Article from The Republic of September 5, 2007, p.. 1
David Grossman
publish here almost exactly the speech with which David Grossman dellaLetteratura Festival opened yesterday in Berlin: an analysis of the language of individuals and the language of the masses against the backdrop of the Holocaust and the relationship that the new generations with the tragedy: the subject of Grossman's most famous novel, "See Under: Love."
Being an Israeli writer who opens literature festival in Berlin is a great honor for me. This sentence would have been unthinkable and unpronounceable until a few years ago and still can not be indifferent to its import. Although between Germany and Israel - and between Israelis, Jews and Germans - are maintained close relationships, a phrase like this is neither neutral nor obvious. Is there a place in consciousness, in the heart, in which certain phrases have to go through the sharp blades of time and memoria, come un raggio di luce, per scomporsi in una miriade di suoni e di colori.
E qui, a Berlino, non posso che cominciare il mio discorso con queste parole, che si scompongono dentro di me attraverso le lame affilate del tempo e della memoria. Sono nato e cresciuto a Gerusalemme, in un quartiere, in una famiglia, dove la gente non era nemmeno in grado di pronunciare la parola «Germania». Faticava persino a dire «Shoah». Parlava di «ciò che è successo laggiù». È interessante notare che in ebraico, in yiddish, o in qualsiasi altra lingua parlata da ebrei, la Shoah è per lo più «qualcosa che è successo laggiù», Unlike "what happened then," for non-Jews. There is a vast difference between there and then. Then is an adverb of time that indicates a past that no longer exists. There is an adverb of place, alluding to the fact that somewhere, at some place, what happened is still smoldering, sirafforza, and could return to explode. It is not a finished thing.
Certainly not for us Jews. As a child I felt very often speak of "the Nazi beast," but when asked who it was adults, they refused to explain.
Dicevano che ci sono cose che un bambino non deve sapere. Più tardi scrissi in Vedi alla voce: amore di Momik, figlio di sopravvissuti all'Olocausto al quale i genitori non rivelano ciò che è avvenuto laggiù. Momik, pieno di paura, immagina la belva nazista come un mostro che domina un paese chiamato laggiù, maltratta le persone a cui vuole bene, fa cose che lasciano ferite indelebili e nega loro la possibilità di avere una vita normale, serena.
La mia generazione, quella dei nati nei primi anni Cinquanta in Israele, viveva in un silenzio carico di presenze, densamente affollato. Nel quartiere in cui abitavo there were people who had nightmares every night, screaming. More than once, when we walked into a room where adults tell stories of the war, the conversation was interrupted. But every now and then we could pick up fragments of phrases: "The last time I saw him in Himmlerstrasse at Treblinka ',' She lost two sons during the first raid." (...)
When I was seven years was held in the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann and then we began to hear descriptions of the atrocities during the dinner. My generation has lost its appetite, and not just for food. He has lost something deeper than our children, then of course we did not understand and that it became clear later. Maybe it was the loss of the illusion that our parents could protect us from what made us afraid, or the belief that we Jews could one day live safe and peaceful as the other people.
But perhaps most of all, we felt the loss of our natural trust of children in the other, in the goodness of others, in his compassion. About twenty years ago when my eldest son was three years old, in kindergarten that he attended was celebrated, as every year, the day of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust. He did not understand much of what he was told. He returned home confused and scared. "Dad, what are the Nazis? What they did and why. " I did not want to tell her. I, who was raised in a silence that I had caused fears and nightmares, I had written a book about a boy who was almost mad because of the silence of the parents, suddenly I understood why my parents and those of my friends had been silent.
I felt that if I told my son what had happened there, if I had mentioned, but with great delicacy, something of its purity of three year old child would be contaminated. I felt that when those possibilities had made cruel innocent in his conscience, he would never have been the same child. It was no longer a child.
