I could not have said this better or even as well. So I will share it.
~ D.H. Lawrence ~
Digitally enhanced image created from a photo taken in November 2020.
© 2022 nightpoet – all rights reserved
Posted in Uncategorized
There seems to be an abundance of nostalgia about that golden age in America’s history, the 1950s, and the 1960s. It is particularly strong among those of us senior citizens born during or just after World War II, the last “good war.” As with every generation before us, we become more sentimental about the past as we grow ever nearer to the end of our sojourn here on earth. We tend to wander around antique stores remembering when we used this or that “antique” item before they were antiques. We smile and comment on how if that item is antique, we must be antiques. Nostalgia is a good thing. It helps us remember the good times and overlook the painful ones. But it is important to remember that it is an incomplete picture.
I recently took up writing a kind of autobiography or memoir. I recall listening to my father talk about his childhood during the 1910s and 1920s, growing up as a child of German immigrants on a farm in Michigan. I have some of his stories on cassette tapes and my mother’s stories of her childhood. I want to leave a record of my life as I remember the good and bad times for my children, only I will do so in the form of a book complete with pictures and assorted “documents.”
My first ten years were spent in a small village called Linwood along Michigan’s Saginaw Bay. Most residents were either farmers or worked in the many factories that made Michigan one of the leading industrial states. The role played by America’s industries in winning the war against Nazism, and Japanese imperialism resulted in the period from 1945 to 1980 being the golden age of the American working class. A bright future envisioned by my generation consisted of taking over the family farm or finding employment in one of the factories after finishing high school. Many of our parents, mine included, did not have a high school education, but they knew the advantages of having one and never missed the opportunity of stressing the importance of staying in school.
When I started elementary school in 1949, we had a picture of George Washington on one side of the blackboard (Real black slate!) and a portrait of Abraham Lincoln on the other. There was an American flag in the corner. We started each day with the pledge of allegiance to the flag. “Under God” was not added until 1954, when I was in the 5th grade. One teacher (no aides) was in a room with kindergarten through the third grade. There were no guards, video cameras, lockable doors, etc., just a teacher and a room full of kids who knew how to behave and the consequences of not doing so.
Linwood Elementary School had only three rooms. The number of kids in each room varied yearly, but the average was 48. There was only one teacher per room and no principal. The method of instruction was simple. There was a table with chairs at the front of the room next to the teacher’s desk. That is where she taught. She would call out, for example, “First-grade reading,” or maybe “Second-grade arithmetic,” or “Third-grade whatever.” The grade called out would go to the table at the front, and the teacher would teach them. The teacher was able to spend only fifteen to twenty minutes on each class. The rest of the students were expected to remain in their seats quietly, working on whatever they were supposed to be working on.
I mention my first school because of the role that small country and small-town schools play in books, movies, and television shows meant to make the audience feel good about the past. I call it a Hallmark, Little House on the Prairie, or Mayberry make-believe world that never actually existed, but we nevertheless enjoy remembering. It’s a small part of the mythical history of America that includes pilgrims eating Thanksgiving dinner with Pocahontas’ family; slaves singing in the moonlight after a good day’s work for Ole Massa; and poor but industrious young men pulling themselves up from poverty to membership in that elite club of Robber Barons that included the likes of Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Henry Ford.
The nostalgic memory of America’s past includes a well-developed civil religion that goes something like this: To enjoy religious freedom and take the Christian gospel’s good news to the New World’s heathen populations, the Pilgrims and other brave Protestant souls endured the long, harrowing journey across the Atlantic Ocean to the shores of North America led by divine Providence. After a patriotic war for freedom from England’s oppressive rule, the newly-founded United States of America set about fulfilling its manifest destiny to expand from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and beyond, eventually becoming what President Dwight Eisenhower called “the greatest force that God has ever allowed to exist on His footstool.”[i]
The period 1945-1970 was, however, a time when America was still a mostly homogeneous nation with a worldview consensus derived from Western Civilization. As some are quick to point out, it was dominated by white Euro-American males. There were racial and cultural minorities concentrated in various locations, but they were kept on the outside looking in. To the dominant racial and cultural class, they were basically invisible, humorous characters in movies and on radio and television shows. Like the children in that small village school that is a part of an Idyllic past that never actually existed, those non-Euro-Americans knew how to act. They knew their place, as we said in those days, and the consequences for not doing so, for presuming to be included in the opening line of the Constitution, “We the people,….” It was a cruel and unjust time in our history for many, not only cultural and racial minorities but women and those who chose to march to the sound of a different drum. That America to which many Americans, myself included, look back with feelings of nostalgia is long gone, and thankfully so.
My generation is the children of those who NBC Nightly News anchor and author Tom Brokaw called “the Greatest Generation,” those resilient and patriotic Americans who lived through the Great Depression and then fought in World War II. Many, like my parents, experienced the Great War, later called World War I, and the Great Flu Pandemic of 1919. They survived without the benefits of unemployment insurance (1941) or Social Security (1935), both of which were part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. FDR’s opponents accused him of being a Communist, or at least a Socialist, for suggesting that the country owed its citizens assistance when the nation’s economy was experiencing a slump. Many referred to the New Deal as FDR’s “Jew Deal,” communist and Jew being the same for many Americans.
