“Our Secret “ Analyzed The essay begins with Griffin across the room from a woman called Laura. Griffin recalls the lady taking on an identity from long ago: “As she speaks the space between us grows larger. She has entered her past. She is speaking of her childhood.” (Griffin 233) Griffin then begins to document memories told from the lady about her family, and specifically her father. Her father was a German soldier from around the same time as Himmler. Griffin carefully weaves the story of Laura with her own comments and metaphors from her unique writing style. Griffin's project is contemplating the human nature or character. She discusses how a person can affect another person's life. The things that happen around us and to us can dramatically change the way we are and the way we see ourselves. She also gives a metaphorical comparison between her life and Heinrich Himmler's life. Although Himmler was an evil man, Griffin somehow still feels a connection to him. …show more content…
But when certain visitors came, we were as if driven by an inward, secret panic that who we really were might be discovered.” (Griffin 241) You see Griffin states that both of her grandfathers were alcoholics. Also, she says her grandmother controlled the whole family and her father was always hiding his true feelings. She always longed for the relationship with her father that she never could obtain. Next Griffin lays out the comparison of Himmler's family: “Gebhard Himmler's family was newly risen from poverty. Just as in my family, the Himmler's gentility was a thinly laid surface, maintained no doubt only with great effort.” (Griffin
The story is a 3rd person view of a young boy called Georg who lived in Germany with his dad who was born in England and his mother born Germany. At the time all he wanted was to be a perfect boy in Hitler’s eyes which now wouldn’t be a good thing these days but at his time it would be all anyone ever
On Hitler’s Mountain is a memoir of a child named Irmgard Hunt and her experiences growing up in Nazi Germany. She herself has had many experiences of living during that dark time, she actually met Hitler, had a grandfather who hated Hitler's rule, and had no thoughts or feelings about the Nazi rule until the end of WWII. Her memoir is a reminder of what can happen when an ordinary society chooses a cult of personality over rational thought. What has happened to the German people since then, what are they doing about it today and how do they feel about their past? Several decades later, with most Nazis now dead or in hiding, and despite how much Germany has done to prevent another Nazi rule, everyone is still ashamed of their ancestors’ pasts.
Orwell himself is the one who coined the term of political purpose, and because of this, he seems to be the best person to compare other writers to when discussing political purpose. Orwell defined political purpose as, “Desire to push the world in a certain direction,” and he writes, “…no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude” (3). Orwell, therefore, believes that art is ultimately political in purpose whether that was the intention or not. He believes that no work can be “free from political bias.” He seems to be of the opinion that art must have political purpose or else it will be “lifeless,” much like his earlier writing. Alternately,
Survivor. This can be defined as “a person who survives, especially a person remaining alive after an event in which others have died”, or as “a person who copes well with difficulties in their life.” Being a survivor is having the ability to experience a difficult or traumatic situation and still being able to progress and contribute to the environment. Each person has a different mental and physical capacity of how much they can suffer through. A survivor can be both selfless and selfish. There is typically a happy medium between all survivors in which they balance worrying about themselves and worrying about others. A person who coped with difficulties was Mrs. Schindler, she dealt with the process of cancer and the aftermath. In the article “ Beyond Secret Tears “ by Lili Silberman, Lili would deal with the mental difficulties of a child and be separated from her mother and father. In the book Hiroshima by John Hersey, it talks about how the survivors of a nuclear bomb had to work together to stay alive and be physically well after being
Laura Deeb’s An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon seeks to rectify post-9/11 notions of political Islam as anti-modern and incongruous with Western formulations of secular modernity. Specifically, Deeb is writing in opposition to a Weberian characterization of modern secular Western societies as the development of bureaucracies through social rationalization and disenchantment. Within this Weberian framework Deeb asserts that Shia communities are in-part modern because of the development of beuorocratic institutions to govern and regulate religious practice. However, Deeb makes a stronger argument oriented towards dislodging the assumptions "that Islamism is static and monolithic, and that
Annemarie is a normal young girl, ten years old, she has normal difficulties and duties like any other girl. but these difficulties aren’t normal ones, she’s faced with the difficulties of war. this war has made Annemarie into a very smart girl, she spends most of her time thinking about how to be safe at all times “Annemarie admitted to herself,snuggling there in the quiet dark, that she was glad to be an ordinary person who would never be called upon for courage.
To read the Civil War diary of Alice Williamson, a 16 year old girl, is to meander through the personal, cultural and political experience of both the author and one's self. Her writing feels like a bullet ricocheted through war, time, death, literary form, femininity, youth, state, freedom and obligation. This investigation attempts to do the same; to touch on the many issues that arise in the mind of the reader when becoming part of the text through the act of reading. This paper will lay no definitive claims to the absolute meaning of the diary, for it has many possible interpretations, for the journey is the ultimate answer. I seek to acknowledge the fluidity of thought when reading, a fluidity which incorporates personal experience with the content of Williamson's journal. I read the journal personally- as a woman, a peer in age to Alice Williamson, a surrogate experiencialist, a writer, an academic and most of all, a modern reader unaccustomed to the personal experience of war. I read the text within a context- as a researcher versed on the period, genre, aesthetics, and to some degree the writer herself. The molding of the personal and contextual create a rich personalized textual meaning .
