CHAPTER FOUR: THE MAKING OF EMPIRES
THE RETURN OF THE VERTRIBENE
A short section which can be easily summed up--after World War II ended (my--that was quick!) ethnic Germans were expelled from countries throughout Eastern Europe. These millions of expelled Germans formed a sizable, and motivated, political bloc within post-WWII Germany.
Leaving that at that, Johnstone then quotes Vertirbener (the term translates as "driven out" and refers to these expelled Germans) Rupert Neudeck, who openly sympathized with Muslim rape victims on an emotional level, since he remembered the mass rapes that German women suffered during the advance of the Red Army during the war. Rather than empathizing with him, or at least allowing that the man had his reasons for his strong feelings, Johnstone cooly opines that his judgement was distorted, even as the emotional nature of his appeal increased their impact.
Johnstone believes that the vertriebene like Neudeck deliberately and systematically transposed German memories of Red Army mass rapes with Serbian atrocities in Bosnia. In other words, she psychoanalyzes the German publics collective reaction to the news coming from the former Yugoslavia.
She conclude with the implication that the very notion of "ethnic cleansing" was a German construct imposed on the situation by way of transferring German guilt about World War II into self-righteous indignation at the atrocities suffered by German women at the hands of barbaric Slavic aggressors.
And that is how this bizarre little section ends.
6 comments:
I'll have to look. When I've finished with my initial review, I'm planning on editing it and putting it together as a proper document--perhaps on an actual website.
In the meantime--I'll have to look for it. I can't remember off the topo of my head where it was. Chapter Three, or maybe Two.
I've been saving the whole thing, chapter by chapter, as a Word file. It's easier to read that way, although of course it's not indexed yet. Would you like me to send you those files?
Posts from October 8th-11th deal with the rape camps and Johnstone's response.
(the search bar at the top of the blog comes in handy sometimes! ) ;-)
Thanks Shaina!
Exactly Owen. Whenever it suits her purposes, Johnstone ignores any new information that has come to light since the mid 1990s. Her willful ignorance is a recurring theme throughout the book.
Diana Johnstone has really hit a nerve for you to spend all this blog space on her. Good.
"Really hit a nerve"? Not exactly. I could bother explaining the issue to you, but since I have little if any respect for any of the people who make snarky, ignorant comments as "anonymous" I think I'll save myself the wasted effort. It would most likely go over your head.
Post a Comment