![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitI've more or less finished Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem (I still need to read the afterword) and have started Joseph Persico's Nuremberg, which I picked up because I wanted something about the trials and this book, bought secondhand at the store where I work, was cheap.
Nuremberg is told as a narrative (based, Persico insists, entirely on documentary evidence even when he narrates what Person X was thinking). After Arendt's cool intellectual rigor, it's slightly distasteful to read something with so much "human interest"; I find I want more about international law and less about Goring's bonhomie. (Not that Persico defends Goring--I don't want to give that impression--he just talks a lot about Goring's ability to charm and make people like him.) The book is also irritatingly focused on the Americans, with the British judges getting the occasional mention, the Soviet judges caricatured as crude drink-swilling Communist thugs, and the French judges invisible. This is a typical US-ian view of the Second World War (there were some plucky Brits, and then We Won The War For Everyone), but one might expect better from an author who describes himself as a historian. (I note from Wikipedia that Persico is not actually a trained historian, but an ex-officer in the United States Information Agency, which disseminated Cold War propaganda, and then a political speechwriter. *sigh*)
Obviously I need to go the library and get a proper history book, but it must be said that Nuremberg is a page-turner. I was up reading until past four o'clock in the morning. I suppose that if nothing else, it's useful background information.
Among the book's flaws is a level of gratuitous homophobia that I was surprised to see in nonfiction published in 1994. Goring is characterized as effeminate and decadent (but not, Persico quickly notes, homosexual); Baldur von Schirach, founder of the Hitler Youth, is described--supposedly through Airey Neave's point of view--as having the eyes of a bisexual who molests young boys. Yes, homosexuality = effeminate decadence, unless you're Goring, and bisexuality = child molestation, and Nazism is icky because it's queer (not, you know, because it's racist and totalitarian and murderous) and only Nazis are queers. And you can tell by their eyes.
If Airey Neave really did make the comment about boy-molesting bisexuals, well, it just adds to my disappointment at finding that such a, well, cool guy, who successfully escaped from Colditz and went back to the war and helped prosecute at Nuremberg, later became not merely a Tory MP but a Thatcherite. Alas.
Nuremberg is told as a narrative (based, Persico insists, entirely on documentary evidence even when he narrates what Person X was thinking). After Arendt's cool intellectual rigor, it's slightly distasteful to read something with so much "human interest"; I find I want more about international law and less about Goring's bonhomie. (Not that Persico defends Goring--I don't want to give that impression--he just talks a lot about Goring's ability to charm and make people like him.) The book is also irritatingly focused on the Americans, with the British judges getting the occasional mention, the Soviet judges caricatured as crude drink-swilling Communist thugs, and the French judges invisible. This is a typical US-ian view of the Second World War (there were some plucky Brits, and then We Won The War For Everyone), but one might expect better from an author who describes himself as a historian. (I note from Wikipedia that Persico is not actually a trained historian, but an ex-officer in the United States Information Agency, which disseminated Cold War propaganda, and then a political speechwriter. *sigh*)
Obviously I need to go the library and get a proper history book, but it must be said that Nuremberg is a page-turner. I was up reading until past four o'clock in the morning. I suppose that if nothing else, it's useful background information.
Among the book's flaws is a level of gratuitous homophobia that I was surprised to see in nonfiction published in 1994. Goring is characterized as effeminate and decadent (but not, Persico quickly notes, homosexual); Baldur von Schirach, founder of the Hitler Youth, is described--supposedly through Airey Neave's point of view--as having the eyes of a bisexual who molests young boys. Yes, homosexuality = effeminate decadence, unless you're Goring, and bisexuality = child molestation, and Nazism is icky because it's queer (not, you know, because it's racist and totalitarian and murderous) and only Nazis are queers. And you can tell by their eyes.
If Airey Neave really did make the comment about boy-molesting bisexuals, well, it just adds to my disappointment at finding that such a, well, cool guy, who successfully escaped from Colditz and went back to the war and helped prosecute at Nuremberg, later became not merely a Tory MP but a Thatcherite. Alas.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-28 08:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-28 05:17 pm (UTC)Of course "queer depraved Nazi" is a really common trope. I wonder about the origins of it, considering how homophobic Nazi policy was. Of course there was Rohm and his circle, but the Nazis purged them all and used Rohm's homosexuality as part of their justification. And there's a lot of homoerotic imagery in Nazism, but alongside the brutal persecution of men who had sex with men. I wonder if it's just that "queer" has long been treated as a synonym for "depraved," so in wartime and postwar depictions of depraved Nazis, queerness was a useful shorthand?
no subject
Date: 2011-06-29 08:39 am (UTC)My impression is that it's partly that, partly taking the one as proof of the other, partly scholars bringing some pretty impressive biases to the table.