Joshua's Response: Sondra Perl, On Austrian Soil, II

[joshua]

#871

I am again struck with Sondra’s absence of judgmental wrath, her willingness to have faith in dialogue rather than confrontation and accusation. In addition to the Austrian students/teachers, I am thinking of Sondra’s description of meeting Gert’s parents, in Chapter 8 (“Unexpected Lessons”). My nonreflexive inclination as a reader is to be judgmental (or rather prejudiced) of Margret’s in-laws, particularly her father-in-law Luis. He seems capable of extraordinary self-delusion and denial regarding his participatory role in an historical atrocity. I have mentioned this, both in my earlier text, and in class, and it is something I have not stopped considering and contemplating regarding this text. It is so seductive to judge others rather than looking inwardly and thinking about one’s own connections, even unpleasant or painful (shameful?) connections with history and historical events. Gert’s father would rather focus on America’s involvement in the failed war in Vietnam, and Bill Clinton’s quasi-draft dodging, just as I would rather focus on Luis’s hyporcisies than think about the many ways which I am complicit with, or at leased linked to, my forebears (or other white men) and their own parade of atrocities throughout history (e.g. Native American genocide, U.S. slavery, colonization, imperial conquest, etc.). This is not to say that someone in my position should feel crushed by the horrors of history, but rather simply to acknowledge their reality and admit one’s connection to them.
William Faulkner’s words (“The past is never dead. It’s not even past”) occur to me again, in the light of recent unrest in Ferguson, New York, Baltimore. As Jelani Cobb wrote recently in The New Yorker, “[i]t is true that we have grown adroit at feigning astonishment at the episodic convulsions of violence in American cities, but that doesn’t make them any less predictable or their roots any less apparent.” Deflection, denial, and self-delusion, in the style of Gert’s father (or ourselves) do nothing to change that dynamic.

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