As we grew up during the 1940s and 1950s, our parents expected us to become mature adults. We faced challenges that required courage and character to survive. And so they instilled in us the same values that served them—knowing right from wrong, the difference between justice and injustice and always choosing the side of justice, a sense of fair play, and loyalty to our country, our family, and most importantly to the God of our fathers. We needed their guidance and example of courage, for we were growing up in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, expecting at any moment a nuclear holocaust. At school, I learned the Duck and Cover song (1951) and how to follow the example of Bert the Turtle. If we heard the explosion or saw the flash of light, we were to do like Bert the Turtle,
“When danger threatened him he never got hurt
He knew just what to do
“He’d duck and cover, duck and cover
He’d hide his head and tail and four little feet
He’d duck and cover!”[ii]
And then we would get under our desks with our hands over our heads.
A part of the nostalgia from the 1940s and 1950s was the lack of computer technology. Many of us senior citizens find ourselves adrift without a compass in this new technological world. We are frustrated, angry, and subject to panic attacks when trying to use our laptop computers that seem determined to thwart all our efforts. Blessed are those of us who have a child nearby to ask for help. I recall a Sunday morning when my wife and I were teaching a kindergarten Sunday school class. It was when the movie “Frozen” was what the children discussed among themselves. “What is your favorite character?” “Do you remember when…?” “What was your favorite part?” Many of the children had some smartphone or other high-tech device within reach. As I heard the word “App” mentioned repeatedly, I eventually asked, “What is an App?” One little girl turned to the girl next to her and, smiling, said, “He doesn’t know what an App is.” They all laughed.
Smartphones? We communicated by telephone if we were lucky enough to have one. Many, including my family, were on a “party line,” meaning more than one household had the same telephone number. You had to learn your number of rings to know whether or not to answer the phone when it rang. Long-distance calls were costly, so sending a Western Union telegram might be cheaper. The local, national, and international news were broadcast over the radio or television if you were one of the fortunate few who owned a tv set. Most people relied on the local newspaper delivered by the “paper boy.” For visual images, we had Movietone News shown at the theater between the main feature, or features if a double feature, along with the mandatory cartoon and previews of coming attractions.
My father brought home our first television set in 1952. It was enclosed in a wooden cabinet and had a 12-inch screen. We could receive only one station. It was a NBC affiliate out of Bay City, Michigan that would sign on in the morning and off at midnight. Black, white, and various shades of gray were the only colors on the screen. Color was introduced in the United States in 1953. The Tournament of Roses Parade on January 1, 1954, was the first program broadcast nationally in color. The Perry Como Show (1956) and The Big Record with Patti Paige (1957) were the first two regular programs broadcast in color. The first all-color prime-time season was in 1966 when I was a Junior at Lynchburg College in Lynchburg, Virginia.
Color television sets appeared in stores in January 1954 with price tags that placed them clearly out of the range of most consumers. Westinghouse made available a color television in the New York City area in February 1954 that sold for $1,295 ($13,422 in 2022). Thirty sets were sold during that first month. Since we are looking back nostalgically at that golden age, it is worth noting that a new 1954 Ford Crestline 4 Door Sedan could be purchased for $1,975 when the median yearly income for men was $3,200. It was not so good for women. Their median income was only $1,200.
I learned to drive in a car with a “straight stick” on the stirring column and a clutch next to the brake and gas pedals. My first car, like all others, came equipped with air conditioning, meaning I could roll the windows down mechanically. It had four gears, first, second, third, and reverse. In winter, the heat came from a “heater,” a box located beneath the dash. I learned how to signal the vehicle behind me my intentions by sticking my arm out the window. If it was straight, I was about to turn left. I was about to turn right if it was pointed up at a right angle. And if I pointed it down at the pavement or gravel, I was slowing down or about to stop. Most cars had bench seats in front, charming for taking your date to the drive-in theater. We navigated with printed road maps given free at service stations. Today’s GPS was spelled “map” back in the day.
For the guys, the military draft was always something that one had to calculate into any plans for the future. Most men graduated high school at 18 and were soon called upon to serve their mandatory two years in the United States Army. We had options. Rather than wait for the infamous letter from the local Draft Board, one could choose to join one of the four military branches for three years rather than two or join the National Guard or a reserve unit of one of the Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, or Navy. Unlike today, the Guard and Reserves were not used to fight wars. They were “weekend warriors.” They dressed up once a week to play soldier. One way of avoiding the draft was to carry a purse to your draft physical when called up.
The female portion of the population did not have to worry about the draft. War was a man’s sport. It was considered uncivilized to send women into combat. They were better suited for nursing and clerical jobs. Hence the various women’s auxiliary corps—WAAC (Army), WAVES (Navy), WASP (Air Force), ANC (Army Nurse Corps), and SPAR (Coast Guard). Women serving in the Marines were called simply Marines.
Being old enough to remember the 1950s and the 1960s, I have difficulty deciding which of the two decades is most worthy of nostalgia. I yearn to make a return visit to both for different reasons related to my growing maturity and awareness of the world in which I live. I see things and am aware of things today that I was not aware of back in the day. I was unaware of the evils of segregation at home or imperialism abroad. I was blissfully ignorant of the negative side of life that has always been, and always will be, present in every age.
We live in a postmodern age when the study of history is considered irrelevant, yet we keep hearing George Santayana’s prophetic comment, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” There is a cure for ignorance about our past, which is education. Unfortunately, we live in a time when most educational institutions have abandoned the teaching of any history.
