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the sense of unparalleled national humiliation felt by millions in the last years of the war had never really found verbal expression, and that those directly affected by the experience neither shared it with each other nor passed it on to the next generation.
the creation of a new, faceless reality, pointing the population exclusively towards the future and enjoining on it silence about the past.
“what we found when we came home,”8 proves on closer inspection to be an instrument already tuned to individual and collective amnesia, and probably influenced by preconscious self-censorship—a means of obscuring a world that could no longer be presented in comprehensible terms.
There was a tacit agreement, equally binding on everyone, that the true state of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to be described.
They did not try to provide a clearer understanding of the extraordinary faculty for self-anesthesia shown by a community that seemed to have emerged from a war of annihilation without any signs of psychological impairment.
developed an almost perfectly functioning mechanism of repression,
it is impossible to understand “the mysterious energy of the Germans … if we refuse to realize that they have made a virtue of their deficiencies.
the unquestioning work ethic learned in a totalitarian society, the logistical capacity for improvisation shown by an economy under constant threat, experience in the use of “foreign labor forces,” and the lifting of the heavy burden of history that went up in flames between 1942 and 1945 along with the centuries-old buildings accommodating homes and businesses in Nuremberg and Cologne, in Frankfurt, Aachen, Brunswick, and Würzburg, a historical burden ultimately regretted by only a few.
As far as I know, the question of whether and how it could be strategically or morally justified was never the subject of open debate in Germany after 1945, no doubt mainly because a nation which had murdered and worked to death millions of people in its camps could hardly call on the victorious powers to explain the military and political logic that dictated the destruction of the German cities.
punishment, even an act of retribution on the part of a higher power with which there could be no dispute.
the Germans faced the catastrophe that was taking place with silent fascination.
This directive did not, as is frequently claimed, spring from a wish to bring the war to a speedy conclusion by the massive deployment of bombers; it was the only way of intervening in the war at
the victims of war are not sacrifices made as the means to an end of any kind, but in the most precise sense are both the means and the end in themselves.
The apparently unimpaired ability—shown in most of the eyewitness reports—of everyday language to go on functioning as usual raises doubts of the authenticity of the experiences they record.
No one knew where the homeless stayed, although lights among the ruins after dark showed where they had moved in.41 This is the necropolis of a foreign, mysterious people, torn from its civil existence and its history, thrown back to the evolutionary stage of nomadic gatherers.
Instead, and with remarkable speed, social life, that other natural phenomenon, revived. People’s ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany at that time.
The population decided—out of sheer panic at first—to carry on as if nothing had happened.
lack of moral sensitivity bordering on inhumanity.
This scandalous deficiency, which has become ever clearer to me over the years, reminded me that I had grown up with the feeling that something was being kept from me: at home, at school, and by the German writers
But I do not necessarily have to return to Germany and my place of origin to visualize that period of destruction. It often comes back to my mind where I live at present.
I am well aware that my unsystematic notes do not do justice to the complexity of the subject, but I think that even in their incomplete form they cast some light on the way in which memory (individual, collective and cultural) deals with experiences exceeding what is tolerable.
yet it is only a tiny part of what we do not know. Many who fled to the most remote parts of the Reich after the raids on Hamburg were in a demented state of mind.
The right to silence claimed by the majority of these people is as inviolable as that of the survivors of Hiroshima, of whom Kenzaburo Oe says, in his notes on the city written in 1965, that even twenty years after the bomb fell many of them still could not speak of what happened that day.
Similar a la comunidad de Manta y Vilca (arrasada por SL)
The elephants who had perished in the ruins of their sleeping quarters had to be cut up where they lay over the next few days, and Heck describes men crawling around inside the rib cages of the huge pachyderms and burrowing through mountains of entrails. These images of horror fill us with particular revulsion because they go beyond those routine accounts of human suffering
excluded from cultural memory because they threatened to break through the cordon sanitaire cast by society around the death zones of the dystopian incursions that actually occurred.
To this day, any concern with the real scenes of horror during the catastrophe still has an aura of the forbidden about it, even of voyeurism, something that these notes of mine have not entirely been able to avoid.
