Finally: Auschwitz Irrefutably Proven!?

Did prisoners of Muslim faith also fall victim to extermination in Auschwitz? By no means!

“The so-called ‘Muselmann’, as the camp language called the inmate who gave himself up and was abandoned by his comrades, no longer had a space of consciousness in which good or evil, noble or common, spiritual or unspiritual could confront each other. He was a tottering corpse, a bundle of physical functions in their last convulsions.”

This is how Jean Améry characterized this category of emaciated prisoners, who have been the image of everyday camp life in the public eye since 1945.[1] There are several explanations for the internal camp term Muselmann. One comes from the literal meaning of the Arabic term “Muslim”. It denotes one who submits unconditionally to the will of God. In the camps, then, the Muselmänner were persons of unconditional fatalism[2].

“Just as autistic children completely ignore reality in order to withdraw into a fantasy world, the prisoners who had become Muselmänner no longer paid any attention to real causal relationships, and replaced them with delirious fantasies.”[3]

Philosophers and theologians alike have often dealt with the paradigm of the “extreme situation” or “borderline situation”. In Kierkegaard’s words:[4]

“The exception explains the general and itself. And if you want to study the general properly, you need only look for a real exception.”

For the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, Auschwitz is now[5]

“precisely the place where the state of exception completely coincides with the rule, and the extreme situation becomes the paradigm of everyday itself.”

The delirious Muselmann becomes a witness. He has seen nothing and recognized nothing – apart from the impossibility of recognizing and seeing anything:[6]

“But that precisely this non-human inability to see becomes the call and question to man […], in this and nothing else lies the testimony.”

Agamben calls this the Primo Levi Paradox:

“The Muselmann is the complete witness.”

For:[7]

1) “The Muselmann is the non-human, the one who could not bear witness under any circumstances.”

2) “The one who cannot bear witness is the real witness, the absolute witness.”

It’s all logical, isn’t it? Then Agamben turns to the so-called Auschwitz deniers:[8]

“Because suppose that Auschwitz is that which cannot be witnessed; and at the same time suppose that the Muselmann is the absolute impossibility of witnessing. If the witness bears witness to the Muselmann, if he succeeds in making the impossibility of speaking speak out – if the Muselmann is thus constituted as a complete witness – then the very basis of all denial is refuted. […] If the survivor does not bear witness to the gas chamber or to Auschwitz, but to the Muselmann; if he speaks solely from the impossibility of speaking, then his testimony cannot be denied. Auschwitz – that of which it is impossible to bear witness – is absolutely and irrefutably proven.”

Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt added to this:[9]

“There has never been a historical event so far-reaching and so little verifiable. […] It is literally inconceivable that, among all historical events, attempts are being made to deny the existence of Auschwitz – as if Auschwitz actually carried its own negation within itself.”

Therefore now, the philosopher Agamben has finally succeeded in providing “irrefutable” proof! We can confidently attribute it to the “Jewish spirit” to pile two paradoxes on top of each other in order to prove something that is supposedly difficult or impossible to prove. It would be like trying to prove to a child the “fact” that Easter bunnies lay eggs by showing that 1) no one has ever seen the Easter bunny laying eggs, and 2) the Easter eggs found bear no indication of origin, which would irrefutably prove that the Easter eggs are laid by the Easter bunny.[10]

In contrast to this, Austrian-born philosopher Karl Raimund Popper, who was of Jewish descent, once said in an interview:[11]

“Truth is agreement with the facts, agreement with reality. Truth is objective and absolute.”

How can this obvious discrepancy in the perception of reality be explained?

