Academic literature on the topic 'Nazisme – Aspect moral'

La novela autobiográfica de Knausgård es un caso paradigmático para el análisis del vínculo entre derecho y literatura, porque permite tener tres perspectivas del mismo: la del Derecho en, de y como literatura. En este artículo se hace hincapié en la primera. La tesis defendida es que la postura de Knausgård, de afirmar el carácter utópico del nazismo, es análoga al debate en torno al derecho nazi. Siendo el aspecto más criticable el relativismo moral que sustenta dicha concepción y que le impide tener una visión más cabal del elemento justificativo de las utopías y del derecho. Palabras clave: Derecho y literatura, Derecho nazi, Utopismo, Relativismo moral.

Abstract Scholars have so far interpreted postwar depictions of Germans saving Jews from Nazi persecution mainly as apologetic references that allowed Germans to avoid addressing problematic aspects of their history. Yet although such portrayals appear in many postwar German accounts, depictions of successful rescues of Jews are relatively rare in literary and filmic works produced between 1945 and the early 1960s. This article argues that in presenting failed rescue of Jews, several German authors aimed to contribute to the re-education and moral transformation of the German population. The article’s first part shows that narratives of failed rescue were considered particularly useful for arousing Germans’ empathy with the Nazis’ Jewish victims. The article’s second part examines those works that went further and tailored stories of unsuccessful rescue to criticize Germans for not doing more to resist the regime. Although these works presented Germans as victims, as was common in many contemporaneous depictions, it would be misleading to view them merely as apologetic accounts. Rather, the widespread reluctance to commemorate the persecution of Jews urged several authors to retain the common image of Germans as victims in order to avoid alienating their audience. At the same time, using narratives of failed rescue, these writers and filmmakers explored new ways to allow Germans to speak about the Holocaust and reflect on their conduct. Attempts to both arouse a moral debate and avoid directly speaking about Germans’ collective responsibility might seem irreconcilable from today’s perspective, but not for Germans of the 1940s and 1950s.

In this forum onNeighborsby Jan T. Gross (Princeton, 2001), four scholars respond to the book and to the issues of evidence, causality, and interpretation that it raises. Janine P. Holc summarizes the contents and the book's approach and explores the roles of individual choice, on the one hand, and ethnic identity categories, on the other, in Gross's presentation of the causes of the massacre of the Jewish residents of Jedwabne by their non-Jewish neighbors. She argues for an approach to readingNeighborsthat links the emotive mode in which some of the narrative is expressed to a productive engagement with traumatic or violent historical episodes. This type of history resists finality and closure and creates an avenue for active engagement by members of ethnic (or other) communities with violent and traumatic pasts. Wojciech Roszkowski discusses three aspects of the debate onNeighborsin Poland: the credibility of the book, the facts of 10 July 1941 and their moral meaning, and the representativeness of the Jedwabne case and the question of “innocence” or “guilt” of nations. While arguing that the credibility ofNeighborsis low and that Gross's thesis that “one half of the Jedwabne inhabitants killed the other half” has not been proven, he writes that it is impossible to deny Polish participation in the massacre. Yet, as with other documented cases of Polish wartime evildoing, it is unfair to blow this incident out of proportion and produce unwarranted generalizations. Past and present realities are always more complicated than simple stereotypes that “Poles” or “Jews” are to blame or that they have always been innocent. William W. Hagen argues that Gross vacillates between a robust positivism promising that “a reconstruction” of “what actually took place” is possible, such that guilt and motive may confidently be assigned, and an interpretive pessimism suggesting that “we will never 'understand' why it happened.” In his assignment of causality, Gross offers a largely unconnected, in part inferential or speculative, array of determinants and motives. Although some ofthecauses Gross adduces are certainly persuasive, his analysis does not address the Jedwabne perpetrators' and witnesses' perception of the cultural meaning of the inhuman violence their Jewish neighbors were suffering. Hagen offers some suggestive historical evidence on the Poles' subjective response to the Jewish genocide and to their own wartime fate, arguing that the Jedwabne Poles' participation in the mass murder of the Jews must be conceived as a response, mediated by the penetration of ideological anti-Semitism into the countryside, to profound anxiety over the individual and social death menacing Polish identity under Soviet and Nazi occupation. Norman M. Naimark argues that the appearance of Gross'sNeighborshas created an entirely new dimension to the historiography of World War II in Poland. The book demonstrated, as has no other work, the extent to which the Poles were directly involved in the genocide of the Jews. The clarity and force of Gross's presentation provides Polish historiography with an unprecedented opportunity “to come to terms with the past.” The essay also suggests that the Jedwabne massacre needs to be looked at in the context of overall German policy “in the east” and in comparison to similar horrors taking place roughly at the same time in Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Latvia. The Nazis intentionally (and surreptitiously) sought to incite pogroms in the region, filming and photographing the horrific events for audiences back home. Their own propaganda about the “Jewish-Bolshevik” menace both prompted and was ostensibly confirmed by the pogroms. In his response, Jan T. Gross replies to Roszkowski's criticism concerning historical credibility.

