The year is 1944, a section of Waffen-SS soldiers of SS-Panzer-Grenadier Regiment 24 ‘Danmark’ are on patrol in the Oranienbaum Pocket. All of them are clad in SS uniforms and armed with rifles or machine guns. It is twilight and everything is calm. Prepared for action, the SS men steal forward searching for partisans. But wait a minute – there is something entirely amiss in chronology and geography. In fact, these are young men in a forest in Northern Zealand, and the year is 2013. They are re-enactors, members of Fronthistorisk Forening Danmark (the Society for Front History, Denmark) claiming to be re-enacting history.

Today, most SS veterans have passed away, but the Waffen-SS survives in the cultural practices through which we commemorate and understand the past, such as the above-described re-enactment episode. In the contemporary world, Himmler's black corps simultaneously serves as an important signifier among extremist right-wing groups, as a rallying point in the nation-building processes in certain east European countries, as an ingredient in pop-culture and as a symbol of the darkest sides of twentieth-century history. In mainstream political culture Nazism and its symbols, especially the swastika and the SS runes, have come to represent the antithesis of democratic values. The story of the Third Reich and the SS in the words of Alec Ryrie thus serves an important role in contemporary western society:

While this observation is valid regarding the overall political culture of western societies, there are important undercurrents where wholly different perspectives on the Waffen-SS live on. This chapter offers an introduction to the diverse ways in which the history of the Waffen-SS is used today.

Notions of the Waffen-SS

During the war, in the occupied countries, there was a general impression of Nazi collaborators as pathological deviants. The early post-war literature reinforced this notion by demonising the SS as the hub of Nazi crime. At the same time, there were many who attempted to delimit the SS, and by implication, the Waffen-SS, from the German population per se, in order to save the latter from accusations of complicity in war crimes.

Over the course of history, the relationship between the concept of refuge and music as a space in which terror and violence can be neutralized has taken on many forms. At times, music has been a privileged place of refuge from a predatory situation and context, a space in which one can feel protected. For Gaston Bachelard, these are the characteristics of all types of refuge. The home, nest, shell and corner are images of havens that demonstrate what one can inhabit as a refuge. The action of seeking refuge does not solely refer to occupying a certain space; it can also allow for one to engage in a “vital exercise,” an experience of subjectivity in which the individual fills an experience with meaning. For Bachelard, inhabiting means experiencing the pleasure of refuge (125–77). Following the postulates of this French philosopher, one could argue that under certain circumstances, music can serve as a protective refuge and as a way to subjectively inhabit a physical and mental space. From there, a refuge has the ability to offer comfort to a subject who needs it, making them feel that they are part of a community. In doing so, it can become a space of resistance.

The purpose of this chapter is to consider how that equation (music-refuge) is used in the book Antes de perder la memoria (Before the Memory is Lost, 2015; hereafter Antes) by Ana María Jiménez and Teresa Izquierdo. In this text, memory becomes a represented space in which music is at once an art, a refuge and a symbol of protection. It is important to clarify and emphasize that in Antes, music is mainly represented through singing and songs that serve as the main driver of memory. We know that singing can reinforce connections to a certain group and that it creates an atmosphere of understanding that goes beyond individualism and all sorts of differences. People who sing step outside of their inner isolation and are open to communication; they renounce the sound of their own voice and adjust to the tone and rhythm required by the song, thus contributing to the unity of the group. In Antes, singing is an expression of a need to speak out under extreme conditions, to resist the violence of one's surroundings, to found and inhabit a communal space.

Biographies of a Generational Experience

Patients learn from Shakespeare how to expand their capacity to represent and therefore comprehend their experiences of illness and health care. Nursing stu-dents develop high-level literary and creative skills to prepare them to serve their patients. Medical students arrive at complex understandings of that elusive and underrated skill of empathy. Socratic dialogues, imported from the Athens of 2500 years ago, deepen cancer patients’ insight and courage in facing the mean-ings of their ordeals. And such diverse groups as elderly men facing retirement, patients in acute care rehabilitation facilities, alcoholics, and geriatrics patients come together in facilitated groups to write, read together, and enter the narra-tive worlds evoked by stories toward improvement in their health and wellness.

