Gvildenu | Mintys / 20220527Irony

Machine translation into English

On May 27, 2022, I read this report at the conference of the Lithuanian Cultural Research Institute Aesthetics, philosophy of art and creative activity during social transformations.

Irony in the memoirs of those who knew the perpetrators of the Holocaust

I will talk about irony, which is a dangerous and responsible thing because irony creates tension. Healthy irony takes care to untangle and make sense of that tension, while unhealthy irony doesn't untangle anything, but simply complicates others with the goal of capturing their attention.

I will introduce the structure of irony. I will explain the importance of this structure for naming. The possibilities of irony are so wide that it is through them that every expression acquires meaning, through them we each weave our webs of meanings, through them every human language develops.

I will show how I study the language of naming with examples of irony. The research was set in motion by this conference of ours on social transformations. I came up with the idea of presenting four memoirs - by Alfonso Nykštaitis, Vytautas Mačiuikas, Rev. Stasios Ylos and Zenta Irena Tenisonaitės-Hellemans - which I found while researching the role of representatives of the will of the Lithuanian nation in the Holocaust. In the memoirs, the lives of the perpetrators of the massacres are revealed to me in a way that the writers themselves did not imagine. I think these works could enrich Lithuanian cinema and television. I'm interested in their terrible irony, which I began to peel back, watching how it affects me and my friends.

The structure of irony emerges when we are just trying to communicate with expressions. And communication is a puzzle - how can different people understand each other? Someone tells me one way, and I, in turn, will understand in my own way. There will always be the opposite. But instead, two possibilities always arise, healthy irony and unhealthy irony, which we look at from the outside. Unhealthy irony will emphasize the discrepancy between expression and content, their opposite, will incite and maintain this tension. Healthy irony will suggest how to deal with this inconsistency, how to enclose it, name it, remember it, make it meaningful, that is, how to find a suitable place for it in your personal network of meanings and at the same time calm down.

The structure of irony is complex enough. However, a two-year-old baby perfectly understands the irony in the word "No". This strange word is a statement of negation, which is pure contradiction. The baby understands that he can use the word "No" in a flawed way or in good faith. "No" may lack any human purpose or may be an honest expression of will. Similarly, the question "Why?" is contradictory because, on the one hand, it accepts the other person's statement, and on the other hand, threatens to reject the statement and demands its justification. Children learn that the question "Why?" extinguishes the word "No" but it can be even more annoying, "Why? Why? Why?" The word "Mama" also comes from irony, after all, the baby uses it to control its mistress. Even a baby's cry can be flawed or honest. Are there any words without irony? After all, the word "cat" means pay attention to that cat, but first, pay attention to me!

Irony pervades all expressions, but particularly striking cases are singled out. "Forest of the Gods" by Balis Sruoga, a prisoner of Stutthof, is considered a masterpiece of irony. He explained why the beatings of prisoners subsided: "A person is not a machine: he gets tired." Sruoga noted the contradiction in that silence and pointed out that it lies within the person - the Nazi's desire to strike exceeds his strength. This is an example of a fictional device where irony is conscious and exposed. Irony can sometimes be unrevealed, hushed up, or hinted at only with a wink, clear only to the intuited, the members of the company, or the participants in the conversation.

Irony can be unconscious, that is, understandable only to those who see more broadly, as if from God's point of view. The details of a man's life sound peculiar when you know what a terrible criminal he was, and even more so that he was the exponent of the will of our nation. The irony is heightened both by the horror of the crimes of the Holocaust and by their ignorance, omission or understatement. It helps me to listen to what personally interested me in the samples and why.

Alfonsas Nykštaitis

The Soviets shot Alfons Nykštaitis in 1961.

The truth of the Komsomol on February 28. described it as follows:

None of the employees of the Kaunas medical equipment repair workshop suspected that under the mask of the modest craftsman Alfonso Nikštaitis, a hardened executioner and murderer, whose hands are stained with the blood of tens of thousands of innocent people, hides. What a disgusting and vile bastard this villain is. You read with disgust his detailed "memoirs" that were found when National Security Committee employees conducted a search.''

I found these unpublished memoirs in the archive of the Lithuanian Communist Party. I was interested in the fact that he knew the mysterious instigators of the crimes, such as the Lithuanian German Ričardas Šveitseris, who became SS General Štaleker's translator and at the beginning of the war introduced him to the Voldemorts, who were already determined to kill Lithuanian Jews. I read the passage:

Since I speak German fluently, I wore a white armband with a skull on it, so Tietz was very talkative. While buying medicine, an unknown SD lieutenant spoke to me in Lithuanian. Only later, when he reminded me of the high school student from Virbali to Kybarti, I remembered the Swiss. I used to walk 5 km every day to the gymnasium. on foot In those days, 2 buses ran between Virbali and Kybarti - one of them belonged to Lithuanians, the other to Jews. Both buses competed. It used to be late at night that we young high school students would block the exhaust pipe of the Jewish bus parked in the yard with piles and clay or put sugar in the tank and until the obstacle was found in the morning, the Lithuanian bus would make several trips. This was our childish anti-Semitism. Schweitzer was a Lithuanian bus driver at the time and he often gave us poor high school students a ride for nothing, apparently knowing about our pranks on a competitor. I saw that Schweitzer was familiar, and Tietz opened his mouth. That's how I learned at that time that all the Jews in the occupied territories would be destroyed.

