Monday 25 March 2024
“Professor, can I ask you a question?” a student requests. Because I’ve taught the War Class for nearly ten years—longer than my Literature of the Holocaust course—when they ask me questions after class, I intuitively sense it’s about the course reading list. When they ask me about an upcoming assignment, they will add, “a question about the next paper.”
“Professor, why aren’t we reading ‘____’?” An alternative inquiry is: “I wish we could be reading ‘___.’” Or “Can you give me a reading list, based off of what we’re covering here?” I get the first type of question often when I teach my War Class. To be precise and official, I call my War Class: “The (In)Humanity of War.” When I teach other classes on other subjects or themes, I don’t usually hear those questions. When I teach Writing classes, I typically hear, “Do you teach other classes, besides Writing?” Or “What are you teaching next semester?” Or “I heard that you teach this course on war. Will you be teaching it again?” There is something about this topic of war that provokes students to ask: “why aren’t we reading ‘___?’
Answering the question of “why aren’t we reading….” I frequently reply: “there are some books I can’t teach anymore because they are personally too emotionally draining, as well as for the students. The book you mention is one of them. Another book I can no longer teach is Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. I wish I could teach it again because Borowski has taught me so much about everything: war, genocide, evil, even love… like I said, everything. He is one of my greatest teachers. Borowski was arrested and sent to Auschwitz by the Nazis. When I taught this book in my Holocaust course, while I explained certain passages, I witnessed as some students cried, holding hands with their friends. The passages don’t spare the reader. Borowski’s writing doesn’t compromise with the reader’s sensibilities. He drags you into the abyss, forcing you to fight for your life not to go under… but you do. I can’t stress enough how wickedly and hideously evil the scenes are. For those students who cried, the day’s lesson became real. When a book makes students cry in class… maybe the book is too real. He survived but felt terrible guilt for surviving. Days after his wife gave birth to their child, he committed suicide. I’ve included his book in my classrooms since my first Literature of the Holocaust course. A very long time. I’ve taught Borowski’s book twice during different semesters for my war class; the last time was Fall 2016. Twenty minutes before the class—as I was prepping myself for my third lesson (out of four) on Borowski—the awful, nihilistic dread found in the book found me, and began crushing me. I couldn’t get up from the office chair to walk to the classroom. I never experienced something like that to that degree. I managed somehow to get up and go to class, but it was a sheer act of willpower. I know I gave you a long answer. Nonetheless, I can’t teach it again.”
Another answer I offer: “For many years, I also included Elem Klimov’s film, Come and See. It’s a Soviet film about the war crimes the Nazis committed in Belarus. Like Borowski’s book, Klimov’s war movie doesn’t spare the viewer; he holds nothing back. The film doesn’t cut away from the war horrors. The camera just watches, recording the scenes. You watch as Nazi soldiers burn a building filled with people. You watch as Nazi soldiers gang rape a young woman. Later, you see this woman, and… well… she’s unrecognizable. You think she is a different actress. No. She limps toward you, and…. The main character is a teenage boy, barely fourteen or fifteen years old. You watch this kid go through some really bad stuff. Many film critics say that this film is the ‘best’—what a bad choice of words, ‘best’—best war film ever made. And yes, what makes Come and See the ‘best’ war movie is that it de-romanticizes war; it shows, as closely as possible, what war crimes look like. I can’t teach it anymore either.”
I also say: “there’s this other movie, Turtles Can Fly. It’s a Kurdish film. It’s about the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It follows a bunch of kids; they clear landmines. There’s this young teenaged girl, very young looking, with a brother who is maybe four or five years old, maybe younger. For some reason, she doesn’t like him; she treats him poorly. She tries to leave him. She tries killing herself. The movie’s ending is terrible. We eventually learn that the brother is her child. She was ganged raped by Saddam Hussein’s soldiers. She kills herself… and her child, well…. I never dared to show this film to my students. Watching it demoralized me; it nauseated me. Can you imagine what the students would feel?”
