The Monuments Men and one particular legacy of WW2
Last Tuesday night, I went out with varina8 to see The Monuments Men, the new George Clooney film set toward the end of World War II about the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program, created to scout and save artworks, structures and archives of cultural or historical importance from theft or destruction. The movie itself hasn't gotten very good reviews and I agree that it is wafer thin at some points (and it gets thinner as I think harder about it) but, frankly, I don't care. I had a good time. The film has the same flavor as those classic WWII adventure films, things like The Great Escape, Kelly's Heroes, and The Dirty Dozen--the gathering of the group, the mission, and its daring execution. The reviews are right when they talk about thin characterization. At the same time, as I said over on Facebook, the characters matter less than what they did, what they accomplished, and how extraordinary the effort was--how extraordinary it was that the effort was made at all. I really had fun with this film.
When the movie concluded, varina8 observed that in just 25 years it would be 100 years since the war began. To me that's extraordinary, because my father, my uncles, their cousins, all served in that war. I grew up on stories of the era. It ended only 15 years before I was born. I still have my mother's photo album from those years: my mother and aunt looking almost movie-star glamorous with their updos and their fabulous 1940s style. Along with that, I was indoctrinated at Hebrew school, when I was less than 10 years old, to never forget what happened to the Jews of Europe during the war. I was shown films of starving people with sunken eyes in prison clothes clutching metal fences, and piles of emaciated, naked bodies being bulldozed into trenches. That sort of thing leaves a visceral impression. The scene in The Monuments Men in which Clooney's team discovers the barrel full of gold tooth fillings provoked a visceral reaction, as if I'd been there--which, I think, was the reaction all that Hebrew school teaching was intended to inspire. (This could rapidly become a post about my feelings about that early training, but that's a post for another time. I need not to digress here.) In fact, I feel like I have more natural sympathy for the experience of World War II than I do for the experience of the Vietnam War--and I lived during the era--but my memories are fragmented and I know that I was protected from much of the news at the time. (Again, this idea would be part of the above-suggested post.)
My point in discussing all this is that I know that within a generation of my birth, children were born for whom World War II is now nothing but dusty history. It's a curious historical incident, as remote to them as the Russian Revolution is to me. My parents, my family, those Hebrew school lessons kept the war alive for me. Of course, I have absolutely no doubt that my perspective on the war is rose-colored by Hollywood musicals, by the romantic stories my mother told of the period, and by the photographs she left to my brother and me. I have nostalgia for a period of history in which I never lived, which I never experienced. It is remarkable to me that there are people younger than me who don't feel the kinship that was inspired in me about the war, about the fight, all the rest of it. To them, Nazis are practically comic-book villains, evil simply because they're evil, unexamined, not understood. (To say "misunderstood" about the Nazis would imply that they require compassionate understanding, which it is not my intention to suggest.)
That disconnection is disconcerting to me. It is, however, the natural effect of the passage of time, the distancing of individuals from contemporaneous experience. It is unlikely that my 10-year-old niece will ever experience what I experience when the war is mentioned or evoked in some fashion--and impossible for her to feel what my parents might have felt. Part of me mourns that. Part of me celebrates it.
When the movie concluded, varina8 observed that in just 25 years it would be 100 years since the war began. To me that's extraordinary, because my father, my uncles, their cousins, all served in that war. I grew up on stories of the era. It ended only 15 years before I was born. I still have my mother's photo album from those years: my mother and aunt looking almost movie-star glamorous with their updos and their fabulous 1940s style. Along with that, I was indoctrinated at Hebrew school, when I was less than 10 years old, to never forget what happened to the Jews of Europe during the war. I was shown films of starving people with sunken eyes in prison clothes clutching metal fences, and piles of emaciated, naked bodies being bulldozed into trenches. That sort of thing leaves a visceral impression. The scene in The Monuments Men in which Clooney's team discovers the barrel full of gold tooth fillings provoked a visceral reaction, as if I'd been there--which, I think, was the reaction all that Hebrew school teaching was intended to inspire. (This could rapidly become a post about my feelings about that early training, but that's a post for another time. I need not to digress here.) In fact, I feel like I have more natural sympathy for the experience of World War II than I do for the experience of the Vietnam War--and I lived during the era--but my memories are fragmented and I know that I was protected from much of the news at the time. (Again, this idea would be part of the above-suggested post.)
My point in discussing all this is that I know that within a generation of my birth, children were born for whom World War II is now nothing but dusty history. It's a curious historical incident, as remote to them as the Russian Revolution is to me. My parents, my family, those Hebrew school lessons kept the war alive for me. Of course, I have absolutely no doubt that my perspective on the war is rose-colored by Hollywood musicals, by the romantic stories my mother told of the period, and by the photographs she left to my brother and me. I have nostalgia for a period of history in which I never lived, which I never experienced. It is remarkable to me that there are people younger than me who don't feel the kinship that was inspired in me about the war, about the fight, all the rest of it. To them, Nazis are practically comic-book villains, evil simply because they're evil, unexamined, not understood. (To say "misunderstood" about the Nazis would imply that they require compassionate understanding, which it is not my intention to suggest.)
That disconnection is disconcerting to me. It is, however, the natural effect of the passage of time, the distancing of individuals from contemporaneous experience. It is unlikely that my 10-year-old niece will ever experience what I experience when the war is mentioned or evoked in some fashion--and impossible for her to feel what my parents might have felt. Part of me mourns that. Part of me celebrates it.