After it was published in See Under: Love in Israel, some critics wrote that I belonged to the "second generation of the Holocaust," which was the son of "Holocaust survivors." They are not. My father arrived in the land of Israel from Poland in 1936. My mother was born in Palestine before the founding of the state.
Yet they are the son of "Holocaust survivors" because even in my home, as in so many Israeli homes, had stretched a wire load of anguish that we could tap at any time. And even though we were very careful and did not quickly, she felt a constant tremor of insecurity in the possibility of existence of jealousy towards others and what these others might get you when you least expect it. (...)
Anyone who was born in Israel after the Holocaust is brought inside the feeling - that we were forbidden to speak and then maybe we were not able to express in words - that we Jews in dialogue directly with death. That life, even when it is full of energy and hope and fertility of a young nation, under renovation, is more of a huge effort, constant, to escape the threat of death.
In Israel of the fifties and sixties, not only in moments of despair but also those in which the exaltation for the "creation of a nation 'faded only slightly, when we felt a bit 'tired of our terrific revival, in those moments of melancholy, private and national, we could feel the grip of frost that gripped the heart and whispered softly but peremptory: the life fades so fast, everything is so fragile. The body, the family. Death is real, everything else is an illusion.
When I realized that I would become a writer, I also realized that I wrote about the Holocaust. I think these two consciousnesses are born in me simultaneously. Perhaps because from an early age I had the feeling that all the books I had read about the Holocaust not answer simple questions, vital, and I had to ask myself to which I respond da solo.
E più il tempo passava più sentivo crescere in mela sensazione che non sarei stato in grado di comprendere la mia esistenza in Israele come uomo, padre, scrittore, israeliano, ebreo, fintanto che non avessi scritto della vita che non avevo vissuto laggiù, durante la Shoah, e cosa mi sarebbe successo se fossi stato una vittima, o uno degli assassini.
Perché volevo sapere entrambe le cose. Non mi accontentavo di una.(...) Volevo sapere cosa avrei fatto per contrastare questo tentativo di annientamento. Quale scintilla di umanità mi sarebbe rimasta into a reality whose only goal was to turn it off.
to a question like this everyone must answer for themselves. But perhaps I can give you a hint. In Jewish tradition there is a legend, or a belief, namely that in every man there is a bone called the "luz" - "heart" in Hebrew - placed on top of the spine. This small bone contains the essence of the soul and is indestructible. Even if the whole body should disintegrate or burn, our "core" remains intact, preserve the peculiarity that in every one of us, the root of our be. And it is from this little bone that man will recreate the day of resurrection of the dead.! (...)
The second question I asked myself while writing See Under: Love is related to the first and in a sense comes from it. I wondered how a normal person - as were many Nazis and their supporters - will become part of a mechanism of mass destruction. In other words, what do I suppress, obscure, remove, kill me in order to collaborate on a planned genocide, to be able to kill another human being for wanting the extermination of an entire people, or accept it in silence.
Perhaps I should refine the question: am I working right now - consciously or unconsciously, actively or passively - in a process whose aim is to harm another person or group of people?
"The death of a man is a tragedy," said Stalin, "but that of millions is statistics." We talk for a moment as a tragedy turns into statistics. I'm not saying of course that we are all murderers. And 'course not. Yet most of us seem almost indifferent to the suffering of whole nations, near and far, or that of hundreds of millions of people poor, hungry, sick, in both our nations and in other parts of the world. We learn not to cure us of the pain of strangers who work for us, the suffering of peoples living under occupation - our own or others - or in a dictatorship or in conditions of slavery.
With astonishing ease we create mechanisms that are responsible for us to distance ourselves from the suffering of others. Can we, in our consciousness and emotional level, to ignore the causal link that exists between the economic prosperity of nazioni occidentali e la povertà altrui; tra il nostro benessere e le vergognose condizioni di lavoro di altra gente; tra la qualità della nostra vita, i nostri condizionatori d’aria e le nostre automobili, e le sciagure ecologiche che si abbattono su altri.
