Some of this seems to lead back to Jaspers, and others, on the topic
of "German guilt" (Schuld - with overtones of guilt as debt, or what
is owing); and from there, for me, to Lyotard and what he has to say
about Durcharbeitung ("working through"), in opposition to official
memory and recollection.
Lyotard notes that official memory creates monuments and museums (and
BBC TV documentaries), but does so in order to neutralise or contain
an "immemorial liability" - not original sin as such, but an
"obligation of justice" to which a certain form of techno-scientific
rationalisation ("immoral logic", to borrow a phrase) turns an
insistently deaf ear.
Lyotard associates the "techno-economico-scientific megalopolis in
which we live (or survive)" with what Heidegger identified as an
"enframing" (Stellung, an act of enclosure), and accused of a
systematic forgetting of Being. But Lyotard's retort to Heidegger is
that "the negative lesson that the 'forgetting' of the Shoah by the
great thinker of Being teaches us is that this Forgotten is not
primarily Being, but the obligation of justice" ("Heidegger et 'les
juifs'", 1989).
"Durcharbeitung" is labouring under this obligation: transformative
memory-work (what Derrida calls "mal d'archive", "archive fever")
rather than monumentalising recollection. That at the very least helps
to explain for me why I'm uncomfortable with the thought of trying to
write commemorative Hiroshima poems - not only a sense of personal
littleness and irrelevance, although goodness knows that would be
enough, but also a feeling that something quite different is called
for.
For today I am re-reading Bonhoeffer's letter from Tegel prison of
27th November 1943, and Geoffrey Hill's poem about the same:
Against wild reasons of the state
his words are quiet but not too quiet.
We hear too late or not too late.
Dominic
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