Status Updates From Life and Fate (Stalingrad, #2)

“Time is a transparent medium. People and cities arise out of it, move through it and disappear back into it. It is time that brings them and time that takes them away.” [p.35]

grossman is of course a believer in 'totalitarianism' as an framework for understanding both nazism & stalinism but it's hard for me to read his descriptions of the holocaust and also properly stomach chandler's introductory assertion that the work "establishes the identity of nazism and soviet communism." but i guess we will see what grossman thinks as we go on.

“The machine will be able to re-create all of this! But the surface of the whole earth will be too small to accommodate this machine - this machine whose dimensions and weight will continually increase as it attempts to reproduce the peculiarities of mind and soul of an average, inconspicuous human being. Fascism annihilated tens of millions of people.”