It can become routine, working in archives. We deal with unique treasures every day, and it is nearly impossible to maintain a sense of wonder about the items in a collection when you are constantly exposed to them.
Yesterday that all came crashing down for me. The staff here at the Claude Pepper Library is working in conjunction with the World War II Institute to process a medium sized collection of WW II memorabilia and veteran memoirs. A very small box in the collection contains items that were donated, I believe, by the family of a woman who was the wife of a high-ranking Nazi in Germany during the war.
It was an eye-opening moment to go through those papers and hold the propaganda and photographs in my hand. It was all in German, naturally, which is a language I do not understand, but that really did not matter. The fact is, what I saw was a beautifully rendered dreamscape, where people are beautiful and happy and proud—the ideal Nazi world of perfect Aryan Germans.
We see pictures of the death camps and the victims and the ovens, and it is easy to see the evil there. We read the delirium of Mein Kampf with a cynical eye, knowing that Hitler was mentally unstable, and in retrospect it is astounding to us that anyone would buy into his fever dream.
This collection, though, is poignant. Smiling, happy people laughing at jokes; proper, educated women holding elegant dinner parties; and children goofing for the camera all speak to a people who are utterly mundane in their normalcy. The propaganda, which left me feeling tainted just to touch it, was gorgeously produced. It was hard to put down, even knowing how despicable it is.
Sometimes, I think, we gloss over the difficult parts in order to make it easy to hate the bad guys. If evil were truly ugly to behold, who would allow it to prosper?
Archive collections like this remind me of the importance of our jobs. These tainted, ordinary objects, imbued with hatred and malevolence, are what we need to remind ourselves of what the fight against “evil” is really about: common people, reaching desperately for hope and prosperity and happiness…and going murderously insane in the process.
#
