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192 pages
First published January 1, 2010
Most of the nation's living citizens were not yet born when the crime happened... All the same, the monstrosity of their forebears' crime weighed heavily on them, and when they approached this monstrosity, they expected nothing but to unmask their forebears and find criminals. They proceeded without hindrance - it was a continuous loop. The crime was so large.
As long as he'd believed it stemmed from Auschwitz, his misery had substance. And the cause of his misery wasn't just the fact that Auschwitz had happened, it was his fixation with it. He thought constantly about what he could do and what the Auschwitz prisoners couldn't, and that Auschwitz had had a very different meaning for them than it did for him. When he went to bed, for example, he thought about how they couldn't go to sleep when they wanted, how they'd had no beds, they'd had berths - that's what he thought about as he lay in his bed.
...he did whatever was in his power to relieve the survivors' misery: so that their suffering would never be repeated, and so that what had happened to them would never happen to anyone again....
I always thought this work was my duty, but now that obligation makes me feel like a concentration camp guard - only it's as if the guards are there to keep the memories fresh. Because we're guarding the concentration camps, too. Because we'd all be unemployed without them. What a horrible thing to say and much too simplistic.
Shocking now that it hardly hurt. That was the essential horror: for to him this was the essential thing. That this crime, which was so enormous, could have stopped hurting. That that was possible. That such a thing is possible - it was terrible. And that amplified his misery.
Without misery he would have been unable to define himself. It was never his; in reality it didn't belong to him. It was not his misery but The Misery. If he removed it from himself, nothing of him would remain, nothing.
The German past is public property and has been adapted for mass audiences. At best, it is calcified, every nuance rubbed away.