Writes Lily Meyer in
"A Better Way of Buying—And Wanting—Things/A new book argues that we should honor our material desires rather than feeling ashamed of them" by (The Atlantic)(reviewing the book "The Ugly History of Beautiful Things" by Katy Kelleher).
This discovery comes from her research on porcelain, which has already led to the discovery that some Jews incarcerated at Dachau had to work at a factory called Porzellan Manufaktur Allach.... One Allach statuette, the Fencer, depicts a white “muscled youth, shirtless, leaning on his épée”; a line from the first Allach catalog read, “White porcelain is the embodiment of the German soul.”
Kelleher considers forcing herself to reject porcelain. Getting rid of her inherited Czech plates, which now remind her of “Braun’s disgusting dish,” could feel good. But it would be “false and futile—wasteful too.” She chooses instead to look squarely at the story behind the plates she uses, recalling as she sets her table that her home and life are “woven into the fabric of the world and its terrible history.”...
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43 comments:
So she wants to be virtuous without having to sacrifice. Sounds like your typical Lefty to me...
Kelleher considers forcing herself to reject porcelain.
So she can either reject the object or she can reject the words someone wrote about something else made from the object's material almost a century ago.
It's such a struggle to overcome her reflexive urge that she almost throws the object away in self-defense.
And her triumph over herself is such a unique event that she must write a book about it.
This is what hath the God of Progressivism wrought.
bear some resemblance? It would help to discover the answer to this question: Are they Eva's plates or not? If you can't see how that might be important then the time honored internet solution you should probably kill yourself may apply...
Let's all get out the world's smallest violin to lament over the first-world's smallest problem.
Women's bottomless anxiety sparked Sigmund Freud's career -- upscale wives with emotional issues who needed a sounding board. Women indeed suffer from depression, anxiety, and mood disorders.
Porgy is "upstairs helping Porcelain make the bed."
Amongst the typewriter enthusiast community, one of the hot button issues is German/Nazi typewriters, typically distinguished by have a special key for the "SS" symbol. Discussions are very often heated. Some think they should all be destroyed, others find them to be historically interesting and desirable collector's items. I'm in the latter camp. My view is that none of these things are Nazis. If you're making a shrine for them, I find that problematic. Otherwise, they represent something like war trophies (demonstrating our victory over them) and using them seems to me the ultimate in turning swords into ploughshares.
Not sure if that reasoning strictly applies to objects made by slave labor, although using them in the resulting deNazified world seems to me to be the same sort of sword/ploughshares concept. But then, keeping and using them also keeps the memories of those people alive and immediate.
Funny, two posts in a row expressing sentiments which don't resonate at all with me. All sorts of bad people liked all sorts of things, but it would never occur to me that the things in question were tainted thereby. And every day is a failure, in which we fail to do all that we ought to have and all that we might have, but that never makes me want to scream or cry. Try again the next day.
Hitler loved dogs, so naturally I have set up an extermination camp for all dogs to show how opposed I am to Hitler.
I know that, had I been alive during the 1930's, I would have seen Hitler for what he truly was and I would have acted courageously in accordance with my deeply held virtuous beliefs to defeat Nazism.
Strangely, I am also confident that I would have been on the correct side of every political and cultural conflict over the last two millennia.
You see, I have a college education.
Congrats to Katy Kelleher for getting a book out of it and Lily Meyer for getting an article in The Atlantic. When I go down an internet rabbit hole researching something arcane, I limit myself to being boring at parties.
Dachau porcelain would have bad juju, but that isn't what Kelleher has. Eva Braun was as blameless as Blondi.
Thank you Wince: "he's so good with the servants"
Anthony writes, "Amongst the typewriter enthusiast community, one of the hot button issues is German/Nazi typewriters, typically distinguished by having a special key for the "SS" symbol."
Machines have no politics, not yet anyway.
American soldiers often admired German weapons, not the bolt-action rifles so much, but the semi-autos and the fully automatic weapons. Every GI in the ETO admired and desired a P.08 pistol, commonly called a Luger, because it was so different from the firearms they learned to use in Basic Training. I'd wager most of them hoped to acquire their Luger from the smoking corpse of a Nazi they just killed. Not the ambition of a Nazi, is it? (Fun Fact: When the U. S. Government was in the process of choosing a new service pistol, the runner-up choice to the Colt/Browning automatic was the Luger. If Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionsfabriken had been more interested in doing business in America, the U.S. Army would have gone to war against Hitler packing .45-caliber Lugers on their hips.)
