Salon.com > Jonathan Shainin

Nation building

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 12:22:00 +0000

For most of the 20th century, the struggle of the Palestinian people was to prove themselves to the world as a "nation," something more than a collection of unaffiliated Arab squatters who happened to make their home on a particularly hot parcel of holy land. But the invisible process by which peoples graduate to nationhood is shrouded in mystery. A nation, as a rule, possesses an illusory timelessness. Its inhabitants are tied to one another, and to their land, by prehistoric bonds that stir the hearts of patriots yet elude definition. Nations are not created in the present, they emerge from the past, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus -- fully grown, and armed -- appearing to all the world to have existed forever. A nation makes its home in a state, with sovereignty over its people on its "ancestral" lands. Nations that have persisted without their own states should, according to the logic of self-determination, have statehood bestowed upon them. But those peoples who have failed history's test do not get states and never will.

The rape of Berlin

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 15:12:00 +0000

"The essence of a nation," the French historian Ernest Renan said in 1882, is that its citizens have much in common, but "that they have forgotten many things." The Germans, it could be said, have forgotten things that most nations never knew. No single country has struggled so openly to reckon with its history, and the process has not been a short one. Germany has spent decades coming to terms with the atrocities perpetuated by the Nazi regime, but the penumbra of shame around these crimes also obscured the suffering visited on German civilians, 600,000 of whom were killed by Allied firebombing of cities like Dresden and Hamburg.

The publication of "A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City," then, shines considerable light on a hidden history of the war. The writer, an anonymous 34-year-old journalist who recorded in her diary the events of the fall of Berlin in the spring of 1945, does not fashion herself a victim. But her diary, released by a German publisher for the first time 60 years after the war, meets the challenge that novelist W.G. Sebald put to Germans in his lectures on "Air War and Literature": "to try recording what [they] actually saw as plainly as possible." In unsparing prose that brooks no pity and assigns no blame, the diarist calmly describes the disintegration of the German capital. Her diary begins less than a week before the Soviets entered the city, hastily scrawled by candlelight in a basement shelter: "My fingers are shaking as I write this."

Politics-a-palooza

Thu, 12 May 2005 14:43:00 +0000

Matt Taibbi is a natural provocateur. He has an uncanny knack for kicking up storms of indignation, and occasionally stumbles into an uproar he didn't even mean to stoke. This happened most recently when he made light of Pope John Paul II's imminent death -- and the saturation coverage sure to accompany it -- in a New York Press cover story titled "The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope." His piece infuriated what seemed to be more people than the paper has readers, and provoked a storm of humorless condemnation from a panoply of local pols like Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Anthony Weiner, the mayoral longshot who urged New Yorkers to gather up bundles of the free paper and throw them in the trash.