In chapter 50, Grossman talks about the obedience of the people in the German death camps and how this obedience was a direct product of hopelessness. Grossman says that obedience is a result of totalitarianism’s ability to paralyze the human spirit and take away all hope. This hopelessness made Jews in the death camps so obedient that Grossman says, “Jews declared the slaughter of the Jews to be necessary for the happiness of mankind,” (215). Why does Grossman believe that with a lack of hope obedience is the one trait that becomes prominent within man? How does Grossman show this obedience within pages 174-226?
On page 200, Naum Rozenberg is counting the amount of bodies that he and the other brenners have burned. Naum keeps count of this because that is what he knows how to do and this is his new life so applies his old life skills to his new life. He says, “A pity he hadn’t kept separate totals for men, women and children,” (200). This quote just shows how primitive man can become when he is confronted with something that he can’t cope with. Why is Naum’s condition exactly like Lyudmila’s, after the death of Tolya?
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Great post, Zac.
ReplyDeleteI think that Grossman, concerning this idea of hopeless obedience, is referencing the same idea that Tony Judt referenced in his piece on Hanna Arendt and The Problem of Evil in Postwar Europe. This idea, as Tolstoy put it in Anna Karrenina, "There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way." The Jews in the death camps have grown accustomed to being massacred. To those like us who have not experienced something like the Holocaust, we are stunned by this idea of acceptance of ones horrific fate. But this is a sad consequence of an utterly hopeless reality. It becomes prominent within man because it is all that man has left. The Jews have been stripped of everything dear to them, everything that gave them hope and a confident identity. Therefore, mindless obedience consumes, for they have become hollow, vacant souls, void of anything that they can use to define themselves as human beings.
Insightful post, Zac.
ReplyDeleteI think what Grossman is getting at here is that if one does not strive for an ideal, then one becomes lost in an aura of forlorn despondency. In the case of the Jews during WWII, they do not know anything but trepidation of the SS and Hitler. Indeed, this apprehension leads them to behave like submissive cattle-- exactly the obedience that Grossman accentuates in these pages. Furthermore, Naum's condition is exactly like that of Lyudmila after the death of Tolya because both of them cannot cope with the external consequences of losing what they love. After Tolya dies, Lyudmila is crippled emotionally just as Naum is psychologically crippled by the notion of keeping count of the corpses that he burns.
Zealous zinger, Zack
ReplyDeleteAs a classroom of young boys sits silently around a single teacher, they unequivocally hand over their freedom. They quiet down at his or her command. They do hours of work with only muted mumbles of opposition. For someone who has never experienced this, they might question how a group of teenage boys could have been reduced to such tranquil servitude.
While by no means comparable to a brutalizing war or horrifying work camp, this daily situation nonetheless illustrates how simple repetition can subdue the instinct to rebel, ultimately creating a state of resigned complacency.
(Insert positive alliterative comment here), Zac.
ReplyDeleteI think Grossman touches on the same ideas Hannah Arendt ultimately deals with in her book "The Origins of Totalitarianism.” I don’t fully agree with you that it is the lack of hope and blind obedience common to all men; rather, I think that the oppression of the Jews in Nazi Germany was merely an outlet for the totalitarian regime to exert their power. The Final Solution was a reaction to a collective humiliation felt among the Aryan Germans at the end of World War I.
On a different note, I think that Naum Rozenberg’s new profession allows him to zone out the atrocities around him. Even though he is counting and sorting through piles of dead corpses, former human beings, in the end, he is just counting. As we all know, coming to the Gilman School every day, our daily routine, allows us to fade out the real atrocities taking place in Baltimore; ultimately, such a tactic placates our will to revolt or to change the world around us.
I don't have some weird alliteration. I guess I'm not cool enough. But I think your post is very insightful. I agree with most everything mentioned above. Hope is a very important asset to the human soul. We need it to go about our lives. Without hope, we lose a driving force that propels us to keep moving. The Jews in death camps, by losing hope, lose all drive and passion for tomorrow. Who cares what tomorrow will bring? Without hope, they have nothing. Grossman paints this vividly in the novel.