Anthony writes, "Amongst the typewriter enthusiast community, one of the hot button issues is German/Nazi typewriters, typically distinguished by having a special key for the "SS" symbol."
Machines have no politics, not yet anyway.
American soldiers often admired German weapons, not the bolt-action rifles so much, but the semi-autos and the fully automatic weapons. Every GI in the ETO admired and desired a P.08 pistol, commonly called a Luger, because it was so different from the firearms they learned to use in Basic Training. I'd wager most of them hoped to acquire their Luger from the smoking corpse of a Nazi they just killed. Not the ambition of a Nazi, is it? (Fun Fact: When the U. S. Government was in the process of choosing a new service pistol, the runner-up choice to the Colt/Browning automatic was the Luger. If Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionsfabriken had been more interested in doing business in America, the U.S. Army would have gone to war against Hitler packing .45-caliber Lugers on their hips.)
Reminds me of deodand.
Well, now I have to find photos of dishes owned by all evil people so I can compare and make sure mine look different. Oh, wait, no I don't because I don't care. That sounds like magical thinking to me - to feel that an object is evil because of an association with a bad person.
Collecting Nazi memorabilia is cultural appropriation, so since they're bad, it's good.
sean said...
Funny, two posts in a row expressing sentiments which don't resonate at all with me. All sorts of bad people liked all sorts of things, but it would never occur to me that the things in question were tainted thereby.
In my state, guns that are seized by the police are auctioned off. There has been a push to not do this with one particular gun that was used in a horrific crime. People want it destroyed. On the one hand, I understand their desire. On the other, as I said in another comment I just made, I think this is magical thinking. The gun is not evil just because its owner was.
I once had a friend who criticized me for buying a Wagner CD because the Nazis celebrated Wagnerian themes.
There is no limit to how stupid a person can be.
Janet Gleeson's "The Arcanum" is a good read about the importance of porcelain to the European economy and the efforts made to figure out the process and make it instead of sending money to the Chinese.
I was contacted once by the history department to evaluate a book that a person had taken to them. This must have been between terms since all the history fac had scattered, and to spare the person a long trek across the unfamiliar campus I went over there.
IIRC it was a bound volume of the Nazi magazine 'Signal,' which was their answer to modern American titles like "Life" and "Look." Lots of color photos, human interest stories, cartoons etc. Published and distributed in many European languages ('Signal' is common among them).
Hitler and Goebbels were big fans of American mass-media reach and effectiveness, and tried to emulate best practices.
Once I told him what I knew, and declined to put a price tag on it, the guy decided to hold onto it. It would have been a nice addition to the other Nazi-era stuff that ended up in our special collections, including a beautifully produced summary report by Army Group North of their activities for the previous year, complete with acetate overlays, photos, graphs, and charts. Riga, 1944 I think without looking up the record.
Then there was "Goering's Atlas" of European economic and industrial data . . .
Not off topic: I was reading a bio of Charles DeGaulle. Before the war, he wanted to have two brigades of tanks staffed and maintained, not by conscripts, but by a professional force. The left defeated this proposal. They characterized it as "fascist". They claimed DeGaulle might use those two brigades not to fight Nazi Germany but rather to initiate a fascist putsch against France. There you have it. Preparing for a war against Hitler is as fascistic as owning certain types of pottery. We must constantly be on guard against these fascist forces.
(Fun Fact: When the U. S. Government was in the process of choosing a new service pistol, the runner-up choice to the Colt/Browning automatic was the Luger. If Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionsfabriken had been more interested in doing business in America, the U.S. Army would have gone to war against Hitler packing .45-caliber Lugers on their hips.)
Interesting. But the Luger is a 9mm. Was Luger proposing to manufacture a .45 caliber pistol for the US Army?
The German term is Ding an sich
Sometimes a plate is just a plate
Unless it’s a plate from which Elvis ate
Hitler was fascinated by squirrels and felt he had special connection to them, sometimes squeaking and chattering to them in conversational tone, though witnesses stated, after the war, that most squirrels snubbed him coldly.
Hitler drank water. Do with this knowledge what you will.
With the vintage watch interest of the day I'm seeing more and more Nazi/German Army watches coming up in the country auctions. Folks are cleaning out grandpas war trophies I suspect. I'm averse to swastikas and SS logos.