Narrative Medicine in Education, Practice, and Interventions reports the accom-plishments of narrative medicine as studied and practiced in Denmark and else-where. Danish scholars, clinicians, and creative artists are joined by internation-al experts in various branches of literary studies, social sciences, and the medical humanities. Over the course of this collection, the reader gets a high-altitude view of semiotic theory, aesthetic theory of creative writing, and phenomeno-logical expositions on suffering. The reader also gets a ground-level exposure to the teaching of this material to health professions students, patients in nursing homes, and persons seeking recovery from alcoholism and cancer. Several of the essays report on research projects designed to assess the outcomes of narrative interventions in education and clinical practice.

Narrative medicine has evolved into a systems narrative medicine since it is in-creasingly influenced by and influencing global and social processes far afield from actual clinical settings. Systems thinking is becoming more and more prominent in the world of science, the world of global politics, the business world, and the world of human services. It is a conceptual process of itemizing the forces out in the environment that impinge on one's practice and also the processes out in the world that might be influenced by what one does. For nar-rative medicine, this means acknowledging the influences of social factors like racism, economic factors like health insurance reimbursement for care, and cul-tural factors like the rise of storytelling in health care. Taking cues from systems biology and complexity science, narrative medicine recognizes itself conceptually and practically as chains of interlocking systems operating at a range of scales from one-on-one clinician-client relationships to vast ecosystems and global economies.

The research of the soldiers in the Waffen-SS has by and large been focused on those who were recruited in the North-western European Germanic countries, such as Holland and Scandinavia. As we have discussed these volunteers had strong ideological motives and to a large extent came from Fascist or Right-Wing extremist groups in their home countries. The same tendency can also be found among soldiers from other parts of Europe such as France and Italy, but in these cases, and even more so when it comes to Eastern Europeans in the Waffen-SS the reasons behind their entry was complex: coercion and material factors in many cases played a much bigger role than ideological motivation. These groups have until relatively recently remained in the periphery of research and have not attracted the same scholarly attention as, for instance, the Scandinavian volunteers. In his classic 1966 study, George Stein included a chapter about the Baltic and Muslim volunteers. He concluded that these units, except the three divisions raised in the Baltic States, were practically useless in combat, even when it came to less demanding anti-partisan tasks. Published a few years later, Alexander Dallin's essay The Kaminsky Brigade: A Case-Study of Soviet Disaffection was an in-depth study of a single unit, whose members were recruited in Russia. Apart from Stein's monograph and Dallin's essay, the Waffen-SS soldiers from Eastern Europe were a virtually untouched subject by academic scholars studying the Third Reich until a few notable studies have surfaced during the last two decades. The East European soldiers in German armed service did receive some attention earlier from authors with an interest in obscure military units or from revisionist far right historians. A third approach was offered by scholars from émigré groups studying the history of their nation under Soviet and Nazi domination. They often tended to neglect or downplay the fact that many (but far from all) east Europeans in German armed service fought within the SS in favour of an uncritical and heroic interpretations of the soldiers as reluctant cannon fodder or misguided idealist who merely fought for their nation's survival. Thus, several books written from this perspective treated the subject of collaboration with Nazi Germany and the SS as a minor one, within a greater theme of national assertion and survival for small nations squeezed between the great powers Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

The history of medical education and practice has rediscovered its humanist core on a number of occasions (Osler, 1961; Charon, 2006; Heslet, 2010; Bleakley, 2015). Edmund Pellegrino, one of the leading figures in medical ethics of his time, has given a striking expression to the link: “Medicine is the most scientific of the humanities, the most empiric of arts, and the most humane of the sciences” (Pellegrino, 1979, p. 17). Regardless of whether illness is interpreted as an abstract pathophysiological, biomolecular, epidemiological, or algorith-mic construction, physicians need to understand it in relation to the patients’ lived experiences and to the narratives they tell. To put it briefly and somewhat polemically, even the best medicine does not work for the “wrong” illness narra-tive (Rasmussen and Sodemann, 2020). The primary aims of narrative medi cine, understood as courses for the qualification and in-service training of physicians, are to raise awareness of and promote the clinician's empathy with individual patients, understood first of all as human beings, by arousing curiosity about and understanding the accounts they provide of their illness and distress.

