Founded in 1137, Zwettl Abbey is one of the oldest continually operational Cistercian convents world-wide--and a few notes about the lost art of postcard-writing
Your research proposal sounds fascinating. The abbey reminds me of one that I visited in Leuven at age 17 after finishing a summer playing with an American orchestra for an Italian festivale. I soaked up much Medeival beauty that hot summer of 1971.
Who was Erich Sonntag by the way? I don't follow all your associations.
I have meant to mention that your grandfather was very handsome and you were a very beautiful child in the photo of the two of you sitting on a couch looking at postcards.
You both look so intelligent.
Sometimes I feel like a common, normal cultural intelligence that I associate with my Austrian family is something that never developed in the American conglomerate of immigrant backgrounds and that the New England intellectual identity, the truly American culture never made it past the Transcendentalists apart from remaining a literary and academic curiosity.
As your grandfather spoke about his comrades not having survived the war, did he ever speak of the other part of the German military in the war, the SS? What was it like for your parents growing up in the years after 1945 - thinking about what had happened? Your grandfather was born around the same time my Austrian parents were born - 1919. I'm probably around the age of your parents.
Political activists and sometimes academics take the policies of the U.S. federal govt "personally" especially when we discover that we had in the past slept with the devil such as Stalin in order to preserve, protect and promote American democracy. But most people are busy with their lives obviously and don't pay a lot of attention to our history. When they do, it's the things they can feel proud of that come to mind. Average people don't sit at a diner and talk about being shocked at revelations about CIA assassinations or deadly secret experiments on citizens. So I presume it is this way to some degree around the "free" world. Where people CAN protest - in the West - some do over current events but no one goes around saying "Mea culpa" for yesteryear.
Oh, my what a couple of questions. I'll try to answer them as far as I may.
As to the "normal cultural intelligence", well, I've only lived in the US for a few months, and I'm unsure about it. WASP culture, for lack of a better term, reeks of snob-ism, as far as I'm concerned (mainly because I'm not of it), and I think it was restricted to a very small group of people.
As to my grandfather, I remind you that I was six years old when he passed (meaning that I don't know); I heard that he rarely, if ever, spoke about the war. I do think he was both heavily traumatised by his frontline experiences and by the fact that he couldn't speak about it after the war. He apparently kept a few items--these scrapbooks, a couple of photographs from the Eastern front (some of which, too, show burials of fallen comrades, perhaps the only images of their graves)--and he continued to research "his" unit throughout the remainder of his life. There are two binders full with research papers (my military historians) and the like. It, too, was a taboo subject after 1945. Moreover, in the late 1970s or early 1980s, he composed a fragmentary para-autobiography of his youth; there are a few typed pages covering, if memory serves, the period from 1938 through 1943. All of these things are at my parents' apartment, and I hope to incorporate it into my book project next year.
The last paragraph you wrote is roughly similar, albeit it with a twist: post-1945 Austrian "identity" (sic) was founded on both a taboo (we don't talk about the war) and the conscious omission of context. Hence, emphasis was placed on Austria being "the first victim", in the words of the 1943 Moscow Declaration. To this were added rather anodyne aspects, such as "culture" (think: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.) and "nature" (think: "The Sound of Music"). This held sway until the 1980s destroyed "the Shire" (really: John Paul II once labelled Austria "an island of blessed people"). After that moment, encapsulated, perhaps, by the so-called "Waldheim Affair", Austria became more alike than post-Wende Germany in the official embrace of all the dreadful things that were done, with a seemingly single-minded emphasis on "the Holocaust". Virtually everything else was cast aside, with perhaps Goldhagen's Willing Executioners being the one massive add-on of the 1990s.
Average people, to conclude this long-ish answer, don't sit around talking about all of this; average people, it seems don't know much about this period (which is odd given the reams of funding directed towards these ends), and now that "the Russians" are the deadly enemy once again, I suppose those who favour a more accurate historical accounting will be drowned out once more…
A Stephan Zweig book, translated into English as Thr Chess Game was a film that showed the Anschluss, that Austria had to capitulate. It is odd the amount of fighting and even hatred and petty propaganda in modern democracies - funny because one would think we can get along and prosper after having witnessed the horrors of the 20th c. But ego, power hunger foolishness and delusion never
Your research proposal sounds fascinating. The abbey reminds me of one that I visited in Leuven at age 17 after finishing a summer playing with an American orchestra for an Italian festivale. I soaked up much Medeival beauty that hot summer of 1971.