It is understood that the education’s being brought under the control of government and educational activities carried out under the name of character and race unity education were tools for the destruction of the individual and masses during the national socialist era in Germany. For this reason, the state’s monopolizing and more or less intervening in moral education can be regarded as a fascist act. The connection of altruism with race and the fact that race consciousness has aspects supporting the idealism have been abused by the fascist education. The fact that the individuals were directed to race by being impregnated with the sense of altruism showed how the two basic principles of national socialist education complemented each other. On the one hand, the individual was taught how to be altruistic, on the other hand, the superiority, holiness and supremacy of race were romanticized, and the infrastructure of the reason for the necessity of being altruistic was instilled on their mind.This study, which was made by reviewing the documents of Hitler (1938), Kubizek (1954), Schirach (1967), Gay (1968), Fest (1970 and 1973), Noakes (1971), Giles (1985), Domarus (1990), Burleigh and Wippermann (1991) and Canetti (2014), not only shows the fact that the character and race unity education that Nazis gave in schools wasn’t compatible with universal principles, but also the fact that the number of children in school age who died during the World War II reached a half million teaches how to act against the negative success of the fascist education that is focused on destruction.

Editor in Chief of “The Pedagogical Quarterly” discourses with Irena Wojnar, employed at the University of Warsaw since early post-war time. Her intellectual evolution (l’âge où l’on grandit) occurs in changing dramatic periods of our history, optimism of elementary school before the World War II, painful time of clandestine education during the Nazi occupation in Warsaw, hopes and illusions of the post-war epoch. In these periods, the essential inspirations for Irena Wojnar were successive books of Bogdan Suchodolski, with symbolic titles: Love life – be valiant (2nd ed. 1930), Whence and where are we going to? (1943) and Education for the future (1947). In the Polish school before the WWII, pupils were educated in the spirit of patriotism and civic duties, sensibility to the surrounding world and the service of humans. Tragic heroism of the WWII became the proof of those values. In the conditions of constant aggressive and permanent threat, quasi “against the night”, the fight with the occupant becomes the essential moral duty. For young people, pupils and students, when secondary and tertiary schools were closed by the Nazis, this duty signified participation in clandestine education supporting hope to preserve future order in the world and preparation of the future activity in the free Poland after the WWII. The end of the WWII created a chance for the future shape of the world in line with our humanistic values. It was the period of the reconstruction of Warsaw, destroyed during the WWII, becoming a city of “sorrow and dreams”. In the final part of the conversation there appears the general opinion that every individual life–story, beyond its individual aspects, reveals a more general educational idea. Human life runs across destiny and personal consciousness. Independently of our destiny, we have a chance to choose values important for us, to realise the “poetics of the self” (poétique du soi) based on our capacity to overcome own limitations and to increase goodness in the world.

