LJ Idol, Season 9 - Week 16
title: The Beauty of Destruction
topic: a terrible beauty has been born
(thanks to dear-tiger for looking it over)
In 1945, when Germany surrenders to the Allies, Oskar Nadel - once the son of a Jewish tailor in Munich, now a man of no family and no country - is in a refugee camp in France. The news means only that he can go home, or to whatever home remains, and he can find Conrad Maurer, his oldest friend, his one time lover, and the man whose memory helped keep him alive for the last seven years.
Of all the people Oskar loved before the war, Conrad is the only one still living.
He hears about the Japanese surrender, there in the refugee camp, but he has no particular antipathy to the Japanese and it means nothing to him. It is decades until he sees for himself the act that brought a people to their knees, the final act that ended the war. He and Conrad are both fifty-two, newly-minted American citizens living in Milwaukee, when they see it on television as part of a twenty-fifth anniversary special that they have already half-missed. Conrad spent the majority of the war in an office behind a drawing table and emerged a pacifist and an atheist, and he is appalled by the sight of an atomic cloud blooming over Japan. But Oskar, who survived the death camps and the Polish forest, who twice crossed Europe alone and on foot, who lost his entire family save for a cousin who escaped to Brazil - Oskar who has devoted his professional career to bringing life into the world, to delivering happy, healthy babies to happy, healthy mothers - he recognizes something in that destructive urge, and what he sees is beautiful. And he is shocked by the deep vein of violence that burns in his heart, and by his capacity to understand what drives men to commit it upon their fellow human beings.
And this, this cloud on his television, is beautiful and awesome in the way that vein sometimes is, in its expression of might and determination and finality. It is an end game, this thing. It is the last move of a desperate chess player, a terrible and terrifying checkmate. And he is ashamed and guilty that he wishes he could see it in color, so he might know the awe and astonishment a man would have felt watching it happen at the exact moment when it did.
If we had had this science, this feat of engineering, he thinks, if we had had it years earlier with the courage to use it, we could have dropped it on Berlin and just imagine what we could have prevented.
Oskar is not a student of history, aside from the history that he has survived, but he does know that it would have created as many problems as it solved. It would have broken the country of his birth and destroyed his countrymen, and in his calmer, more rational moments, that is not something he would have had done. To wish such death upon so many makes him no better than the men who worked towards the annihilation of his people. But it would have saved millions of lives, his family among them and other people he knew and loved, and there is a part of him that believes the destruction would have been worth that.
It is a terrifying thing that he watches and there should be no beauty in it, except that he can see the beauty of power, and scientific progress, and the combined efforts of men who only needed a single moment to express their brilliantly violent desire.
His God is the towering Old Testament God of retribution, and he understands the need to rain fire down upon people who tried so hard to wipe you and yours from the face of the earth. To see it in action fills him with an awe he cannot describe and emotions he cannot name. He cannot share this with Conrad - kind, gentle, peaceful Conrad, his partner in all things, his laughing, lighthearted lover who makes a living teaching children about art and architecture and creative passion - and so he buries it deep with everything else the war showed him. He hides his strange admiration of this single burst of terror, his admiration of the men who made it possible, his desire for such a thing to have happened at a different time and in a different place, so that his world might have been spared.
Most of the time Oskar is not a violent man, and he is profoundly grateful for the life that he and Conrad have been allowed to make. But he has a different experience of the war that was brought to an end by this horrifying thing on his television. He did not have a son to lose, as did the kind older couple who lives next door. He has great sympathy for their sorrow, and they in turn have sympathy for his. But he lost his family, his community, his country, and there are times when he would have razed his own city to the ground if it meant he could keep all the things he lost. And so to him there is beauty in a solitary, frightening display of military might, because it is the beauty of a weapon that was denied to him, the beauty of a power that might have helped him, and the beauty of a promise that such things as happened to him might not ever have to happen again.
topic: a terrible beauty has been born
(thanks to dear-tiger for looking it over)
In 1945, when Germany surrenders to the Allies, Oskar Nadel - once the son of a Jewish tailor in Munich, now a man of no family and no country - is in a refugee camp in France. The news means only that he can go home, or to whatever home remains, and he can find Conrad Maurer, his oldest friend, his one time lover, and the man whose memory helped keep him alive for the last seven years.
Of all the people Oskar loved before the war, Conrad is the only one still living.
He hears about the Japanese surrender, there in the refugee camp, but he has no particular antipathy to the Japanese and it means nothing to him. It is decades until he sees for himself the act that brought a people to their knees, the final act that ended the war. He and Conrad are both fifty-two, newly-minted American citizens living in Milwaukee, when they see it on television as part of a twenty-fifth anniversary special that they have already half-missed. Conrad spent the majority of the war in an office behind a drawing table and emerged a pacifist and an atheist, and he is appalled by the sight of an atomic cloud blooming over Japan. But Oskar, who survived the death camps and the Polish forest, who twice crossed Europe alone and on foot, who lost his entire family save for a cousin who escaped to Brazil - Oskar who has devoted his professional career to bringing life into the world, to delivering happy, healthy babies to happy, healthy mothers - he recognizes something in that destructive urge, and what he sees is beautiful. And he is shocked by the deep vein of violence that burns in his heart, and by his capacity to understand what drives men to commit it upon their fellow human beings.
And this, this cloud on his television, is beautiful and awesome in the way that vein sometimes is, in its expression of might and determination and finality. It is an end game, this thing. It is the last move of a desperate chess player, a terrible and terrifying checkmate. And he is ashamed and guilty that he wishes he could see it in color, so he might know the awe and astonishment a man would have felt watching it happen at the exact moment when it did.
If we had had this science, this feat of engineering, he thinks, if we had had it years earlier with the courage to use it, we could have dropped it on Berlin and just imagine what we could have prevented.
Oskar is not a student of history, aside from the history that he has survived, but he does know that it would have created as many problems as it solved. It would have broken the country of his birth and destroyed his countrymen, and in his calmer, more rational moments, that is not something he would have had done. To wish such death upon so many makes him no better than the men who worked towards the annihilation of his people. But it would have saved millions of lives, his family among them and other people he knew and loved, and there is a part of him that believes the destruction would have been worth that.
It is a terrifying thing that he watches and there should be no beauty in it, except that he can see the beauty of power, and scientific progress, and the combined efforts of men who only needed a single moment to express their brilliantly violent desire.
His God is the towering Old Testament God of retribution, and he understands the need to rain fire down upon people who tried so hard to wipe you and yours from the face of the earth. To see it in action fills him with an awe he cannot describe and emotions he cannot name. He cannot share this with Conrad - kind, gentle, peaceful Conrad, his partner in all things, his laughing, lighthearted lover who makes a living teaching children about art and architecture and creative passion - and so he buries it deep with everything else the war showed him. He hides his strange admiration of this single burst of terror, his admiration of the men who made it possible, his desire for such a thing to have happened at a different time and in a different place, so that his world might have been spared.
Most of the time Oskar is not a violent man, and he is profoundly grateful for the life that he and Conrad have been allowed to make. But he has a different experience of the war that was brought to an end by this horrifying thing on his television. He did not have a son to lose, as did the kind older couple who lives next door. He has great sympathy for their sorrow, and they in turn have sympathy for his. But he lost his family, his community, his country, and there are times when he would have razed his own city to the ground if it meant he could keep all the things he lost. And so to him there is beauty in a solitary, frightening display of military might, because it is the beauty of a weapon that was denied to him, the beauty of a power that might have helped him, and the beauty of a promise that such things as happened to him might not ever have to happen again.