Geoffrey H. Hartman

Bitburg in moral and political perspective

Acknowledgments Chronology Introduction: 1985 / Geoffrey H. Hartman I. Essays Bitburg as Symbol / Raul Hilberg Some German Struggles with Memory / Saul Friedlander Defusing the Past: A Politico-Cultural Tract / Jurgen Habermas The Reactions in France: The Sounds of Silence / Henry Rousso Bitburg: The American Scene / William Bole The Christian World Goes to Bitburg / A. Roy Eckardt Another Revisionism: Popular Culture and the Changing Image of the Holocaust / Alvin H. Rosenfeld Memory and Monument / James E. Young What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean? / Theodor W. Adorno The Memory of Offense / Primo Levi II. Sunday, 5 May 1985: The Events at Bitburg and Bergen-Belsen The Two Ceremonies at Bergen-Belsen / John Tagliabue The Peace of the Dead / Avraham Weiss Reagan Joins Kohl in Brief Memorial at Bitburg Graves / Bernard Weinraub For Bitburg, Day of Anger Ends Quietly / James M. Markham III. Photographs and Cartoons IV. Press Commentaries Editorials About Cemeteries / Wall Street Journal Conceal Not The Blood / New York Times The Commemorations / Washington Post Reconciliation OForgiveness to the Injured Doth BelongO / Lance Morrow The Rush to Reconcile / Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. V-E Day: East and West / William McGurn :Walking in Our SleepO: Bitburg and the Post-1939 Generation / Mark Krupnick The Old Songs Filled with Anger / Max Kohnstamm Chancellor Kohl Honouring Evil / Meir Merhav Germany After Bitburg / Timothy Garton Ash The East Bloc The Anxious Germans / Flora Lewis The Liberator Is Still There... / Claire Treau History, Washington Style / Yevg Bovkun Regan and History OI Am a Jew...O / William Safire The One-Track Mind / Anthony Lewis Germany and History Facing the Dark Side of Nationalism / Charles William Maynes Germans Decry Bitburg Furor / Tyler Marshall The Holocaust Samuel Pisar: Of Bitburg and Liberation / William Mc Gurn Anti-Semitism ONewO SS Wreaths, Old Anti-Semitism / Marvin Kalb Epilogue Alas, poor Ronald, I knew him well / Miles Kington V. Essential Documents Remarks of President Reagan to Regional Editors Remarks of Elie Wiesel at White House Ceremony for Jewish Heritage Week Address by Chancellor Helmut Kohl during the Ceremony Marking the 40th Anniversary of the Liberation of the Concentration Camps Interview of President Reagan by Representatives of Foreign Radio and Television Address by Chancellor Helmut Kohl to President Reagan during Visit to Bergen-Belsen Remarks of President Reagan at Bergen-Belsen Address by Chancellor Helmut Kohl to German and American Soldiers at Bitburg Remarks of President Reagan at Bitburg Air Base Speech by Richard von Weizsacker in the Bundestag during the Ceremony Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the End of the War Appendix: Definition of the SS as a OCriminal OrganizationO by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg Selected Further Readings Essayists

Trauma Within the Limits of Literature

Trauma Study in the arts explores the relation between psychic wounds and signification. Everyone believes in expressiveness: either as the value of articulating clear and distinct ideas that alleviate mental confusion or as the value of unburdening the heart with the aid of innovative signs. The structure of psychic wounding, of ‘trauma’ in its psychical connotation, has a bearing on the second of these: on the pressure and relief of a determining yet deeply occluded experience. According to Freud, an event that is overwhelming penetrates the ‘shield’ of the psyche. We either do not have time to prepare for it, or whatever receptive capacities (and defenses) are in place prove inadequate. Trauma results from an experience that lodges in a person without having been experienced, that is, without having fully passed into consciousness or stayed there. It is a ‘foreign body’ (Fremdkörper) in the psyche, or as Ruth Klüger writes of the memory of Auschwitz, an inoperable bullet. Unintegrated, it gives off strange signals. How trauma affects the formation of words, or how words deal with trauma, can be viewed as a technical matter in which the focus becomes what region and processes of the brain are involved. But neurology, cognitive science, or a formal therapy are not the primary concerns of trauma study in the arts. Insofar as there is an established field to which it belongs, it would be close to semiology in Saussure’s definition as the study of signs within the context of social interaction. On the level of the affections, moreover, trauma study is motivated by concerns about social and moral well-being. Freud’s early hypothesis about the origin of trauma – that what overwhelmed the psyche was often a premature erotic arousal or sexual aggression – had a culture-specific component.1

