I'm very much stuck on the question of motivation to do Second World War re-enactments outside of educational settings. In some sense, re-enactment is always about interfacing with history, but I think most people (or at least the adults) living in participating countries have known someone for whom the war is in living memory. It's accessible in ways that most other conflicts aren't, even if the people who remember don't talk about it much, we put it together as we get older and we realise how it impacted them and how that impacted us.* In that context, I'm having a hard time seeing re-enactments as something other than a denial of history one way or another (not necessarily glorifying Nazism, but a re-enactment is, by necessity, a sanitised version of the event).
One thing I keep thinking about was an activity in my German 3 class. We were supposed to be learning about German history from, I don't know, maybe 1918 through reunification. Inevitably for a Berkeley German class, this involved small groups and skits. With a few minutes preparation, three of us were supposed to silently re-enact 1933 to 1945. This is probably the most taxing thing I ever had to do in a German class. I think everyone's natural impulse is not to deny Nazism exactly, but to deny anyone like you could have been involved and here we were getting asked to re-enact a genocide. That one activity (I think it's canonical German 3, but maybe not) was probably more effective than any previous efforts I'd seen to teach about Nazism.
*I have a friend who can see the impact of the First World War on his family, but I suspect our access to that war has faded considerably outside of the places that saw combat.
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Date: 2010-10-13 10:44 pm (UTC)One thing I keep thinking about was an activity in my German 3 class. We were supposed to be learning about German history from, I don't know, maybe 1918 through reunification. Inevitably for a Berkeley German class, this involved small groups and skits. With a few minutes preparation, three of us were supposed to silently re-enact 1933 to 1945. This is probably the most taxing thing I ever had to do in a German class. I think everyone's natural impulse is not to deny Nazism exactly, but to deny anyone like you could have been involved and here we were getting asked to re-enact a genocide. That one activity (I think it's canonical German 3, but maybe not) was probably more effective than any previous efforts I'd seen to teach about Nazism.
*I have a friend who can see the impact of the First World War on his family, but I suspect our access to that war has faded considerably outside of the places that saw combat.