Essay On Biirgermeister's Daughter By Szymborska

manages, quite against the odds, to humanize Hitler by re-imagining him as an "average" child from the perspective of ordinary late-nineteenth-century Aus trians. To achieve this, Szymborska utilizes simplistic diction, or the "baby talk" associated with doting mothers ("Precious little angel, mommy's sunshine, honey bun" [11]), coupled with an appeal to bourgeois fantasies of self-determination and social advancement: "Where will those tootsy-wootsies finally wander? / To a garden, to a school, to an office, to a bride? / Maybe the Biirgermeister's daughter?" (8-10). In the world of the poem, Hitler appears "like the tots in every other family album" (24)—that is, as the innocent object of both tender emotion and modest middle-class aspirations. As the series of rhetorical questions in the first stanza suggests, for the Hitler family and its neighbors, "tiny baby Adolf" represents raw potentiality, a hope for the future that remains open to numerous possibilities for meaningful action. On the other hand, unlike the community of Braunau imagined in the poem, which seems without exception to cherish an avuncular affection for the young Hitler, we as readers …show more content…
Given the putatively ordinary circumstances attending his birth, how did Hitler go so extraordinarily wrong? Who, or what, is to blame for the fact that this seemingly commonplace child would go on to become not a doctor of the law, "an L.L.D." (3), but its destroyer? These are difficult questions precisely because the poem insists on both Hitler's and Braunau's "normality." What we as readers want and perhaps even expect are stories about the young Hitler torturing cats or the deplorable abuses of family and village, but neither Szymborska's poem nor history allows for such convenient answers. The poem does, however, provide at least a partial answer to such questions in its final im age of a yawning history