I'm not a Potterhead. I'm serious. I don't collect anything except for the books. I don't even own any of the DVDs. I love JK Rowling's writing- she is truly a gifted artist. Yes, I have read the "sequel" which I liked okay.
Yet, as I'm sitting through my "Literature of the Holocaust" course, I am getting freaked out each week. The novels, as my professor warned, would get more difficult as we progress. Well, last week, we read Israeli novelist David Grossman's See Under: Love. It's a beautiful story that should be read at least twice. It's a difficult book because of the writing structure (not just because it's translated from Hebrew). It's full of magic realism. In class, we began covering the usual themes of Holocaust literature. The more we discussed the themes of good vs. evil and language, the more I thought about Harry Potter.
For example, there is a long chapter where Wasserman, the house Jew, and Nigel, the SS officer, discuss Wasserman's story-telling. Wasserman manages to convince Nigel that humanity exists in this world and what Nigel was doing out there to the laborers was just pure evil and thoughtless, and heartless. Nigel commits suicide because he couldn't believe what he was doing and accept the fact that humanity exists. Wasserman wins by telling the story of love between him and his wife, and his actual story characters. Love saves Wasserman's life, just as many other Jews', their faith in humanity.
And of course, the Nazis lose.
Seeing the power struggle between Wasserman and Nigel completely reminds me of the scene between Voldemort and Harry in the Goblet of Fire where their wands clash. Harry triumphs because he saw the love in the characters whom Voldemort killed in this scene. Voldemort killed innocent people who believed in humanity and Harry decides to fight to preserve that. Also, people speculated for a long time why Harry survived. They believed that he was the Messiah, the Chosen One. But Dumbledore points out that Voldemort was defeated because of Harry's mother's love saved Harry and defeated Voldemort when he attempted the death curse on them. Harry goes on in the rest of series with this belief that his mother saved his life and uses humanity and love as a weapon to fight off Voldemort. Before Goblet of Fire, Harry survived their duels through wit and talent.
There's the issue of racism in Harry Potter as well.
Voldemort represents Hitler. They believe in racial purity. They have specific categories. Any drop of non-pure blood is considered inferior. Both of them have a drop of non-pure blood but they don't make an issue of it at all (or rather, just makes them believe the importance of having pure blood in order to keep the rest of the world from becoming deformed and crazy like them). The terms are extremely offensive and marginalize the targets- mixed blood and inferior blood people (In Harry Potter, that means Mudbloods and Muggles, in Nazism, Jews all around). In Harry Potter, the issue really is whether you have the blood and inherited ability to perform magic. There are mudbloods like Herimone who are exceptionally talented. There are squibs, like Argus Filch the groundkeeper at Hogwarts, who are wizards but cannot perform magic to save their lives. For Nazis, you had to be Aryan without mental or physically disablities. For them, if you were not pure and perfect, you would be detested.
Recruitment for evil deeds
In Harry Potter, we have watched Darco Malfoy struggle in school. He's a decent student but feels like a failure compared to Harry Potter and Herimone Granger. As he moves up, especially after The Order of the Phoenix, he becomes intrigued by the idea of joining Voldemort's world of Death Eaters. He also is under pressured, by self and his father, to be part of it because then he would be something, somebody. Through this line of thinking, Draco begins to fantaizes about killing Harry Potter himself. Voldemort gives him the opportunity to do so but Draco fails because he still had some sense of humanity within himself.
This parallels with the recruitment for Hitler Youth and the SS. The SS officers joined because they were just "ordinary" German citizens who didn't see a future for themselves. They wanted an opportunity to be part of something big that would change history.
Death Eaters and SS officers will tell you, if on trial, that they were just "following orders".
Yes, both groups have internal motives. They believed in purity. They hate the fact that "impure" people are highly successful in the society. Death Eaters cannnot stand Harry Potter because he "loves" mudbloods and is the sensation of the wizardry world. This is analogous to German Jews, especially the highly acclaimed scientists like Oppeheimer and Einstein.
Language of silence.
If it's one thing that I truly learned from this course and connected with this series is the use of language. In Harry Potter, there is a specific set of vocabulary that pertains to Voldemort's world. Nazis butchered German language, taking certain words and associating them with their own actions. Consequently, the population can't bring themselves to say certain words or make specific references. For example, I saw this connection in See Under: Love when Momik (the protagonist) hears specifi vocabulary of "Over There" and "Nazi beast". "Nazi beast" represents anything (in my understanding) relevant to the Nazis, most likely the whole systematic killing machine developed in death camps. They never mention Hitler, Auschwitz or Europe, or anything. This is the same for when wizards avoid naming Voldemort by his name, but only "The One Who Must Not Be Named". They never mention the three "unforgivable curses". They want to forget the horrible times when Voldemort was in full power. People rejoice when they see or hear about Harry Potter and don't ever want to talk about the past with him. (That is the beauty of the series, forcing the readers and Harry Potter to keep going in order to understand his past.)
Resistance.
I liked "Dumbledore's Army" to the Jewish resistance fighters. I see a connection between the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in The Half-Blooded Prince (one of the most amazing scenes in any of Harry Potter films). This was a somewhat failed attempt by Dumbledore's Army to kill as many Death Eaters as possible. It was heroic in a sense that they took a chance. When Harry, Herimone, and Ron drops out of school to "fight" Voldemort by finding all the Horcuxes and encounters danger in every corner, I am reminded of the Jewish partisan fighters in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. To be such a fighter, one had to be willing to face the worst.
Rowling acknowledged that she made "death" the major theme of her books. We always knew that Voldemort wanted revenge on Harry Potter but it only becomes serious when Voldemort returns to full power after Goblet of Fire. When he realizes that he didn't kill Harry just by taking his blood, he decides that in order to truly banish Harry from the world was to create a "final solution" - to kill him once for all, not to take him by alive and do something. It wasn't enough. The Nazis, once they figured out mass killings through Einsatzgruppen and gassing, death became a prevelant theme of the Holocaust literature. Elie Wiesel's Night smells of death. Once the Nazis and Voldemort figured out the "Final Solution", the rest of the story is centered around death.
These just some... rambling thoughts that went through my head during class... truly, I haven't read the books in a good while... I'm sure I can do a deep analytical paper on this. But I don't think my English professor would go for it at all. If she actually says fine, this would be the best final paper that I can ever write in my whole academic career in a sense that I would absolutely enjoy this topic.
Again, I will emphasize that I'm no Potterhead but simply that I recognize JK Rowling's incredible literary imagination that encompasses all themes of the Holocaust throughout her series.
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