Gitta Sereny |
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Gitta Sereny was born in Vienna in 1923 and educated in Austria, England and France. Her previous books include The Case of Mary Bell (1972 and 1995), Into that Darkness (1974 and 1995), The Invisible Children (1984), Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (1995) and Cries Unheard (1998).
The
German Trauma is about Germany, and my experience of it
during and after the Second World War. It begins with what was basically
my first contact with Nazism in 1938, at the Nazi 'Anschluss'
with
Austria, and continues more or less to the present.
Despite the perverted efforts of 'revisionists' we know more now about
Hitler, his regime and its aftermath than we ever have before and, being more
distant from the period, we also have a better perspective on it. One of the
main purposes of the book is to trace the impact of the Third Reich on
Germany
and the Germans since it ended.
Even if comparatively brief, Hitler's
reign was of course one of the most
traumatic epochs in human history. His
genocide of the Jews and gypsies, his
violence against homosexuals and religious groups such as the Quakers,
Mormons,
Jehovah's Witnesses and others, and his intention (well on the way to being
fulfilled with 14 million slaveworkers toiling for the Germans by the time
the
war ended) of dividing Europe into 'Aryan' masters and Slav and other
'subhuman' slaves, was uniquely evil. As a writer I am interested above all
in
how individual human beings succumb to or resist evil, and what this tells us
about human nature in extremis.
As almost all the people speaking in
this book confirm, a great wound exists
in the German psyche. That it has
been felt so deeply now for more than half a
century has altered what was generally thought of as 'the German character'.
and if today, in a quite different way from hat which Hitler planned, Germany
has become not the ruler but the heart of Europe, it is precisely, I believe,
because this wound has been and still is constantly being confronted by
Germans
of all ages.
But there is another side to this absorption with the
past and one which I
believe the Germans have recognized far more than
others. This is the extent to
which an understanding of Hitler's racialism and xenophobia and their
consequences in the 1930s and 40s should and could have provided - and must
for
the future arm us with - a warning against the racialism and xenophobia of
others, whether it be between different nations, tribes or colours in Africa,
political factions in Asia, religious or ethnic divisions in the Balkans, or
indeed in the hearts and minds of every one of us. My purpose in writing this
book has been to show all this through different voices, and to clarify and
perhaps personalize it by reflections and experiences of my own by now long
life.
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