The rivalry between the aristocrats in the Wehrmacht and the new men and career officers who came from lower-middle-class backgrounds, people who like Himmler the amateur chicken breeder now set themselves up as protectors of the Fatherland, is certainly an important chapter in what is as yet the largely unwritten social history of the corruption of the Germans.
The majority of Germans today know, or so at least it is to be hoped, that we actually provoked the annihilation of the cities in which we once lived. Scarcely anyone can now doubt that Air Marshal Göring would have wiped out London if his technical resources had allowed him to do so.
It is almost as if he felt barred from calling to mind, either then or later, what he must have seen there.
But his admission of the fear which seized upon him that afternoon in the police station, making him ready, as he writes, “to say anything required of me,”15 does bear the mark of authenticity and is one of the most impressive moments in the book, since here Andersch indulges in no posturing.
Few emotions are harder to repress than resentment.
When a morally compromised author claims the field of aesthetics as a value-free area it should make his readers stop and think. The burning of Paris was, for Ernst Jünger, a wonderful sight! Frankfurt burning, as seen from the Main, is for Andersch “a terrifyingly beautiful image.”45
Efraim’s violent outburst, intended to reflect legitimate moral outrage, really shows that Andersch is involuntarily projecting into the mind of his Jewish protagonist a German soldier showing a Jew how best to deal with his own kind.
At heart, Andersch was always a man who stayed behind the lines himself.
Andersch’s self-centered reaction to this insufficiently glowing reference offers a final insight into a mental existence plagued by ambition, egotism, resentment, and rancor. His literary work is the cloak in which those qualities wrap themselves, but its lining, which is less attractive, keeps showing through.
1950s. In many ways, however, the alacrity with which literature was now reclaiming “Auschwitz” as its own territory was no less repellent than its previous refusal to broach that monstrous subject at all.
Once a victim, always a victim. “Twenty-two years later,” writes Améry, “I am still dangling over the ground by dislocated arms.”
Islands of amnesia do develop in them, but that is not at all the same as being genuinely able to forget. Rather, it is as if a diffuse ability to forget goes hand in hand with the recurrent resurgence of images that cannot be banished from the memory, and that remain effective as agencies of an almost pathological hypermnesia in a past otherwise emptied of content.
The experience of terror also dislocates time, that most abstract of all humanity’s homes. The only fixed points are traumatic scenes recurring with a painful clarity of memory and vision.
Torture, writes Améry, has “an indelible character. Whoever was tortured, stays tortured.”8 This is the lapidary revelation which he presents to us without the slightest attempt to emotionalize his case.
Améry is still the only one who denounced the obscenity of a psychologically and socially deformed society, and the outrage of supposing that history could proceed on its way afterwards almost undisturbed, as if nothing had happened.
History, “ce mélange indécent de banalité et d’apocalypse,”11 remained terrible and horrible to him, and he stood firm by his position.
Améry believes as little in the possibility of revenge as in the idea of atonement, which he describes as dubious from the outset: at the most, he considers it of theological significance and therefore irrelevant to him. The issue, then, is not to resolve but to reveal the conflict.
“entre le foyer et le lointain.”
“It was a long time,” he writes, “before we were able even to learn the ordinary language of freedom. Still today, incidentally, we speak it with discomfort and without real trust in its validity.”
the act of writing becomes both liberation and the annulment of délivrance, the moment in which a man who has escaped death must recognize that he is no longer alive.
It is a particularly macabre irony, as Niederland says, that the survivors and not those who committed Nazi crimes should bear the burden of such guilt.
To Lefeu survival means condemnation to an existence like that of the lemures, for in his true form he is still an inhabitant of the city of the dead.
Fire, the perfect medium of the force of divine retribution, is ultimately the true passion of the arsonist, here indulging in a revolutionary fantasy: he, Lefeu, is the fire in his own person, and so devours himself as fire does.
Rembrandt’s picture of the dissection of a hanged body in the interests of higher ideals is an unsettling comment on the particular kind of knowledge to which we owe progress.
