In chapter 26, when Cecil Jacobs is presenting on Hitler, he says the following:
“. . .old Adolf Hitler has been after the Jews and he’s puttin’ 'em in prisons and he’s taking away all their porperty and he won’t let any of ‘em out of the country and he’s washin’ all the feeble-minded and --”
What has he confused with “washin’ all the feeble-minded”? Perhaps the euphemism of ethnic cleansing?
As an aside, re-reading this book as a teacher has been an eye-opener. There’s a lot of stuff I glossed over as a kid - Scout eating a Lane cake “loaded with shinny” that “made me tight” for instance. At first I thought it made her constipated. :dubious:
I have heard the term “washing the institutionalized” here all the time, when I was growing up, almost alway referring to the state mental hospitals but every so often our prisons too.
In otherwords you not helping the mentally ill, you’re just cleaning them up to look decent but not doing anything else.
Since the book was written in the 50s and published in 1960 it’s possible Lee used the term to mean “genocide” in sort of a way. The term wouldn’t have been used in the time frame of Hitler but an author writing about it 20 years later may use the term, not realizing it wasn’t really used at the time.
It seems to me that washing could be regarded as the same as showering. The feeble-minded would have been high on the list of people Hitler would have had exterminated. Many of the victims of cyanide gas poisoning at Auschwitz were told that they were being taken to clean themselves and were led into gas chambers that were disguised as shower facilities. It’s not hard for a kid of that age just learning world history to make the connection between showering and washing and to literally think the concentration camp victims were being taken into a shower.
TKAMB takes place during the 1930s, prior to WWII. The Nazis were persecuting Jews, but not yet carrying out an extermination policy. Hitler did promote euthanasia of the mentally handicapped, but was met with strong resistance from the German clergy. I think they were sterilizing people in the 1930s though.
Oh well, I suppose it doesn’t matter that much. I was curious though, if only because as a teacher I know the feeling of confusion when your student says something ridiculous in a matter of fact tone.
Heh, the irony here is that what Hitler was actually up to in real life was far more absurd than the mangled student report. The kid is wrongly attributing a sense of decency to Hitler’s Germany that was of course totally lacking.
I thought, when reading that scene, that the dramatic point was to highlight the absurdity of the injustices taking place in the town - the racism. Also a dramatic forerunner of the culminating justice offered to the ‘feeble minded’ Boo Radley.
I always took this passage to mean Cecil had misinterpreted “brainwashing” as literal and not figurative as it was intended. The symbolic meaning was lost on him, as were the meanings and proper usage of some other words with which he was not familiar.
Seconded. There were many sterilization programs in the Third Reich (there had been some in the U.S. also) and it’s easy to assume somebody looking up the meaning of sterilize would come up with washing.