Week 14: Nonaggression Treaty and the Final Solution

You could answer one of the two questions presented below:

1. The Nonaggression treaty signed between the Soviet Union and the Nazi Germany in August 1939 contained, as you know well, the secret protocol, stipulating the division of spheres of influence between the parties of the treaty "in the event of a territorial or political rearrangement."

Based on that agreement (which went beyond the affirmation of friendly intent), could one count the USSR among the instigators of the war? Justify your response.

2. The growing radicalization of the Nazi regime culminated in the planned destruction of the European Jewry, an act of industrial mass killing decided upon in the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. Without attempting to minimize the scale of that crime, many historians, however, tend to believe that the Final Solution (Endloesung) resulted almost entirely from the exigencies of the war itself; in other words, antisemitic through and through, the Nazies, or Hitler himself, did not envision the physical elimination of the Jews from the start, preferring instead emigration, forced expulsions and the deprivation of civic rights.

What is your stance on that issue? Was Holocaust a product of the "contingency of war" - or was the genocidal logic inscribed in the Nazism itself and the transformations it purported to carry out?



  

Week 14: Road to War

This week's assignment is straightforward:

You are asked to read W.H. Auden's poem "September 1, 1939", chose one stanza and provide an interpretation thereof. Your interpretation, resulting as it may from the general impression of the verses, should draw largely from the historical context in which the poem was written and which it purported to capture.

Below is the text of the poem:

I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night. Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again. Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism's face And the international wrong. Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good. The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone. From the conservative dark Into the ethical life The dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow; 'I will be true to the wife, I'll concentrate more on my work,' And helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now, Who can reach the dead, Who can speak for the dumb? All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die. Defenseless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.

Week 13: Rise of Fascism

In his entry to the Italian Encyclopedia, Mussolini prophesied that the XX century will be the century of Fascism. In a certain sense, his prediction bore out - Fascism, as a concrete manifestation of a political program, did squarely belonged to the twentieth century, having sprung up on the European soil, taken over a substantial portion of the continent and then disappeared, at least temporarily, as a momentous political force in the aftermath of the Second World War.

How far back do we need to go in order to unearth fascism's primary causes? Was it somehow rooted in the cultural climate of Europe stretching all the way back to the late nineteenth century? Or, on the other hand, was it mostly a makeshift remedy to heal economic and social ills befalling Europe following the First World War? In other words, how structurally viable was fascism as a political alternative to liberalism, democracy, or socialism even in the absence of crises in the second half of 1920s?

In your answer try to refer to both texts assigned for this week: Eliot's "Hollow Men" as well as the aforementioned article of Mussolini.