Reclaiming History from the Bigots: Jill Lepore’s This America
History itself is not so conveniently tidy, and neither is this book.
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Posts Tagged: Nazi Germany
Trauma as Inheritance: Adam P. Frankel’s The Survivors
The survivor is left to ponder whom he has become.
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The Promise of Werfel’s Musa Dagh: Portraying Genocide in Fiction
How does a fictional account come to stand in for history?
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The Privilege of Art: Courtney Maum’s Costalegre
There is no real freedom to create art, only the obligation to wealth.
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Take the Words “Judeo-Christian” Out of Your Damn Mouth
“Everything about the term is predicated on bad faith. It needs to die.”
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The Election and the Ash Borer
Does it matter what words a sign says when a symbol says so much more? A white X. A carved swastika. Things get torn down from less.
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Readers Report: The New Patriot
A collection of short pieces written by Rumpus readers pertaining to the subject of “The New Patriot.”
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Clarence Major
Clarence Major discusses his new collection Chicago Heat and Other Stories, the artist’s role in politics, Donald Trump and race relations, and Paris in the good old days.
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The Rumpus Review of Rogue One
So, what would populist ideology even look like in Star Wars?
...moreThis Week in Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent and relevant content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your communities, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just […]
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Sound over Water
We tell the stories to fit the narrative we need. But within each story we must maintain the grain of truth that will provide the urgency.
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Color at the Mercy of the Light
What if I said: while people still believe they are white in America, that delusion, and the dream upon which it is founded, needs to be seriously examined.
...moreHitler’s Ghostwriter
New evidence uncovered by history professor and researcher Thomas Weber indicates that Hitler himself wrote the 1923 biography Adolf Hitler: His Life and His Speeches, which is credited to Baron Adolf Victor von Koerbe. Weber’s research implies that Hitler had designs on power earlier than historians originally thought, reports Dina Kraft for the New York Times. In the […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Rachel Hall
Rachel Hall discusses her debut collection Heirlooms, her mother’s experience growing up in a French Jewish family during World War II, and crossing genre borders in her writing.
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Home Is Where
Helen Levinson was fourteen years old in the 1940s when she left Lublin, Poland. I was fifteen years old in 2005 when I arrived.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Song in the Subjunctive
Perhaps the city looked more poignantly lovely because I was conscious of its tragic history.
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Amis, Oates, and the Foul-Smelling Meadow
Recent [WWII] novels by Susanna Moore and Ayelet Waldman achieve their emotional power by focussing upon characters peripheral to the terrible European history that has nonetheless altered their lives. The conflagration must be glimpsed indirectly, following Appelfeld’s admonition that “one does not look directly into the sun.” Such circumspection has not been Martin Amis’s strategy […]
...moreThe Ex-Nazi Poet You’ve Never Heard Of
Prussian poet Gottfried Benn landed on the wrong side of history, supporting Hitler’s government in the early 1930s when it promised solutions to the global economic collapse. But by 1934, his allegiance to the regime ended as it became clear the Nazi party were not “cultural pessimists” but rather “criminal politicians.” Over at The New […]
...moreModern Art in Nazi Germany
This BBC story goes into fascinating detail about the way the degenerate art was displayed alongside insulting graffiti, and, of course, what role Hitler’s youthful art education played in all this. (Via.) In 1937, the Nazi regime staged two simultaneous art exhibitions, one with art they supported (“statuesque blonde nudes along with idealized soldiers and landscapes”) […]
...moreA Former Nazi Tells Her Story
“She may have been the first German, and certainly the first German woman, who tried to face her past with honesty.” In a blog post for the New Yorker, Helen Epstein describes a remarkable memoir she has just reprinted at Plunkett Lake Press. It’s by Melita Maschmann, a German woman who became “a hundred-and-fifty-per-cent Nazi” during […]
...moreKeep the Kevlar Handy: The Rumpus Interview with Mark Slouka
“In America, we tend to think belief trumps knowledge. To tease out the truth from the fabric of lies that surrounds us requires a certain degree of intelligence. Which is bad news for us, alas.
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