Questi «altri» vivono in condizioni talmente terribili che per lo più non hanno nemmeno la possibilità di porre domande come quelle che pongo io ora. Non è solo il genocidio ad annientare il «nocciolo» di un essere umano. Anche la fame, la povertà, le malattie, l’esilio spengono e uccidono gradualmente l’anima del singolo, e talvolta di an entire people.
We will not accept any personal responsibility for the terrible things that happen at a short distance from us. Either through direct actions or to merely express solidarity. We are comfortable when it comes to personal responsibility - part of an indistinct mass, faceless, identity, and apparently free from burdens and sins. And probably this is the big question that modern man has to ask: in what circumstances, at what time, I become "mass"?
There are different definitions for the process by which an individual is confused in the mass or agrees to hand over parts of themselves. And because we are men of literature, I will choose one in accordance with our interests. My impression is that we become "mass" when he stops thinking, to develop things according to our own vocabulary, and automatically accept and uncritical expressions of terminology and language dettatoci by others.
I turn into "mass" when they cease to make compromises with my words and moral choices that are willing to make. (...)
resorts to the figure of the Polish writer Bruno Schultz jew to illustrate the match between an individual who had a very peculiar language and the language of mass "- the meeting between the tragedy and statistics. I refer to the story of his assassination during the Second World War in the ghetto of his town, Drohobycz. The story is well known, and perhaps not even true, is a legend, a story in which over the years has built "the myth of Schulz 'among his admirers around the world.
But even if it was an anecdote, tocca un punto profondo, vero. «Gli aneddoti sono sostanzialmente fedeli alla verità» scrive Ernesto Sabato, «proprio perché sono finzioni, inventati in dettaglio per adeguarsi con grande precisione a una certa persona». E infatti, anche se questa particolare storia sulla morte di Shulz non è vera, ciò che essa esprime è sostanzialmente fedele alla verità ironica e tragica di quest’uomo, all’orrore del possibile incontro tra il «singolo» e la «massa», e quindi la racconterò così come l’ho sentita la prima volta.
Nel ghetto di Drohobycz, durante la guerra, un SS officer had forced Shulz to paint a fresco in his house. An opponent of that officer, who had quarreled with him because of a gambling debt, Shulz came upon the street, drew his revolver and shot him in revenge for the man for whom he was working. According to the rumor the murderess, he then went to his rival and said: "I killed your jew." And he said, "Very well, and now I will kill you."
I learned of this story right after having finished reading the first book of Bruno Schulz. I remember that I closed the book and left the house. I walked for hours immersed in such a fog. I was in a state where, to put it simply, I did not want to live anymore. I did not want to continue to exist in a world where things could happen like this, where there are people like those Nazi officers who thought things like that. Where there is a language that allows monsters like to say phrases like "I killed your jew" and "All right, now I will kill you."
wrote See Under: Love to return to myself, among other things, the will to live, love for life. And perhaps also to heal from offense that I felt on behalf of Bruno Shulz, for the way in which his murder was described and "explained". One explanation inhuman, 'mass'. As if human beings were bargaining chips, or wheels of a system or accessories that you can replace with others, or only part of a statistic.
In the writings of Bruno Schulz, every piece of reality has its own personality. Every passing cloud, every mobile, every tailor's dummy, every bowl of fruit, every dog, every ray of sunshine, every object, even the most trivial, has its own individuality, its own essence, its own character.
And every page in every song, bursting into life, rich in content and meaning. Suddenly a life that deserves the name. Enormous work that takes place simultaneously in all the substrates of conscious and unconscious, illusion, dream, nightmare, senses, feelings, a language rich in nuance.
Each row has a rebellion against what Schulz calls "the fortified wall that rests on the meaning of 'is a protest against the desolation, the banality, routine, the stupidity, the stereotypes, the tyranny of the simple, mass. (...)
When I finished reading the book, Schulz knew that he gave me, with his writing, a key for me to write about the Holocaust. Not death and destruction but of life, of what the Nazis had destroyed mechanically, in an industrialized, mass.