There are growing signs that historians are taking a new and more objective look at our nation’s history. Many stories that were treated as history back in the day are being replaced with carefully researched narratives. Both the positive and negative are given a fair hearing. A good example of history replacing myth is exposing the “Myth of the Lost Cause” as a myth. Still, there will always be a place for looking nostalgically back at our past. When I was in the third and fourth grades, I did walk two miles to school in the snow during the winter and was happy to find when I got there that the furnace was not working and I could walk back home in the snow,
[i] Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, “Radio and Television Address to the American People on the State of the Nation.,” Dwight D. Eisenhower Radio and Television Address to the American People on the State of the Nation. | (The American Presidency Project, April 5, 1954), https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/radio-and-television-address-the-american-people-the-state-the-nation.
[ii] “Dick ‘Two Ton’ Baker – Bert the Turtle (the Duck and Cover Song),” Genius, accessed November 2, 2022, https://genius.com/Dick-two-ton-baker-bert-the-turtle-the-duck-and-cover-song-lyrics.
Posted in American History, Humor, Opinion & Editorials, Uncategorized
Tagged Memories, Nostalgia, United States
I am sitting at my desk in my study, surrounded by various objects assembled with the hope that they will make my time spent here more enjoyable and productive. My goal is to spend some time each day writing. Within the past month, I completed work on a new edition, the fourth edition, of a book on the history of twentieth-century Europe. It was a joint effort by myself and Michael D. Richards, who, like myself, is a retired history professor.
I enjoy writing, but there is a difference between writing for pleasure and writing as work. Writing a history book is laborious. There is an outline to follow, deadlines to meet, editors to please, fact-checking facts, drafts and rewrites of drafts, and much more. I have always wanted to write about whatever interests me at that moment. It might be something in the news, something someone said, something I happened to read or hear, or my thoughts inspired by the beauty of a sunrise or a sunset.
The internet offers all sorts of opportunities to put one’s thoughts into words and release them in cyberspace on the chance that someone somewhere might choose to read them. In August 2010, I started a blog. It seemed like everyone had a blog, so why not I? There wasn’t any particular theme. I did not limit the blog to a specific topic such as philosophy, politics, food, or whatever. I entitled it “My thoughts and opinions on a variety of subjects, mostly history.” I chose history because that was my profession. I was a history professor and remained one until retirement in the spring of 2016.
The blog was not my first effort at writing for publication. Since my time in graduate school during the 1970s, I have written and published numerous book reviews and articles of one sort or another for journals and reference books. By 2010, I even had five books to my credit. My first venture into writing for publication was during my high school and college years. I occasionally wrote editorial-style letters to newspaper editors, sometimes using a pen name. Yes, some of my comments might have gotten me pilloried. I have a couple of “memory boxes” in which I keep newspaper clippings and other mementos from my past lives.
Recently, I took up the challenge of writing a memoir or autobiography. My better half has repeatedly encouraged me to do so for our daughters. Also, I was involved in certain events and met people who might interest local history buffs. And, who knows, maybe others from my past might choose to reflect on the time when our paths crossed.
Like everyone, I am not the same person today I was at various periods of my life. I have learned a lot about the meaning of life through past experiences. There was more than one fork in my life’s path at which I had to choose which direction to take. My choice was not always what presented itself as the best choice, but I always decided to take the path I was convinced was the right one.
I am learning how to use the Worpress, something I did not do in the past. And so, as I begin to bring my blog back to life, I plan to include “my thoughts and opinions on a variety of subjects.” I will have a home page and different “pages” to organize my various blogs, for example, fiction, history, opinion, book reviews, memoirs/autobiography, musings on the meaning of life, etc.
So, consider this the launch of my “new” blog, and if you think you might be interested, please sign up to receive email notices when I publish. Just use the “Email Subscription” form in the upper right-hand corner. And until next time, be good to all God’s creation and always live under the mercy.
Posted in Uncategorized
The pandemic known as COVID-19 has dealt a severe blow to the institutional churches. Pastors have resorted to streaming their services on Facebook, YouTube, and other means made available by modern technology. Such substitutes are a poor substitute for meeting together. Some churches may not reopen once the pandemic ends. There is a fear that many who missed meeting together with fellow believers may decide that attending church at least once a week, or even less often, was not necessary or rewarding.
Some denominations were already experiencing a flight from the pews well before the pandemic struck. The Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination, has noted a drop in baptisms and membership for several years in a row. Some of the losses are accounted for by the rise of non-denominational church fellowships and the fact that the youth are abandoning the faith of their parents as soon as they are free to do so.
Collin Hansen and Jonathan Leeman’s book, Rediscover Church: Why the Body of Christ is Essential (Crossway 2021), is timely. The authors provide an argument for the role of the institutional church in the believer’s life. Their argument is persuasive. However, it is important to note that they are referring to the institutional church, that is, the brick-and-mortar building that is likely a part of an organized denomination. Before becoming too depressed about the state of affairs, one must keep in mind that the institutional church and the Church as the Body of Christ consisting of all those—past, present, and future—who have been saved by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ and not the samething. The former is finite and will vanish; the latter is eternal.
There are numerous verses in the New Testament that call upon believers to gather together for fellowship, exhortation and teaching, worship and celebration of the Lord’s Supper, etc. Hanseen and Leeman provide a good both a reminder of the importance of meeting together and an encouragement to do so.
