Uldis Ģērmanis - LATVIEŠU TAUTAS PIEDZīVOJUMI (Social Democrat friendly version of Latvian history written by a Latvian patriot/nationalist).

Chapter 66 - LATVIEŠI SĀK ATGŪT SAVU ZEMI
72 - TAUTAS KAROGA NĒSEJI
73 - KRIEVI ATKLĀJ SAVUS ĪSTOS NODOMUS
“Lai mus glauda glaudi,
Lai mus drauda draudi,
Zinam lapsas, zinam vilkus,
Zinam pasi sevi.” - J. Rainis
77 - LATVIEŠU LIELĀ REVOLŪCIJA
“Kas dzivs, tas iet uz asins kauju,
Un pilis kritis, troni grus.
Jums murusiem, lai muzam slava,
Mes dzivie, ejam atriebt jus.

Un asinis, kas nevainīgas
Uz balta sniega kvēloja,
Tās neizkvēlos gadu gadus -
Tas kvelos mūsu karogā!” - J. Akuraters

78 - TAUTA PĀRŅEM VARU
“Gaidit un cerēt ir labi,
Un rātni ir prasīt un lūgties:
Labāk ir negadit daudz,
Neprasīt, nelūgties - ņemt.” - J. Rainis

Special note to PC - Germanis (page 139): “Ari daudzas latviesu sievietes iet lidzi un upurejas 1905. gada cinas.  Revolucijas laika vinas piedalas visas velesanas lidzigi virisiem.  Tada karta Latvija ir pirma zeme Eiropa kur sievietes iegust velesanu tiesibas un ari pasas tiek ieveletas par tautas parstavjiem.”

82 - “PULCĒJATIES ZEM LATVIEŠU KAROGIEM!”
“Strelnieki,
Latviesu strelnieki!
Apzilbst man prats
No siem vardiem
Vairak
Ka rudens nakti
Uz ielas
No ugunu salts” - A. Čaks

u.t.t.

Um, Ambi—point? I met Ģērmanis in the flesh, & suspect I’ve read most everything he wrote. Send your book lists (lists of books you haven’t read) elsewhere.

/P

PC,
If you “met” Germanis “in the flesh”, lucky you.  If as you claim you’ve read all of his works, I’d say you may want to give them another go-round since it seems you’ve forgotten what you claim to have read or missed out on the essential Germanis.  How can one read “Latviesu Tautas Piedzivojumi” and miss the “Latviesu tauta” in the “piedzivojumi.”

The book was called a collection of fairy tales by a friend who is expert in history. I’m not so harsh—but it is a history for younger readers, and far more suitable to patriotiskā audzināšana than serious study. I find much of Ģērmanis’s other work extremely interesting, like Zili stikli, zaļi ledi.

As to the title—I didn’t miss that, no. In fact, I wrote about that before, in this forum. Minorities are practically absent. This is true of many histories by Latvians, esp. in the trimda (Spekke, Bīlmanis).

/P

P.S. “Latviešu” isn’t capitalized, except by strange fascistic persons. Klubs-415, for instance, used a capital, ostensibly for victimized nations. Somehow that didn’t extend to the Jews…

/P

What I do find interesting is the amount of new information that I learned about Latvia and Latvian heroes when I was writing the Afterword to my translation of Zelta zirgs.

I had always known that 30 + yrs ago, Latvian youth were being taught a select history (and isn’t it always select), but the degree of self-aggrandizement and the amount of information that was hidden away, and not easily accessible pre-Internet is mind-boggling.

Honestly, the problem that I have now, is that I don’t know who is a real scholar with objective information and who has what agenda. The problem is greater for Latvia, b/c so much information was hidden, documented to support some result that never really existed or occurred, etc.

One who has the time and ability to really study, will get a better del for this, but I, although decently educated, can’t reach a conclusion. How many books on Rainis and how many different agendas are there?

What is also frustrating is that living in the US, it is almost impossible to get many Latvian books. I would love to read more about Stucka, (to understand Rainis better). There are books on Rainis that are out of print - the end. So, in addition to the lack of objectivity, it is also difficult to simply get the information.

(I gave the ex. before of ordering a book for 7 Lats with 34L for postage. So and $80 book, if you know that it will be good, might not be excessive, but one never knows).

So, I do think that people on the boards have to understand that some of us who care and try to keep up with things to a certain degree, may not know all of the subtleties of the past or the present.

