Song of a Reformed Headhunter

"Night" was less harrowing than I thought it would be. The stark style is moving, especially when it revolves around the author's "betrayal" of his father, but I miss the exact choice of detail and word that would render the incidents piercing. Even the famous description of the hanging of the child lacks focus, capitalizing as it does on sentimentality. At one point the victim is described as a tall and well-built young man. At another he was a mere child. Having reread George Orwell's essay "A Hanging" recently, I could not help comparing the two. There is nothing in "Night" that compares with the victim's sidestepping of a puddle on his way to the scaffold in Orwell, that unforgettable humanizing detail. "Dawn," a short novel, has a promising premise—a Holocaust survivor becomes a resistance fighter in British-ruled Palestine—but again the the promise was not fulfilled. What plot there is is covered by a thick layer of ...

Suddenly, in Sweden  O the chimneys      Nelly Sachs The very tall chimney on the very tall building has been glumly silent all winter. This morning, finally, it has something to say for itself. Whatever it says shoots up so quickly that it is lost in the space behind the sky. The black smoke flies after it, haltingly, then spreads out like a net that catches nothing but its own unknotting. I say smoke, but it could have been hair. I say sky, but it was a handcart of discarded clothes. I say silent, but the chimney has been speaking in German.

TLS May 8 2009 from Stephen Mulhall's review of Axel Honneth's "Reification: A new look at an old idea--The Berkeley Tanner Lectures": It is not difficult to share Honneth's sense that the monstrousness of genocide is not adequately acknowledged by condemning it as immoral--a mere violation of ethical principle, as it were. But what the work of his critics should have helped him to see is that his own strategy also risks failing to acknowledge that monstrousness. For what makes genocide abhorrent is precisely that its practitioners did not mistake the ontological status of their victims. To be sure, they described those victims as racially inferior, as subhuman; but just as only human beings can be enslaved, so only human beings can be treated as subhuman. Indeed, recognizing that in this sense the Nazis knew exactly what they were doing is essential to grasping the distinctive evil of their inhumanity.  *** from Tamler Sommers' review of Jesse J. Prinz's ...

Narrated by Death, this story does not belong to Death so much as to Liesel Meminger, the book thief of the novel's title. It is a Bildungsroman of a German girl living with foster parents, the Hubermanns, in Himmel Street, in Molching, a town outside Munich, during World War II and the Holocaust. While the novel empathizes deeply with Jewish suffering (in the description of Max Vandenburg, a Jew hidden by Hans Hubermann, and of the marches of the Jews through Molching on their way to Dachau), its ambition is to depict ordinary Germans living through a harrowing time.  There is the promise-keeper Hans Hubermann, who was saved by a Jew during WWI, and tries to repay the debt by hiding his savior's son in the basement of his house. There is Frau Holtzapfel who loses both sons to the Russian front, one of whom cradled the other dying in the hospital. There is Frau Diller, the fervent Nazi, who keeps the candy store. There is Ilsa Hermann, the mayor's wife, who mourns in her b...

Just as I feared, the further I read into the volume, selected and translated by Michael Hamburger, the less I like the poems. The lyrical richness of the first two books seems to dry up into obsession repetitions in the third. My favorite in Mohn und Gedachtnis , or Poppy and Remembrance , (1952) is the heartbreaking "Your hand full of hours." Your hand full of hours, you came to me--and I said: Your hair is not brown. So you lifted it lightly on to the scales of grief; it weighed more than I . . . On ships they come to you and make it their cargo, then put it on sale in the markets of lust-- You smile at me from the depth, I weep at you from the scale that stays light. I weep: Your hair is not brown, they offer brine from the sea and you give them curls . . . You whisper: They're filling the world with me now, in your heart Im a hollow way still! You say: Lay the leafage of years beside you--it's time you came closer and kissed me! The leafage of years is brown, yo...