As I read and thought about the content of Rediscover Church: Why the Body of Christ is Essential my mind was drawn to the words of an old Negro spiritual:
Let Us Break Bread Together Lyrics
1. Let us break bread together on our knees, (on our knees)
let us break bread together on our knees. (on our knees)
When I fall on my knees with my face to the rising sun,
O Lord, have mercy on me. (on me)
2. Let us drink wine together on our knees, (on our knees)
let us drink wine together on our knees. (on our knees)
When I fall on my knees with my face to the rising sun,
O Lord, have mercy on me. (on me)
[3]. Let us praise God together on our knees, (on our knees)
let us praise God together on our knees. (on our knees)
When I fall on my knees with my face to the rising sun,
O Lord, have mercy on me. (on me)
4. Let us praise God together on our knees, (on our knees)
let us praise God together on our knees. (on our knees)
When I fall on my knees with my face to the rising sun,
O Lord, have mercy if you please. (if you please)
Until next time, be good to all God’s creatures and always live under the mercy.
Suppose for a moment that your mother dropped you off at an orphanage when you were just an infant. Although she could not, or would not, care for you, she did remain a part of your life. She would occasionally pick you up and take you to visit your grandmother. Those were good times, for you adored your grandmother. She was always happy to see you, and you were able to experience from her some of the love you were missing in your relationship with your mother.
Suppose further that when you were seven years old, your mother agreed to allow your then foster parents to adopt you, after which the visits with your mother and grandmother ceased. Your new home was a loving one. You gained a mother and a father and two brothers who welcomed you as a full member of the family. You call your adopted parents “Mama” and “Papa,” and your brothers speak of you as their “sister,” never as their “adopted sister.” The manner in which you are welcomed into your new family is all the more remarkable since you are a mixed-race child in a German family. Your mother was German; your father was Nigerian.
Your parents are not wealthy, but neither are they poor. You are able to attend good schools and travel abroad. As an adult, you are able to live for a time in Paris and Israel. You earn a degree in Middle Eastern and African studies from Tel Aviv University. Eventually you marry a German and have two children. Then, one day while visiting the central library in Hamburg, you happen “by chance” to pick a book off a shelf that smashes into your world like a bolt of lightning, forcing you to confront the question, “Who am I?” The book is the story of your mother, Monika Göth, daughter of Amon Göth and his mistress, Ruth Irene Kalder. Suddenly, you must face the fact that you are the grandchild of one of the most notorious mass murderers of the Holocaust.
The above is in brief the story of Jennifer Teege as she relates it in her autobiography, My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past (New York: The Experiment, 2015). Jennifer Teege was 38 years old in 2002, when she happened upon the book, I Have to Love My Father, Don’t I? by her biological mother, Monica Göth. It is Monica’s account of her life’s struggle with the knowledge that she was the daughter of Amon Göth, the commandant of Płaszów concentration camp near Kraków, Poland, who was convicted of war crimes in 1946 and executed by hanging.
Amon Göth was not just a SS officer carrying out orders given to him as the commandant of a concentration camp. He enjoyed inflicting fear, pain, and death on those who were his victims. He would stand on the balcony of his villa overlooking the camp and randomly shot prisoners with a rifle. He had two dogs, Rolf, a Great Dane, and Ralf, an Alsatian mix, that he trained to attack and tear apart prisoners on his command. He would ride about the camp on his white horse and, if he saw a prisoner working too slow or pausing to rest, he simply shot him or her, adult or child. “When you saw Göth, you saw death,” a survivor of Płaszów later recalled. Helen Jonas-Rosenzweig, a survivor who suffered daily abuse as a maid in Göth’s villa, describes the terror that Amon Göth’s mere presence inspired: “As a survivor I can tell you that we are all traumatized people. Never would I, never, believe that any human being would be capable of such horror, of such atrocities. When we saw him from a distance, everybody was hiding, in latrines, wherever they could hide. I can’t tell you how people feared him.”
As a retired history professor with a special interest in twentieth-century European history, and in German history in particular, I found Ms. Teege’s book informative and very interesting. I have often wondered how the children of high-ranking Nazi officials dealt with the burden of their parentage. How would such a person answer when asked, “What did your father/mother do for a living?” “Who were your parents/grandparents?” These survivors, sometimes called “Hitler’s children,” confronted their family’s history in various ways.
Not all of them survived the fall of Hitler’s “Thousand Year Reich.” The six children of Magda and Joseph Goebbels, one of Hitler’s closest confidents and Reich Minister of Propaganda, died in the Berlin bunker, poisoned by their mother. Magda could not bear the thought of her children having to live in a world without Hitler. She had another child by her first marriage, Harald Quandt, who survived the war. He was a successful industrialist in the postwar era, and died in a private airplane crash in 1967.
Some of the children of high-ranking Nazi officials, like Edda Goering (b. 1938), Wolf Rudiger Hess (1937-2001), and Gudrun Himmler (1929-2018), refused to ever accept the fact that their fathers could have been guilty of the crimes of which they were accused. Gudrun Himmler, daughter of the Heinrich Himmler, leader of the infamous SS and chief architect of the Holocaust, spent her life defending her father and channeling aid to former SS and Gestapo members through an agency known as Stille Hilfe (Silent Help). Among those she helped were Klaus Barbie (1913-1991),”the Butcher of Lyon,” Martin Sommer (1915-1988), the “Hangman of Buchenwald,” and Anton Malloth (1912-2002), convicted in 2001 of beating at least 100 prisoners to death in Theresienstadt.