FYI - when I read Germanis - I understood it for what it was/is - an excellent primer that provides an outline in an informative way. He was successful in engaging a reader to read on. This is not always easy with history.

It is fascinating to read some of these history books and essays and see what “terms” are dropped, that immediately indicate the perspective of the author. (Same goes for American books….)

Sorry - I’m just blabbing away here,

Visu labu Vilis

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/03/24/080324crat_atlarge_lepore

Peteri - Absolutely to the NYorker article.

One of the best ways to understand the conditions of man during the Industrial Revolution is to read Zola, Dostyevsky, Sinclair, Dickens, etc. The tales of the those who have and those who have not are put in jarring contrast in a way that the facts and statistics simply can’t accomplish.

My difficulty in writing the Afteword for the translation was that I only had access to x amount of history. My goal was to place Zelta zirgs in its greater historical context and to provide a succinct 40 page history that our nephews and friends could read quickly and get a quick picture of the “story.”

My hang-up is that I was an attorney. Every argument in every brief is based on the facts - and the goal is to apply the law to the facts. (FYI - a real NYC attorney v. the TV attorney).

My prior book - Art in the Courtroom, published by Preager in 1998, is a discussion of five art trials. The impetus for the book was that I kept reading horrible article (by art journalists) that had less basis in reality - with respect to these trials, than the positions that they wanted to argue through their supposed objective reporting. So, I went to all of the trial documents, depositions, etc. to provide the most objective resonation possible. No agenda on my part. I know that one could glean my position of whether I thought that the court decision regarding the issue at hand was right or wrong - but one had to look for that and it did not get in the way of presenting the facts.

So, telling a brief history of Latvia in the translation was difficult and frustrating. I had no interest in presenting a specific agenda per se. I wanted to show Latvian Independence in the greater context of what was happening in Eastern Europe at the time. Independence was only possible because of these broader events. No group of Latvians could have achieved any sort of independence if it weren’t for world and regional events. BUT, we were never taught this.

But the limits to my discussion were clear & my goal was limited - not a historian - but simply providing a quick and easy context for Zelta zirgs.

Sorry - totally off topic.

Labvakar, Vili!

I’m still swamped with this, that, & the other, so a scatterbrained response.

The problem is greater for Latvia, b/c so much information was hidden, documented to support some result that never really existed or occurred, etc.

Definitely true. A sad example is one you cite a little later in your post—Stučka. Most of what’s out there is steeped in Soviet propaganda to the point of being unreadable. I got more out of American books on Soviet law (in which he figures prominently) than I did out of many a Latvian encomium. Takes on Rainis, as I already pointed out, are always highly colored, whether by nationalists (and there are different kinds of nationalists, of course, often at odds with each other) or the Left—and the Left was and is as splintered as can be… there was an amusing observation by Lizzy Davies in the Guardian this morning: “Voting has begun - albeit slowly - in the polling station of Plaka, Athens’s historic district under the Acropolis. Carefully laid out inside a school are leaflets for all the parties - from the centre-right New Democracy (ND) through the Ecologists to what I’m told is an historic coalition of the Marxist-Leninist Communists and the Leninist-Marxist Communists. (There’s a big difference, apparently.) The children at the school are obviously being taught good English because, scrawled on the health and safety poster in the hallway, are the words ‘F___ Them’.” (Italics and underscore mine; the Guardian isn’t American & doesn’t censor the “F” word…). Then there are the shifts & contradictions within factions, personal gripes, & wavering, shifting (& contradictions!)  within a single individual—you won’t find Linards Laicens the idealistic nationalist in the seven-volume (!) 1959 edition of his Raksti. You’ll find the fervent Bolshevik he became. You won’t learn anything about him being shot to death in the Purges, either, of course (Ģērmanis has an elegant—but inaccurate—passage on Laicens’ death).

Then there’s the language problem. Staying with Stučka and Laicens as examples—both wrote gobs in Russian.

I won’t even get into historians who don’t know our languages (Leonidas Donskis recently wrote about the “Discursive handicap of Central and Eastern Europe” for the Baltic Times).

How many books on Rainis and how many different agendas are there?

Countless, of course. Bear in mind, too, that a lot of information emerges in seminars and lectures, which don’t always leave adequate residue behind. Here are materials from a recent lecture on Rainis’s relevance in the 21st century by Arturs Priedītis—you can download the full video and one of his books at the link, free of charge. (Full disclosure, lest a certain person goes ballistic—Priedītis was the head of the department I taught in at Daugavpils University; though he’s a friend, we have opposing views on many a matter, to put it mildly.) The book has some insights I haven’t found elsewhere.

