In somehow trying to observe both Kristallnacht and Armistice Day, I thought I would draw attention to this intriguing article at the New York Times on a commemoration a few days ago of Jewish soldiers who fought for Germany in the First World War:
The memorial, the first public service at the site for as long as anyone can remember, was organized by the Association of Jewish Soldiers, a small but growing group in the German military whose existence testifies to the feeling by at least some Jews that it is possible for them to be patriots again in the nation that once tried to wipe them out.
If you're interested, there's more information (in German) on the Bund jüdischer Soldaten at their website.
One striking quote:
Abraham Ben, the son of a concentration camp survivor who has helped organize similar events in Munich, said that he saw no problem with Jews serving in the modern German army.
“Ten years ago I would have given you a different answer,” he said.
But, he said, “Jews in Germany are no longer sitting around with their bags packed. This is home.”
In a different context, I wrote about related matters.
As a small commemoration of Yom HaShoah (thanks to Norm for the reminder), I offer a couple of images I took recently while we were in Berlin for a conference.
John and Francis's moving posts about their fathers and grandfathers have inspired this brief Remembrance Day comment of my own. I know, being a Hun my act of remembrance doesn't count for much. But then again ....
Since I don't have any of the few photos here that exist of my grandfather Johann ("Hans") Lamm, a picture that we took a few years ago of the headstone of the grave that he shares with another man at the cemetery in Niederbronn-les-Bains (Alsace) will have to suffice. My grandfather was 24 when he died from a bullet wound in the stomach in February 1945, some three months before the end of the war. Not long before that, he had received another injury, but was unfortunately declared fit for service by a GP from his native town of Bamberg (who, needless to say, survived the war and merrily continued to work until well into the 1960s).
He never met the twin daughters who were born about a month later.
He never met me.
But then I guess my life would have been very different if hadn't died. In fact, I'm convinced that if he had survived I wouldn't be here at all. My mother's life would have taken a completely different, maybe happier turn, preventing my parents' fateful encounter and disastrous mixing of genes. Such is the contingency of life.
Still, I like to think that I have inherited some of his traits and talents, as I'm told that he was a very even-tempered and athletic man.
Today is not only Remembrance Day but also the 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War. (In Germany, Volkstrauertag falls on 16 November this year.)
And I have to admit that I am one of those soppy people who gets all emotional about the whole poppy-wearing, wreath-laying, old-men-with-medals-parading, two-minutes-silence-observing solemnity of it all. (And, at the same time, a bit irked by the very notion of a 'Veterans Day Sale'. Yes, by all means, honour wartime sacrifice by buying cheap crap...)
This has a lot to do, no doubt, with being raised among people who took their personal military history seriously. After all, the two generations of men who came before me on both the American and British sides of my family went off to war, and taking my uncles into account, their service included the army, navy and air force and extended to theatres from Europe to North Africa to the Middle East to India to the Pacific.
That's a lot of soldiering.
I don't think there's anything particularly unusual about that: the first half of the twentieth century saw both a lot of fighting and mass conscription, and the twenty years between the two world wars were almost ideally calibrated for the children of the veterans of the first to go off to fight in the second. (A chain only broken in my family when, with fortunate timing for my brother, the Vietnam draft ended just in time, in 1973.)
I grew up with hearing those veterans' stories and experiences at family get-togethers and army reunions. It seemed kind of normal to me as a kid that you leave home and go off to some part of the world where you might experience some pretty horrible stuff.
Which strikes me, now, as a fairly odd thing.
Although, these days, of course, it shouldn't. (There was a remarkable article yesterday about an American outpost in Afghanistan, it it well worth reading.)
But, on Remembrance Day, I tend not to think of flags or stirring poetry, but rather of the rather mundane experiences of individual people from my family who were in those two generations. Some of them I knew well, some of them I never met.
I think particularly of my grandfather (and namesake), John Dennis, who was in the Great War. I never met 'Jack', as he died before I was born, but I heard a lot about him.
I don't know much about his military service, but I was always told that he left his quiet Devonshire town as part of an infantry regiment and that he spent some time in Flanders and then some in Mesopotamia, the area now known as Iraq.