The late Jewish sociologist Alphons Silbermann claimed that a Jewish spirit can be recognized that can only be solidified in the collective memory, which is based on a wealth of experience in the topic of “suffering.”[12] It is:

“a system of ideas endowed with dynamic force, peculiar to a particular group and determined in ultimate analysis by the central interests of that group. The system of ideas of the Jews is characterized by a story as a history of suffering, whose essential traits have been oriented towards survival since Moses’ memory.”[13]

“It is not an oft-invoked historical consciousness that leads these insights, but the collective memory, which has appropriated the history of suffering as the history of the collective and buried it within itself. Incessantly projecting the historical past onto the present and a hopeful future, it repeatedly touches on being Jewish. […] The history of suffering lies on the shoulders of every Jew.”[14]

A kindred spirit of Agamben is the French-Jewish philosopher Jacques Derrida. He had learned that “through Weizmann, the Jews themselves – almost like a state – declared war on the Third Reich in September 1939.” He blames “the logic of objectivity” for this “insinuation”, which

“created the possibility of invalidating testimony and responsibility, that is, of erasing them, and of neutralizing the uniqueness of the Final Solution: it created the possibility of historiographical perversion, which in turn generated the logic of revisionism […]. To be brief, we can define revisionism as a Faurissonian-style revisionism; objectivism as one that invokes the existence of an analogous totalitarian model and the fact of prior mass extermination (the Gulag is mentioned) to explain the Final Solution, and even ‘normalizes’ it in the sense of a declaration of war, in the sense of a classic state response, a response given during the war against the Jews of this world.”[15]

The philosopher therefore does not consider it appropriate to take note of the various declarations of war – as early as 1933![16] In relation to our Easter bunny example, this would be like someone complaining that there are objective zoologists who actually claim that the hare is a mammal, thereby denying the testimony of Easter eggs. And Prof. Faurisson would see himself in the role of the zoologist who summarized his findings about hares in the formula: “Those who suckle do not lay eggs!”, for which he was repeatedly beaten to pulp, was sentenced to heavy fines, and was academically ostracized.

Still, we can say that much: The philosopher Jacques Derrida has obviously studied Faurisson’s work and findings and grants them “objectivity”. But he does not want objectivity, as it contradicts the “dialectic” of his Jewish sensibility. He considers an objective view of history to be perverse. Prof. Faurisson would never have dreamed of such confirmation from the other side! If his findings are objective, then this simply means that he is right![17]

While for decades the “incomprehensibility” of the number of victims, initially four million and later over one million, was associated with Auschwitz, “new archival findings”, as reported by Spiegel editor Fritjof Meyer, published in the periodical Osteuropa which is by no means right-wing, resulted in the fact that

“the degree of this breach of civilization finally enters the realm of the imaginable, and thus becomes a convincing warning sign for those born later. […] Half a million fell victim to the genocide.”[18]

Leaving aside the question of whether this remains the final official death toll of Auschwitz, and leaving aside the question of whether everyone who died in Auschwitz was also murdered, the number approaches the number of people who were burned alive in Dresden within two days. The further the number of Auschwitz victims is reduced to the realm of the imaginable, the more difficult it becomes to explain the difference to the unquestionable six million. Any German or European (or now even Canadian; ed.) who politely asks a prominent Jew for an explanation can expect to be reported to the police. But we know from German mainstream historian Martin Broszat, the now deceased former director of the government-run Munich Institute of Contemporary History, that the Six Million Figure is a “symbolic number”[19].

Herbert Kempa wrote years ago:[20]

“No one who is to be taken seriously doubts that Jews were persecuted in the Third Reich. But in a state governed by the rule of law, anyone dealing with this subject must be allowed to investigate what is credible, what is implausible and what is technically impossible. If laws prohibit historical research on this complex, if experts are not allowed to testify under threat of punishment, then one inevitably comes to the conclusion that much of the accusations that incriminate Germany so heavily would not stand up to scrutiny.”

And Norman Finkelstein also mused:[21]

“[…] not only is the figure of ‘6 million’ becoming increasingly untenable, but the figures of the Holocaust industry are rapidly approaching those of the Holocaust deniers.”

Hermann Langbein, the well-known former Austrian communist, Auschwitz inmate and researcher of this camp’s life, confessed:[22]

“Anyone who wants to separate facts from legends must consult all sources, compare them, examine them critically, if possible obtain the opinion of eyewitnesses as to the truth of the publications, and beware of all prejudices. […] Even publications from institutions whose seriousness is generally recognized cannot be accepted uncritically. This also applies to the Auschwitz Museum, which has rightly earned a reputation among experts.”