What is also frustrating is that living in the US, it is almost impossible to get many Latvian books.

It’s getting easier. Try ibook.lv, if you haven’t. I understand the financial difficulty, believe me. I have an even harder time getting books from the West, because of their cost and my subsistence income. I used to schlep them back when traveling, but now that baggage allowances are down or have disappeared, can’t even do that.

So, I do think that people on the boards have to understand that some of us who care and try to keep up with things to a certain degree, may not know all of the subtleties of the past or the present.

I understand that. I don’t attack genuine people for having weak Latvian, either—some is better than none.

I make an exception for those obsessed with hypocritical preaching about “defending the language” who constantly refer to the same handful of books, some of them wildly out of date and/or irrelevant, cherry-pick what’s in them, and won’t debate their substance or bias.

FYI - when I read Germanis - I understood it for what it was/is - an excellent primer that provides an outline in an informative way. He was successful in engaging a reader to read on. This is not always easy with history.

It’s a fine primer, yes, and was used in Krišjāna Barona latviešu skola in Chicago, which I attended—my point is in response to Ambersun’s emphasis on my missing the Latviešu tauta [sic] in the title. She is trying to be clever with regard to old arguments we’ve had about “the Latvian people” vs. “the people of Latvia”—see my old post on Miķelis Valters, for example.

It’s a fine primer written from a nationalist perspective. The perspective is quite narrow. Perhaps necessarily so.

No group of Latvians could have achieved any sort of independence if it weren’t for world and regional events. BUT, we were never taught this.

There were many in the trimda with a broader view (incl. Ģērmanis himself, in other works). Books, too—I’ll pick a strange example because the discussion drifted into history & fiction: Karsta dzelzs: Latvija tautu likteņu kaltuvē, by Pāvils Klāns (Kovaļevskis). It’s worth reading this massive tome despite its failings… and the past of its late author, who also authored the Nazi propaganda brochure Baigais gads and was the editor of the venomously antisemitic Tēvija during the German occupation.

You might find Ezergailis’s review interesting.

/P

Peteri,

Paldies par ieteikumiem.

Es domaju kad varetu but loti interesants vesturisks romans par Raini, Aspaziju, Stucku, Doru, u.c. Nezinu vai kads to pirktu, bet…

Vilis

Labvakar, Vili!

There are plenty of characters in the Latvian past and present one could make a hit book/movie out of—it’s the treatment that’s lacking, not the characters. And hits and misses—and differences in what chords one wants to strike, even in a bestseller or an obscure work (or two-in-one), in, over, and out…

If I were ever to write a linear curlicue of a script for a fascinating movie, it’d be about this guy. Now that is a life. Crazy as can be. Second on the list—Fricis Menders. And… ... ...

Tied for first—Linards Laicens. There is already a lot of art out there anent Walter Benjamin and Asja Lācis… from this to that.

But none of the Asja stuff making the rounds touches upon her Latvian side, or those ripple effects. Laicens never gets a mention. Poor Linards was a far better doomed lover than Walter Benjamin, who was… well, read Wally’s Asja stuff. As to Laicens—anybody who knows Latvian poetry would agree that Ho-Taī must be among the best love lyrics ever written in Latvian, Orientalism included… Ģērmanis said the best.

How many men did Asja turn Red, and how? Or was it that the men turned red upon Asja’s threshold? And what shades of red…

And now we are in an era where most of us wish to get rid of, or at least whitewash, our very own Reds.

Visu to labāko,
/P

But back to “historian” Jill Lepore,

The bottom line: To read this gibberish is to understand perfectly how Harvard produced a president like Barack Obama.

ak

ak,
http://scholar.harvard.edu/jlepore

PC,
http://la.lv/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=353044:inesis-feldmanis-bez-vsturisks-atmias-palikt-nedrkstam&catid=95:intervijas&Itemid=439

