«Since then, many have tried to describe what it feels like to endure the disintegration of one’s entire civilization, to watch the buildings and landscapes of one’s childhood collapse, to understand that the moral world of one’s parents and teachers no longer exists and that one’s respected national leaders have failed. Yet it is still not easy to understand for those who have not experienced it. Words like “vacuum” and “emptiness” when used about a national catastrophe such as an alien occupation are simply insufficient: they cannot convey the anger people felt at their prewar and wartime leaders, their failed political systems, their own “naïve” patriotism, and the wishful thinking of their parents and teachers. Widespread destruction—the loss of homes, families, schools—condemned millions of people to a kind of radical loneliness. Different parts of Eastern Europe experienced this collapse at different times and the experience was not everywhere identical. But whenever and however it came, national failure had profound effects, especially on young people, many of whom simply concluded that everything they had once thought true was false. Besides, the war had left them without a social network and without a context. Many really did resemble Hannah Arendt’s “totalitarian personality,” the “completely isolated human being who, without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades, or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement, his membership in the party.”» (Anne Applebaum. “Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956”)
Posted on: Fri, 01 Aug 2014 04:06:03 +0000
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