So many people who try to understand and accept the terrible habits and deeds of closed societies in faraway countries and civilizations should also try to understand the contradictions and conflicts, the errors and disasters of a free society. This would also mean, in the end, understanding the unsettling potential of human beings — not only elsewhere, but here, in our proximity, at the core of modernity.
Political errors and new options should be discussed more and more in the near future in relation to the premise, cause, and consequences of the September 11 terrorist attack. This must be an open and also a self-critical discourse of a sort that is unthinkable in the terrorists’ countries of origin.
An American military victory alone would mean another huge diversion. The major event of September 11 should force us all to rethink major questions about ourselves, and the national and international social-political environment.
As much as I hope for a serious debate on this matter, I must confess that I sometimes find myself stupefied by the scandalously frivolous old / new anti-capitalist and anti-American slogans. They seem to say: “The attacker is always perfect.” The victim, in this case America, has taken the guilt upon itself, has done regrettably bad things, so we should blame it for its imperfection.
We should not forget that we are under attack by the brutality and barbarism of a deluded enemy, for whom human life does not count and who can rely on fellow believers and other extremist ideologies. The threats from the centers of the fanatical movement are a serious danger to the entire free world. This is a fact we should no longer allow ourselves to ignore.
I would hope, as I have already said, for much more than an American military victory. What we all expect is a more secure and open world, a change for the better — which means a lawful and fair society — in some of the Islamic and underdeveloped countries, and an enhanced democracy in many other places as well as here at home. America needs to do its best in this direction. Otherwise this unusual battle may result, in the end, in another trivialization of tragedy.
Translated from the German by Eric Grunwald and
Edward Kanterian, February 2002
THE WALSER DEBATE*
Of course, the Holocaust is not exclusively a German problem. While it was a crime perpetuated by the National Socialists, it has a significance that goes beyond geographical boundaries and historical fact. The question of German guilt, especially now, after unification, remains a moral obligation for this country, whose current and future generations have a right to learn about what happened in the past, but also to be assured that they themselves bear no direct responsibility for it.
Every four or five years, I offer a seminar at Bard College entitled “Literature and the Holocaust.” I don’t teach the course more frequently because I wish to avoid developing rhetorical routines I could fall back on in discussing this difficult topic. The first thing I tell my students is that the Holocaust is not only a Jewish tragedy, though it was above all a tragedy for the Jews. The Holocaust was a tragedy for the Germans as well, and, indeed, for all mankind.
*The German writer Martin Walser, in his acceptance speech on receiving the Peace Prize of the German Booksellers’ Association at the Book Fair in 1998, warned against the “permanent representation” of the Holocaust in the mass media as an enduring argument against Germany and the Germans. He also spoke of the media’s use of the Holocaust as a “moral cudgel.” Walser’s speech has provoked a broad controversy in the German press and a high rate of popular approval. However, some intellectuals and Jewish representatives have criticized his way of mentioning only German “shame” (never “guilt”), of suggesting that foreign pressure, not Germany’s inner postwar evolution, has imposed the Holocaust Memory, and of using the term Errinerungsdienst (memory service) that echoes the Nazi term Arbeitsdienst (labor service) or Wehrdienst (military service).
I can understand Martin Walser’s irritation. No doubt it was provoked above all by the way in which the memory of this tragedy has repeatedly been commercialized, trivialized, and even instrumentalized to various ends (including political ones). I have to say that for a Jew — above all for one who has his own memories of that horror — it is not easy to come to terms with the sensationalist notoriety that surrounds this terrible wound and shame. I see this matter rather differently than do the activists of many Jewish and non-Jewish organizations who, with the melodramatic pathos of the “good cause,” invoke the catastrophe again and again, to the point of exhaustion, until all that remains is tedium.
When I arrived in the United States, I was surprised to see what a huge quantity of literature had been written about the Holocaust. Bit by bit, a fully-fledged industry had come into being to keep the memory alive. Enough survivors were ready to participate in bizarre, theatrically earnest exorcisms which took the form of ostensibly spontaneous discussion sessions before all sorts of audiences. But I also found people who took a critical, even sarcastic, approach to this mechanism of supply and demand.
On my own, I came to combine tolerance and skepticism in my attitude toward the freedom of expression enjoyed by the masses in this consumer democracy. That I (like Walser, presumably) would have preferred to keep alive the memory of this tragedy in a different way doesn’t much change matters. After all, what would the alternative have been? If poetry did not cease to exist after Auschwitz, why should other expressions of life in its various manifestations cease, whether they belong to the “higher spheres” or are of more banal, “humble” origin? Without this “lower sphere,” life could not go on. The Holocaust, after all, did not become well known primarily through sophisticated forms of representation.
As overwhelming as it was, the Holocaust did not put an end to the course of human existence. Life went on, outside the sphere of memory, but also within and in relation to it.
Reactions to the Holocaust are no less various and contradictory than other human responses, for even this barbarism was the work of humans, not demons: it came neither from hell nor out of nothing. Some sacralized the tragedy, others denied its existence; some suffered silently from the wounds they bore, still others took it as a basis for investigation, pity, hate, revelation, revenge, despair. Unfortunately I am not religious, but I must confess that the Jewish prohibition on pronouncing the name of God or making images of him has always struck me as somehow more appropriate than the naïve fairy tale iconography of other religions. Perhaps I’d have been satisfied to have the catastrophe known as “the Holocaust” similarly enshrouded in a solemn, dignified silence. But I am not sure if there can be any solution to this dilemma.
Perhaps Samuel Beckett described the problem best. Not long after the war, in 1949, he wrote “There is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express … together with the obligation to express.” In the more than fifty years that have passed since it took place, the general public response to the Holocaust has changed from silence to a more and more open and insistent reappraisal, to the current state of saturation. Expression has taken a variety of forms: documents, memoirs, reminiscences, diaries, debates, novels, poems, films, plays, works of art. Many of these works are minor, but many are original, authentic, and striking. The substantial repercussions in the mass media, sparked less by the most significant works than by the products appealing to the general public, have kept the memory of these events alive in the public imagination.