[Alexander Kluge’s two books] are sobering inventories of a catastrophe, cool, dry and therefore more gripping. A card index of all imaginable inhumanities. Kluge’s books consist of excerpts from diaries, telegrams, official reports, sermons of…
On one of his trips [in South America] ([Franz Stangl] confessed to Gitta Sereny in 1971), ‘my train stopped next to a slaughterhouse. The cattle in the pens, hearing the noise of the train, trotted…
Today we must take the most important thing that [Peretz] possess and that shines through in all his works, in all their times: his love for Jew and man. Also his universalism and humanism, his…
Whether culmination or aberration of history, the Holocaust transcends history. Everything about it inspires fear and leads to despair. The dead are in possession of a secret that we, the living, are neither worthy of…
Actually, even if it were possible, Rachel Ertel would not have tried to revive Eastern European culture. She wants only to preserve its memory and apply some of the political insights associated with the tradition…
Everything was doomed [in 1943]: [Yankev Glatshteyn’s] people, his tradition, its language, his artistic freedom, his chances of contributing to a continuing literature. Even his awesome responsibility as the chronicler of the last days of…
I have no idea that at the same time in the United States of America, Theodore Adorno has come out with the sweeping statement that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. A meaningful, powerful…
War presented itself to him only as a matter of subjecting himself to danger, to the possibility of death, and thereby earning awards, and the respect of his comrades here and of his friends in…
Last night I asked Dianne Lee if she’d heard about the Whoopi Goldberg controversy earlier this week when she said the Holocaust had nothing to do with racism, but rather “man’s inhumanity to man.” …
Recently, the Persian scholar and poetry translator Matt Miller sent me condolences upon the death of one of my teachers, Thich Nhat Hanh. I mentioned to him that the several of the teachers I first…