Moral ethics which developed and grew only to become stronger and clearer, during and after World War II is a complex and resourceful subject which can be found in the work from “The Good Man from Cologne” – Heinrich Böll. Even at first glance, Böll has a rather clear message that he sends to his readers, whether he writes from experience or his state of mind (one affected by the other): War is not to be glorified. There is not one aspect of the war that can or should be considered as pride or heroism, for no one participating (in example – honoring a soldier with a piece of metal, which is in war used to kill and destroy). Then, why write about war? Because no one should ever forget it. All the suffering and victims should be presented simply – as they were, to warn and clarify the readers. The clarification meant for Böll to name the ones that let this kind of horror to take place, like organizations that collaborated with the Nazis for their own interests. In his works, he shows how the characters – uneducated and the intellectuals – deal with guilt even years after the war has ended – every simple character for himself, as an individual. Therefore, he shows his compassion for the simple men but underlines his hostility towards organizations. Not only have Germans had to live with their guilt, but also with a vast amount of rubble – in their minds, souls, but also in their physical world. That is why Böll holds onto “Rubble Literature” for a long period after the war. The importance of the precise depiction of war shows how strongly Böll committed in his effort to shine the light only on the real side of war. His determination to fight for the “weak” that were by the mainstream defined as “waste” shows high levels of his morality and ethics. He enjoys a society full of individuals, whose life conditions vary from case to case, and therefore, vary in their (inter)actions towards life, and is their voice in the constant fight for human and civil rights.

Moral ethics which developed and grew only to become stronger and clearer, during and after World War II is a complex and resourceful subject which can be found in the work from “The Good Man from Cologne” – Heinrich Böll. Even at first glance, Böll has a rather clear message that he sends to his readers, whether he writes from experience or his state of mind (one affected by the other): War is not to be glorified. There is not one aspect of the war that can or should be considered as pride or heroism, for no one participating (in example – honoring a soldier with a piece of metal, which is in war used to kill and destroy). Then, why write about war? Because no one should ever forget it. All the suffering and victims should be presented simply – as they were, to warn and clarify the readers. The clarification meant for Böll to name the ones that let this kind of horror to take place, like organizations that collaborated with the Nazis for their own interests. In his works, he shows how the characters – uneducated and the intellectuals – deal with guilt even years after the war has ended – every simple character for himself, as an individual. Therefore, he shows his compassion for the simple men but underlines his hostility towards organizations. Not only have Germans had to live with their guilt, but also with a vast amount of rubble – in their minds, souls, but also in their physical world. That is why Böll holds onto “Rubble Literature” for a long period after the war. The importance of the precise depiction of war shows how strongly Böll committed in his effort to shine the light only on the real side of war. His determination to fight for the “weak” that were by the mainstream defined as “waste” shows high levels of his morality and ethics. He enjoys a society full of individuals, whose life conditions vary from case to case, and therefore, vary in their (inter)actions towards life, and is their voice in the constant fight for human and civil rights.