During different conversations, I will add: “There are some books I would like to include but they’re too expensive for students to purchase. Some important war books are out-of-print. Or the translations are terrible. Or the book is too confusing: the novel’s political background is unfamiliar and complicated and therefore hard to follow. Some texts are easier than others to teach; others are hard to teach. I also can’t stress enough the emotional factor. Some books and movies are truly upsetting. I thought I could handle it; jeez, I’ve taught this material for a long time, but I, too, have a limit. Our course theme is important. It should be, must be taught; however, some of these war texts are just too depressing. They’re hard to read, hard to watch, and hard to teach. And the book you mention is one of them.”
I usually say other things like: “When I taught this war course for the first time, I wanted to teach Tolstoy’s War and Peace. My friend—who also was a college professor—thought I was crazy for even considering it. 1,200 pages! He said, ‘Who’s going to read a 1,200-page book during a semester? In a non-Literature major course? What if they don’t like it. They’re stuck with it. They won’t read it.’ So, I didn’t include it. An easy decision.”
I also mention: “I try to teach aspects of war that others may not want to include in their classrooms. I try not to teach the same lessons you might learn in your other classes or teach the same books you’ve encountered already. I don’t want to repeat what you read in high school either. For example, I teach about child soldiers. Maybe in high school, you read A Long Way Gone. I mention it in my introductory remarks on child soldiers, but I want you to know about other child soldiers. As a father, that subject matter—child soldiers—hits me hard, but I feel a moral obligation to include it in our war class. I usually show one of two films: Kim Nguyen’s Rebelle, also known as War Witch, or Luis Mandoki’s Voces inocentes or Innocent Voices. War Witch is set in the Congo region of Africa; Voces inocentes is set in El Salvador. The reason I don’t teach Beasts of No Nation is that it’s well known; you probably saw it. The other films are less known. I think you should know about War Witch and Voces incoentes.”
I sometimes add: “Other stories that go under-reported in classrooms are the Comfort Women, the Rape of Nanking, Unit 731… various Japanese World War II war crimes. Since my West Point days, I’ve taught memoirs, films focusing on those events. Again, a long time. Recently I added a piece on the Srebrenica massacre, the genocidal killings of over 8,000 Bosnak Muslims; yea, the one we read three weeks ago. For the third semester in a row, I’m teaching about Chechen Muslims and their suffering during Russia’s Second Chechen War. The catalog of war horrors spares no group or people. The challenge is to find a book, movie, a work of art that can connect with an American undergraduate audience. Not easy.”
Another insight I share: “There are so many works we could include in the class, but we don’t have enough time. The sixteen, seventeen-week semester may seem like a lot of time, but, honestly, it isn’t. For this reason, our Journal Assignment is important. I include short non-fiction pieces, news articles on war crimes happening in other parts of the world that we don’t get a chance, as a class, to study together. You have three options to choose from to write your Journal: nonfiction pieces; the second option, paintings; the third option, musical compositions. Also, there’s the Field Trip Report: you choose a war memorial or statue in the city, and study it.”
I also mention: “For the past two years, I’ve included Nobel Peace Prize speeches. I realized that I needed to address the other side of war: peace. I wanted to bring in more current events; in a sense, I wanted to include real, historical figures, not fictional ones.”
Sometimes while answering this often-asked question of “Why don’t we read…,” I know my answers don’t always satisfy my most inquisitive, politically aware students. I appreciate that they demand that their classes and readings be relevant, not mere classroom exercises or busy work. I don’t want them to take away from my class reading list that it was abstract or simply unreal in the sense that it was abstruse or make-believe. I want my reading list to challenge them: to jolt them from complacency, puncturing their illusions. Too much is at stake for their education not to challenge their initial intellectual positions and then nurture their intellectual growth.
Over the years, I have noticed that a particular course text will connect strongly with one group of students, but the following group, during a different semester, for whatever reason, they won’t latch well to it. Why is that? I don’t know; I can’t find a satisfactory answer for that elusive question.