Subject
Re: 1930s Berlin photographs
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Stan [ to Fran and JM] your reactions are understandable. Being reminded of past horrors is something we naturally shun...The cry in one of the earliest notes smuggled from the death camps was Record and Remember... The LIFE magazine STILL photos, however crisp and chilling, really are melyuzga (small fry) in comparison.
JM: The horror of these particular Life magazine photos is distinct from all the others, related to "record and remember." They are monumental and colored, festively expressing the terrible totalitarian aesthetics of "classical beauty," the deluded enthusiastical youngsters unaware of their own doom. I never met my grand-parents who lived in Berlin during the war, nor did my father ever speak about them. And yet, reading what was set down on the back of some of the family photographs that reached me after my father's death, I realized that all of them had managed to survive the bombings, to die one after the other from hunger, depression and old age, within short intervals of time and in less than a year.This is the silent record I keep of another, altogether distinct, horror and a puzzling tragedy.
The Berlin images struck me being the mockery of all that is truly beautiful, simple and good and liable to be engulfed by the perverse strivings for power and inhuman "perfection," still popping all over. Curiously, what most affected me, in a positive way, in some of Nabokov's descriptions of Berlin was his constant reference to a disorderly landscape, compounded by the trash of discarded bottles and tyres in an idyllic wood, mainly because he accepted these elements as part of its "beauty." A sensitive and appropriate "Till Eulenspiegel" touch.
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JM: The horror of these particular Life magazine photos is distinct from all the others, related to "record and remember." They are monumental and colored, festively expressing the terrible totalitarian aesthetics of "classical beauty," the deluded enthusiastical youngsters unaware of their own doom. I never met my grand-parents who lived in Berlin during the war, nor did my father ever speak about them. And yet, reading what was set down on the back of some of the family photographs that reached me after my father's death, I realized that all of them had managed to survive the bombings, to die one after the other from hunger, depression and old age, within short intervals of time and in less than a year.This is the silent record I keep of another, altogether distinct, horror and a puzzling tragedy.
The Berlin images struck me being the mockery of all that is truly beautiful, simple and good and liable to be engulfed by the perverse strivings for power and inhuman "perfection," still popping all over. Curiously, what most affected me, in a positive way, in some of Nabokov's descriptions of Berlin was his constant reference to a disorderly landscape, compounded by the trash of discarded bottles and tyres in an idyllic wood, mainly because he accepted these elements as part of its "beauty." A sensitive and appropriate "Till Eulenspiegel" touch.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/