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bouvier's review against another edition
Just didn't have time
The book is GREAT
The book is GREAT
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence, Xenophobia, War, Murder, Gun violence, and Death
gh7's review against another edition
3.0
Recently I complained that novelists never attempt to construct a credible Nazi in WW2 novels. We always get the good guys, which you might say is the author simply projecting him or herself back into that period. The bad guys are usually automatons. They have no inner life. They are like computer programs in a video game, their sole purpose to obstruct the good guys. We never get any insight into the humanity of these individuals. So I read this in the hope of finding out what made a Nazi tick.
A Polish underground fighter and dissident journalist, Kazimierz Moczarski, spent 255 days in a prison cell with SS General Jürgen Stroop. You could argue that the first political achievement of the Nazis was to open the door of power to hordes of ill-educated, mediocre men with a chip on their shoulders. Social climbing for men bereft of intellectual, spiritual or artistic gifts made easy. Stroop was clearly one of these. In any normal society, based on meritocracy, he probably would never have been much more than a clerk. Probably he would have taken out his social frustrations on his wife or dog. He's clearly a man whose most important driving force is to feel himself superior. He comes out with lots of sentimental bullshit about knightly valour. I would argue all these leading Nazis were essentially sentimental. Never underestimate the nefarious depth charges of sentimentality. Sentimentality is the expedient distortion of truth. It gets the popular vote. All nationalist dogma is essentially sentimental claptrap. And its evil twin is cynicism. It's sentimentality that threatens always to plunge us into cynicism.
Stroop is the banality of evil personified. He's also mediocrity personified. He remained unrepentant and still refers to Jews in derogatory terms yet comes across more like a kid in a playground trying to impress bigger boys (the ghosts of Hitler and Himmler in his case) than a mass murderer. Because to admit his ideas were twisted was also to admit he was a pathetic little man pretending to be a great man of history. In essence his loathing of all non-Aryans was peacock vanity. He had to belittle in order to feel taller. One thing I learned reading this is that, to become binding, self-esteem has to come solely from within, not through nonsensical competitive comparison with others. If you have to denigrate Jews or Muslims or gays to walk tall then you're always going to feel like a short arse in private and thus always be eaten up by resentment. Ultimately Stroop came across as a pompous windbag, someone who loved the sound of his own voice, which doesn't make this any kind of compelling reading experience. However, he would make a great character in a novel for an author keen to examine the Nazi psyche and give us the other side of the story.
A Polish underground fighter and dissident journalist, Kazimierz Moczarski, spent 255 days in a prison cell with SS General Jürgen Stroop. You could argue that the first political achievement of the Nazis was to open the door of power to hordes of ill-educated, mediocre men with a chip on their shoulders. Social climbing for men bereft of intellectual, spiritual or artistic gifts made easy. Stroop was clearly one of these. In any normal society, based on meritocracy, he probably would never have been much more than a clerk. Probably he would have taken out his social frustrations on his wife or dog. He's clearly a man whose most important driving force is to feel himself superior. He comes out with lots of sentimental bullshit about knightly valour. I would argue all these leading Nazis were essentially sentimental. Never underestimate the nefarious depth charges of sentimentality. Sentimentality is the expedient distortion of truth. It gets the popular vote. All nationalist dogma is essentially sentimental claptrap. And its evil twin is cynicism. It's sentimentality that threatens always to plunge us into cynicism.
Stroop is the banality of evil personified. He's also mediocrity personified. He remained unrepentant and still refers to Jews in derogatory terms yet comes across more like a kid in a playground trying to impress bigger boys (the ghosts of Hitler and Himmler in his case) than a mass murderer. Because to admit his ideas were twisted was also to admit he was a pathetic little man pretending to be a great man of history. In essence his loathing of all non-Aryans was peacock vanity. He had to belittle in order to feel taller. One thing I learned reading this is that, to become binding, self-esteem has to come solely from within, not through nonsensical competitive comparison with others. If you have to denigrate Jews or Muslims or gays to walk tall then you're always going to feel like a short arse in private and thus always be eaten up by resentment. Ultimately Stroop came across as a pompous windbag, someone who loved the sound of his own voice, which doesn't make this any kind of compelling reading experience. However, he would make a great character in a novel for an author keen to examine the Nazi psyche and give us the other side of the story.
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