We're discussing Maus in English, so I thought that this would be a good time to continue my thoughts about Constantine's Sword, this time dealing a bit with anti-semetism as I will be speaking about the Holocaust. For readers who are not familiar with the previous post, I am setting up a link to the first post here. I don't know if that post has much to do with this, but I figured it's related to the same topics, and I might as well add it.So, the Holocaust and the Nazis have been popping up pretty often in my English course, which is why I'm writing this. This is a response to a question raised by my professor. I thought it would be a good idea to do this as a blog post. Maus is pretty directly about the Holocaust, since it's the memoirs of the author's father and his father's survival in Auschwitz, but imagery of World War Two and the Holocaust has been popping up in lots of places in our readings. We've seen it in the first three poems, which were there to deal with World War One, but we've seen reference to the Holocaust and the Nazis in Leonard Cohen, Sylvia Plath, Robertson Davies and probably a few others I've forgotten. Ironically, I also read Roberto Bolano's Nazi Literature of the Americas around this time, which while being a Spanish novel or anthology can apply to this. The question that my professor raised is, why does everything seem to lead back to the Holocaust?
I've been trying to understand this myself. It's not like people kill other people, heck this is probably going on right now. But why does this particular thing have so much affect on us. You could slap on a picture of a swastika to something and automatically that thing is tainted.
To be perfectly honest, I don't have any good idea why this is. In the absence of any rational exclamation, I will go on to non rational. My guess is that the Nazis made a giant psychic wound that we have no understanding of how they did it. They may not even have conciously known that they were doing it, except for a select few but those were all shot or activly trying to do this. Because of this hole in the fabric of the universe, our conciousness is trying to process all this information. Since the Nazis were at the right time and place in history to pull this off, they have been able to do this, and we are dealing with their psychic refugee. I really don't think something like this is out of the question. Some of the Nazis, especially Himmler were into weird magick-with-a-k stuff like this. I'm not saying this is there actual plan, but maybe I'm wrong about this more, and the fact I can apply something as heighnous as a gouging out the collective unconcious of mankind is just something that comes from this. Maybe that was what the Holocaust was, and since it got more press then other mass genocides it was given more precident.
Once, as a child, I had a fantasy world I would play in and fight various fictional enemies in. One of these were alien Nazis from another demension. I didn't really understand what the Nazis were for, at least not in the big picture. I knew that they were evil, and that was all that matters. This dosen't have to do with anything in this, but I thought it would be important to bring up. It may be important to note that they were also the opposite of my good-semi elvish species the Draan. I have recently decided that once I get around to creating the Draan language, Hebrew will be a major influence.
