From the European magazines; Konrad, Gyorgy and Poland’s investigation of its own Anti-Semitic history
By Tom Teicholz at 6 June, 2008, 9:57 am
Sightandsound.com does a great job of summarizing what’s been appearing the European press of literary or cultural note. Two items I want to bring to your attention, Gyorgy Konrad, author of “The Case Worker: among many other important works on the importance of Memory.
Nepszabadsag 10.05.2008 (Hungary)
Does man need to remember? There is no question about it for writer György Konrad:
“The personal history is an active working instrument, a collection of
examples, a living metaphor which shows its muscles like an animal.
(…) It is human to remember, it is was makes us human. Nature is
indifferent to history. Grass growing on a mass grave is no less green
than anywhere else. Nature does not mourn and bears no witness.
To remember is an unnatural action, which takes a stand against death.
Why would I want someone to live who is no longer alive? Is it not
humility which prescribes the over-simplicity of forgetting. One says
that people who never forget are dangerous. But one also says that God never forgets.
Man’s memory is a similar hubris, an audacity, like the invention of
fire. The apple which forced Adam to decide between good and evil gave
everything he had ever lived a simultaneous presence in his mind.
Remembering is rebellion.”
And the Warsaw Weekly’s series on the history of Polish Anti-SemitismPolityka 02.06.2008 (Poland)
The Warsaw weekly has now started translating selected articles into German – one of them being Tomasz Wolek’s instructive history of Polish anti-Semitism and the complex relationship between Poles and Jews. It ends in a rallying call: “If anti-Semitism is an infectious disease, then it must be treated. But every therapy should be preceded by an appropriate diagnosis.
We must be untiring in our efforts to get to the bottom of this
shameful phenomenon and attack its historical roots. This text is not a
moral treatise but a modest attempt to do just that.”
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