So it goes, that many assert that if man is to be truly free,then he must be free to make his own moral decisions, accepting or rejecting a given absolute moral standard, or else he is neither free nor even human. But does freedom lie in a capacity to define what is right and wrong? Auschwitz was a horror but only by a certain definition. If a man made definition, and that of Adolf Eichmann’s happen to disagree, what is there to make our definition more compelling than his?
—I would like to conclude with a detail and the image of a large painting that is dedicated to a great man of Nuremberg. This city was the cradle of the Nazi Racial Laws against the Jews, and the place where the world had judged the Nazi crimes.
He, the great master of Nuremberg, one of my artistic Rabbis, is distanced from these events by four centuries. But his melancholic angel that lingers between the middle ages and the age of enlightenment seems to warns us that history may revert its course. He is the famous Albrecht Durer, whose house in Nuremberg, today a museum, hosts several of my works.
What an irony, and at the same time what an emblem of the extremes of human behavior –and yet also of coming to terms, of accepting change, even, if you wish, of redemption.
The various components of this canvas are: water that hints at the universal flood, a shattered rainbow representing God’s broken promise, extinguished Shabbat candles, a cross, a Jewish star, tablets of law, and in the midst of this mess a dejected angel. The angelic figure of Durer’s great Melancholia, in a soldier’s greatcoat. The meaning of all these components is so self evident that any additional comment or extra interpretation would be more than redundant.—Read More:http://chgs.umn.edu/museum/responses/bak/gallery3.html
Obviously, there are problems that exceed or ability to deal with. Auschwitz never taught the world anything about god, but it told us everything about man, and the infinite depths to which he could sink. Though it seems incredible in a civilized world, man’s reliance on himself as the measure of all things could have remained intact except for Auschwitz; humanity was pretty convinced it had outgrown barbarism until Auschwitz, that there was a core human good which would always prevail which was quickly swept away as fantasy and illusion which exposed the shaky foundation of moral relativism.
—The Hypocritical Oath!
The image refers to the medicial experimentation done on inmates at various concentration camps. The most infamous experiments were at Dachau (hypothermia and high-altitude experiments), Dr. Mengele’s lethal experiments on twins at Auschwitz and simulated gunshot experiments on women at Ravensbreuck. The paradox of the Nazi era was that an order from Goering in October, 1933, prohibited experimentation on animals.One of the results of the medical aspects of the Holocaust was the Nuremberg Code for Medicine, 1947.—Read More:http://chgs.umn.edu/museum/exhibitions/surRational/
How can the world of the human represent the world of the inhuman?
An early indication of the latter question is found in Adorno’s partly revisionary essay ‘After Auschwitz’. Commenting that ‘in the concentration camps it was no longer an individual who died but a specimen’, Adorno draws our attention to the dehumanization of the individual before conceding that ‘perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream’ (Adorno, 1973, 362). Reflecting on the pertinence this comment has to autobiographical and biographical representations, it is evident that the need to reassert one’s humanity in the face of inhumanity becomes paramount, and is inextricably linked with individuation against deindividuation. Read More:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/opticon1826/archive/issue9/articles/A_H_Copley.pdf
—Yvrlyne Wood,The Last Soup (2000-2010)60 x 150 x 135.5 cmCing mains en platre,une ecuelle et cinq cuilleres,trois sacs de toile,rails de chemin de fer,balastes, traverses.—click image for source…
Adorno’s dictum of not representing the holocaust is not far-fetched. Especially with regard to art there is something of a Gresham’s Law at work where the bad drives out the good; more often than not fiddling around with something not really understood and hence treated superficially, or using the holocaust as a pretext for an ideological grudge such as anti-capitalism , human rights in Gaza etc. such that we end up with a discourse of offense to memory, a memory that is uniquely owned by the victims and the ruthless logic that was the death camps become banalized within mass market idioms. Norman Finkelstein was only partially incorrect about his holocaust industry theory, but between the polarity of the Jew as the demon or the divine more people grasp, however vaguely the crucual issue of “chosenness.”
ADDENDUM:
YY Jacobson: It’s hard to sense the sheer scale of the destruction. On Sept. 11, 2001, history was changed by a terrorist attack in which 3,000 people died. During the Holocaust, on average, 3,000 Jews were killed every day of every week for five-and-a-half years. And the killing didn’t stop with just Jews: the mentally ill, the physically handicapped, gypsies and gays were murdered because they were different.
The Holocaust was exceptional in the scientific precision with which it was carried out. It was unprecedented in the sheer scale on which it was conceived. But what made it different from other mass murders was that it served no interest. At the height of the slaughter, the Nazis diverted trains from the Russian front to transport victims to the exterm
ion camps. As Emil Fackenheim once put it, the Holocaust was evil for evil’s sake.——————————–
Auschwitz confirmed the philosopheme of pure identity as death…. Absolute negativity is in plain sight and has ceased to surprise anyone…. What the sadists in the camps foretold their victims, “Tomorrow you’ll be wiggling Skyward as smoke from the chimney,” bespeaks the indifference of each individual life that is the direction of history. Even in his formal freedom, the individual is as fungible and replaceable as he will be under the liquidators’ boots.
… Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living….
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics
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