Hitler, himself, did not have any children. The claim made by a Frenchman, Jean-Marie Loret (1918-1985), that he was Hitler’s illegitimate son, conceived during World War I while Hitler was serving on the Western Front, did not survive DNA tests. Hitler’s sister, Paula (1896-1960), did not have any children. As of December 5, 2018, there were five surviving descendants of Hitler’s half-sister Angela (1883-1949) and half-brother Alois (1882-1956). They agreed among themselves not to have any children, thus assuring that the Hitler bloodline will end with them.
Bettina Goering is the great-nice of Hermann Goering, one of Hitler’s earliest followers. Hermann Goering was one of the highest decorated heroes of World War I. He took over command of Manfred von Richthofen’s squadron, the “Flying Circus” (Jagdgeschwader 1) following the Red Barron’s death in aerial combat. Goering’s popularity as a war hero enabled Hitler to win the support of many upper-class patriots who otherwise would have ignored “corporal” Hitler. Goering served as commander of the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) and after 1941 was Hitler’s designated successor.
Speaking of how she remembers her father, Bettina Goering says, “When I see Hermann as a family person, I think he’s really nice, and charming, and incredibly caretaking, and it’s hard for me to see flaws. But then you see what he does in politics and how he killed people, including his so-called friends.” She has lived with the fear that some of what made her father a war criminal, though he was never the level of monster as others mentioned above and below, may reside in her DNA. She and her brother both underwent sterilization so as to bring an end to the Goering bloodline.
Some of the children and grandchildren of prominent Nazis discovered only later in life that their infamous forbearer was a war criminal, having been told as children that he died during the war, often as a hero. Some, like Jennifer Teege’s mother, Monica Göth, have personal memories of their parent or grandparent. That was true of Brigitte Höss, daughter of Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz.
Höss was born in 1900, the son of a former army officer who wanted his son to become a priest. When World War I broke out, Höss was allowed to join his father’s old 21st Regiment of Dragoons. At 15 years of age, he served in the Middle East with Germany’s ally the Ottoman Turks. During his service in the Middle East, he witnessed the Armenian Genocide. Around one million Armenians were killed by the Turks in what today would be referred to as “ethnic cleansing.” He served with distinction, having been wounded three times and received several decorations for bravery, including the Iron Crescent and the Iron Cross first and second class. After the war’s end, he joined the Nazi Party in 1922, and in 1934 the SS Death’s Head Unit. He served in both Dachau and Sachsenhausen concentration camps before becoming Commandant of Auschwitz concentration and death camp in 1940.
As Commandant of Auschwitz, Höss oversaw the mass killing of between 2 and 3 million Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Russian prisoners of war and various other individuals. After experimenting with various methods, Höss introduced the use of Zyklon B gas. At his Nuremburg trial he boasted that as many as 2,000 prisoners could be disposed of in half an hour. He was transferred to Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1943 after revelation of an affair with an inmate. He returned to Auschwitz in May 1944 to oversee the murder of 430,000 Hungarian Jews over a 56-day period. When the war ended in 1945, Höss tried to evade arrest, hoping to escape to South America. He failed. When charged at his trial with the murder of three and one half million prisoners, he replied: “No. Only two and one-half million—the rest died from disease and starvation.”
Inge-Brigitte Höss was the third of five children born to Rudolf and Hedwig Hensel Höss. Brigitte moved to Spain during the 1950’s, where she worked as a model. She met an American engineer working in Spain. They married in 1961. They eventually settled down in Georgetown, located in northwest Washington, D.C. She was employed by an exclusive fashion salon in D.C., owned by a Jewish couple who fled Germany in 1938 after the Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass) attack on Jews throughout Germany. The salon owners never revealed to anyone that their employee, whom they so liked, was the daughter of Rudolf Höss. They chose to see her as a human being, not as the daughter of the commandant of Auschwitz. Reflecting on his parents’ relationship with Brigitte, their son later commented, “I am proud to be their son.”
Should these so-called “Hitler’s children” feel a burden of guilt for the crimes of their parents or grandparents? After all, they were only children. Like all of us who are unrelated to anyone guilty of war crimes and/or crimes against humanity, they try to understand how someone can be a loving parent or grandparent, and at the same time be a mass murderer. After having breakfast with his family, a husband/father kisses his wife and children before leaving for a day’s labor of participating in the murder of men, women, and children. After returning home and enjoying the evening meal, he plays with his children before seeing them off to bed, wishing them “good night” and “sweet dreams.” Perhaps he even stands by as they say their good night prayers. Later in life, how do those children, how do we, understand that? How do we get our minds around that reality? The theories offered by social scientists are of little or no help. It is a part of that perennial human problem of the existence of evil that haunts humanity.
I have spoken above about those whose father or grandfather was a Nazi war criminal. But is it any different, should it be any different, for the children whose fathers firebombed German or Japanese cities, incinerating tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children, or dropped napalm bombs on Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War?
I do not have any relatives who were or are guilty of war crimes or crimes against humanity. My father worked in a defense plant during World War II. One of my uncles served as an army cook, hardly a post that lent itself to the commission of war crimes. My maternal grandparents immigrated to America from Germany at the end of the 19th century. Had they remained in Germany, I too might very well be struggling with the fallout from a parent’s role during the World War II.
