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Please read the blog entry "Historical Revisionism" from Wed. May 16th, 2018 to prepare for participating in this discussion.

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For your convenience this is a copy of the blog entry "Historical Revisionism"



As I was writing our latest novel - - The Art of Being Another - - (coming soon) I was confronted with historical revisionism, both while writing the novel and while doing the research for it.

The Art of Being Another is set in Germany. It starts in the 1920s and ends after the end of the Second World War. Although it is historical fantasy where the main characters are guardians of the Conduit (see The Conduit - by Sascha & Tatiyana Witt), we hoped to stay historically accurate. A lot of research about the 1920s in Germany, about the rise of the Nazi party and of course about the Second World War was done in order to make the setting of the novel authentic.



The first thing that comes to mind when mentioning the terms - revisionism and - World War Two - in one sentence is of course the efforts of neo-Nazis to deny that the holocaust had ever happened. On the one hand they will never grow tired of arguing about their great Jewish conspiracy to destroy Germany, even today. During these arguments they will then recommend that the concentration camps are re-opened. But with the same breath they will give you their drivel why the holocaust is a - holohoax - that never happened. Allegedly it is all just a gigantic ploy by the Jewish state of Israel to press money out of poor little Germany.

Why then, an intelligent man has to wonder, would you want to re-open the concentration camps, if, as you say, nothing had ever happened there? This does not seem to make an awful lot of sense now, does it?

While I was growing up in Germany, I had often wondered why it was illegal in Germany to discuss the holocaust if you questioned the authenticity of historical facts. After having had the displeasure of running into some of those neo-Nazis, or should I call them neo-nutsies, I can now understand how wise the German government was to try and prevent that from happening. Unfortunately with the onset of the digital world and the Internet, such people now have a platform available to them, that often times is beyond the scope of the German justice system.



How does this relate to the novel? Well, since we were writing it from the point of view of the protagonist, one of the guardians who infiltrates the SS, we ourselves often times re-interpreted historic events. This was not done in order to try and falsify history. But it was done in order to show how a German nationalist and an officer in the SS may have thought about historic facts concerning the Great War which had ended just a few years prior to the beginning of the plot. Would such a man, for example, claim that Germany had started the war? Or that Germany was evil? Or would he use the same established historic facts and interpret them in such a way that makes the Entente powers look like the aggressors and the evil that destroyed Germany and then stole large tracts of land and resources from her to establish Poland, a country that had not existed for 120 years prior to the end of the Great War?

I was almost a little appalled to realize just how easy it was to use the same facts available, but to come to different conclusions. Often times the actual facts are few and far between. And what we know as fact today are naught but interpretations of people who had gone before.

I once heard it said that history is just that: it is - his story - these words seem all too true once you attempt to tell a different story, like the neo-Nazis are doing, once I did as part of writing the novel, or once, as I call them, Allied revisionists now try and pretend that their military had not killed anyone during the entire war.



While doing the research for the novel I could not help but feel as appalled by the revisionism practiced by these Allied revisionists as I was by that practiced by the neo-Nazis. I will mention but one example here: the Bombing of Dresden, February 13th - 15th, 1945. The Nazis claimed that 210,000 + people were killed in the attack. It was a number also used in Soviet propaganda for years to come to show how evil the Western powers are.

Now the Nazis of course are not exactly the most trustworthy source. But reading the German translation of Raymond Cartier‘s book - La seconde guerre mondiale - from 1965 I found that historians in the 60s had determined that approximately 135,000 people were killed in Dresden and that within the charred remains of the victims 20,000 wedding rings were found.

Remembering a documentary from the 1990s the number of victims had suddenly shrunken to 45,000.

In 2015 I saw a documentary on German state television commemorating the 70th anniversary of the attack. The number of victims had suddenly shrunken again and it was now stated as 35,000, including some mothers who had just given birth in a maternity hospital.

As I researched the event last year while considering whether to mention Dresden or Hamburg in the novel I found disturbing accounts of this event on the net where: in fact 16,000 buildings were destroyed during the attacks, but most of the city must have been empty, because within the ruins of these buildings less than 22,000 people had died, while the maternity hospital had quickly been turned into a military hospital.

Within the span of just 70 years the number of victims of the fire bombing of Dresden has dropped from 210,000 to 22,000!

Another 10 or 20 years of this and I can throw out my novel, because WW2 will just simply not have happened!



And I have to wonder: The victims of the holocaust deserve to be remembered. Do not the other victims of this same war also deserve this courtesy? Is it OK for people whose grandparents were still in diapers at the time it had all happened to now juggle the numbers and to pretend that no one was killed?