Fifty years ago, Jean Améry insisted, with the full right given him by the fact of his own survival of Auschwitz, that for the German people truly to remember the Holocaust would be for that people to bring itself as a whole and at last to judgment for what it did during those years. However, Améry, at least, was never under the illusion that any such thing would ever happen. Already fifty hears ago, he knew it never would.
Read moreHolocaust Remembrance (2)
When a community has committed crimes against some of its own members, there can be no genuine reconciliation of the community as a whole (both those who were made to suffer and those who made them suffer, both victims and perpetrators) at the level of “historical practice” itself, as Jean Améry calls it (rather than at the level of what an American expression disdainfully refers to as “pie in the sky bye and bye”) unless the victims are allowed to cherish their resentments, and the perpetrators in turn are made to maintain a deep and lasting self-mistrust.
Read moreBorder Crossings
Borders are things that are meant to be crossed. Otherwise, they cease to be borders, and become barriers instead.
Read moreHolocaust Remembrance (1)
Holocaust "survivor" Jean Améry knew as well as Primo Levi, another famous “survivor” of Auschwitz in the same sense that Améry was (both eventually committed suicide), that he was required to speak not only for his own sake but also above all for the sake of those who could no longer speak for themselves—those who could no longer speak for themselves, because they had been murdered by the Germans and their accomplices during the Holocaust.
Read moreForgetting Ourselves (3)
At rare times, what we call art provides us with a moment when we can at last forget ourselves in just such a truly liberating way. At those rare moments, art catches us up short, and opens before us at just that moment the opportunity to forget ourselves and to “set ourselves free”—free from ourselves, and thereby free at last just to be ourselves. It does so, according to Celan, at those moments when we are so suddenly and unexpectedly struck by a work of art, or something at work in that work, that it “takes our breath away,” as we commonly yet accurately say. We encounter “breath-taking beauty,” as we also say.
Read moreForgetting Ourselves (2)
What we call “art” can sometimes offer a false feeling of forgetting oneself in the positive sense, the sense of setting oneself free of “the bondage of self.” That is so, at least, for some of what we commonly call “art.”
Read moreForgetting Ourselves (1)
“Those who have art before their eyes and on their minds [. . .] have forgotten themselves. Art draws away from the I. Art here demands a certain distance in a certain direction, on a certain path.”[1]
The poet Paul Celan made those remarks some fifty-six years ago in “The Meridian,” his acceptance speech for the Georg Büchner Prize for literature.
Read moreNew Website
Thank you for visiting my new website! I will be making all my blog posts here from now on, beginning with the first new on Monday, January 9. After that, Mondays will be my regular days for putting up new posts.
Embracing Ourselves (3)
What projections are to us all individually, scapegoats are to us all collectively: the parts of ourselves we are continuing to disown.
Read moreEmbracing Ourselves (2)
How, for instance, can the United States of America, one of the communities to which I belong, embrace not just its war heroes but also its war murderers, as it were.
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