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Connections across texts
War is an atrocious event and brings an awful loss of life. War is evil and there is little glory about it. But can there be a just war? To investigate the idea of a just war, I have studied the texts Schindler’s List directed by Steven Spielberg, The Book Thief written by Marcus Zusak, Base Details written by Wilfred Owen, and The Soldier written by Rupert Brooke. Connections across texts include character relationships, contrasting moods, narrative and author’s viewpoint.
Character relationships between a German and a Jew are connections seen in both the novel The Book Thief and the film Schindler’s List. The two texts show what horrific events happened during WWII. Schindler’s List focuses on the charming and greedy German businessman Oskar Schindler during the Holocaust who buys 1100 Jews. He does this to save them from concentration camps using his own money and with the help of an accountant named Itzhak Stern, a Jew whom Schindler protects. Similarly, there is a relationship between a German and a Jew in The Book Thief. Hans Hubermann, a German foster parent and house painter living in Molching, risks his life as he hides a Jew named Max in his basement from the Nazis. They form great bonds through the struggles that life puts in front of them, like Oskar and Itzhak in Schindler’s List. Itzhak and Max are some of the few Jews being treated humanely in these texts. There is a comparison here as the texts are both about WWII but in the texts the characters portray different ways the Jews were treated. Both Germans in these texts are protecting the Jew from being killed. Another aspect of the justice of war is the extent of harm to civilians. This is shown in these texts as the rest of the Jews ...
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...d by Steven Spielberg, The Book Thief written by Markus Zusak, and Base Details written by Siegfried Sassoon. In contrast to this, Rupert Brooke the author of The Soldier perceives war to be heroic as he is proud to die for his country. The texts are all connected by the theme ‘can there be a just war’ and also other connections within the texts. The character relationship between a Jew and a German was seen in The Book Thief and Schindler’s List. Contrasting moods was seen in The Soldier and Base Details and narrative and author’s viewpoint was seen in The Book Thief and Base Details. The question is - how do you perceive war?
Bibliography:
Brooke, Rupert. (1914) The Soldier.
Sassoon, Siegfried. (1918) Base Details.
Spielberg, Steven. (1993) Schindler’s List. United States, Universal Pictures
Zusak, Markus. (2005) The Book Thief. Australia, Picador
War is seen as a universal concept that often causes discomfort and conflict in relation to civilians. As they are a worrying universal event that has occurred for many decades now, they posed questions to society about human's nature and civilization. Questions such as is humanity sane or insane? and do humans have an obsession with destruction vs creation. These questions are posed from the two anti-war texts; Dr Strangelove by Stanley Kubrick and Slaughterhouse Five written by Kurt Vonnegut.
Guy Sajer’s The Forgotten Soldier is a work notable not only for its vivid and uncompromising account of his experience as a member of the Wehrmacht in World War II, but also for its subtle and incisive commentary about the very nature of war itself. What is perhaps most intriguing about Sajer’s novel is his treatment of the supposedly “universal” virtues present within war such as professionalism, patriotism, camaraderie, and self-sacrifice. Sajer introduces a break between how war is thought about in the abstract and how it has actually been conducted historically.
In the history of modern western civilization, there have been few incidents of war, famine, and other calamities that severely affected the modern European society. The First World War was one such incident which served as a reflection of modern European society in its industrial age, altering mankind’s perception of war into catastrophic levels of carnage and violence. As a transition to modern warfare, the experiences of the Great War were entirely new and unfamiliar. In this anomalous environment, a range of first hand accounts have emerged, detailing the events and experiences of the authors. For instance, both the works of Ernst Junger and Erich Maria Remarque emphasize the frightening and inhumane nature of war to some degree – more explicit in Jünger’s than in Remarque’s – but the sense of glorification, heroism, and nationalism in Jünger’s The Storm of Steel is absent in Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Instead, they are replaced by psychological damage caused by the war – the internalization of loss and pain, coupled with a sense of helplessness and disconnectedness with the past and the future. As such, the accounts of Jünger and Remarque reveal the similar experiences of extreme violence and danger of World War I shared by soldiers but draw from their experiences differing ideologies and perception of war.