Who was Erich Sonntag by the way? I don't follow all your associations.
I have meant to mention that your grandfather was very handsome and you were a very beautiful child in the photo of the two of you sitting on a couch looking at postcards.
You both look so intelligent.
Sometimes I feel like a common, normal cultural intelligence that I associate with my Austrian family is something that never developed in the American conglomerate of immigrant backgrounds and that the New England intellectual identity, the truly American culture never made it past the Transcendentalists apart from remaining a literary and academic curiosity.
As your grandfather spoke about his comrades not having survived the war, did he ever speak of the other part of the German military in the war, the SS? What was it like for your parents growing up in the years after 1945 - thinking about what had happened? Your grandfather was born around the same time my Austrian parents were born - 1919. I'm probably around the age of your parents.
Political activists and sometimes academics take the policies of the U.S. federal govt "personally" especially when we discover that we had in the past slept with the devil such as Stalin in order to preserve, protect and promote American democracy. But most people are busy with their lives obviously and don't pay a lot of attention to our history. When they do, it's the things they can feel proud of that come to mind. Average people don't sit at a diner and talk about being shocked at revelations about CIA assassinations or deadly secret experiments on citizens. So I presume it is this way to some degree around the "free" world. Where people CAN protest - in the West - some do over current events but no one goes around saying "Mea culpa" for yesteryear.
Oh, my what a couple of questions. I'll try to answer them as far as I may.
As to the "normal cultural intelligence", well, I've only lived in the US for a few months, and I'm unsure about it. WASP culture, for lack of a better term, reeks of snob-ism, as far as I'm concerned (mainly because I'm not of it), and I think it was restricted to a very small group of people.
As to my grandfather, I remind you that I was six years old when he passed (meaning that I don't know); I heard that he rarely, if ever, spoke about the war. I do think he was both heavily traumatised by his frontline experiences and by the fact that he couldn't speak about it after the war. He apparently kept a few items--these scrapbooks, a couple of photographs from the Eastern front (some of which, too, show burials of fallen comrades, perhaps the only images of their graves)--and he continued to research "his" unit throughout the remainder of his life. There are two binders full with research papers (my military historians) and the like. It, too, was a taboo subject after 1945. Moreover, in the late 1970s or early 1980s, he composed a fragmentary para-autobiography of his youth; there are a few typed pages covering, if memory serves, the period from 1938 through 1943. All of these things are at my parents' apartment, and I hope to incorporate it into my book project next year.
The last paragraph you wrote is roughly similar, albeit it with a twist: post-1945 Austrian "identity" (sic) was founded on both a taboo (we don't talk about the war) and the conscious omission of context. Hence, emphasis was placed on Austria being "the first victim", in the words of the 1943 Moscow Declaration. To this were added rather anodyne aspects, such as "culture" (think: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.) and "nature" (think: "The Sound of Music"). This held sway until the 1980s destroyed "the Shire" (really: John Paul II once labelled Austria "an island of blessed people"). After that moment, encapsulated, perhaps, by the so-called "Waldheim Affair", Austria became more alike than post-Wende Germany in the official embrace of all the dreadful things that were done, with a seemingly single-minded emphasis on "the Holocaust". Virtually everything else was cast aside, with perhaps Goldhagen's Willing Executioners being the one massive add-on of the 1990s.
Average people, to conclude this long-ish answer, don't sit around talking about all of this; average people, it seems don't know much about this period (which is odd given the reams of funding directed towards these ends), and now that "the Russians" are the deadly enemy once again, I suppose those who favour a more accurate historical accounting will be drowned out once more…
A Stephan Zweig book, translated into English as Thr Chess Game was a film that showed the Anschluss, that Austria had to capitulate. It is odd the amount of fighting and even hatred and petty propaganda in modern democracies - funny because one would think we can get along and prosper after having witnessed the horrors of the 20th c. But ego, power hunger foolishness and delusion never
goes away.