User Profile

Niklas

pivic@bookwyrm.social

Joined 1 year, 4 months ago

Favourite book genres: biography, music, philosophy, dissence; anything kick-providing, really. I review books, which means that I am—via Kurt Vonnegut—rococo argle-bargle. niklas.reviews

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Niklas's books

Currently Reading

Georges Rodenbach: Brygge-den-Döda (Paperback, swedish language, 2024, Alastor Press)

Det här är berättelsen om Hugues Viane, en änkling som sökt sig till den melankoliska …

Han hade vad man skulle kunna kalla "känsla för likheter", ett extra sinne, ett ömtåligt och lidande sinne, som band samman tingen sinsemellan med tusentals länkar, som skapade släktskap mellan träden, som spann en imaginär telegraftråd mellan hans själ och de otröstliga tornen.

Det var bakgrunden till att han hade valt Brygge, Brygge, som havet hade dragit sig undan, likt en stor lycka som försvinner.

Brygge-den-Döda by  (Page 81)

Richard J. Evans: Hitler's People (EBook, 2024, Penguin Books, Limited)

Richard J. Evans, author of the acclaimed Third Reich Trilogy and over a dozen other …

In 1950 he contacted Vera, who was busy telling Allied investigators that she had divorced her husband, and then that he was dead, and she joined him in Argentina with their children in July 1952. When the hydro-electric scheme fell victim to an economic recession, they moved to Buenos Aires, where Eichmann tried his hand at a number of jobs before obtaining employment as a mechanic with a branch of the Mercedes-Benz car manufacturing company which employed a number of former SS men. In Buenos Aires, as Hannah Arendt noted, Eichmann did not go underground but occupied himself with talking endlessly with members of the large ex-Nazi colony, to whom he readily admitted his identity. These conversations were recorded by a half-Dutch, half-German ex-member of the SS, Willem Sassen, and edited extracts were published anonymously, though there could be little doubt about the identity of the principal participant. The existence of the original tapes and transcripts had long been known, but until recently their poor quality has defied systematic investigation. In 2014 the German philosopher and historian Bettina Stangneth deciphered them, put them together with other, often little-known source material, and delivered a full analysis of Eichmann’s ideas as he expounded them to his friends and former colleagues in exile. In the conversations he had with Sassen and others, Eichmann was completely unrepentant about the extermination of the Jews, which he saw as historically necessary, a policy he was proud to have carried out in the interests of Germany. The cynicism, inhumanity, absence of pity, and moral self-deception of the conversations is breathtaking. Ten years and more after the war’s end, Eichmann’s lack of realism, typical of a political exile, even persuaded him that he could make a comeback, or that Nazism could be rehabilitated in Germany. He even planned to launch a public defence of what he saw as its achievements. In one of the conversations, Eichmann described himself as a ‘cautious bureaucrat’ but also ‘a fanatical warrior, fighting for the freedom of my blood’. He lacked any kind of moral intelligence, or any ability to judge the system for which he worked. He had assimilated Nazism so completely that he was unable as well as unwilling to escape from it years after it had completely collapsed.[34] Over nearly seven hundred pages of transcripts, Eichmann condemned himself more thoroughly than any courtroom prosecutor could hope to do. Reality finally intervened when, alerted by the German prosecutor Fritz Bauer, the Israeli secret service sent a snatch squad to Buenos Aires, kidnapped Eichmann on 11 May 1960 and smuggled him back, drugged and provided with a false identity, to Jerusalem to stand trial.

Hitler's People by  (49%)

Very interesting to hear Bettina Stangneth's revelations in 2014 led to knowing how much Eichmann lied about basically being a 'clerk' and not a nazi follower...

Richard J. Evans: Hitler's People (EBook, 2024, Penguin Books, Limited)

Richard J. Evans, author of the acclaimed Third Reich Trilogy and over a dozen other …

Despite submitting innumerable petitions for clemency, Ilse Koch was never released from the women’s prison of Aichach. She always rejected all the allegations brought against her. In despair, she hanged herself with bedsheets in her cell on 2 September 1967. She had certainly been guilty of profiting from her husband’s corruption in a variety of ways. The testimony from some former inmates that she had incited SS guards to murder was convincing. She shared fully in the Nazi world view: the ‘hate propaganda’ against her, she charged, ‘was orchestrated against me mainly by Jews’, although the witnesses who testified against her, like the journalists who vilified her in the press, were overwhelmingly not Jewish. She did herself no favours by refusing to recognize that she had done anything wrong. Her defiance was unrepentantly Nazi: when she was arrested in Germany, she is reported to have said that the West German ‘regime’ would be short-lived, the Third Reich would return, and those who were prosecuting her ‘will see what will happen to them’. Not only in America but above all in West Germany, a tendency to ascribe crimes of Nazism to a perverted, psychopathic individual provided a convenient excuse for the vast numbers of ordinary Germans who had brought Nazism to power, sustained it there, and participated in its crimes. Both West Germans and Americans could claim that by bringing the ‘Witch of Buchenwald’ to justice, they had demonstrated their willingness to punish Nazi criminals, whereas in fact hundreds of men who had carried out murder and cruelty on an industrial scale escaped with far more lenient sentences or avoided retribution altogether.

Hitler's People by  (50%)

Julia Ebner: Going Dark (2020, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc)

The Christchurch attack blurred the lines between trolling and terrorism. From the beginning to the end the terror spectacle was orchestrated to entertain a specific audience: the 8chan shitposters. Tarrant’s so-called manifesto was dotted with jokes, language and ideologies that I have encountered numerous times in my research into online extremist networks. ‘Well lads, it’s time to stop shitposting and time to make a real life effort post,’ he announced on 8chan. ‘I will carry out an attack against the invaders, and will even live stream the attack via Facebook.’

Going Dark by