After watching the movie last week "The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas" I’ve been watching some more films this week about WWII and the Nazi occupation with Yale who seems to have missed a few of those ‘must see’ films. We watched "Life is Beautiful" and "Schindler’s List" and I think next we were talking about watching "Das Boot" (in German with the subtitles – Jurgen Prochnow just don’t have the same… ummm… gravitas when dubbed over with some strange English voice).
So… as you do when you’re interested in something – anything really – you do a few Google searches… remember the old days of remaining ignorant until you had time to make it to the library??? I love the internet. Anyway I started off by searching info about the construction etc of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi German Concentration Camp just to get a sense of the timeline where these films (The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas and Schindler’s List in particular) were supposed to be interacting with the actual history. I then read through a number of different pages on the Denazification of German and Austrian society after the war and several other pages about various key SS officials and the Nuremberg trials etc and at some point I realized that there wasn’t a lot I was reading that I wasn’t already at least vaguely familiar with – it was the minutiae that I’m not overly conversant on (dates, key officials, numbers of deaths, post-war reparations etc).
I kept hopping from one link to another and ended up (somehow) reading about the Japanese involvement in the Pacific which somehow got me to reading about the Nanking Massacre which occured when the Japanese Imperial Army had invaded China and took Nanking by force in December of 1937. An event I am sad to say I have never heard about in my entire life. I don’t ever remember studying this in school, don’t ever remember stumbling over it in a Time Magazine or on a History Channel documentary or anything. In fact my only recollection of anything even remotely connected to the Japanese occupation of China at this time was as the backdrop for a film I saw last year "Children of the Silk Road" which was an interesting enough film but apparently was not very true to historical fact from what I understand. I guess modern history hasn’t ever been ‘my bag’ so I’ve gaping holes in my knowledge base here.
Obviously I don’t think it’s possible to know something about everything… hell it’s hard enough to know everything about one thing. But feeling like you don’t know anything about some things makes me feeling like i know nothing about anything! It bothers me somewhat. Maybe I need to get my head out of the literature and back into the reference section…
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