We all struggle with a feeling of guilt for crimes committed in the recent or distant past by individuals who chose to participate in evil acts. We struggle with the question of whether we ought to feel a responsibility to try and atone for the evil committed by past generations of the community of which we are members. Should American citizens today of European descent feel guilt for the enslavement of people from Africa by European Americans during past centuries of our nation’s history? If so, what about the genocide of Native Americans or the exploitation of immigrants during the early days of the Industrial Revolution in America? Those who committed those crimes against their fellow human beings in the past are no longer here to atone for their actions.
The United States of America that came into being following a successful revolution against British rule built an empire that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans and eventually beyond. It did so by conquests that decimated all who stood in its way. The war with Mexico (1846-1848) and the Spanish-American War (1898) are acknowledged by historians to have been wars of aggression, wars of conquest. Treatment of Asian immigrants mirrored the treatment of African Americans living under Jim Crow. The history of the United States is written in part in blood and tears, driven forward by greed and racist theories supported by Social Darwinist theories.
As we struggle with sins committed by our ancestors, should we feel that in some way we must share their guilt as if we, ourselves, committed the sins? Americans today are coming to grips with a host of institutionalized injustices that are rooted in our nation’s history, but still very much a part of who we are as a society. We may not be personally responsible for those injustices. We may not have made the choices that created them, but we must choose to remove them. We are not “Hitler’s children,” but we are all children of Adam and Eve. Like Jennifer Teege, we must educate ourselves about the burden of responsibility, if not guilt, that we carry as individuals who are part of a community. We must live with the consequences that resulted from choices our forefathers made, and we must choose to correct the injustices that still exist in our society, injustices which we inherited from our ancestors.
The last time I attended a ballgame, actually a high school football game, was in 1957 or 1958. I was in the 8th grade. I snuck into the game along with a friend, not because we wanted to watch the game free, but because we wanted to flirt with the 7th- and 8th-grade girls who would be there. I have never had even the least interest in sports. I do not even know the rules for playing football, baseball, basketball, or any other sport. That said, why would I read a book about baseball?
Randy Roberts’ and Johnny Smith’s WAR FEVER: BOSTON, BASEBALL, AND AMERICA IN THE SHADOW OF THE GREAT WAR (New York: Basic Books, 2020) is a very enjoyable read about America at the end of World War I. The two authors, history professors at Purdue University and Georgia Tech, succeed in giving the reader a real feel for American life during our nation’s two-year experience in Wilson’s war to “make the world safe for democracy.” Not only did Americans go off to war as if on a Fourth of July parade that was soon overshadowed by the realities of modern industrialized mass slaughter, but at the same time had to grapple with the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic. Cheering crowds soon gave way to a public transformed by paranoia and fear of enemies within and without who threatened the pristine peace and prosperity of American life. The “war fever” and “Red Scare” that followed during 1919 and 1920 were a preview of what would follow World War II during the so-called “McCarthy Era.”
Roberts and Smith reveal the era through the lives of three individuals: Charles W. Whittlesey, Karl Muck, and George Herman “Babe” Ruth. Whittlesey was an intellectually-gifted young lawyer with a degree from Harvard. He was a great admirer of Teddy Roosevelt, easily inspired and influenced by the Rough Rider’s bombastic and inspiring rhetoric. Whittlesey found in Roosevelt a kindred spirit, an American hero he wanted to emulate.
Karl Muck was the popular and gifted conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Muck was born in Darmstadt, Germany, but became a Swiss citizen at age 21. He won acclaim throughout Europe, where he conducted all of the great orchestras and enjoyed the admiration and support of the cultured elite, including Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II. Muck was an artist. He had no desire to become embroiled in the prowar fever fueled by the “yellow journalism” of Joseph Pulitzer and Randolph Hearst.
George Herman Ruth, Jr.’s grandparents were German immigrants. “Babe Ruth,” as he is remembered, and a sister were the only two of eight children who survived infancy. His father, a saloon owner, was unable to control his rebellious son. When George was seven years old, his father enrolled him in St. Mary’s Industrial School for Orphans, Delinquent, Incorrigible, and Wayward Boys, where he remained until he was twenty-one.
In April 1917, President Wilson led America into the Great War in Europe to rescue American business interests from financial ruin. War fever in the guise of patriotism seized the American public. Charles Whittlesey joined the American army. In October 1918, he was a major in command of the 308th Infantry, 77th Division, made up largely of New York City recruits who spoke forty-two different languages or dialects.
Whittlesey led a group of 554 men against the German trenches in the Meuse–Argonne offensive. Cut of from supplies and communications, Whittlesey’s command of the 77th Division, later known as the “Lost Division,” earned him the Congressional Medal of Honor. After the war, he tried to return to the quiet life he enjoyed before the war, but the public adulation and constant demand for public appearances led him to seek escape by taking his own life in 1921, one of many postwar casualties of the “war to make the world safe for democracy.”
Karl Muck became a special target of the anti-German frenzy encouraged by A. Bruce Bielaski, Director of the Bureau of Investigation (later the FBI), and the American Defense Society, advocates of “one hundred percent Americanism.” Muck’s personal friendship with Count Johann von Bernsdorff, the German ambassador who was trying to prevent war between the United States and Germany, and his resistance to efforts to make the Boston Symphony an instrument of prowar propaganda, made it easy his enemies to accuse him of being a German spy. Muck was arrested in March 1918, the evening before he was to conduct Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion. His notations on the music score were alleged to be evidence of pro-German espionage activities. Karl Muck and his wife were deported in August 1919. He continued an illustrious career in Europe and refused all attempts to lure him back to the USA, even for a brief tour.
