Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany Quotes

“The literature prizes I was given shouldn’t fool you: they are, finally, only the alibi of those who, in the shadow of such alibis, continue with other, more contemporary means, what they had started, and continued, under Hitler. —Paul Celan, letter to Erich Einhorn, August 10, 1962”
― Sonja Boos, Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany: Toward a Public Discourse on the Holocaust

“As a public speaker, Buber sought to engage in a plurality of genuine dialogues, and he did so by attempting to speak to an audience of many, as if he were addressing one participant at a time. In each distinct encounter, Buber explained, he singles one person out from the crowd, making him or her the “partner” in a unique—if only temporary—exchange. That is to say, in his ideal scenario the speaker converts a crowd into a multiplicity of separate participants who are, however, not conceived as stable, clearly defined human individuals but rather as distinct, indivisible “things”—no longer faceless but not yet individualized.”
― Sonja Boos, Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany: Toward a Public Discourse on the Holocaust

“As he once explained, the only way in which he found himself capable of delivering a public address was by envisioning it as a direct contact with worthy individuals: “The indispensable presupposition for my speaking publicly: being able to regard every face that I turn toward as my legitimate counterpart.”51 Of course public speech involves more than an effort of imagination. In his treatise Die Frage an den Einzelnen (The Question to the Single One, 1936), Buber asserted that a public speaker must be able to accept and acknowledge each audience member individually: “Even if he has to speak to the crowd he seeks the person, for a people can find and find again in truth only through persons.”
― Sonja Boos, Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany: Toward a Public Discourse on the Holocaust

“In Buber’s view, even the success of political debates between statesmen is tied more to specific formal attributes than to the substantive content of the debates. These debates lack significance because of how rather than what they communicate: they provoke no answers, and thus fail to stimulate deliberation and pluralist debate. Diametrically opposed to genuine dialogue, such discourse is fossilized speech. For Buber, the inability to speak in a genuine, dialogical manner is not, however, restricted to modern statesmen and rulers. It is a problem that pertains to all people and peoples: “That peoples can no longer carry on authentic dialogue with one another is not only the most acute symptom of the pathology of our time; it is also that which most urgently makes a demand of us” (GD, 238). The battle cries of war have drowned out genuine human dialogue, particularly the dialogue between Germans and Jews.”
― Sonja Boos, Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany: Toward a Public Discourse on the Holocaust

“Buber’s language no doubt differed from the rhetoric that dominated the political culture of West Germany, a plain and unadorned rhetoric that expressed the greatest possible distance from the emotional amalgam of Nazi mass propaganda with its ideologically inflated, triumphalist pathos. In this historical context, Buber’s Peace Prize address stands out as a wisely and cautiously deliberative speech in the garb of conventional epideictic rhetoric.”
― Sonja Boos, Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany: Toward a Public Discourse on the Holocaust

“Dialogical encounters are thus diametrically opposed to information exchange, persuasion, and intentionality, and involve presenting oneself in such a way that one is open to hearing the other’s “otherness.”
― Sonja Boos, Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany: Toward a Public Discourse on the Holocaust

“Buber favored the genre of public speech because of its compatibility with the very essence of his philosophy, as this form of spoken communication provided him with the adequate means to demonstrate, indeed perform, the most fundamental principle of his philosophical thought: that human existence is inherently dialogical in nature. Privileging”
― Sonja Boos, Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany: Toward a Public Discourse on the Holocaust

“The meeting with Buber, unsatisfactory as it seemed, pushed Celan to revisit his own stance on the question of what it meant for a Jewish exile to address an audience of a variety of Germans—made up of former bystanders, victims, and perpetrators, of members of the first and second generations, of individuals, too, who downplayed the significance of the Cologne synagogue desecration in 1959, and of others who came to Celan’s defense against Claire Goll’s plagiarism charges.13 In a letter to Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann had expressed her concern that “having entered a room full of people one has not chosen oneself, whether one is still prepared to read for those who do want to listen, and are ashamed of the others.”
― Sonja Boos, Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany: Toward a Public Discourse on the Holocaust

“even though his appearance in Germany occurred at a time when the 1951–52 retribution debate had only barely receded from public view:5 at that time not a few Israelis were opposed to the idea of accepting monetary retribution from the federal government, insisting that this would bestow an undeserved sense of redemption on West Germany.”
― Sonja Boos, Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany: Toward a Public Discourse on the Holocaust

“degree of objectivity and a view of totality. As Archimedes’s theory of the lever maintains, the greater the distance between the fulcrum of a lever and the object to be lifted, the stronger the motive force that will be applied to it. By the same token, the ability to assume a detached and independent standpoint is taken to increase a thinker’s—and by extension speaker’s—capability to survey his object of study and see it in relation to all other things. The question that arises from this analogy, then, concerns the possible forces set in motion by public speakers who occupy such an assumed location outside Germany’s political and cultural coordinates.”
― Sonja Boos, Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany: Toward a Public Discourse on the Holocaust

“Jews were thus being reclaimed as fellow Germans, while their previously asserted racial or ethnic “difference” was disavowed on the grounds that, after all, they had been born in Germany, spoke German as a mother tongue, or at any rate wrote for a German readership. Those exiles whom the Nazis had deprived of their German citizenship on political and racial grounds were now entitled to renaturalization according to Article 116, Paragraph 2 of the German constitution, the Grundgesetz.29 Yet with the exception of Adorno, who renewed his German citizenship in 1955, the public speakers considered here did not seek to repatriate: Arendt, a secular German Jew, never reapplied for German citizenship, even though she took her German readers seriously enough to personally produce German versions of books she had originally written in English. In a similar vein, Weiss, son of a Jewish-Hungarian father and a Swiss mother, acquired Swedish citizenship”
― Sonja Boos, Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany: Toward a Public Discourse on the Holocaust

“Rather than being predicated on the ideological framework of West German postwar politics with its emphasis on economic growth, political integration, and cultural recovery, their speeches are characterized by their insistence on a historical absence and an ontological loss: the (virtual) absence of Jews and survivors and their living memory in Germany and the concomitant loss of truth and meaning, justice and ethics.8”
― Sonja Boos, Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany: Toward a Public Discourse on the Holocaust