Matching Tracksuits

There’s something about waking up in a house when it’s a holiday that has a similar feel no matter where you are. Waking up this morning and realizing a) I didn’t have to go to school and b) it wasn’t the weekend made me suddenly feel as if I could be at home (whatever those two words mean for me now) on Thanksgiving morning. Or at least in Nashville, waking up in a place that isn’t “home” but at the same time is familiar and rather comfortable.

Speaking of “home,” I guess I’ve come to realize that I don’t really have any place that I think of like that. I feel like I’m visiting when I go to my parents’ house, because even though I’ve been there several times now, I still feel like it’s not really “home.” It’s familiar, but not like 106 Lamont Road was. And of course if I went there now it would feel completely alien.

I read some reviews of Hitler’s Willing Executioners and I have to say that a lot of the things I read had a familiar feel — that feeling of reading something that you’ve felt but not been able to put into words. For example one reviewer (I’m not sure who — I just copied this from the internet and I didn’t collect any information for an individual review other than what was on the actual page itself) wrote, “Goldhagen’s book has been aptly described as ‘angry.’ He writes like a lawyer rather than like an historian.” This lack of a historian’s voice came up again in the review several pages later:

In this fashion, Goldhagen systematically discounts all statements indicative of normal human emotion by the perpetrators. However, at several places in his narrative he is quite willing to casually throw empiricism to the winds and to liberally conjure up fantasies to bolster his portrait of collective German brutality! For example, on p. 339 he muses about what went through the minds of the soldiers as they “. . . made love in barracks next to enormous privation and incessant cruelty. What did they talk about when their heads rested quietly on their pillows, when they were smoking their cigarettes in those relaxing moments after their physical needs had been met? Did one relate to another accounts of a particularly amusing beating that she or he had administered or observed, of the rush of power that engulfed her when the righteous adrenaline of Jew-beating caused her body to pulse with energy.” One can legitimately ask whether Goldhagen is writing history at such points, or creating a short story.

I remember thinking as I read that very passage, “This really doesn’t read like history. It reads more like a novel or something.” I think I might have even assumed that it wasn’t in the original dissertation but was added when it was edited with a mass-market in mind.

And the whole time I read it, I thought, “Nothing counts against this guy’s thesis. He can dismiss almost everything in some fashion or another.” Somewhat similar to how Armstrongians will accept nothing that comes from a non-Armstrongian source. Once people get something into their heads, it seems it’s all but impossible to get it back out.