This is as close to that mess as I'm willing to get: there's documentation of a so called thirteenth 'Dirty Dozen' MoD watch from Enicar, who was possibly rejected because they also supplied watches to the Germans.
She "interrogates" her love of dishes. What in the hell is that supposed to mean? She handcuffed it to a chair in a darkened room, then shone a bright light in its face and said, "We have ways of making you talk, you know."
Cruel neutrality. That said, Hitler was an environmentalist. Hitler would have been at home in SoHo. Hitler was an advocate of diversity (i.e. color judgment, class-based bigotry), equity, and inclusion (DEI). Hitler defended human rites and distinguished between Jew and human. Hitler engaged in ethnic Springs and wars without borders. Hitler was a proponent of redistributive change. Hitler was an authoritarian. The Nazis subscribed to a secular religion. Remember the Capitol Hill... Reichstag fire.
Bob Boyd said...
Interesting. But the Luger is a 9mm. Was Luger proposing to manufacture a .45 caliber pistol for the US Army?
5/12/23, 11:56 AM
https://lugerman.com/product/luger-45-1907-classic/
To pile on - Hitler was also an artist. A painter I believe. Do with that what you will...
Interesting. But the Luger is a 9mm. Was Luger proposing to manufacture a .45 caliber pistol for the US Army?
Yes they were. However the US Army probably would’ve selected the Colt Model 1911 anyway. Turns out the Luger is pretty delicate for a handgun intended for use in combat, 1911s are amazingly rugged, as befits a gun designed by John Moses Browning.
Anthony @ 10:28--I wholeheartedly embrace the "swords into ploughshares" mentality. In 2020 (right before the world ended, or tried to) there was a huge controversy about a bell on Tulane University's campus. Generations of students had gone through school touching the bell at convocation and commencement for good luck. It was a fun campus tradition...until someone decided to speculate on the origin of the bell. Turns out if MIGHT HAVE come from a plantation. Not DID. Might have.
Now, I thought how cool it was that this bell, that might have sounded for rest and work for slaves, was now used as an icon of good luck and favor to a new generation, black and white. That is a triumph. But no. Even though the provenance wasn't certain, it was removed. You can't have a bell on campus from a plantation. RACIST. We must remove all vestiges of that earlier time from existence. Erase them.
Obviously this bothered me enough that I'm still thinking about it three years later. I don't understand people anymore.
Swastika Mountain in Oregon, named for the ancient Sanskrit symbol many years before the rise of Hitler, was recently stricken from our maps.
@ColoComment
Cool. Thanks.
I had no idea what was in the Hitlers' kitchen cupboard nor do I know where you even learn that.
"She "interrogates" her love of dishes. What in the hell is that supposed to mean?"
Yeah, that's as far as I got, too. What a maroon!
The plate is an Eva Braun horcrux. What she needs is the Sword of Gryffindor to stab it to death.
It seems you can find self-loathing writers.....everywhere.
“So she wants to be virtuous without having to sacrifice. Sounds like your typical Lefty to me...”
I’ve made this observation here before, but it’s original to me (as far as I know) so I like to repeat it. The sociopaths who bag their dog shit, and then leave the bag on the trail under the blind assumption that surely someone else will pick it up, are the perfect metaphor for the White middle-class Left.
Sometimes a plate is just a plate.
Hitler was a vegetarian and loved animals.
Cry harder...
Back in the '90s IIRC there was an interesting article in The Atlantic or Harper's about Hitler's personal library, now in the possession of the Library of Congress.
Turns out the guy had some nice things, and there is even evidence that he read a lot--but only to confirm his prejudices.
My German history professor (that is, the Oklahoma cracker who taught me German and other history) interviewed a man who met Hitler and some other Nazis at a social event in the late 1920s. Somebody broke an antique vase, and Hitler launched into an apparently well-informed
little commentary on Chinese porcelain. He undeniably had a prodigious memory.
"And her triumph over herself is such a unique event that she must write a book about it."
A triumph of the will.
That comparison is a bizzare "humblebrag" and nothing more.
Standing at my sink this morning, caught up in the Groundhog Day routine of brushing my teeth, it occurred to me that Eva Braun had teeth, too, and probably brushed them so I threw away my toothbrush and donated the partially-filled tube of toothpaste to starving feminist scholars. Glad to have off my conscience!
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