I feel tension in myself that Nykštaitis understands Schweizeris as an acquaintance from high school, and I see that the Kybarts were a nest of anti-Semitism from which these two rascals came. I honestly think that their life path is not accidental, the contradictions are hidden in its course, and in such a circumstance I meaningfully lower the tension of irony.

The expression "childish anti-Semitism" is also of great interest to me, because Nykštaitis means that it was simply the everyday life of those times. Going deeper from the outside, the objection arises that his experience as a murderer is not common to everyone. I am reassured by the thought that his development as an anti-Semite was indeed orderly, purposeful.

What interested me the most was his unexpectedly heartfelt teaching, which I have never read in Lithuanian literature. He poured out 175 pages of his experiences as a pauper, a militiaman, a cosmopolitan, a non-commissioned officer, an agent, a rebel, a collaborator, an underground worker, a partisan, a political prisoner and a returnee. I hoped that my friends would confirm that it is a masterpiece of Lithuanian literature, which combines the ugliest and noblest and, in Kierkegaard's words, the most human. I looked around. In their opinion, these are lies, gossip, fabrications, "rebels" of the "rotten west". I realized that the layers of irony that moved me depended very much on my personal knowledge, ultimately on my culture.

My friend got his skull stuck on his band. If they are supporters of order, why is there a skull? Thinking about it, one suspects that he had contacts with the Germans before the war because of this, after all, it is possible. Each reader is interested in a certain expression, discovers his own contradictions, and, if he thinks sanely, encloses them in circumstances.

Vytautas Mačiuika

The writer, sculptor Vytautas Mačiuika describes his childhood, how he grew up among military pilots, and his adolescence, how he was imprisoned three times in a camp for partisan activities. They immortalize the greats, including Jonas Pyragiu, Igna Vyliai, Klemens Brunių, who accompanied and cared for him after the death of his father, Voldemarine commander Antanas Mačiuika, just before the war. His father's comrades became leaders of the Lithuanian Nationalist Party, as terrible as A. Nykštaitis. We see their coolness through the eyes of a boy. Here is a picture of how the soldiers of the military aviation company took the oath.

"Suddenly, Vytenis rushed to the priest and, following behind him, began to repeat what the priest was doing - he trampled each soldier in turn. The line snickered and snorted with laughter. The entire tribune, full of officers who put their hands in respect to their military caps, watched curiously what was happening on the square. The Chief of the General Staff asked his adjutant:

"Whose is that boy? Order must be restored!"

And when he got home...

"The father jumped to his son and, grabbing him with strong hands, was about to stab him in the fur. But when he felt that Vytenis was being investigated, he asked:

"Do you know what you've done?"

Vytenis shook his head. He couldn't say a word.''

"Do you understand what an oath is?"

"No," whispered Vytenis' lips.

"Know this: an oath is a sacred matter," said the father seriously, and after kissing his son on the forehead, he placed him at the door.

And further...

"When Vytenis appeared in the barracks again, the soldiers joked when they saw him:"

"Our priest! Don't you want military porridge?"

"Vytenis did not refuse porridge, but he did not like being nicknamed "priest". He wanted to be a military pilot. But the fact that an oath is a sacred matter stuck in his head for the rest of my life.''

The boy took the oath of war pilots to heart. He had no idea how his heroes then inhumanly violated it. I understand it is possible that pilots who do not fear death can condemn thousands. A possibility is a circumstance, and "oath" is the word with which I hedge this objection. Again, he was loved by a gang of criminals, and he accepted it as the guardianship of a beloved father. I do not cover such a gap, it surpasses me, instead I accept this our common humanity as a circumstance - a presence with which I enclose the contradiction, together with the word "father".

Father Stasys Yla

In his memoirs "People and Beasts in the Forest of the Gods" (1951), the prisoner of Štuthof, Rev. Stasys Yla, educates the emigrants that Lithuanians were oppressed not only by the Soviets, but also by the Nazis. Introduces Lithuanian luminaries who were imprisoned together. He does not get caught or admit that a dozen of them contributed to the abuse or even the extermination of Lithuanian Jews. One of them is Major Stasys Puodžius, a leader of the Lithuanian Nationalist Party. He writes about his death:

"... our patients told us that Puodžius wandered and shouted loudly before his death. Even in the raised ward, he heard his words repeated in German: "I am asking for justice... I am asking to call Fr. Yla."

