Larvatus Prodeo

Image of the Prague skyline courtesy of Pavelm - licenced under Creative Commons.

I didn’t comment, but I read the thread on Kim’s post on the crimes of Joseph Fritzl and discourses in the media (Austrian and otherwise) about cultural and national responsibility. I found the thread a fascinating read, and I’m not certain that anyone could finally arbitrate the question of whether a certain Nazism or its social legacy was actually at stake here or whether to think that is to misunderstand the nature of causation and social pathologies as they manifest themselves in individual lives and choices. That’s forcing the two positions argued somewhat, and occluding a lot of nuance, but I suspect that the debate’s conditions of possibility include different levels of explanation and different methods of thought and intellectual work - I thought some of the borders of the social scientific and humanistic worldviews were both marked out and blurred in that discussion. It ought to be possible to integrate the two, but saying that is harder than doing it because there is a certain split - that’s not just manifested in disciplinary training and territory in the academy - between a more hermeneutic and a more positivist style of thought. That’s actually a dividing line that’s inscribed in our everyday culture as well as in our intellectual traditions in the West, and it’s possibly a most unfortunate divide. But then national borders, and cultures, are contingent constructions of Western modernity too.

Anyway, that’s something of a prelude to some thoughts the thread stimulated for me. I remembered I’d written a post back in December 2004 on W.G. Sebald’s work. At the time, I wrote, apropos of his A Natural History of Destruction:

Literature has often been seen as a mirror of meaning, a way of sense-making, what the literary scholar Erich Auerbach called, following Aristotle, Mimesis. To take the example of the hitherto unparalleled destruction wrought by the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648, German literature produced such classics as Johann Jakob Von Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus (first published in 1669) and much more recently, Günter Grass ’ The Meeting at Telgte.

There is a massive, and often fine, literature of the Holocaust. But going in search of a similar literature of the suffering of German citizens during the Second World War, Sebald was surprised to find it scant, and largely unsatisfactory.

Continue reading ‘A national/natural history of memory and forgetting’