This picture, we think, was likely taken in or on the way to the latter. Quite a handsome chap. Certainly, a pith helmet does wonders for any man.
In any case, Jack apparently didn't want to talk much about what he had seen at the front, which was not all that atypical. Returning home to a land that he found hadn't quite managed to make itself fit for heroes to live in, he became a lifelong left-winger. He also, for more prosaic reasons, became a bus conductor. (I have his union lapel pin, which actually says 'Workers of the World Unite'. Very Old Labour.)
He ran for local council in 1947, still looking quite dapper.
He lost the election. The area was, I think, solidly Tory. But according to family legend, he got more votes than anyone would have expected.
In my view, that was victory enough.
This other chap I knew well, if too briefly.
I can see, perhaps, why my mother fell for him. Despite the ears.
The uniform certainly does add something. (For her part, she always insisted that one of his best qualities was that he was a gentleman, unlike some of the other Yanks who were, as she put it, 'all hands'...)
My father, fortunately, never saw combat, though he did experience bombing raids and got more of a glimpse of war's reality when D-Day wounded arrived at the hospital where he worked as a supply corporal. (Unbeknowst to him at the time, his brother--who had followed family tradition and joined the navy--was stationed on a cruiser in the Channel that had been shelling the Normandy coast that day and had narrowly missed being blown apart by a torpedo.)
After the war, he worked at a psychiatric hospital on Long Island, helping soldiers psychologically traumatised by the war, an experience that he never talked about to me, but which my mother said deeply affected him.
Afterwards came the usual post-war stuff: work, love, kids and suburbia.
Not that long ago, my sisters found a huge number of photographic negatives from my dad's army days. One of them is above.
And this is another.
(The headline of the Scottish 'Daily Express' -- he had been re-stationed to Glasgow sometime after D-Day -- is 'Nuremberg is Blazing. Hitler Wires: Hold Out to the Death'.)
Of all the conversations I wish I could have today, most of them would be with these two guys.
John’s expatriate thoughts on July 4th have triggered some, albeit clearly less patriotic, associations of my own. They are related to things I've said earlier in the week - and of course they have to do with what I do (at least most of the time) for a living.
One of the ideas that currently seems to possess some popularity in a variety of disciplines – the cognitive sciences, philosophy and literary studies – is the notion that “we are our stories”. In other words, the way we perceive our lives – from everyday experiences to life-changing events – is shaped to a significant extent by the narrative forms in which we wrap up these events and experiences. In fact, so the story goes, without these narrative forms, we wouldn’t really have an identity at all. We need the coherence-creating sweep of narrative to make sense of who we are in time and space.
All this does not lack a certain plausibility or attractiveness. Nevertheless, I can’t deny that I increasingly feel a sense of unease vis-à-vis the idea that we are what we tell others/ourselves we are.
First of all, the notion that “all is stories” seems to lead into the poststructuralist abyss that there is no truth and/or reality. I know that this is not really what poststructuralist theory really maintains, but somehow this is the facile conclusion at which many of its adherents always seem to arrive. It's all stories, ergo there is no truth.
Or, as a character in Todd Solondz's film Storytelling (more on that below) puts it: "I don't know about what happened. But once you start writing, it all becomes fiction".
Secondly, the “we need stories” argument is a bit too feel-good for my liking, suggesting not only that the stories we tell are practically significant, but in fact that they have a positive psychological effect.
By contrast, my immediate association with storytelling is something less uplifting: ideology. Whenever I read that stories are good for us, I feel the urge to ask: where do these stories come from? Which intentions do they serve? What is the person telling me stories trying to do to me as he/she is letting me in on his/her adventures, exploits or woes? Rather than untainted truths, stories transport ideologies - or, to put it more bluntly, lies - be it the gossipy lies spread about colleagues in the (non-)professional contexts in which some of us work, be it historical untruths of the "We have always been at war with Eurasia" kind. While the stories themselves may be fiction, the political situation and the agents that bring them forth are not. Think of the current situation in Zimbabwe, which looks like a postmodern joke, but is in fact bloody serious.
