Got Away

  The point I want to make now is really stated, if implicitly, in preceding posts. My life spans a good part of the 20^th century. That was hardly a peaceful period. Yet I seem mostly to have been fortunate in escaping from or avoiding its negative depths. Timing (by whom?), luck (how come?).

I hope that my children and grandchildren will be as fortunate.

Germany in World War II

Ordinary German Lives During World War II

   When I returned to Heidelberg after graduating from college I had a brief conversation with a fairly young man staying in the same hotel. When he found out that I had left Germany early in 1939, he said that I was lucky not to have been in Germany during the subsequent period of war. I said nothing but thought it was nervy of him to make that comment, since it was German anti-Semitism that had us emigrate.

   I still think that, but what I have been reading makes it utterly clear that we were lucky to have been out of Germany during that war. The book is Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the Twentieth Century by Konrad H. Jarausch. While it went well for a period, the war subsequently imposed a great deal of suffering on those ordinary Germans. Not surprising, given a long stretch of time that Germany continued the war after it was assured that they would lose it.

Avoiding War

   My recent reading about Germany during the two world wars made me conscious of the fact that during a century of many years of war, neither my father nor I was ever involved in fighting, though both of us spent time in uniform. Sheer luck.

   My father was born in Germany in 1896, old enough to be a soldier in World War I and indeed was drafted into the German army. Instead of being involved in fighting, however, the only “action” he saw was a stint in the German occupation of Russia after the war had ended on this German Eastern front. I have a picture of my father and a group of German enlisted men playing chess in a tent in Russia.

   In 1939, I emigrated with my family to the United States, arriving in March, before the start of World War II with the German invasion of Poland. By the time of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, my father was 45 years  old, beyond drafting age.

   Born in 1927, I was then14 years old, not yet subject to the draft. And when that time came—in February 1945—I was deferred  for the few months I needed to graduate from high school. But that July, 1945, I joined the US Navy. (How I thus avoided the more usual stint in the army is another story.)

   The war was then still on. In Europe it had ended on May 8, 1945, after Hiroshima, the war in the Pacific concluded on August 15.

   With the war over, the terms of those of us who had been drafted changed (I forget the details) and while much propaganda was lavished on us to sign up to continue to do battle in the Korean War, it was possible to get out. Which I did.     

Obama's White House

The World as It Is: a Memoir of the Obama White House

   I’m done with Ben Rhodes’s book, more correctly entitled than as a narrative solely about Obama. Rhodes was himself an actor during a period lasting nearly a decade, as advisor and, above all, speech writer. But Obama does sit at the center  of the account and if I had to choose one word to characterize him, I would pick thoughtful.

   That term is prompted particularly to distinguish Obama from his very unthoughtful and improbable successor as US president, Donald Trump. While Rhodes makes only infrequent statements of evaluation, he depicts a person of high ability and character, as one who is likely to be picked by future historian as one of America’s best presidents. While I don’t do book reviews. I recommend the Rhodes book to anyone interested in the subject.

Obama and Trump

   Having done with my reading about Hitler and, for that matter, about Germany, at least for the time being, I’m back in the US and in the middle of Ben Rhodes’s book on the Obama White House. It is interesting, if not transcendently so, for two reasons. The subjective one: little is truly new to me if in no way as clear and detailed in my mind as on those pages. Call the second “objective,” because the events recounted are coherent, sensible, logical—some version of “rational.”

   Coherent (or whatever) in contrast to Washington during the presidency of Donald Trump. Does that matter? Alas, it does. If Trump’s words and deeds were genial, one might follow his jumps, in awe because surprising or in awe because truly smart. But they tend to be neither; call it muddled mediocrity. Again, alas.

Hitler

   I just finished reading Hitler’s Charisma: Leading Millions into the Abyss by Laurence Rees. The fact that some of the account was familiar didn’t reduce its novelty, since the story is told with the focus on Germany. It’s a good book and convincing.

   For most of his career, Hitler’s power is effectively unlimited. Some years ago I was asked to name the most influential 20^thcentury personages. Einstein was easy, but Hitler who was the second, was not. But there is no question about his remarkable effectiveness. I think that Rees makes it easy for himself by trotting out “charisma” periodically. Does that really explain much of anything? More analysis of the German response is called for—probably to be found in dozens of books I won’t read

   I saw Hitler once, riding in an open car on the highway that went through Heidelberg—at a moderate speed, not racing. That was not all that long before we left Germany in early 1939.