I saw the movie The area of interest, which was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.
It is the story of Commander Rudolf Höss and his family, who live peacefully in their property, which is built against the walls of the Auschwitz extermination camp. Höss being the historical leader of the camp. The description of a tragic indifference alongside horror.
I visited the former Auschwitz and Birkenau camps in Poland. Repellent!
As I replayed the film in my head, I repeated to myself that if I had the ability to go back in time and use the theory of the butterfly effect as a metaphor, I would program myself to land in the Austrian capital, at the beginning of the XXe century, in order to change the course of the existence of Christian Griepenkerl, the idiot who refused Adolf Hitler’s candidacy, twice rather than once, to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
The desired result would have been to save tens of millions of lives lost in World War II.
The theory of the butterfly effect was formulated by a meteorologist, Edward Lorenz, to extrapolate on predictability, asking the question: “Can the flap of a butterfly’s wing in Brazil trigger a tornado in Texas1 ? »
A little scientifically perverted, this theory could be useful if we knew how to go back in time in order to intervene to change an event that was not so important, but which would have enormous consequences in the future.
I can already imagine what I could have invented to prevent Griepenkerl from humiliating the future Führer, who, like businessman Starmania and his blues, wanted to be an artist. The only question would have been the moral limit that I would have imposed on myself…
Of course, you will tell me that I know nothing about them, but I don’t find them so bad, the sketches presented by Hitler to the Academy2. Quite a pretentious guy, this Griepenkerl, I would have said yes right there!
A happy Hitler, admitted to this institution, and a 99% chance that the Führer will never exist.
The feeling that remained with me after seeing this film led me to revisit something I read last year: Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955by German journalist Harold Jähner.
Costaude is the idea of explaining everyday German life in the 10 years following the war, and very little has been written about this period.
I have long been fixated on trying, through much reading, to discover, like thousands of individuals, I suppose, and in vain, THE day when Hitler decided, or gave the order, to carry out the extermination of the Jews.
As at this Wannsee conference of 1942, where German leaders agreed on the operationalization of the “final solution”.
And also, how long to try to fully grasp the social and political environment of this strange period of the Weimar Republic, the interwar period, which led to Hitler’s rise to power in Germany.
I still remember my first stay in Munich, where almost as soon as I got off the plane, I walked around the city to identify the location of the Bürgerbraükeller brewery, where Hitler and his henchmen met, and from where he miraculously escaped an attack in 1939. And the Löwenbraükeller, the other refreshment bar of which he was a regular.
Jähner’s book begins with the capitulation of the Nazi regime on May 7, 1945.
On this date, the approximately 75 million people living on German territory are hidden, or buried under 500 million cubic meters of rubble.
But in Berlin, this was not the main concern then. Because the entry of the Red Army into the city will make women the main victims, again, because as many do in Ukraine, Russian soldiers will indulge in their favorite sport of wartime invaders: rape.
In Dresden, capital of Saxony, the German state, the work of clearing the rubble was completed only 35 years later, in 1977.
Of the 75 million inhabitants, around forty million were so-called “displaced” people, that is to say they were far from their pre-war homes, for all kinds of reasons, not wishing to be where they were, like so many wanderers.
Millions of prisoners, German soldiers, urban dwellers who had fled to the countryside, populations from the East who had fled with the arrival of the Russians, etc.
So, imagine all these people wandering around, like homeless people, or trying to return home while Germany is destroyed: almost non-existent infrastructure, famine, and its corollary, violence to survive.
Chaotic, you say?
A monographic book whose main interest for me was the psychological analysis of the complex feeling of non-guilt of the Germans of the time.
Or how they almost succeeded in victimizing themselves, a fortiori, in relation to the Nazi regime, in repressing their collective responsibility and in living this paradox of “communicative silence” on the consequences of the Shoah and the rest of the disaster, as theorized by a philosopher named Hermann Lübbe.
Hence the dramatic link to try to understand the indifference of the protagonists of The area of interest…
Disturbing!
Read the Quebec article “The butterfly effect: when one detail changes everything”
What do you think ? Participate in the dialogue
Between us
In the same vein : Their Second World War, by Bruno Halioua. How, children or young adults, Chirac, Giscard d’Estaing, Beauvoir, Sagan, Brassens and other French personalities experienced the years of German occupation in France.
And another recently published biography of this magnificent French and Jewish politician who lived through the death camps, Simone Veil: the struggles of an immortal. By Laurène Vernet.