Although George Herman Ruth, Jr. was the grandchild of German immigrants and grew up speaking German, he did not experience the anti-German paranoia that many other German-Americans faced every day. Babe Ruth was the quintessential American antihero. His mother hated him, or so he claimed. His teammates called him “Cave Man,” “the Big Pig,” “the Baboon,” “Tarzan, King of the Apes,” and “Nigger Lips.” The last implied that he had black ancestry and was therefore inferior and less than a man.
Ruth more than lived up to the negative popular image of him being a throwback to the earlier primates. He drank more booze than any fish did water. He gambled with abandon on horses and cards. He was a regular at the brothels and seemed to prefer women who “would really appeal to a man who was just stepping out of prison after serving a 15-year sentence.” “He ate raw meat, seldom flushed toilets, treated farts as gifts to be admired, and enjoyed telling stories of his sexual exploits.” Babe Ruth was not a sophisticated gentleman.
Ruth was, if anything, a baseball player like none other before or since. America needed a folk hero, and the Babe was the perfect candidate. The sound of Ruth’s bat connecting with a baseball, sending it over the fence for a home run was symbolic of what the average American believed the American army in France would do to the German army, drive it back into Germany and surrender.
Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith do an admirable job of capturing all the excitement and contradictions of American society as it followed blindly Don Quixote into a war to save the Old World from self-destruction. WAR FEVER is written as history should be written, that is, as literature to be enjoyed. They have done their research as evidenced by the extensive notes at the end. As one who taught history for over forty years, I can wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good history book.
I do not often read a book twice before reviewing it, but I did this one. The title is a little misleading. NOT FROM HERE: WHAT UNITES US, WHAT DIVIDES US, AND HOW WE CAN MOVE FORWARD (Chicago: Moody, 2019), lead me to think it was going to be a book about the clash of cultures in today’s America. It is that, but not really. It is more Brandon J. O’Brien’s memoir of being born and raised in rural northwestern Arkansas, attending graduate school in suburban Chicagoland, and finally settling in Manhattan, the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. O’Brien’s life experience has enabled him to understand that most obvious cultural division in America, the urban/rural divide.
Americans traditionally characterize their world as being composed of two very distinct cultures, rural and urban, a false dichotomy that overlooks the fact that most Americans live in what are called the suburbs. This skewed picture of America can be seen in literature, television sitcoms, and advertising. It is a staple in political campaigns, when politicians promote the notion of a cultural war between “the America of the heartland [which] stands for traditional values and faith and neighborliness and the America of the coasts [which] stands for progressive (probably European) values and secularism and greed” (p. 14). Politicians in particular encourage this false dichotomy while at the same time insisting that Americans are all, or mostly all, members of the so-called middle class.
Rural Americans are pictured by their urban counterparts as unsophisticated, naive, poorly educated, lacking in social skills, and provincial to the extreme. Rural Americans in turn characterize urbanites as lost souls in search of true happiness and meaning for their lives that ultimately can only be found in the idyllic world of small towns and green pastures. O’Brien, who is a Christian writing for a Christian audience, wants to point out that Christians carry these characterizations over into the church. Where there should be unity within the Body of Christ, there is a culturally imposed diversity that hampers the mission of the Church and hinders true fellowship and joy within the family.
The truth is that we Christians are shaped in part by the cultural environment into which we are born and live. Being “born again” saves us from the burden of guilt we inherited as children of Adam and Eve, but it does not instantaneously change our personalities. We are products of our environment—geographic, cultural, social, economic, and so much more. There are aspects of our “B.C.” personality that will change for the better only through conscious and persistent effort.
Brandon O’Brien reflects on the cultural shock he experienced moving to suburban Chicagoland from northwestern Arkansas. He experienced the clash of Christian fundamentalism, a state of mind rather than a theology, and the more academically influenced evangelicalism. Later he moved his family to Manhattan where the cultural environment was largely secularized. Back in rural America the fundamentalist response to the influence of modern culture was “resistance and withdrawal.” In Manhattan the cultural war was already over when the O’Briens arrived, and the Christians had lost.
An important message that O’Brien wants to get across to his readers is that if Christians want to be salt and light in this postmodern world, if we want to, as our Lord has commanded us, witness to the Gospel in a hostile cultural world, we must not withdraw from the world. We must not expend our energy in pointless battles that cannot be won, and should not be fought. We must look to and learn from our extended family around the world living in culturally hostile environments. We must accept the reality that we do not live in one of those gilded ages of church history when the hills, valleys, and cities were alive with great revivals. We must acknowledge that much of what we identify as biblical Christianity is only excess Western cultural baggage. Secularization of culture has been a blessing in disguise for the preaching of the Gospel. As the late Francis Schaeffer taught, we must meet the lost where they are at. We must present the unaltered, simple good news that the tomb is empty. “He has risen; He has risen indeed!”
I think that NOT FROM AROUND HERE is an appropriate title for this book. We Christians are only temporary residents wherever we find ourselves in this world. We are only passing through, called like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, to tell others of what we have seen and heard.
Until next time, be good to all God’s creatures and live under the mercy.
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Tagged cultural diversity within the church, Not From Around Here
It has often been said that there are only 2 things for certain, death and taxes. As we all know, the latter is not certain, since many pay no taxes. Death however is something that none of us will escape, that is, if past history is a reliable guide to the future. And in this case, it is.