Entering the clinical wards for the first time felt like encountering the first talking pictures or the birth of technicolor. Everything seemed brighter, the sounds were crisper, and the smells more acute. With pressed short white coats and newly unboxed stethoscopes, my classmates and I were released from the prolonged purgatory of our books and our classes. But while we had spent many years studying pathophysiology, biochemistry, anatomy, and organ systems, we had had very little formal training in humans. I remember my first cases of life-threatening gastrointestinal hemorrhage, newly diagnosed congestive heart failure, and pneumocystis carinii pneumonia in a patient with AIDS. We stabilized vital signs, made complex diagnoses, performed interventions, and initiated treatment plans. But we were woefully unprepared for the messy contours of life: unpaid bills, domestic violence, racial tension, and unmitigated loss. We had not been trained to appreciate individual variation, scrutinize our own biases and unexamined assumptions, or overcome the often vast gulfs in age, sex, race, class, and life experience that separated us from our patients. Simply put, we had not been trained in the imagination.

It was the late 1990s, and narrative medicine had not quite been born, but Rita Charon had already been planting the seeds and laying the foundation for decades. Her interest in literature and its applications to the pedagogy of medicine were legendary at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons where I was attending medical school. Her methods and approach, centered on a close study of literary language and aesthetic form, were at their core, an education in the imagination. As I tried to care for my patients as people, I sought out Dr. Charon, and we embarked on a shared exploration of works by Virginia Woolf, Naguib Mahfooz, Henry James, and Vernon Maxwell as I continu ed my clinical rotations. During those months of close reading and writing, we stretched our imaginative capacity to care for, be curious about, and apprehend the predicaments of other human beings. But we also developed the imaginative humility to appreciate the limits of those presumptions.

Those early insights carried me through graduate school in English and comparative literature, residencies in primary care and emergency medicine, and the development of an undergraduate program and major in medical humanities.

The winter of 1941–1942 was tough on the German troops employed in the Demyansk Pocket, but it was still worse for the Soviet civilians who suffered from the extremes of hunger, cold and lack of shelter. This, however, made no impression on Theodor Eicke, the general-officer-commanding Division Totenkopf. In January 1942, in one of the division's journals, he encouraged his soldiers to see the locals the way Heinrich Heine's forlorn grenadier did in a poem: ‘What do I care for the woman, what do I care for the child. I have higher aspirations. Let them go begging if they are hungry.’ Being a Nazi Altkämpfer, Eicke undoubtedly represented the most ideologically committed segment of the Waffen-SS but there is no doubt that Nazi ideology played a central role in the justification and rationalization of the crimes committed by many an SS soldier. However, other factors were also at play, including, for example, career ambitions, peer pressure, dispersal of responsibility and the general brutalization of war. The present chapter offers an analysis of how these various components may help us understand how the monstrous atrocities described in the Chapter 11 could take place.

The early research of Nazi crimes tended to demonize the perpetrators, and portray them as deviants, psychopaths and sadists with a particular proclivity for authoritarianism. Later research tended to emphasize structural explanations such as, for example, Bauman's famous interpretation of the Holocaust being a product primarily of bureaucratic and dehumanizing decision-making in a modern rational state. Detailed empirical historical accounts have since clearly demonstrated how face-to-face killings and executions committed by soldiers and guards in German uniforms remained a central genocidal practice throughout the war and throughout the Nazi territories, something which cannot be explained solely by looking at bureaucratic procedures and mechanisms. Furthermore, a number of sociological, psychological and historical studies have demonstrated how all the perpetrators of mass violence and killings during the Second World War were generally quite ordinary people and not deviants in any particular way. Their deeds were not a product of pathological personalities, but were rather the results of the extreme environment and culture within which they operated. Important factors were conformism and loyalty to their co-killers, the role of authority figures and careerism as well as – not least – acceptance and internalisation of Nazi ideology and the consequent dehumanisation of the victims.