At one point in “The Meridian,” his acceptance speech for the 1960 Georg Büchner Prize for literature, poet Paul Celan remarks that “the poem today,” which in his case especially means a day that dawned only after the night of the Holocaust (a day that is still passing by us), “shows, as cannot help but be recognized, a strong tendency toward holding its tongue.”
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To remember the Holocaust means to come to dwell in the chaotic no-place of a place that art after the Holocaust creates, and to build together a human home there, the only place such a home can be built any longer today, this day that dawns only “after” the Holocaust.
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As I hear them, the poems of Paul Celan, who survived the Holocaust himself, gives us a definitive example of a poetry that truly comes after the Holocaust both substantively and chronologically.
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The truth of the Holocaust calls upon us to open all our own identities to all who choose—whether under compulsion of external circumstances (as with Améry) or by the experience of free, inner vocation (as with Freud)—to claim those identities themselves, given their own conditions of birth and heritage.
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Art—at least that art that has been purified of all artifice and flashiness, all grandiloquence and gaudiness—can call us back from the sort of forgetting of ourselves that shames us, and into the sort of forgetting of ourselves that honors us. It can call us back from forgetting ourselves negatively and into forgetting ourselves positively—back into forgetting ourselves precisely by honoring our obligations, and paying what we owe.
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Significantly, though he died in 1938, even before the Kristallnacht pogrom let alone the implementation of the “final solution,” and had no tattooed number on his arm, Sigmund Freud said much the same thing as Jean Améry, the Auschwitz survivor, later did.
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In my preceding post, I argued that our remembrance of the Holocaust must remain a carefully articulated one, in which we are careful to honor all he victims of the Holocaust at the same time that we preserve acknowledgment of the disproportionate suffering that the Holocaust inflicted on some segments of the general population--above all, but not exclusively, on those who were classified as Jews. Not to show such care to remember all the victims in their full articulation into disproportionate segments is to “forget ourselves” in the negative sense of a self-forgetfulness that works to our own dishonor.
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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.
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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.
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Borders are things that are meant to be crossed. Otherwise, they cease to be borders, and become barriers instead.
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