In the historical thinking of Walter Benjamin, another Jewish kindred spirit, there is such a thing as a “counterfactual claim to truth”. Thomas Schwarz Wentzer explains the theory behind this:[23]

“The movement of interpretation knows a counterfactual claim to truth, as it were, which is fulfilled in every successful interpretation, insofar as truth can be experienced unbroken when carrying out the interpretation within current perceptions.”

Thus, truth does not depend on facts, but on experiences of the perceiver.

The German Jüdisches Lexikon (Jewish Encyclopedia) also explains Jewish historiography as follows:[24]

“The ultimate ideal of historical scholarship – the establishment of full agreement between historiography and history, between ideas about the past and historical reality – encounters great difficulties in Jewish historiography in particular.”

The New York historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi explains why this is the case:[25]

“Jews who are still under the spell of tradition, or who have returned to it, find the work of the historian irrelevant. They are not concerned with the historicity of the past, but with its eternal present. If the text speaks directly to them, the question of its development must seem secondary or completely meaningless to them. […] Many Jews today are looking for a past, but the one the historian has to offer is obviously not what they want. […] The enormous current interest in Hasidism is not in the least concerned with the theoretical foundations and the richly disreputable history of this movement. The Holocaust has already sparked more historical research than any other event in Jewish history, but there is no doubt in my mind that its image is being formed not at the anvil of the historian but in the crucible of the novelist [note this well!] Much has changed since the 16th Century, but one thing has remained strangely the same: It seems that Jews then, as now, are unwilling to face history directly (if they don’t reject it altogether). They seem to prefer to wait for a new, meta-historical myth, and the novel is suitable as a modern surrogate for this, at least for the time being.”

The founder of Hasidism mentioned by Yerushalmi, the Eastern European Jewish piety movement, was Israel ben Eliezer, called Ba’al Shem Tow, the “Master of the Good Name”; he lived in Podolia from 1700 to 1760. A more recent reference work of Judaism states:[26]

“From its earliest period, Hasidism cultivated the oral tale as an important vehicle for conveying its teachings. The Ba’al Shem Tov himself was a master storyteller.”

Elie Wiesel reported:[27]

“The call of the Baal Shem was a call to subjectivity, to passionate commitment.”

He then quotes his grandfather:

“They will tell you that this or that story cannot be true; so what? An objective Hasid is not a Hasid.”

Elie Wiesel himself confirmed:[28]

“For a historian, there is nothing more confusing, more humiliating. To be unable to draw a line – not a single one, no matter which one – between myth and reality, between fiction, fantasy and experience, that is the height of embarrassment for a historian.”

But he demanded:[29]

“Make prayers out of my stories”!

In his autobiography, he reports on the kabbalistic and ascetic attempts of his youth, on the attraction of suffering, and his envy of the suffering of the poor around him: suffering as a path to sainthood.[30] The Nobel Prize was awarded to him in 1986 at the request of 83 members of the German parliament, among others.[31] These members of parliament must have (or should have) been familiar with Wiesel’s expression:[32]

“Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate – healthy, virile hate – for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of the dead.”

Either these members of parliament did not see themselves as Germans, or they were caught up in anticipatory self-hatred; in either case a poor basis for representing the German people.

Norman G. Finkelstein blames Wiesel as a string-puller who arrogated to himself the office of “high priest” of the culture of remembrance, and whom he categorizes as a crook and fraud.[33]

The consequences of assimilation are also referred to as a holocaust on various occasions, for example by the Hasidim from Belarus. A religious movement emerged there “which attempted to combat the ‘spiritual holocaust’, the assimilation of the Jewish people by means of fax, television, Walkman and all modern means of communication.”[34] Since “Jewish life” in Germany is increasingly shaped by Eastern European Jews, this opens up unimagined possibilities for cultural memory and historical understanding. Gershon Greenberg from the American University, Washington D.C., writes:[35]

“There is a universal spiritual community which spreads from the Far East to the West, with its center in Germany.”

In America, the center of the Hasidim is known to be located in the New York borough of Brooklyn.

