A haunting dream

Waffen-SS recruitment poster (detail).
See full graphic below.

The young man walked toward me with a smile, shook my hand, and said, "I'm on your side."

His next statement, however, was not reassuring: "Hitler has seen some of your letters."

For an instant, I felt flattered that someone as high up as the Fuehrer had taken notice of me. The next moment I felt the full flush of horror. Wasn't this young man supposed to be part of the Resistance? And what year was this, anyway!?

This dream (in my first night of dreams in 2025) had started innocuously enough. I was on a train, expecting to see a familiar face when I got to my destination, Stuttgart. It was a familiar context: I often have dreams in which my grandparents appear—my father's parents or my mother's parents, depending on whether I'm dreaming of Norway or Germany.

I stepped off the train and went into the waiting room, looking around for my grandmother. She wasn't there. Once again, I scanned the people on the wooden benches, looking for anyone familiar, and that's when the young man approached me.

It was confusing. I had the strong impression that he was indeed an ally, a part of the resistance against fascism, but why did he mention the chief fascist himself? And why did that young man look so strikingly like a stereotypical "master race" poster child?

Before I could untangle my confusion, the dream came to an end. However, unlike most of my dreams, I remembered this one with crystal clarity, so I continued to try sorting it out.

Source.  

My first question: where did that young man come from? I think the image came from a recruiting placard for the German occupation forces in Norway, specifically for their SS forces and their "Norwegian Legion."I had seen this placard before, most recently at the impressive Norwegian Resistance Museum in Oslo last July. The invitation to join the common fight against Bolshevism is based on a blatant visual appeal to a myth of racial solidarity. The explicit identification of their mutual enemy was "Bolshevism," but, in Nazi usage, that political term often signified "the Jews."

Here are some other influences that probably went into the creation of my confusing dream:

As the 80th anniversary of World War II's end approaches, I've kept up my usual reading habits, which have always included a proportion of books about that war, its roots and its aftermath. After all, that war and its associated deportations and migrations resulted in my hybrid Norwegian-German family. Last week, for example, I read Eight Days in May: The Final Collapse of the Third Reich, by Volker Ullrich, the most detailed account I've seen of this period.

My recent reading also included the powerful story of Daniel Finkelstein's mother and father, Two Roads Home: Hitler, Stalin, and the Miraculous Survival of My Family. Finkelstein's mother Mirjam and her family were caught in Nazi Germany's mass brutality and the Holocaust, all of which the author describes in heart-stopping detail. This amazing story is interwoven with the equally miraculous survival of the author's Polish-born father Ludvik, who somehow survived Stalin's mass savagery. I cannot recommend this book highly enough, even though it puts us face to face with the reality of our human capacity for mass cruelty committed by leaders and followers and whole societies who all seemingly could have chosen differently.

Among the factors that seem to have reliably fueled this cruelty is racism in all its demonic forms, of which antisemitism has played a persistent and outsized role for many generations. All of these forms are rooted in the primordial sin of objectification, which to my sorrow and distress as a follower of Jesus, seems to have found expressions in today's white Christian nationalism, and not just in the USA.

The other sources for the "resistance" theme of my dream are no doubt the stabbing heartaches of the daily news: the genocide (as Amnesty International names it ... and I'm persuaded) in the Gaza Strip, committed by the armed forces of a nation that acts with near-total impunity; and then there's the ongoing "special military operation" in Ukraine, committed in the lethal service of a "great power," its leadership, and its "Russian World" mythology; in short, a gang whose other organizing principle seems to be to embezzle money and natural resources from its own population while suppressing most means of protest.

Add to all that: the uncertainties of our post-January 20 USA, with a new administration whose saving feature so far seems to be its own internal contradictions.

I have a feeling that there are going to be some more interesting dreams in my future. I'll keep looking for my grandmother ... and for the resistance.

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Rerunning a sweet favorite: the late Little Arthur Duncan with Illinois Slim, "Scratch My Back."