Whatever the rights and wrongs of the original thread, I do think that it's a bit disingenuous to keep harping on the fact that you think P.J. is not-a-Nazi and not-a-Communist, and then try to correct people when they say you are slandering her. You hint that she has Nazi tendencies, because of her religious practices, and Communist tendencies because she has a Brechtian user name, and at the very least you are tainting her by association.
I also don't think Brecht is as vile an ideologue as you're suggesting (and he certainly loathed the Nazis). Brecht =/= Piraten Jenny, though I imagine he wd have said that he admired her for remaining defiant in a nasty situation. Like many others, I think he genuinely believed that the DDR could be made into a a fairer, peaceful Germany. Of course, it didn't come that way, and you can certainly argue that it was naive to think so, but I don't think it was a massive moral failure. Lots of people backed the DDR with honourable intentions in the early days. And while Brecht never spoke out openly against the nastier actions of the regime (as, I agree, he should have), his poem following the 1953 rebellion, with the ironic suggestion that the govt should 'elect a new people' shows that while he may not have been a Havel, he wasn't blindly toeing the party line either. It's much more complicated than that. ( speak as someone who has lived in the former East Germany and who has lots of friends who had a difficult time because of church or democratic allegiences, and who 'Ostalgie' annoys, even when i can see where it springs from)
Anyway, I think the assumption that liking a writer or one of his poems also means identification with his or her political programme is fundamentally flawed. I like both Chesterton and Brecht - but I wouldn't vote for either. And I also find the Eddas very moving, more so than that rather tiresome crowd on Mt Olympus, though I am not about to start sacrificing to the Hanged God.
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Hang on a moment
Date: 2006-06-22 09:48 am (UTC)I also don't think Brecht is as vile an ideologue as you're suggesting (and he certainly loathed the Nazis). Brecht =/= Piraten Jenny, though I imagine he wd have said that he admired her for remaining defiant in a nasty situation. Like many others, I think he genuinely believed that the DDR could be made into a a fairer, peaceful Germany. Of course, it didn't come that way, and you can certainly argue that it was naive to think so, but I don't think it was a massive moral failure. Lots of people backed the DDR with honourable intentions in the early days. And while Brecht never spoke out openly against the nastier actions of the regime (as, I agree, he should have), his poem following the 1953 rebellion, with the ironic suggestion that the govt should 'elect a new people' shows that while he may not have been a Havel, he wasn't blindly toeing the party line either. It's much more complicated than that. ( speak as someone who has lived in the former East Germany and who has lots of friends who had a difficult time because of church or democratic allegiences, and who 'Ostalgie' annoys, even when i can see where it springs from)
Anyway, I think the assumption that liking a writer or one of his poems also means identification with his or her political programme is fundamentally flawed. I like both Chesterton and Brecht - but I wouldn't vote for either. And I also find the Eddas very moving, more so than that rather tiresome crowd on Mt Olympus, though I am not about to start sacrificing to the Hanged God.