Have you written about the war?
Earlier this week I joined in Ed Champion's five-part roundtable about Nicholson Baker's new book, Human Smoke. The non-fiction work collects little scraps from historical documents, memoirs, and letters, stitching them together into a new picture of the lead-up to World War II.
The book spent a lot of time exploring contrasts between writers. On one end of the spectrum, we had Joseph Goebbels, an author who stopped writing his novel to become Hitler's horrific propaganda minister; on the other end we had the writer Christopher Isherwood begging for a non-violent solution to the conflict.
That contrast between two writers, one who failed to stop a war and another who managed to incite his countrymen to murder millions, has haunted me for weeks.
What should writers do during wartime? Should we remain apolitical? Or should we be leading the pacifist charge? The comments section awaits you. To get you started, here's what Isherwood wrote about non-violent response to Nazi aggression, a difficult, thought-provoking quote: "I am afraid I should be reduced to a chattering, enraged monkey, screaming back hate at their hate.”
I can't help but think that writers should look at how the war affects people and tell those stories. That might mean becoming political or pacifist at some point, but then it's based on a human perspective, not an ideological one.
Posted by: Sarah | March 14, 2008 9:28 AM | Permalink to Comment