The third source of my unease, however, is related to the fact that I simply fail to satisfy the narrative paradigm. Because, truthfully, I neither feel that I'm a particularly narrated personality, nor that I like telling stories (about) myself. My past comes to me in fleeting flashbacks, some pleasant, many others embarrassing or painful, and it takes some effort on my part to turn these brief glimpses and impressions into a coherent narrative. Usually I fail.
Because, really, I’m one hell of a lousy storyteller. I lack the theatricality, the ability to create suspense, the sense of timing that a storyteller needs. When I was little, my mother once (or more than once? Depends on the version of my story, I guess) referred to me in public as “the child who can’t tell jokes”. I can tell you that this particular skill hasn’t improved with age.
And whatever impression I might leave at this here blog, I’m kind of a quiet person in real life. I’m not chatty – only when I’m nervous, stressed and need to get something off me chest (which happens sometimes, but not often).
What is more, I’m not particularly attracted to natural storytellers (or those who believe that they are), whom I instinctively tend to find manipulative. I don't like to be reduced to a passive claqueur for the public performances of egomaniacs. Which is why I dislike this whole culture of narrative as it manifests itself in scandal-mongering talk shows about and intimate memoirs by vulgar people who apparently lack a sense of distance and discretion. Some things should remain left unsaid and not every kinky habit needs to be shared.
So I was glad, a few months ago, to stumble over an essay by Galen Strawson, provocatively named “Against Narrativity ” (in Ratio XVII [2004]). Strawson questions the current narrative dogma that I have sketched above, which he calls the “psychological Narrativity thesis”. One of the reasons why he challenges this thesis has to do with the ethical stipulation entwined with it, the idea, namely that only a narrated life is a fulfilled and moral life (this, Strawson calls the "ethical Narrativity thesis").
Strawson's defence of non-narrative people such as himself, i.e. people whose memories are episodic rather than narrated and chronological, is quite intricate and I will not comment on it in great detail. What I like about Strawson's argument is that he draws our attention to the undeniable self-importance that characterises many champions of the Narrativity thesis as it is usually applied. As he puts it: "... those who think in this way are motivated by a sense of their own importance or significance that is absent in other human beings" (436).
This is an impression I, too, have begun to have.
Note, however, that this criticism does not apply to the kind of storytelling represented by Hugh Lupton, a storyteller cited today in a post by Francis Sedgemore. For Lupton, myth, legends and folklore possess a very real truth value: "The function of myth is to tell the truth. Not the everyday truth that is the opposite of lying, but the truth that can’t be told any other way." I'm not talking about this kind of truth, which for want of a better term we might call "human universals", but the more pedestrian, individual myth-making that seem so characteristic of our egocentric age.
A less theoretical challenge to the Narrativity thesis can be found in Michael Frayn's 2002 novel Spies (a wonderful, wonderful book on this and other topics which I recommend wholeheartedly):
What I remember, when I examine my memory carefully, isn’t a narrative at all. It’s a collection of vivid particulars. Certain words spoken, certain objects glimpsed. Certain gestures and expressions. Certain moods, certain weathers, certain times of day and states of light. Certain individual moments, which seem to mean so much, but which mean in fact so little until he hidden links between them have been found (32).
The novel describes the narrator-protagonist’s attempt to retell an embarrassing and guilty period in his childhood, during which he caused (or helped cause) others great pain. Although this "confession" is done with a therapeutic aim ("I have a feeling that something, somewhere, has been left unresolved, that some secret thing in the air around me is still waiting to be discovered" [1]), the narrator is aware that his retrospective attempt at ordering his memories is a construct. And while it may bring out some of the "hidden links" of which he is not yet aware, his revelation is tainted by his unfulfillable desire for repentance.
In the end, the narrative told to make sense of his past only reveals how effectively stories can be used to veil what really happened. The narrator wishes to confess so as to repent, yet all we learn about him (and ourselves) is how human beings can use stories to defer repentance.
And this brings me back to Solondz's Storytelling, which is a viciously funny film about exactly that: how our many everyday stories help us to do just one thing - lie, lie, lie:
