Fail! Massive Fail!
Mar. 13th, 2008 04:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lesbiassparrowYou know how I said I was going to look at only things on puppies and Korean drama and be all cheery as a result? Well, today one of my colleagues was giving a talk on Egyptology under the Nazis - and GOD. I know about the classics stuff but I think familiarity with it makes it less depressing. But hearing about a sister discipline and all the horrendous people becoming enthusiastic Nazis and shiving their old friends who didn't tow the party line in the ribs was just.... Actually I don't have words. And then the speaker read off some of their obituaries which talked about how these former Nazis had suffered for periods after the war (not all of them, mind you) and how terrible this was that they spent some years without posts. Of course, they didn't mention the Nazi bit because you'd have no sympathy for the bastards.
I'M OFF NOW TO BE TOTALLY DEPRESSED AT THE HUMAN RACE.
ETA: But there was one guy who had left Germany in the late '30s and was asked after the war to write about what he knew about the Nazi activities of various professors. Of one (Grapow)* he said among other things about him holding Nazi meetings at his house that he "was the meanest Egyptologist of them all." And of another he wrote "as to his character I cannot describe it for he has none." There were other good stabs in there but god - one of them, Kees (I think) was considered too important to one university to even have his career suspended after 1945. So despite having turned in some Belgian scholar for writing articles that were unNazi and multiple other things he gets to keep his nice cushy job. Bastard of bastards.
(Grapow after Franck, a Nobel laureate, resigned his chair in Physics in protest at Jewish colleagues being driven out and sacked, organized 42 other academics to write a telegramme asking for faster purging of undesirable elements from the universities.)
I'M OFF NOW TO BE TOTALLY DEPRESSED AT THE HUMAN RACE.
ETA: But there was one guy who had left Germany in the late '30s and was asked after the war to write about what he knew about the Nazi activities of various professors. Of one (Grapow)* he said among other things about him holding Nazi meetings at his house that he "was the meanest Egyptologist of them all." And of another he wrote "as to his character I cannot describe it for he has none." There were other good stabs in there but god - one of them, Kees (I think) was considered too important to one university to even have his career suspended after 1945. So despite having turned in some Belgian scholar for writing articles that were unNazi and multiple other things he gets to keep his nice cushy job. Bastard of bastards.
(Grapow after Franck, a Nobel laureate, resigned his chair in Physics in protest at Jewish colleagues being driven out and sacked, organized 42 other academics to write a telegramme asking for faster purging of undesirable elements from the universities.)
