Adolf Hitler
Why Didn't the Nazis High Five?
THE HITLER SALUTE: ON THE MEANING OF A GESTURE
By Tilman Allert
Metropolitan, 106 pages, $20
What if the Nazis had greeted each other with high fives instead of that stiff-armed, sharp-handed salute? What if Germans had been allowed to say hello to one another by name instead of invoking their Führer?
Tilman Allert’s The Hitler Salute, a joyously sharp account of a massively evil slice of human history, doesn’t treat the Nazis’ obligatory two-word, one-arm greeting as a product of evil, but as its enabler. He argues, movingly, that the salute wounded Germans’ sociability, connectedness and personal sovereignty, warping the holy human order.
A nation that’s forced to adopt inhuman gestures, in other words, is fated to oblige inhuman horrors: First hellos disappear, then morality. read more »
Wiesel’s Near-Abduction by Holocaust Deniers Weirdly Uncovered
Satan, Meet Norman
![Mailer's Morality: "Even the writer who can be a perfect scamp ... there is a moral under that."](http://www.observer.com/files/imagecache/article-teaser/files/012207_article_cover.jpg "Mailer's Morality: "Even the writer who can be a perfect scamp ... there is a moral under that."")
My Assimilationist Christmas: 'This Too Survived Hitler'
The first party was all film industry. I asked the host's daughter about being Jewish and having a Christmas party and she laughed and said, "Yeah. Basically we do whatever's fun. Like we had an Easter egg roll." I liked her attitude. California. No baggage.
The next party was more interesting because there was a Holocaust survivor there. He grew up in a wealthy German family, then spent years in Theresienstadt. After the war, stateless, he said No to Palestine and came here. In the last few years he has been able to recover some of the family's actual property. The survivor's wife took me in the kitchen and showed me some china they had finally gotten back. "This too survived Hitler," she said, touching the beautiful Deco-styled plates.
It felt like a west coast dream. Attitudes are different out there, people are more open to new ideas. At New York parties, I get in fights about Jewishness. Not in L.A.
I sat with the wife for a while at dinner and talked about my issues. She explained that she was firmly secular. Religion is a negative force in society. Jewish identity was important to her, but worship was no real part of her children's lives, and she'd never tried to separate them from kids of other creeds. She was a little regretful about intermarriage but it wasn't like she could have stopped it. Hey, it's America. The Holocaust was not something they talked that much about. When I asked her about Israel, she said, "Israel is important." When I asked her to elaborate, she repeated that statement.
I went in to get Christmas cake and passed a pretty towheaded girl singing, "Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel." It felt surreal to me.
One of the claims of Jewish parochialists is that Where Hitler failed, intermarriage is succeeding: eliminating the Jewish people. It may be an incorrect statement (the latest Forward reports that Jewish #s in the U.S. are up to between 6-7 million). But right or wrong on the #s, it's ugly. It's guilting Americans who are making free and wide cultural choices, saying they're betraying their people. And the answer of the Michael Steinhardts and Elliott Abrams is, Segregating youth. Segregating privileged youth, at that. Think of the little blonde girls who won't get to sing the dreidel song.
Queen of the Muckrakers— And Champion Letter-Writer
Floored by Emo Flu, My Languor Soothed by Noir Guy Kerr
My (Docile) Generation
Keith Moon.
So what are younger rock bands up to these days? Well, they're not exactly riding motorcycles through the Chateau Marmont.
When the Canadian band Metric opened for the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden earlier this year they stayed not at the Chelsea, but at the Hotel on Rivington, a sleek tower of glass on the Lower East Side, where rooms are $400 a night.
And touring with the Rolling Stones (of all bands) must have led to some wild nights. Or not.
The modern rock star appears to be more docile than his television-hurling predecessors. According to Mr. Mesh, the tour manager, the most asked-for hotel features are high-speed Internet and a workout room. "Fifteen years ago, having a hotel bar was very important," he said. "But it's changed. Fifteen years ago everybody was partying."
And for Southland, a rock band from L.A., partying comes with life on the road. But so does trying to get a bargain.
"Our new move is Priceline.com," said Jed Whedon, the band's singer. "We can stay in four-star hotels and we get really cheap deals."
Things they do look awful cold. read more »
- Michael CalderoneFor a Guilty Nation, Docu-Satire My Bad Profoundly Scorches
Three Worlds, One Book: Rieff Tries to Explain It All
Precise Moral Judgments Blurred by War's Messiness
Precise Moral Judgments Blurred by War’s Messiness
Terror-Porn Rampage, From Sleeper Cell To New Spielberg
Architecture, Power, Gossip: Building Blocks of a Good Read
Red Hook: Where Time Really Stands Still
Of course, there are quite a few characters in Red Hook, but The Real Estate never figured that the neighborhood would have a Nazi Party headquarters.
Lo, this weekend we were scouring the streets, looking for new developments, when we came across the freshly poured foundation of 71 Coffey Street, which is at the corner of Richards Street. Coffey Gardens LLC is developing two carriage houses, each with three stories and 3,442 square feet. A rendering, if you can call it that, was nailed up on the construction site.
Pretty ugly! Coffey Gardens is using Bricolage Designs, a company that seems to turn out horrible brick rowhouses that are remarkable for nothing more than their tedious uniformity and dullness. By the looks of it, 71 Coffey Street won't improve that track record too much.
But check out the building next door! High up top, you can make out a swastika—which is, in this case, actually a rather oddly Celtic-looking piece of ornamentation. The building was erected in 1926, while Adolf Hitler was in prison writing Mein Kampf. And sure, the swastika wasn't even removed from the British Boy Scout's Medal of Merit until 1934—but still, you'd think someone might have come along and altered this building circa, oh, 1944?—Matthew Grace read more »
Brecht Nominee: David Jones
David Jones, the president of the New Jersey State Troopers Fraternal Association, differs in a press release sent our way (no link available), and wins himself a nomination for the Politicker's Brecht Award: read more »
"Hitler had his Goebbels, Saddam Hussein had his Tariq Aziz, and now Joanne Chesimard has her Mr. Barron. People of ill will who promote terrorism and try to disguise their criminality by wrapping it in a cause are nothing new.... Saddam tried the same thing when he gassed 150,000 Kurds and Hitler blamed the slaughter of six million people on their religion. So this ill-informed politician is doing nothing different than any of the other self-serving lackeys of terrorist causes."
Given the degree to which, in a New York Mayor's race, candidates can be made to own their supporters (think Bloomberg and Fulani, Ferrer and Sharpton), it seems fair to ask Virginia what she thinks of this stuff.
