I find it unconvincing. Conditioning becoming a decent person on the ability to love — to feel, comprehend, and share love — is not really all that radical and hardly counts as a view restricted to the Enlightenment, although the methods of the Enlightenment certainly seem to have been more effective in bringing the principles into people’s lives. This was a conscious effort, I should add, with writers such as Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller implementing pragmatic drama, one could almost say Enlightenment dogma, with the express hope of winning hearts and minds for the cause of progress and humanity. (For Schiller and others, the French Revolution was a tragedy that threatened their view of this possibility in much the same way that you, Ronan, are wondering whether in light of the Holocaust the Enlightenment is actually noble or not.)

As you know I have been reflecting on the Magic Flute recently, and find a small trace of something grimly “Aryan” about Tamino and Pamina. This whole obsession with pagan myth feels very German, very Wagnerian, and we all know what that came to symbolise. Is it such a surprise, then, that the Nazis came to choose fair, German Margarete over the swarthy, biblical Shulamith?

Having grown up with many Jewish classmates, some of whom were descendants of survivors, a chilling and sobering thought for me is that many of my German friends are descendants of German soldiers in WWII and some of them, surely, are descendants of Nazis and perhaps even SS and other “ordinary men” who found themselves in Eastern Europe with orders to carry out such monstrosities.  

Posted by john fowles

I was fortunate enough to go to junior high and high school in a predominantly Jewish community (West L.A. & Beverly Hills). Naturally, lots of my friends were Jews, grandchildren of survivors and the liberation of WWII was a key celebration for them, almost to the point of sacred observance. Sadly, our collective generation, regardless of faith or nationality, has a tendancy to forget how vulnerable, and responsible, we are to each other.

Keep up the good work. 

Posted by Simón

——
What’s sad is that there is no longer much of a Jewish presence in Romania (even a weak one). Almost all of the Romanian Jews that weren’t killed in the Holocaust emigrated (many of them to Israel).

I remember talking with an old man who, although his family wasn’t Jewish, grew up in the Jewish part of Bucharest. His memories albeit colored by the passage of time painted a picture of a wonderful, vibrant neighborhood. And it always made me sad to realize that it was a part of the city that was gone and that I would never know. 

Posted by William Morris

Posted by john fowles

He was born in Czernowitz (in the Bukowina region of what is now Romania), which was a Yiddish cultural center, indeed the site of a famous conference held in 1906 or 1907 where Yiddish was advocated for fiercely as a more mainstream language and as the language of the Jews for the future (in opposition to the contemporary movement for more mainstream Hebrew usage).

I don’t have that book, unfortunately. If you don’t have the book, where did you get that translation? 

Posted by Jordan Fowles

Posted by john fowles

This is a very appropriate tribute- thank you!

“Schwarze Milch” is a truly tragic masterpiece. And Paul Celan (geb. Antschel) was very affected by the holocaust. He killed himself in 1970.

By the way- do you have Felstiner’s book? 

Posted by Jordan Fowles