I also remember that, with the arrogance of the young writer, I said to myself that I wanted to write a book that tremble on the shelf. That was vital as a blink in the life of a man. Not a "life" in quotes that spends weak, but as one that teaches us Shulz. A real life, the square in which we must be content not to kill the next but we must make it alive, as time has passed, the visions seen, the words spoken thousands of times, and you and me.
The reality we live in today is perhaps not as cruel as the one created by the Nazis, but some of its underlying mechanisms have laws very similar to that obscure the individuality of man and led him to reject obligations and responsibilities towards the fate of others. And the increasingly dominated aggression, dall'estraneità, incitement to hatred and fear, where fanaticism and fundamentalism seem to get stronger every day while other forces lose hope for change.
values \u200b\u200band horizons of our world, the atmosphere you breathe and the language that dominates it are dictated largely by what we call mass media, expression coined in the thirties of last century when sociologists began to speak of 'mass society'. But are we really aware the meaning of this phrase? Of which process the media have suffered? We realize that most of them not only convey a type of communication to the masses but turn their users in bulk?
And they do it with arrogance and cynicism, using a poor and vulgar language, dealing with complex political and moral simplicity and false virtue, all around us creating an atmosphere of spiritual and prostitution emotional ensnares us, making everything they touch kitsch: war, death, love and intimacy.
At first glance it seems that this type of communication focuses on the individual, the individual, not the masses. But it is a dangerous suggestion. The means of mass communication place the individual in the foreground, even the consecrated, channeling more and more towards himself. Indeed, in the end, only to himself, to his needs, his interests, his aspirations, his passions. In many ways, overt and hidden, they release the individual from what he is nevertheless anxious to break free: the responsibility to other pearls consequences of his actions. And when they do obscure his political consciousness, social and morality, and turn it into a docile material for manipulation by those who control the media and others. In other words, turn it into mass. (...) And 'This is the message of the media: a rapid turnover, so that it sometimes seems that the information not to be significant and important, but the pace of one another, the cadence neurotic, greedy, commercial, seductress who create. In the spirit of the time the message is zapping.
The literature has no influential representatives in the centers of global power that I just described, and it's hard to believe in his power to make some change. Può però proporre un diverso modo di vivere: secondo un ritmo interno, una coerenza personale più adatta ai nostri bisogni spirituali e naturali di quanto ci venga prepotentemente imposto da apparati esterni.
Io so che quando leggo un buon libro qualcosa dentro di me si chiarisce. La mia percezione di essere una creatura particolare si fa più netta. La voce precisa, distinta, che mi giunge dall’esterno risveglia in me altre voci, alcune delle quali erano mute in precedenza. E anche se migliaia di altre persone leggono lo stesso libro nel momento in cui lo sto leggendo io, ognuna lo vive in modo diverso. Per ognuno quel libro è una cartina particular type of litmus.
A good book - and there are not many because the literature, of course, is susceptible to the lures and pitfalls of mass communication - makes the player stand out from the crowd. (...)
When I finished writing See Under: Love knew that she wrote to say that he who destroys a man, any man, in the end destroys a work of genius, unique, specific and infinitely more that we can never recreate, nor there ever will be similar.
Over the past four years I have written a novel that mean the same thing, but set elsewhere, in a different reality. The protagonist is an Israeli woman of about 50 years, mother of a soldier leaving for war. His concern for her son leads her to foresee the tragedy lurking, and she tries with all his strength by fighting to avert the fate that awaits the boy. He makes a long march, covering almost half of Israel and constantly telling the child. It 's so in fact trying to protect him, doing the only thing in his power to make the existence of child more vivid and concrete to tell the story of his life. And one day, the small notebook that brings with it, writes: "Thousands of moments and hours and days, millions of shares, a multitude of gestures, attempts, mistakes, words and thoughts. Everything to create a unique human being. " He added: "A human being that is so easy to destroy."
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