The German World of Disappointment
From the youngest child to the oldest man, everyone has experienced the unpleasant feeling of disappointment. Everyone has been to a place that was not all that they anticipated it to be. No one can say that someone has never somehow let them down. At one point or another, everyone has been disappointed in something they have purchased. And what child is not heart-broken when he learns there is no Santa Claus? Whether it is in a person, thing, place, or idea, disappointment can be the most devastating and hurtful feeling people face. Disappointment is an experience that the German people, especially, have had to live through. The German writer, Heinrich Boll, uses his story “Pale Anna” to illustrate the universal experience of disappointment, an experience his countrymen are very familiar with, through both literature and history.
When a long-lost German soldier returns to his hometown five years after World War II has ended, he returns to a place that is familiar, but everyone he knows is gone. His new landlady constantly asks him if he knew her dead son. She talks endlessly about her dearly departed son’s life and shows him again and again all the pictures of her son. The final picture that was taken of the landlady’s son was of him at his job as a streetcar conductor. All the other occasions that the soldier had seen it he reminisced about his own time spent at that particular terminus. He remembers the pop stand, the trees, the villa with the golden lions, and especially a girl that he thought of often during the war that always boarded the streetcar at that terminus. The soldier never recognizes any of the people in the picture until he had been there for three weeks and then he sees the girl in the streetcar. The landlady tells him that the girl was her son’s fiancée and that she is living in the room next to his. Pale Anna is what they always call her because of her extremely white face, but her face was unrecognizably destroyed when she was thrown through a window by a bomb blast. The soldier returns to his room and tries unsuccessfully to imagine Anna’s face being anything else but beautiful, even with scars. He thinks about his past romances and remembers them as complete disappointments.
Many war stories today have happy, romantic, and cliche ending; many authors skip the sad, groosom, and realistic part of the story. W. D. Howell’s story, Editha and Ambrose Bierce’s story, An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge both undercut the romantic plots and unrealistic conclusions brought on by many stories today. Both stories start out leading the reader to believe it is just another tpyical love-war senario, but what makes them different is the one-hundred and eighty degrees plot twist at the end of each story. In the typical love-war story the soldier would go off to war, fighting for his country, to later return safely to his family typically unscaved.
Throughout the book, apart from describing her experiences of living in Auschwitz, Livia Bitton-Jackson focuses on presenting certain ideas to the reader. The three main themes are: hope; taking risks; and growing up.
A Lucky Child by Thomas Buergenthal is a memoir about his time as a Jewish child in multiple ghettos and death camps in and around Germany during World War II. The author shares about his reunions with family and acquaintances from the war in the years between then and now. Buergenthal wished to share his Holocaust story for a number of reasons: to prevent himself from just being another number, to contribute to history, to show the power and necessity of forgiveness, the will to not give up, and to question how people change in war allowing them to do unspeakable things. The memoir is not a cry for private attention, but a call to break the cycle of hatred and violence to end mass crimes.
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Eva Galler was a death train escapee. Her story tells of Eva and her family being put on a train to be brought to a death camp where everyone still on the train would die. Her father told her to jump through the window that others were jumping through. Even when they jumped, they still weren’t safe. There were Nazis shooting the people once they were on the ground after they jumped. Eva landed in a snowbank and when the gunshots could not be heard anymore, she checked on her brother and sister who had also jumped. She found them dead. Eva headed back to her home where she was taken in by someone in the neighborhood. The woman was afraid of hiding a Jewish person so Eva had to leave. She then travelled from train station to train station to get farther away from anyone who would recognize her. She found herself at a place where German farmers pick up work...
During the process of growing up, we are taught to believe that life is relatively colorful and rich; however, if this view is right, how can we explain why literature illustrates the negative and painful feeling of life? Thus, sorrow is inescapable; as it increase one cannot hide it. From the moment we are born into the world, people suffer from different kinds of sorrow. Even though we believe there are so many happy things around us, these things are heartbreaking. The poems “Tips from My Father” by Carol Ann Davis, “Not Waving but Drowning” by Stevie Smith, and “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop convey the sorrow about growing up, about sorrowful pretending, and even about life itself.
From the cookies and presents, to the break from school, there are many factors that bring glee to the heart of any child; however, one aspect of Christmas has this affect more than any other, and that is Santa Claus. Being the bringer of presents, the symbol of Christmas, and the spreader of joy, his character is iconic, and known by all. With this, though, comes the eventual realization that this man we so adore, does not exist. It is soul crushing to say the least, as in essence, one of our idols has died. For a child, this death is perhaps the beginning of their maturation; once the realization has come, there is a part of the child that grows up. In the poem “The Death of Santa Claus” by Charles Webb, he writes, “he (Santa Claus) can't breathe, and the beautiful white world he loves goes black,” (line 13). While he is discussing Santa, and his passing, this line could also be in reference to the child. The beautiful white world is the whimsical fantasy that is childhood; our imaginations are the very thing that bring that world to life, and when we begin to learn that the things we believed so strongly are not real, the once illuminated, endless world goes black. This goes along with the way we view death as children. In the shows we watch, books we read, and movies we see, death is portrayed as someone ‘seeing the light.’ Naturally, due to our lack of understanding of such a topic, this
Mary Anne is initially introduced to the audience, narrated by Rat Kiley, as an innocent and naïve young woman present in Vietnam solely to visit her boyfriend, Mark Fossie. She arrives in “white culottes” and a “sexy pink sweater” (86), and is deemed by the other soldiers as no more than a happy distraction for her man. As Mary Anne settles in though, her abundant curiosity of Vietnam and the war heighten, and she soon enough possesses as much interest in the war as many of the men. Forward, Mary Anne’s transformation into a soldier begins as she leaves her sweet femininity behind. No longer caring for her vanity, she falls “into the habits of the bush. No cosmetics, no fingernail filing. She stopped wearing jewelry, [and] cut her hair short” (94). Mary Anne’s lost femininity is also evident when she handles powerful rifles like the M-16. Not only does the weapon literally scream out masculi...
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