The Culture of Criticism

FOR THOSE who approach literary studies with literary sensitivity, an immediate problem arises. They cannot overlook style, their own or that of others. Through their concern with literature they have become aware that understanding is a mediated activity and that style is an index of how the writer deals with the consciousness of mediation. Style is not cognitive only; it is also recognitive, a signal betraying the writers relation, or sometimes the relation of a type of discourse, to a historical and social world. To say that of course words are a form of life is not enough: words at this level of style intend a statement about life itself in relation to words, and in particular to literature as a value-laden act. Thus, even without fully understanding it, one is alerted by a similarity in the opening of these two essays:

Minor prophecies : the literary essay in the culture wars

Introduction - pastoral vestiges the culture of criticism tea and totality from common to uncommon reader the state of the art placing F. R. Leavis judging Paul de Man meaning, error, text advanced literary studies the Philomela Project literary criticism and the future.

A Note on Plain Speech and Transparency

Recent writings, a flood of them, take up the legitimacy of moral philosophy. They revisit a question formulated with the advance of secularism in the eighteenth century: can rationally cogent grounds be found for ethical pronouncements? The possibility of devising a political moraity, however speculative, and avoiding disastrous positivisms or political religions, is also the latest cottage industry of the law schools. Wittgenstein concluded that there were matters philosophy should not attempt to justify by its procedures; and many feel the same about validating on propositional or logical grounds specific interpretations of art. My concern with “authenticity” and “spirit” is a way of linking ethical talk to art once more, while taking into account the contextual historical pressures art articulates in its own way. The aesthetic response, seen by some as an avoidance or escape, may be as much foreknowledge as response. Like philosophies of history inspired by Hegel, but less discursively, art raises the issue of human freedom: of the self-determination of the individual, or sometimes of the collective with which the individual identifies. The persuasiveness of art needs the supplement, however, of a hermeneutic that includes art itself rather than being applied to art from the outside. How does imagination become a reality-principle? How does the unreality of art’s imaginaire lessen the sense of unreality that so often invades us? Ideology, however grand, is not adequate as a reality-system. The Christian conflation of spirit and freedom, for example, and the secularhumanistic pairing of truth and freedom — two great ideologies that merge in Hegel — reduce to empty cliches if we neglect the historical controversies that, for example, led Cardinal Newman in his Apologia to adopt an “antagonist unity” as his persona. Newman is not only aware, before the letter, of the principle of positionality; he also knows that some role-playing is inevitable, even in non-fictive autobiography. The unreal real tends to prevail unless two conditions are satisfied.

The Tricksy Word: Richard Weisberg on The Merchant of Venice

Abstract This essay is a critical appreciation of Richard Weisberg’s understanding, in his Poethics, of the ethical and jurisprudential aspects of The Merchant of Venice. It agrees with him on the importance played by “the structure of mediations” as a major concern in Shakespeare. But it challenges the way he contrasts, on this basis, the character of Antonio as a too-accommodating Christian, with Shylock as one who, “unmediated,” keeps his word and bond. The essay argues that Antonio and Shylock are both odd-men-out in the society represented by Shakespeare, and that the play’s underlying, often subversive theme is how to deal, in law as in human affairs generally, with the “tricksy word.” Weisberg, in this early book, is beginning to work through a major theme of his career: a “postmodern” (in his view) avoidance of judgment, as well as an ancient danger rooted in the Christian (Pauline) interpretation of Hebrew Scripture. This interpretation permitted, in crucial modern legal situations (like Vichy’s definition of “le statut du juif ”), a near-unlimited hermeneutic flexibility.

The Struggle Against the Inauthentic: An Interview by Nicholas Chare

Nicholas Chare: In The Longest Shadow you recognize that the proliferation of monuments commemorating past events is concomitant with a possible disburdening of memory. It might be said that the monument remembers for us and relieves us of our responsibility to remember. An example of this could be the memorial dedicated to Willy Brandt in Warsaw, which commemorates Brandt’s own historic gesture in front of the Warsaw Ghetto memorial. Brandt accepted the burden of memory but we might read this brass relief, which was unveiled in 2000 in the presence of the current German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, as consigning the weight of history to the past. Do you feel we have entered an age of monumental amnesia or is there a future for public commemoration?

High romantic argument : essays for M.H. Abrams

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Shakespeare and the Question of Theory

The theoretical ferment which has affected literary studies over the last decade has called into question traditional ways of thinking about, classifying and interpreting texts. Shakespeare has been not just the focus of a variety of divergent critical movements within recent years, but also increasingly the locus of emerging debates within, and with, theory itself. This collection of essays, written by distinguished and powerful critics in the fields of literary theory and Shakespeare studies, is intended both for those interested in Shakespeare and for those interested more generally in the emerging debates within contemporary criticism and theory.