Faceless Monsters

During a time of war most often there are two sides, the “good guys” and the “bad guys”, these are terms that could describe either groups depending on who you ask. Either way the bad guys, or enemy, are very often a sort of faceless being that conjures up the image of all things evil when mentioned. However, from reading Suite Française and from observing the photos of the enemy German soldiers in the PowerPoint on Sakai we see how this description can be misleading.

            In Suite Française, Nemirovsky describes the first German soldier awkwardly asking for a light for his cigarette on page 100, an act that is so simple and yet so telling of his humanity. I think that Nemirovsky accurately portrays the enemy in her novel, often opposition soldiers are nothing but faceless villains, and thus her contrasting description of the young German soldier demonstrates the dehumanization caused by war.  Most of the soldiers in World War II were young men who were drafted into the war without their consent, forced into this position of fighting one another. They were just young boys so it is expected of them to be lively, to be flirtatious, and ride motorcycles around the city of Paris even if it is in the middle of a takeover. I found the PowerPoint of photos to be very intriguing because it shed light on how youth culture and interests of the time transcended over a language barrier. These photographs, particularly the one of the soldier flirting near the Eiffel Tower were striking because it made me realize that we are currently around the same age as the people in the photographs, it could have easily have been us being forced to fight each other had we been born in another era.