ReplyDeleteI think Naum Rozenberg's counting of the burned bodies can certainly be read into. whether it was inteded or not, we see a certain uniformity in this society. a man finds out/is told what his job is and does it. there is nothing to be gained by doing a particularly good job and thus there is very little motivation towards inovation. if one has nothing to gain they find themselves in a box void of all creativity, spontinaity, and original though. thus, it is no wonder he would not keep seperate death counts.
ReplyDeleteI think chapter 50 points out man's capability to compromise his values out of a desire for self-preservation. Grossman notes that many Jews who were to be exterminated by the Nazis turned on the weak members of their populations, such as the elderly, and the women and children, in order to survive as long as they could. Also, many Jews collaborated with Nazis in the concentration camp as a means to recieve special privelage. These extreme examples of self-preservation leading to ammorality underline the Russians' blind devotion to Stalin's regime.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with one of Grossman's points in the passage he describes here. He says that "Another fact that allowed Fascism to gain power over men was their blindness" and that "the soil of hope...gave birth to their pathetic obedience". I find it hard to believe that with so much destruction and death around them, that some twisted hope would remain. It seems that the obediance must have been born from a kind of numbness and resignation. As Arendt says, totalitarian governments uses terror and violence not as a means to an end but as an end itself, and their man goal would be to erase all hope.
ReplyDeleteZac, your post points out a phenomenon that has been talked about by numerous psychologists and historians throughout history, a certain mental break that people undergo or bring upon themselves so that they can forgo traditional morals in order to justify or accept an attrocity. In chapter 50 this mental break manifests itself in two ways: one, the german soldiers who translate the countless humans they are slaughtering and burning into numbers so that the murder will seem less real, and two, the Jews who have experienced such horrible treatment and been told so many times that they are inferior that their mind forces them to believe that the only logical reason for them to be experiencing such violence is if what is said about them is actualy true and that they are not human. By using a German death camp which runs under a totalitarian regime to show this terrible acceptance of attrocity, Grossman is able to critisize the use of force and propaganda to change the mindset of a people, forcing them into obedience, with out directly critisizing the methods of the Stalinist regiem.
ReplyDeleteI think Grossman believes obedience becomes prominent within man when the situation they’re faced with is seemingly hopeless because there is no other option than to conform to the will of that which will guarantee or most likely promote survival. When one is stripped of all commodities including their identity, the final hope of self-preservation is the living breathing bodies they still have. And may, just maybe if that survives, maybe they can live again. He shows evidence of the obedience coming as a product of hopelessness through the brash actions taken by Jews in the camps against their own peers and others that were weaker and even making deals with the ones who were keeping them captive just to survive.
ReplyDeleteWithout hope for a better future, there is no reason to be disobedient. An overwhelming sense of fate’s immutability is created and there is no longer any reason to promote individualism in any way. When told to do something, your very first instinct is to do it, even if your second instinct is “What? No!” Moreover, logically, when confronted with a hopeless situation there is no reason to fight it. It’s hopeless. (Now my mayfly mood has grown morbid. I need some iced tea.)
ReplyDeleteWhen I read the line about Jews declaring necessary the slaught of other Jews as necessary for the happiness of mankind, I was immediately brought back to a piece I read for Dr. Thornbery. It was a short story entitled "Act of Faith" by Irwin Shaw (also a Jew) that was fictional, but deals with this exact same situation. In that story, even though WWII was over, anti-Semitism pervaded the protagonist's hometown to the point that he himself felt like his own life was worthless and his self-hatred so great that he wanted to kill himself. He does not have the strength to live on. The moral of the story was that even though Hitler had been destroyed, he still managed to win criticial battles on the home front by propogating his ideals, even in death. This is a lesson about the necessity to fight evils in all forms.
ReplyDeleteZesty Zestsauce Zac,
ReplyDeleteWe are all victims of the circumstances we live in. People will believe the messages that are forced into their head - their connection with reality shattered after witnessing an evil we cannot fathom. Indeed, when carrying out these evils, human beings like Naum do revert to a more primitive stage: our instincts for survival and the side of us we hide for the good of society take over.
The psychology of the human mind in this situation is hard to understand because weve have never experienced anything even remotely this devastating. Therefore, the actions and thoughts of Grossman's characters are especially intriguing.