NOT CHANGING LOOKS. PRESENTATION OF CRUELTY AND EVIL IN THE FILMS OF ANDRZEJ WAJDAAmong Andrzej Wajda’s legacy, the image of the totalitarian regime and its repercussions for people, countries, and humanity holds a significant place. Films of Andrzej Wajda, who was a liaison officer in the anti-Hitler Polish underground, are a kind of chronicle of the survivors of twentieth century. The article is dedicated to study the various forms of evil and its effects on real people. The study is applicable for our time because the world again deals with the recidivism of evil which the Soviet government spread in its own country and beyond its own borders. In the USRR, the perception of Andrzej Wajda’s films was dependent on the political play in action: when the relations between two countries were friendly, he received awards, however after the Solidarity was established, no one ever mentioned Wajda. The epic work Danton, about the French revolution, made in France during times difficult for Poland because of the martial law imposed on Poland, reveals the effects of revolution that paradoxically destroyed its most dedicated revolutionists, including Danton. Wajda’s refusal to American producers to direct a motion picture based on a screen play of Aleksander Slozenicyn had se-rious reasons, primarily commitment to his homeland. He made up for the missed opportunity to show Stalin’s evil empire when he shot the film Katyń. This word echoes deep tragedy in the heart of every Pole and the director succeeded in portraying the cruelty of mechanism of punishment in totalitarian USRR. The second most important aspect was the discovery of the lies of this regime, which tried to place the responsibility for the execution of Polish officers on the Nazis. After a premiere of Katyń in Ukraine, Andrzej Wajda was awarded the medal of Jaroslaw Madry. The article also includes the theme of influence of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novels on Andrzej Wajda’s work — the director not only used Dostoyevsky’s work for his filmmaking and staging, but as well he was inspired by Dostoyevsky’s deep analysis of dangerous social phenomena and the courage in discovering the evil. In Wajda’s films, which belongs to the so-called “cinema of moral unrest”, the tragic fate of a talented journalist Jerzy Michalowski, the hero of film Bez znieczulenia who personalizes the characteristics of a professional and a good man, simply horrifies. In his last film Powidoki, the director masterfully shows circles of hell survived by avant-garde artist Wladyslaw Strzeminski, the lecturer of Fine Arts Academy. All the films mentioned above are deemed necessary warning for future generations, they cannot put up with the aggression — on a political and private levels. Wajda’s lessons are universal, timeless, and everla-sting, like an eternal battle of good against evil.

This article is dedicated to my beloved mother, Zofia Kuzak, Honorary Member of the Polish Neuropsychological Society, and my highest moral authority, to honor her 100 th birthday. During the Nazi occu pation, at the age of 23, she was deport ed to Germany and forced into slave labour at a German camp, from which she managed to escape. During this escape she had to sit for three long days high up in a tree, without food and without anything to drink, something made possible by her strong physical condition. After three days, she dared to leave the tree and, in throwing the Nazis pursuing her, she ran away not to the South - to her home in Nowy Sącz, but to the North – to Poznań, where she took refuge in the apartment of other relatives, true Polish patriots. She stayed there for the years 1943–1947, keeping the accounts at the large family grocery store. The experiences from this period influenced the formation of her own self and her identity. Her stories about times of tragedy and her ways of dealing with the darkest moments in her life contributed to the fact that I became interested in the subject of the self and identity. I have prepared two monographs and several articles on this topic. This article presents a new approach to integrated self system, associated not only with the physical organism, but also with the social and cultural world. The foundation of this approach to the self is microgenetic theory, especially its account of consciousness, of the transition from self to image, act and object, the epochal nature of this transition, and its relation to introspection, imagination and agency. The affinities of microgenetic theory to many aspects of the thought process should be evident to readers of this journal, but the theory, which was developed from studies of pathological cases, rests on a wealth of clinical detail. In brief, the micro-temporal transition from archaic to recent formations (distributed systems) in the phyletic history of the forebrain constitutes the absolute mental state, with consciousness the relation of self to image and/or object. The reader will be able also to find here the overlapping of states, the continuity of the core over successive states, and subjective time experience. However, the integrated self system is associated not only with the operation of the biological brain and its complex patterns of neural connections, but also with the activity of the social mind/brain, in terms of bonds created within social groups, as well as the cultural mind/brain creating the world of cultural values, including religious ones. I will sum up with a model of self system changing in time (4D), pulsating according to the states of mind (5D) forming different numbers of “bits” of information, as marked on the x axis, and linked to the duration of memories, marked on the y axis. The self system also depends on gravity (6D), and other hyperspace dimensions hitherto unknown in neuroscience.