Priest S. Yla imagined that S. Puodžius wanted to confess the terrible sin of being unfaithful to his wife in Berlin. Apparently, he did not think about a more terrible sin: S. Puodžius and the nationalist party organized a putsch against the Provisional Government and accelerated the extermination of the Jews. I consider the memoirs of Reverend S.Yla to be the blindness of the Lithuanian intellectuals, their lack of understanding of how they committed a crime against humanity. I looked for information about Puodži in my memoirs, I was surprised that I didn't find anything, and I realized that the contradiction fits into the overall situation, to the German words "I am asking for justice", which I imagine as follows - it is appropriate for S. Puodžius to be with the killers, not with the murdered. I don't know, but I imagine, and that calms me down.

Zenta Irena Tenisonaitė-Hellemans

Another prisoner of Stutthof, whose crimes I investigated, is Captain Jonas Noreika. I found it in 1941. July 19 the document by which the death penalty was imposed on behalf of the Republic of Lithuania to Aldona Tenisoniene, and the Lithuanian activist front in Telšiai, led by Noreika, rejected her request for clemency. According to the book "Hitler's Occupation in Lithuania", she said: "Let's not humble ourselves before these scoundrels, let's not beg for mercy from them. Let's die without tears."

After the war, her husband, the famous forester, Aleksandar Tenison, and her daughter, the poet Zenta Irena Tenisonaitė-Hellemans, lived in Belgium. After her death, her obituary in Drauge noted, "The terrible storm of war and human cruelty in July 1941 took her mother away."

The archive of the Maironis Museum of Lithuanian Literature contains the correspondence between Zenta Tenisonaitė and the Californian poet Pranas Visvydas, which began in 1976 and continued for twenty-five years. At the beginning of the correspondence, she mentions that one of her mother's friends wrote to her thirty years later.

"My mother is long dead, still in Lithuania. None of my mother's friends have ever missed me, and there are them both in America and Lithuania. Well, maybe that riddle will be solved someday. With that letter, I could start writing the book, "Portrait of My Mother."

Her mother studied at Kaunas Art School. She was taught by Sofija Čiurlionienė. Her mother's husband in Kaunas was Aleksanders Tornau, a member of the Seimas.

My parents were separated for some time, I had a mother and stepfather (good) in Kaunas and a father and stepmother (bad) in Telšiai. That's how I spent my holidays with my mother, and I went to high school in Telšiai. Later, the stepfather died young (42), the father broke up with his Albertina and the mother returned home, but it was not without him. But that's another story, which I'll just maybe describe if I ever write that book I've started, the six pages of which are lingering in the drawer.

But it does not come close to "tragic death". She wrote four poems to her mother.

"Closed my eyes, I try to remember your precious face, which I have only looked at with a child's eye. Your form appears to me to be radiant and delicate. And how holy you are with a golden aureole - a graceful hand of the rich rainbow colors of the country.''

I contacted Ludo Hellemans, Zenta's son. Grandpa told him the only thing about Grandma. When she was arrested, he went to the highest prelate who was responsible for her arrest. On his knees he begged for her life, while the prelate laughed in derision. Apparently, it was Bishop Justinas Staugaitis, the signatory. He did the same with the Jewish representatives of Telšiai.

The rebels had also arrested sixteen-year-old Zenta. She was supposed to be shot together with her mother, but the old guard let her go at night. He said, I will not allow girls to be killed. Zenta told him that her mother was shot not because she sympathized with communism, but because she was a free-thinker - an atheist who encouraged women to pursue education and freedom. Years later, a former cleric demanded that she forgive him for being one of those who shot her mother. We know that she was shot together with Mina Abeloviene, a Jew who performed abortions. They were shot as feminists.

Silence - the unwritten book - can be ironic.

Conclusions

From the examples of irony, it is clear to me that the contradiction reveals itself, either we see it ourselves, or we deliberately seek it, or it is beyond us. In these four ways they indulge themselves, and there are twelve circumstances by which we may hedge the objection. They constitute the possibilities of language by which we brace ourselves, release the tension of irony, relying on our existing, personal network of meanings.

Irony lies in everything, but its purpose is to justify the possibility of speaking simply and responsibly, without irony. It is to be avoided as a means of communication because it is too easy to deceive, as it depends on networks of meanings that are deeply personal. In his article "Against irony", Ruslanas Baranovas rightly notes that in an ironic relationship, people refuse vulnerability, participation, responsibility. And the most important thing is to distinguish between healthy irony and unhealthy irony - not to use contradictions arbitrarily, and to surround them - not to incite the tension of irony, but to lower it.

Finally, I would like to thank my friends and my mother for the useful conversations (Thanks to Evaldas Balčiūnas, Thomas Gajdosik, John Harland, Rūta Kulikauskienė, Rimas Morkūnas, Raimundas Vaitkevičius, Tautvydas Vėželis).