Everyone knows what war is. It's a nation taking all of its men, resources, weapons and most of its money and bearing all malignantly towards another nation. War is about death, destruction, disease, loss, pain, suffering and hate. I often think to myself why grown and intelligent individuals cannot resolve matters any better than to take up arms and crawl around, wrestle and fight like animals. In All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque puts all of these aspects of war into a vivid story which tells the horrors of World War 1 through a soldier's eyes. The idea that he conveys most throughout this book is the idea of destruction, the destruction of bodies, minds and innocence.
The Holocaust was one of the most tragic and harmful things to befall the human race. Yet not a lot of people understand just how terrible it was. But if we don't know about it, how will we know if history will ever repeat itself or not? We need to know because we can't let it happen ever again. There is so much to know as well. From the life of Anne Frank to World War II as a whole, there are so many things involved its unbelievable. But what exactly is the full depth of the Holocaust, and what was all a part of it.
O’Brien, Tim. How to Tell a True War Story. Literature and Ourselves. Sixth Edition. Eds.
“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” As depicted in the quote by Ernest Hemingway war is a difficult situation in which the traditional boundaries of moral ethics are tested. History is filled with unjust wars and for centuries war was not though in terms of morality. Saint Augustine, however, offered a theory detailing when war is morally permissible. The theory offers moral justifications for war as expressed in jus ad bellum (conditions for going to war) and in jus in bello (conditions within warfare).The theory places restrictions on the causes of war as well as the actions permitted throughout. Within early Christianity, the theory was used to validate crusades as morally permissible avoiding conflict with religious views. Based on the qualifications of the Just War Theory few wars have been deemed as morally acceptable, but none have notably met all the requirements. Throughout the paper I will apply Just War Theory in terms of World War II as well as other wars that depict the ideals presented by Saint Augustine.
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain ...
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, written by the talented author Chris Hedges, gives us provoking thoughts that are somewhat painful to read but at the same time are quite personal confessions. Chris Hedges, a talented journalist to say the least, brings nearly 15 years of being a foreign correspondent to this book and subjectively concludes how all of his world experiences tie together. Throughout his book, he unifies themes present in all wars he experienced first hand. The most important themes I was able to draw from this book were, war skews reality, dominates culture, seduces society with its heroic attributes, distorts memory, and supports a cause, and allures us by a constant battle between death and love.
The difficult association between the occurrence of war and storytelling is told through the eyes of Tim O’Brien; he explains that a true war story has a supreme adherence to offensiveness that provides a sense of pride and courage commonly found in storytelling. “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and im...
The word “Holocaust”, was originated from the words “Holos” meaning whole, and “kaustos” meaning burned. To Adolf Hitler, Jews were an “inferior” race. After years of Nazi rule, Hitler’s “final solution” came under the cover of world war, with mass killing centers constructed in the concentration camps. Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma Gypsies, Priests and Pastors, homosexuals, and black children were all victims of the holocaust. Most of the victims left were from other countries. 6,000 Jehovah's witnesses, over 15,00 homosexuals, 400 “colored” children, and over 5,000,000 jews were killed.
Markus Zusak, author of The Book Thief (2005), and Steven Spielberg, director of Schindler’s List (1993), both use their works to portray the theme of racism in Nazi-era Germany. Racism today affects millions of people daily, with 4.6 million people being racial discrimination in Australia alone. However, in Nazi-era Germany, Jewish people were discrimination because they weren’t part of the ‘master race’, causing millions to suffer and be killed. To explore this theme, the setting, characters, conflicts and symbols in both The Book Thief and Schindler’s List will be analysed and compared.
Carl von Clausewitz, “What is War?” On War. Edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, 89-112. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976.
Clausewitz's On War, first published in 1832, until now remains one of the most influential studies in understanding character, nature and conditions of warfare. In his book Clausewitz not only traced an interaction of intension and planning with the realities of combat, but by exploring the relationship of war to policy, politics and society gave a new philosophical justification to the art of war. (Heuser, 2002)
Throughout their lives, people must deal with the horrific and violent side of humanity. The side of humanity is shown through the act of war. This is shown in Erich Remarque’s novel, “All Quiet on the Western Front”. War is by far the most horrible thing that the human race has to go through. The participants in the war suffer irreversible damage by the atrocities they witness and the things they go through.