Griffin spends a good portion of “Our Secret” writing about Himmler’s childhood. It is through his family’s history and child-rearing practices that she hopes to find answers. When Himmler is just ten years old he is told by his father that “his childhood is over now” (236). Himmler has to take himself seriously now and obey his father’s watchful eye. Everything Heinrich does from that point on is directly meant to influence his future and who he will become. This is a choice the society he is born into makes for him, he has no choice. Gebhard, Himmler’s father, is extremely overbearing and controlling of Himmler. Like many Germans of the time, he follows the advice of German child-rearing experts: “Crush the will. . .Establish dominance. Permit no disobedience. Suppress everything in the child” (237). German parents are taught that children “should be permeated by the impossibility from lock...
Situations can affect people in various ways;positively or negatively.In the case of Griffin from "Girl Stolen", and CeeCee from "Saving CeeCee Honeycut", the effect is positive. They both face struggles most would not be able to recover from.With the help of other main characters in the novel, Griffin and CeeCee develop into better characters and show they can overcome these hardships.
Throughout “Our Secret” Griffin explores the different characters’ fears and secrets and she gives specific insights into these “secrets”. Through examining others Griffin comes to terms with her own feelings, secrets, and fears. She relates to Himmler, Leo, Helene, and everyone else even though she is different than all of them. One fact that can be made about all of these characters is that they all represent humans and human emotion
In the book, Parallel Journeys, the author, Eleanor Ayer, shows how two individuals as well as their loved ones are affected by life-changing events that take place in their lives during the Holocaust. In this part of the book, World War II has just recently taken a turn towards the start of the eradication of non-Aryans. Although Helen, a jew living in Amsterdam Holland, and Alfons, a member of the Hitler Youth, both go through transformative experience, their lives are much different.
Himmler for instance shows signs of being brainwashed by his father when Griffin states “a day arrives when he believes the image he has made of himself in his diaries is true” (306). Also in a photograph taken in 1917, Griffin says the look on Himmler’s face “has become harder, and his smile, though faint like his mother’s smile, has gained a new quality, harsh and stiff like the little collar he wears”. This proves that later on in life the traits from Himmler's father has been carried down to him, and he’s turned into a harsh and violent man whose career as a soldier shows his thirst for bloodshed, hence the collar. After the war ended Himmler has no purpose so he found a new figure to look up to, and Griffin explains that he “Followed Hitler with unwavering loyalty”. Hitler being the new leader of Germany, in that time, was held responsible for the killings on millions of Jews, and because the way Himmler was raised, he had taken a liking to Hitler's ideas and what he standed for, so he started working for him in the SS or Schutzstaffel institution. Later on in his career, the violence increases, and his job is to compile Jews into “temporary camps” when prisons become over populated (317). This shows the reader how Hitler is now affecting his actions, and another example of this is when Himmler addresses homosexuality in a speech that “Germany forebears knew what to do with homosexuals. They drown them in bogs…”’This is not punishment he argues, but’ “the extermination of unnatural existence.” This helps the reader understand the exponential growth of Himmler's violence, and see the trend associated between Leo and Himmler’s period of realization that they're both gay, and the origins of this. In comparison to Himmler's actions, Leo also showed violence later on in life that shows the trend between the characters upbringings. The way
Throughout the memoir, Wiesel demonstrates how oppression and dehumanization can affect one’s identity by describing the actions of the Nazis and how it changed the Jewish people’s outlook on life. Wiesel’s identity transformed dramatically throughout the narrative. “How old he had grown the night before! His body was completely twisted, shriveled up into itself. His eyes were petrified, his lips withered, decayed.
Her family life is depicted with contradictions of order and chaos, love and animosity, conventionality and avant-garde. Although the underlying story of her father’s dark secret was troubling, it lends itself to a better understanding of the family dynamics and what was normal for her family. The author doesn’t seem to suggest that her father’s behavior was acceptable or even tolerable. However, the ending of this excerpt leaves the reader with an undeniable sense that the author felt a connection to her father even if it wasn’t one that was desirable. This is best understood with her reaction to his suicide when she states, “But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him. Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb.” (pg. 399)
Eva Hoffman’s memoir, Lost in Translation, is a timeline of events from her life in Cracow, Poland – Paradise – to her immigration to Vancouver, Canada – Exile – and into her college and literary life – The New World. Eva breaks up her journey into these three sections and gives her personal observations of her assimilation into a new world. The story is based on memory – Eva Hoffman gives us her first-hand perspective through flashbacks with introspective analysis of her life “lost in translation”. It is her memory that permeates through her writing and furthermore through her experiences. As the reader we are presented many examples of Eva’s memory as they appear through her interactions. All of these interactions evoke memory, ultimately through the quest of finding reality equal to that of her life in Poland. The comparison of Eva’s exile can never live up to her Paradise and therefore her memories of her past can never be replaced but instead only can be supplemented.