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Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily.
Is this what sadness is all about? Is it what comes over us when beautiful memories shatter in hindsight because the remembered happiness fed not just on actual circumstances but on a promise that was not kept?
But waking from a bad dream does not necessarily console you. It can also make you fully aware of the horror you just dreamed, and even of the truth residing in that horror.
WHEN AN airplane's engines fail, it is not the end of the flight. Airplanes don’t fall out of the sky like stones. They glide on, the enormous multi-engined passenger jets, for thirty, forty-five minutes, only to smash themselves up when they attempt a landing. The passengers don’t notice a thing. Flying feels the same whether the engines are working or not.
at a certain point the memory of her stopped accompanying me wherever I went. She stayed behind, the way a city stays behind as a train pulls out of the station. It’s there, somewhere behind you, and you could go back and make sure of it. But why should you?
What is law? Is it what is on the books, or what is actually enacted and obeyed in a society? Or is law what must be enacted and obeyed, whether or not it is on the books, if things are to go right?
I remembered how I had blown the hair away from that neck and how I had kissed that birthmark and that neck. But the memory was like a retrieved file. I felt nothing.
She must have been completely exhausted. Her struggle was not limited to the trial. She was struggling, as she always had struggled, not to show what she could do but to hide what she couldn’t do. A life made up of advances that were actually frantic retreats and victories that were concealed defeats.
the fact that I had not driven her away did not change the fact that I had betrayed her. So I was still guilty. And if I was not guilty because one cannot be guilty of betraying a criminal, then I was guilty of having loved a criminal.
Hanna kept struggling. She admitted what was true and disputed what was not. Her arguments became more desperate and more vehement. She didn’t raise her voice, but her very intensity alienated the court.
She could have made that kind of trade herself, and did not, which meant she didn’t want it. Her sense of self was worth more than the years in prison to her.
I tried to talk about the problem with friends. Imagine someone is racing intentionally towards his own destruction and you can save him—do you go ahead and save him? Imagine there’s an operation, and the patient is a drug user and the drugs are incompatible with the anesthetic, but the patient is ashamed of being an addict and does not want to tell the anesthesiologist—do you talk to the anesthesiologist? Imagine a trial and a defendant who will be convicted if he doesn’t admit to being left-handed—do you tell the judge what’s going on? Imagine he’s gay, and could not have committed the crime
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When I tried to understand it, I had the feeling I was failing to condemn it as it must be condemned. When I condemned it as it must be condemned, there was no room for understanding.
Sometimes I think that dealing with the Nazi past was not the reason for the generational conflict that drove the student movement, but merely the form it took.
But on the other hand, the Nazi past was an issue even for children who couldn’t accuse their parents of anything, or didn’t want to. For them, coming to grips with the Nazi past was not merely the form taken by a generational conflict, it was the issue itself.
Pointing at the guilty parties did not free us from shame, but at least it overcame the suffering we went through on account of it. It converted the passive suffering of shame into energy, activity, aggression. And coming to grips with our parents’ guilt took a great deal of energy.
love of our parents is the only love for which we are not responsible.
There’s no need to talk, because the truth of what one says lies in what one does.
Prosecution seemed to me as grotesque a simplification as defense, and judging was the most grotesque oversimplification of all.
Doing history means building bridges between the past and the present, observing both banks of the river, taking an active part on both sides.
The disadvantage of reading aloud remained the fact that it took longer. But books read aloud also stayed long in my memory. Even today, I can remember things in them absolutely clearly.
Illiteracy is dependence. By finding the courage to learn to read and write, Hanna had advanced from dependence to independence, a step towards liberation.
“I always had the feeling that no one understood me anyway, that no one knew who I was and what made me do this or that. And you know, when no one understands you, then no one can call you to account. Not even the court could call me to account. But the dead can. They understand. They don’t even have to have been there, but if they were, they understand even better. Here in prison they were with me a lot. They came every night, whether I wanted them or not. Before the trial I could still chase them away when they wanted to come.”
I don’t remember whether I was under actual pressure to finish the lecture I was working on, or only under self-inflicted pressure to work and succeed.
The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive.
