Mad Dogs and Englishmen

If you've ever been to a meeting or a conference open to the public, You'll know what I'm talking about. It happens every time. That one person who asks an obvious/irrelevant/stupid/insulting question and will not shut up and keeps talking about it for five minutes while the speakers pretend to be taking it seriously and everyone else is quietly facepalming. This one took the cheese for not only being insulting, but also completely incomprehensible. It didn't help that this was at the tail end of a six hour conference which had mostly entailed four historians sniping at each other (mental note, never put an Israeli historian, two German historians and an opinionated English historian in the same room) and no air con, so everyone was pretty much falling asleep in their chairs.

I have no idea what the question was, only it started off with the guy trying to prove that Jews are a biological race, wandered into Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene and finally ended on the note that the Wannsee conference house was next door to a house by a famous Jewish expressionist painter. It took about ten minuters, during which I had the honour of seeing one fo my tutors doing a massive facepalm. Watching the historians trying to find a coherent responce to the words salad was also entertaining.

Seriously, that's the third time in a row that our conferences have been gatecrashed by at least one idiot. Can we have some sort of door policy? Screen for morons or something?

That's the first time I've translated anything that directly insults the person I'm translating it for.

You're halfway through an essay before your alarm bells go ping and you realise you've spend fifteen minutes reading some David Irving trash that Google helpfully served up as the first hit. Fuck you Google.

All I wanted was a bloody pagecount.

In an 'oh wow, so wrong', kinda way.

So tomorrow my class is going to have a Goldhagen vs Browning debate. I am really hating this because Browning writes like a brick wall and Goldhagen is a moronic hack. Then I start doing the reading for the week and see that instead, this appears to be a functionalist vs intentionalist debate preparation work. Then I realise it is entirely my fault because thanks to my blathering we did the functionalist vs intentionalist debate three weeks ago.

*headdesk*

Really good article on Gay people in the Third Reich, in depth study of the whole homosocial but not homosexual paradigm and link between misogyny and homophobia. Really well written, excellent depiction of Hitler, Himmler and Rohm as real people (seemed to be concerned at portraying Hitler as someone with friends. Psst, you don't need to defame Hitler, he did it for you), after so many dry texts, it's ncie to read something by someone who knows how to write. Article in Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany. Will have to borrow it tomorrow. Looks pure awesome.

Hope it won't prompt the same uproar as the feminist article last week. Teacher didn't realise he had three outspoken feminists in group. Gentlemen rather shamefully silent.

A bit odd listening to Mozart while working, but I've always found it great brain music.

I find it really, really hard to believe that the Nazis had no plans to pass the Nuremberg laws until less than a month before said rallies. I mean, I'm a functionalist, but I'm not that much of one.

Went to class. Had pizza with classmates. Bitched about Goldhagen for ages. Will have to read Freidlander again (the first book, thank fuck) for next week. Bought new trousers including Lucky Brown Trousers #3,  (Lucky Brown Trousers must 1- be brown, 2- possess voluminous pockets, 3- be pretty damn comfortable. Previous Lucky Trousers #1 and 2 having failed due to split zip and holes in unmentionable places), these look pretty steampunk and will be known as time-travel trousers. Went to gym for first time in months. Laughed myself silly at this.

It's all good.

I probably shouldn't be reading this as 'how to start a political party in these hard times and become a millionaire and get to kill off... oh, I don't know, clowns or something'.

Seriously, history is one hell of a how-to guide.

IT WAS AWESOME!

I ended up upstaging the teacher and monopolising the class by accident and got told to be quiet like five times. And then we had a massive nerd-debate over the meaning of the term Holocaust and whether it's a good term and if Shoah's better and we all completely forgot what the Romany version is called. And I upstaged the teacher again when he asked what percentage of people in germany were Jewish and I went, about 1% and he looked at me and said thank you for messing up the class, everyone always guesses something like 20%. Then we talked about the history of anti-semitism and I took like A MILLION NOTES. Then it was over and I had tea with one of my classmates who is also pure awesome and we spent the time geeking out about the Holocaust over tea and fruit tarts. She's American so I then gave her a tour which only ended when she couldn't keep going any longer (heavy laptop bag).

THIS WAS LIKE THE BEST DAY EVER HOW CAN I WAIT TILL NEXT WEEK

(Incidentally, for those who haven't heard, going to see Trollhunter on Sunday, all welcome)