Hitler occupation of Ukraine became the most difficult challenge for the Ukrainian people as the "new order" leaders’ aim was to eliminate the population of captured territories, to prepare a living space for the "Aryan people" whom Hitler and his ascendants considered the Germans to be. The policy of the Nazi regime on the occupied territories, which were regarded as an object of exploitation, oppression and robbery, led to significant changes in the practice of everyday life of the civilian population. History becomes more anthropological and it encourages the study of everyday life in order to understand holistic picture of historical events. This picture had its own peculiarities in different regions of Ukraine. In the Soviet period the issues of everyday life in occupied areas were considered fragmentarily, with the main focus on the other images - the nationwide struggle against the invaders, the moral and political unity of the Ukrainian people, the leading role of the party in fighting back the occupiers, etc. In fact, modern national scientists had to study the problem of anthropological measurements of occupation from scratch. However, in recent decades in Ukraine there has appeared a lot of historical research, the subject of which is the anthropological defining of occupation. These studies are being considered in the given article. A particular subject of research and this publication as well is certain categories of population: women, minors and intelligentsia. The existence of these categories of people in occupation has certain features that researchers disclose from different, often opposite, points of view. At the present stage various aspects of the Ukrainian peasantry life during the years of Nazi occupation are investigated by O. Potylchak, O. Perekhrest, V. Revehuk, T. Nagayko and others. The works of T. Vronska, K. Kurylyshyn, L. Kovpak, O. Isaikin, M. Herasimov, V. Kononenko, A. Yankovska and others were dedicated to the everyday life issues in the years of the Second World War and in the first post-war decade. The material, household and social spheres in the post-occupation period in different regions of Ukraine were studied by S. Galchenko, M. Dedkov, I. Spudka. However, in most of these works, the strategies of town people’s survival in the liberated territories in 1943-1945 are briefly outlined. Some researchers (T. Zabolotna, T. Nahayko, O. Savitska, V. Yakovenko) emphasize the everyday life of individual cities. I. Vetrov researched the economic robbery of the national economy and the population of Ukraine by invaders. Some aspects of the social policy of occupiers are highlighted in the study of O. Potylchak. M. Shevchenko, V. Hedz conducted a study of "female" narrative sources. Nowadays there are two directions of coverage of children lives during the occupation. The first direction is represented by D. Slobodynsky, who assumes that the state of children during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine was unbearable. H. Holysh and L. Holysh consider that children and teens played a very active role in the struggle against the Nazis. The state of the intelligentsia during the occupation was studied by L. Bidocha, V. Hinda, O. Salata, T. Zabolotna. The researchers point to the reasons of cooperation of this segment of the population with the occupants, which in fact did not differ from the motives of other groups of society. The author comes to the conclusion that the Nazi occupation had a negative impact on the various spheres of life of the society at that time, which led to significant changes in the everyday life of the local population of Central Ukraine. At that period the majority of people tried to fulfill their existential needs, for example to preserve their own lives and protect their loved ones in particular. The author comes to the conclusion that the aspects of people’s life during the Nazi occupation, disclosed by the authors in modern historiography, constitute a far-incomplete picture of Ukrainians’ life during this period. There are issues that require a detailed study and analysis of researchers in order to imagine life and daily realities on the occupied territory and what problems they had to deal with in order to survive in those conditions. There is a considerable spectrum of problems associated with the occupational routine, which requires a detailed study and analysis of researchers and it allows to make a coherent picture of living conditions on the occupied territories of Ukraine.

This chapter aims to remind ourselves that one-sided political theories are bound to lead to moral and political calamities and to encourage a search for a set of compromises that fit the needs of our age. It notes that we have a lot to learn from the failures and successes of the last century; the most important lesson of all is to be more critical of our own beliefs and more open to those of others. The chapter then reviews two of the leading ideologies of the last century, liberal democracy and nationalism. From each of them, worthwhile human values and social strategies are exerted. The chapter identifies with nationalism's most extreme expressions: brutal neoliberalism, on the one hand, Nazism, and fascism on the other hand. Ultimately, the chapter draws out some of the valuable and constructive aspects of nationalism, arguing that they reflect a scope of human needs and aspirations that should be considered. It presents the case for nationalism, trying to highlight its importance in any future social construct.