As I am reading Chapter 14 I am imagining my character taking the risk of hiding a fugitive at her apartment. I was obviously already aware of the most famous hidden family, of which Anne Frank was most famous, but I was not aware that people had taken in Jews to hide right in the…
Author: sperry@rollins.edu
Gestapo
It’s funny and sad how the V-Men and the Gestapo treated Germans in contrast to the prejudice the system had against other ethnicities. The story in which a young woman was let off for singing an offensive song reminds me of a recent happening in which an underage white girl at a music festival was…
Evacuations
I am curious to know what the differences were between the KLV children and the British children evacuated to the countryside. Were both groups as oblivious to the danger of the war? What sort of experiences would each have had in their respective new homes? I’m especially curious to know how the ideas of the…
Ignorance is Strength
^^Title quote from 1984 by George Orwell Chapter 6 made me mad. It wasn’t just the forced labour, the hellish conditions for the Ostarbeiter, or the fact that I can count myself as part of one of the nationalities kidnapped and enslaved (as I am of French ancestry). It’s the fact that nobody ever teaches these things…
Expansionssüchtig
The title of this blog post is one of the vocabulary words we learned in German 491 this semester. It is a compound word, constructed using ‘expansion’ and ‘süchtig’, the latter meaning ‘addicted’. The word was used to describe Adolf Hitler, and after reading Chapter 5 of Berlin at War, I now completely understand why. It strikes…
Angst. (Fear.)
Simulated diary entry from my character, a 22-year-old German woman living alone in Berlin. Es gibt keine sichere Beförderungsart für eine Frau in Berlin. Mit dieser Verdunkelung werde die ganze Stadt eine freie Arena für die Kriminalität. Nach der Arbeit muss ich eine Taschenlampe mitbringen aber mit einem roten Farbglas. Ich würde die Bahn nehmen, aber es ist…
Let’s Have a Parade
I’m simply finding it amazing how Hitler could have taken all this power to himself as a dictator without anyone freaking out over it. My best guess is that anyone who realised what was going on and was vocal about it would have been swiftly killed. Otherwise, the show and the spectacle which hid the…
On Perspective, Storytelling, and Representation
This post is being re-posted from my personal blog, bleepbloopwhirr. Alright, I’m posting on this blog again. It’s not because I had some stroke of inspiration or some intense life event that convinced me I needed to blog about it, it’s because I’m required to. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to try and make…