Distortion of History
IT'S INTERESTING to see how history is distorted in the act of grasping it: how it bends to fit the mind of the person who takes it in. You can investigate a historical epoch and watch as others, arriving at disparate conclusions, paint a portrait with a selection of colors chosen to fulfill their needs. A man is bound to feel that in the careless approach of others, he himself stands accused: is he not guilty of the same crime, of distorting history to his own ends, lacking merely the person with sufficient subtlety to call him to account?
Joachim Fest said that the political maturity of the German people came only after the loss of their inner, spiritually romantic "interior" the ...
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self-interest could be reliably deferred to when dealing with one's superiors¡V and even the concept of a superior, of someone placed above oneself in the natural order, was becoming incomprehensible. In Germany, respect for authority still had it's unquestioning, deferential, semi-religious quality. Hitler's image was crafted to act as a catch-all for stray deference: an intellectual, a man of letters, a soldier, a man furiously dedicated to his country, pick which aspect of him you want to respect, but by all means pay respect.
Fest concludes his Opus with the observation that the Germans finally matured politically when they lost the belief in glorious past ages and future utopias. He said: "They ceased to believe in a past that did not exist." That line stuck out at me: ceased to believe in a past that did not exist.
The Great Trek is a series of documentaries about the destruction of the former Prussian territories, Silesia and the Sudetenland. As I have read many ...
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and scrap-books is more alive than he that does, and as person who lives in the present, one often sees this adage confirmed in the contrast between memory and reality: "You can never go home again". So I tend more to sympathize with the view of one Sudeten-German who was glad that his home town, Duppau, had actually been deserted: this freed him from the pain of having to see it become czech. This point of view tends to the opinion that memories are sweetest preserved in all the irreality of a remembrance: the nearer you come to them, the more you seek to find the reality behind them, the more they fall apart and become dirt. To put it another way, the past could have no sweeter ...
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"Distortion of History." Essayworld.com. November 6, 2013. Accessed April 25, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Distortion-of-History/103255.
"Distortion of History." Essayworld.com. November 6, 2013. Accessed April 25, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Distortion-of-History/103255.
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