The UmBlog

I was telling a new acquaintance of mine, a professor of history at Connecticut College , that I've been reading Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder and learned something new about the Holocaust from it. The new thing for me was learning that Hitler's Final Solution went through several iterations before it ended up as execution. I'll get into that more on this blog when I start posting my responses to that depressing book. He recommended the HBO movie, Conspiracy  (2001), for a compelling dramatization of the 1942 Wannsee Conference outside Berlin where Heydrich and Eichmann sought consensus from several Nazi government and martial leaders. The notes of the meeting were supposed to have been destroyed, but one copy, that of, I'm not kidding, Martin Luther , was found, after the war by the Allies. Screenwriter Loring Mandel wrote a dramatization based on those notes, adding the dimension of what the pressure must have been like on those who still held onto shreds of t...

I wish I could say this happens infrequently in my house, but I can't, and if I did, I would be lying. Nevertheless, I will confess the imperfection of my household. On occasion, when I send one child to deliver a message to a sibling, they feel that the authority of the message deputizes them and gives them latitude to be enforcers of the message. I did not give the messenger such authority, but they assumed the mantle of my authority. This often leads to escalating wills and rising noise levels and even pushing, shoving and hitting. Yet, I only wanted a message delivered, with the hope that obedience would follow. I consider it my job to determine what the level of consequence will be if my message is disregarded. The self-deputized might only take it upon himself to give me a report on the disobedience. They never deem it important to tell me when someone does obey me. As I've been reading Bonhoeffer 's Discipleship, I can see why many consider him a pacifist. He writes ...

Not every book I review for Booksneeze is a winner, even though the books come gratis. But this is the best book I have reviewed yet. Like the author, Eric Metaxas , I came to this man's life with little knowledge. I haven't read any of his famous books, such as the Cost of Discipleship or Life Together or Ethics . Since finishing this biography, I have already started reading Discipleship, which has been sitting in my home library for years, neglected, perhaps even feared by me. I always enjoy biographies in which the biographer adores their subject. Certainly, Metaxas wishes he had the opportunity to meet Dietrich in this life, but shares the same faith and has the same hope that they will meet in the next life with Jesus Christ. At 600 pages, Metaxas spends time understanding Dietrich from before his birth through his early childhood and school days. He quotes generously from Dietrich's letters and books as well as those of his contemporaries. My only disappointment is...

There so many great quotes to pull from Eric Metaxas's biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer . I am thoroughly enjoying getting to know this man. He was incredibly bold to break away from the state church, it's Nazi compromised form calling themselves " German Christians ". He also had many sympathizers who wanted him to help them change it from within, but Bonhoeffer had no hope for that approach. He had become convinced that a church that was not willing to stand up for the Jews in its midst was not the real church of Jesus Christ. On that he was quite decided. He was far ahead of the curve, as usual. Some wondered whether he was just kicking against the goads, but when someone asked Bonhoeffer whether he shouldn't join the German Christians in order to work against them from within, he answered that he couldn't. "If you board the wrong train," he said, "it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction." pp. 186-7 He was part...

When I started Ian Kershaw 's biography of Hitler 6 months ago, I expected to be done by now. I Cover of Hitler have a ways to go. I was re-interested in it after the last book on Patton, Montgomery, Rommel: Masters of War , by Brighton. The last time I quoted from Kershaw, I was reminded of the political enthusiasm for Palin and Obama. This quote did the same thing to me. The hopes long cherished of the coming great leader eradicated the critical faculties of many intellectuals, blinding them to the magnitude of the assault on the freedom of thought as well as action that they often welcomed. Many of the neo-conservative intellectuals whose ideas had helped pave the way for the Third Reich were soon to be massively disillusioned. Hitler turned out for them in practice to be not the mystic leader they had longed for in their dreams. But they had helped prepare the ground for the Fuhrer cult that was taken up in its myriad form by so many others. Hardly a protest was raised at th...

There's no better cure for a fat, lazy summer than a book that will chill your very soul. Reading about the siege of Leningrad in WW2, from summer 1941 to January 1944, will make you shiver through their winter without fuel, and feel guilty for eating another hamburger while hundreds Cover of Leningrad: State of Siege of thousands died of starvation because of the Nazi siege and communist corruption. Michael Jones writes a 300 page history with abundant first person accounts, diaries, intercepted letters, oral histories, and personal sketches in Leningrad: State of Siege . I didn't review it here, but, previously, I had read an excellent account of the battle for Stalingrad . That battle was the turning point of the Nazi tide into Russia. Leningrad was not much of a battle though. Hitler was so impressed with the speed which his armies reached Leningrad, that he decided to bypass it, and starve it to death, so that the armies could go on to Moscow, a poor decision on his part ...

Cover of Hitler My reading for this summer is Ian Kershaw 's condensed-from-two-volumes-to-one-yet-still-massive biography of Hitler . I expect to plod through it in fits and starts. I also expect there will be many noteworthy quotes in it. My first one is from the prelude. ...as the key to understanding how Hitler could obtain, then exercise, his peculiar form of power, I turned to the concept of ' charismatic authority ', as devised by the brilliant German sociologist Max Weber , who died before Hitler had been heard of - at least outside Munich beerhalls...'Charismatic authority', as deployed by Weber, did not rest primarily on demonstrable outstanding qualities of an individual. Rather, it derived from the perception of such qualities among a 'following' which, amid crisis conditions, projected on to a chosen leader unique 'heroic' attributes and saw in him personal greatness, the embodiment of a 'mission' of salvation. 'Charismatic a...