, as well as the crazy offset between black and white really added to the surreal feel of the movie, especially considering that it all takes place in the head of Francis really tie in well together with the tone the movie is going for.

One of the biggest parallels that critics draw with this movie is how it treats figures of authority and power, and how the film is a commentary to how the militaristic ideals of WWI-era German leaders were such a toxic influence on the German people. It also shows effect of Germany’s thoughts towards authority: not just that it was bad, but also that it was malevolent, and considering how Dr. Caligari “wins” in the end, possibly even suggests that the force of the government was all-too powerful, even unstoppable.

In regards to most other aspects of the movie, I really don’t have too much to compare the film too. As I stated before, I really don’t have a whole lot of experience with movies from the silent era, so while I think that this is a great example of a movie from its time, most of that comes from reading about how highly it was and still is praised as such a wonderful movie. The music, while good, was not as particularly memorable as the music in, say, Star Wars. It was simple, yet effective. The cinematography was pretty subpar, but film at this time was still a very new medium, and a lot of things we take for granted in a film today were not even thought of at this time.

Overall, I did really enjoy the film. It was a fun story, sort of spooky, and while very dated, I can still see the educational value of this film, both in terms of studying film and studying German history. I do see it having more use in film studying, as a lot of fun techniques used in film today are definitely in use here, and history classes rarely spend a lot of time deconstructing art, literature, or film. Either way, it was a worthwhile watch, and while I don’t feel like it taught me anything particularly about the time or even expressionism, it got me curious enough to check out expressionism more as a whole anyway, so it gets another check in the “win” column for me.

Reflection Essay: How German is American?

One of the main reasons I originally took this class was because I was interested in German culture. Aside from some traditional German foods, I really didn’t know a whole lot about the German culture. I never really had a chance to experience any distinctly “German” events or celebrations, and I never really had even heard of any big ones, save for Oktoberfest. Because of this, I was quite eager to delve into the “How German is American” text. It was surprising that German traditions would also be American Traditions.

One of the biggest surprises came rather early in the text when I read about the German fascination with Native American culture. German settlers were not the first in the Midwest, but they still managed to make and maintain contact with the Native American populations. The pamphlet provided only glosses over David Zeisberger’s writings, but what really struck me as interesting were the amount of fictionalized depictions of Native Americans during the late nineteenth century, most notably Karl May and his works.

Just this statement alone made me think of some parallels that the American people went through, specifically the romanticized Western dramas and films of the mid-20^th century. The Native peoples must have seemed almost surreal to the Germans over in Germany. Interestingly enough, Karl May’s “Cowboys and Indians” books were actually from the Native American viewpoint. I wonder if the way Americans had historically treated Native Americans and the way the people in Germany had no say in the culture of the Native Americans had anything to do with their depictions of them.

Another big surprise I had was the impact of the Turners association on the American School system. To find out that the first Physical Education teacher and superintendent of Physical Education was a member of this association was a really exciting thing. In fact, seeing that a lot of German immigrants had a hand in shaping much more progressive thoughts such as women’s suffrage and anti-slavery was really cool. To think that the German mindset helped influence and shape the American mindset not only in the mid-1800s, but also today, fills me with a lot of pride as someone with German heritage.

That being said, I would say the most interesting and surprising thing I’ve heard about how German heritage was being held by the Old Order Amish, which is almost the exact opposite of the mentality shown by the Turners and the Freethinkers. I’m not sure why exactly I was so surprised that the Amish were of German descent; to be fair, the only thing I knew about the Amish before this reading were that they didn’t use technology. To think that this specific group of people came from the same part of Europe as the Turners and Freethinkers is almost mind-boggling, and I think that Germany’s diversity in terms of its American immigrants matches perfectly with the “melting pot” that America as a whole strives to be.

Overall, I found this reading to be very informative and it sparked a lot of questions and desires to learn more as I read it. I managed to find more reason to be proud of my German heritage as well, aside from just wanting to eat a little more sauerkraut. To think my ancestors played such a prominent role in the shaping of the country I live in today is really exciting, and I’m eager to find out about more ways they have shaped this nation.

World War I Notes

• I really liked the "If World War One Was a Bar Fight" text, and I actually found it pretty useful. Putting the entirety of a world war into something simple we can understand helps us understand the motives behind some of the chain of events, even if they are overly-simplified and not entirely accurate. It's also humorous, which makes it easier to read and relate to.
• I learned that WWI was almost effectively a clash of egos and pride rather than actual conflict. The initial conflict would have possibly led to a war, but due to the system of alliances that had been established in WWI, so many extra players joined in.
• There were ultimately two groups involved in WWI: The Allies and the Central Powers. The Allies were Britain, France, Russia, and some smaller countries. The Central Powers were mostly Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and some smaller countries.
• While the text is funny and informative, it still has its problems. A few events are misinterpreted, and as I said previously, it was very simplified.
• A lot of smaller events that led to the war's beginning that raised tension throughout Europe are completely glossed over, and instead the bar fight starts with one event. It also does not completely discuss the motives for some of the actions, which partially adds to the humorous nature of the reading.
• The assassination of Franz Ferdinand may have been the spark that started the war, but there were many other things that could have potentially been a cause of the fighting. I personally view the cause as all of the complicated alliances, alongside with a shared desire for their countries to expand and flourish, and having no place left to do so.