“...Jāatceras, ka tad tā tomēr bija izšķiršanās starp Vāciju un PSRS, un pēc Baigā gada lielākā daļa Latvijas sabiedrības izšķīrās par labu Vācijai. Man šķiet, pretējā puse šodien to nemaz negrib saprast. Visas šīs runas, ka padomju okupācijas nav bijis, es uztveru kā izaicinājumu latviešiem. Latvieši izdarīja savu izvēli, atjaunojot valsti. Man ir grūti teikt, kas pašreizējā situācijā būtu jādara, bet, ja jau izskan domas, ka mūsu valsts nacionālā drošība ir apdraudēta, tad politiķiem būtu jāsāk nopietni domāt. Tad jāapsver ne tikai “piparkūku” politikas iespējas, bet arī to, vai nesākt īstenot zināmu rīkstes politiku. Citādi, ja demokrātijas vārdā visatļautība turpināsies, valsts drošības jautājums tikai turpinās milzt. Vēstures politikā viens no virzieniem varētu būt lielākas uzmanības pievēršana šejienes krievvalodīgo vēstures pozīcijas nestabilitātei. Runājot par Otro pasaules karu, paši Krievijas vēsturnieki Boriss Sokolovs, Marks Soloņins dod tādus faktus, kas, ja tos vairāk popularizētu, atstātu iespaidu arī uz Latvijas krievvalodīgo publiku. Sokolovs, piemēram, norāda, ka mūsdienu Krievijas ofici-ālā vēsture par Otro pasaules karu ir mītu līmenī un patiesā vēsture nemaz netiek pasniegta. ...”

Cut and paste, Ambi. It is so exciting.

What does it mean?

Andrejs Makwitz was just here, in the flesh.

Do you even have a name?

/P

PC,
I can well understand why you would find a way, even as transparent as the usual “cut-and-paste” distraction, to avoid commenting on Inesis Feldmanis’ interview since you were in Latvia for the last years of this “What is Latvian history?” debacle.  It is embarrassing.  Too bad historians the calibre of a Bilmanis or a Spekke are not around to show your generation how to write scholarly and brilliant history on behalf of Latvia and the tauta of Latvia.  I am grateful to those Latvian and other historians, wherever in the world, who have dedicated themselves to scrupulous scholarship and difficult research to fill in the missing pages of Latvia’s history, but it’s most unfortunate that in this attempt to get all the facts collected and just so perfect and harmonized to please everyone in today’s Latvia before “the people of Latvia” have a collective history of Latvia to know and love as their very own, new false facts and Soviet fables have filled the void to create a deformed history for Latvia that is being popularized before anything as good as Bilmanis ever gets printed. 

Maybe there will be a comment on the following:

18.06.2012 Inesis Feldmanis

Man liekas, ka tā ir ļoti liela nekaunība, cūcība un viss, tā izteikties, kad izveda mazus bērnus, no kuriem liela daļa iet bojā, izšķir ģimenes, faktiski iznīcina jebkādas radu saites. Viņš te grib kaut ko attaisnot, tā ir pilnīgi neattaisnojama lieta. Tas ir pilnīgs genocīds pret Latvijas tautu.


Latvijas Vēsturnieku komisijas vadītājs Inesis Feldmanis, komentējot Aleksandra 
Giļmana rakstu laikrakstā “Čas”, kurā apšaubīts 14. jūnija represiju traģiskums

I just want to repeat that for all of the BS that Latvians were learning during the Soviet era, the kids in trimda were learning equally distorted history.

So - in my attempt to provide an accurate brief history of some of the most basic facts (to Accompany the Rainis translation) ran into discrepancies.

I agree 100% - there needs to be scholarly research and new “authoritative” books. Unfortunately, these will require backing up everything (perhaps in foot or endnotes). Because, at this point, one must prove that they are telling the true story.

They must also prove that they have no agenda per se. They are historians - period.

I am in the middle of a fascinating book by John Mosier : Deathride: Hitler v. Stalin - the Eastern Front 1941-45. Mosier states that much of Russian history was obfuscated. If something bad occurred - all trees of it were destroyed and a positive spin was placed on everything. If there couldn’t be a positive spin, then the people involved were enemies of the state, foreign agents, etc.

Mosier clearly states that the German administration kept track of everything - documented everything. Therefore, it is easy to go back to see what they did. Not so with the SU.

We know this - but I guess my main point is - I do not know who to believe when I am doing a quick study. So, Latvia must tell the story and back it up. It can’t just tell the story.

Again - we were so inundated with a version of the truth, that anyone with half a mind has to be skeptical of what we learned 35 years ago.

And - IF I am to get on my Latvian PR campaign again - I would state that it is essential for Latvians to keep reminding the world that it took x yrs for the Russians to fess up to splitting up of Eastern Europe in 1939. While scholars try to write the truth, Latvians must also, unfortunately, delegitimatize the “truth” that the other side tells.