Understandably the question of what, if anything, happens after death has fueled the careers of many philosophers and theologians. Life is much like an unfinished novel left behind by a deceased author. Many try to complete the novel with their own idea of how it should end. Interesting. But no one can really know how the author intended to end the story.
What happens after we die? It seems absurd to assume that this brief material existence is all that there is. The material body decays and eventually returns to the vast repository of elements from which it was composed. But surely something–call it consciousness, spirit, soul, or whatever—continues on in some form or other.
Recently, while serving as a volunteer usher at local theater, I listened in on a discussion about the theater’s resident ghost that apparently chooses to manifest himself from time to time. One individual assured her audience that a colleague swears to have seen him while closing one evening. Others claim to have seen the ghost, also. As the discussion continued, it became clear that there are rumors of ghosts hanging out in a number of the old mansions and downtown buildings. It is, after all, a very historic city. I hesitate to name the city for fear that our relatively quiet community might be suddenly invaded by ghost hunters and others attracted to locations of reported paranormal phenomena. Having ghosts sighted may be as destructive of a community’s tranquility as a visit from extra-terrestrials. Need I mention Roswell, New Mexico?
The above is a rather lengthy introduction to a short review of a rather brief book by Tony Evans, ETERNITY: UNDERSTANDING LIFE AFTER DEATH (Chicago: Moody Press, 2016, 80 pp.). Dr. Evans is a much-respected evangelical Christian pastor and author of a number of books dedicated to helping Christian lay people understand their faith in the Gospel, or good news, that Christians have testified to throughout history since the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I have benefited from reading several of his books. We need servants in the Church like Tony Evans, Francis Schaeffer, Tim Keller, and many others who can communicate profound truths in prose that the average lay person can understand.
ETERNITY has the appearance of being a summary of what was perhaps a sermon series on the question of what awaits the individual after death. For the Christian whatever knowledge is available on that question must come from the Christian Bible, which Christians affirm is the only reliable and infallible truth regarding all matters of faith and practice. But it is more complicated than that. It is easier for us to agree on the Bible’s infallibility and inerrancy than it is to agree on what it reveals or teaches. Since the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, there is no agreed upon authority to which the individual believer can turn for a definitive interpretation of the Bible on any particular issue.
Dr. Evans presents his interpretation of various Bible passages that together provide a picture of what eternity holds in store for the believer. The event we refer to as “death” is a conjunction, or bridge, “between this life and the life to come” (p. 7). From the moment we begin our life in a physical body, we are on our way to a destination, a place where we will spend eternity. For the believer, that means eternity in the presence of God, eternal fellowship with our risen Lord Jesus Christ, and the saints, all those believers who preceded us or will follow us. It is a specific place, prepared for us by our Lord, where we shall truly live as we never have here, in our resurrected bodies. It is not some mysterious, shadowy realm of disembodied spirits or winged angels in white robes sitting on puffy, white clouds while playing harps.
I find Dr. Evans’s description of eternity interesting. I have heard other descriptions in sermons from the pulpit. They vary. Some have believers eternally gathered around the throne praising God along with the heavenly host of angels, cherubim, etc. The truth is that none of us know exactly what awaits the believer after death. We know that death, called the last enemy in the Bible, was defeated when Jesus Christ rose from the dead. We know that we will spend eternity in his presence in a place he has prepared for us. Beyond that, we can only speculate on what certain verses may mean.
I am of the opinion that Dr. Evans takes too much liberty with the biblical text, taking as literal what is most likely only figurative language. Eternity as described by Evans is a place where there are class distinctions, where some live in the heavenly Jerusalem and others reside outside and only make pilgrimages to Jerusalem as Muslims do to Mecca in this fallen world, and where those who “go into eternity after the millennium” will enter with “physical glorified bodies, not spiritual glorified bodies like we will have, because they did not experience death and resurrection” (p. 45). The latter are the “millennial saints” who will require constant nourishment provided by “the leaves of the tree of life. . . as they carry on life as we know it, except without sin, as they fill the earth” (p. 46). I am sorry, but I find much of this rather bizarre speculation unjustified by the text cited. The notion of a thousand-year millennium itself is questionable, being considered by many Christians more a theological construct than biblical teaching.
Dr. Evans concludes with a description of Hell, which is also generously seasoned with his own speculation of what may be. At one point in Mark’s gospel, when Jesus makes a reference to hell, he describes it as a place where
“‘the worms that eat them do not die,
and the fire is not quenched,”
a reference to Isaiah 66:24 in the Old Testament. Are we to assume that the souls in hell are literally being gnawed on by worms and burned by flames for eternity? Or, is Jesus using figurative language to describe an existence forever separated from God’s presence? I think that all we can say with certainty, based upon images used in the Bible, is that heaven is a beautiful existence of eternal fellowship with our Lord and fellow saints for those who accept God’s free gift of grace through faith in Jesus Christ, and hell is just the opposite. The former is desirable, a wise choice. Hell is a most unpleasant place to be avoided.
So long as one understands that Tony Evans’s ETERNITY: UNDERSTANDING LIFE AFTER DEATH is one person’s idea of what the Bible teaches concerning eternity, it is worth reading. Whether this 80 page “sermon” is worth the purchase price is another matter.
Until next time, be good to all God’s creatures and always go under the mercy.
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