And then there is the “Wilkomirski Syndrome”. At some point, an adopted Swiss man began writing “memoirs” about his supposedly Jewish childhood during the war years, including his experiences in the Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau camps with outrageous details.[36] Despite his exposure as a fraud,[37] the Holocaust researcher Israel Gutman tells us:[38]

“This is not a fraud. This is someone who is living through this story deep inside himself. The pain is authentic. […] Even if he is not Jewish, the fact that the Holocaust affected him so deeply is of the utmost importance.”

An international conference in Potsdam in April 2001 was even dedicated to “Imaginary memories, or: the longing to be a victim.”[39]

Harold Bloom, the American-Jewish Kabbalah researcher, writes:[40]

“Hasidism was the last descendant of Kabbalah and can be understood as the positive final achievement of a movement which, in its darker aspects, led to the swamps of magic and superstition, to false messiahs and apostates.”

While Orthodox Jews make up about 12 percent of the world’s Jewish population, the Hasidim included in this figure are given as five percent or 550,000. Orthodox leaders, however, claim that their share is constantly underestimated by liberal Jewish demographers in order to downplay the importance of orthodoxy, presumably to counter “anti-Semitism”.[41] “The religious life of today’s Jews is predominantly shaped by Hasidism”, admits Peter Stiegnitz openly in a small educational pamphlet on Judaism.[42]

It would be going too far to uncover the “theoretical foundations and the rather disreputable history of this movement” (Yerushalmi),[43] but a comment by the religious philosopher and Kabbalah researcher Gershom Scholem should give food for thought:[44]

“For the Kabbalists, it was not Israel’s task to be a light to the nations, but, on the contrary, to extract from them the last sparks of holiness and life […] a truth that all too many theologians of Judaism are very reluctant to open up to, and that an entire literature is struggling to avoid.”

Dr. Daniel Krochmalnik, chairman of the Jewish community of Heidelberg, confirms, at least as far as Germany is concerned, the will to extermination with a cabalistic background. In an article entitled “Amalek” in an association organ that is actually only aimed at Jewish readers, he writes:[45]

“The genetic localization and prophetic anticipation of radical evil also gives rise to the hope that a final solution of the final solutioners [the Germans] is pre-programmed.”

The unconstitutional[46] and yet deliberate demographic collapse of the German people thus appears to be “God-willed” from a Jewish perspective. On November 18, 1969, Simon Wiesenthal gave a highly attended lecture on the “persecution of Nazi criminals” to the Jewish student body in Zurich. The aim of that Nazi hunt, Wiesenthal stated, was to destroy potential opponents once and for all, even in their embryonic state.[47] According to the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”[48] Art. III (c), this was actually a “direct and public incitement to commit genocide”. Art. IV states:[49]

“Persons committing genocide […] shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.”

By the way: Steven K. Langnas, the head of the rabbinate of the Jewish Community for Munich and Upper Bavaria, claimed in a lecture to the Peutinger College that the country of Israel (!) had invented human rights.[50] However, they evidently do not apply to Germans.

A German government, regardless of its composition, which complies with the demands of Hasidic-Kabbalistic commemorative culture and other requirements, removes even the last “sparks of holiness and life” from the German people! The case of the Hamburg punk group Slime is probably symptomatic. While the 1980 song “Germany must die so that we can live” (“Deutschland muss sterben, damit wir leben können”) was previously banned, it is now permitted following a ruling by the German Federal Constitutional Court on November 23, 2000. It is considered art in the sense of the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of art.[51] Almost concurrently, however, German historian and political scientist Udo Walendy had the license to run his publishing house revoked by the Herford district authority because he had committed the crime (!) of trying to “free the German people from the original sin imposed on them.”[52] Angela Merkel, on the other hand, characterized Germany’s situation with some chutzpah as follows:

“Recognizing the singularity of the Holocaust has, after all, made us the country we are today – free, united, sovereign.”

The ideological basis of her party, the “Christian Democratic Union,” includes “the ongoing recognition of that which is irreconcilable, the singularity of the Holocaust.”[53]

Dan Diner had already described the Holocaust as the unwritten constitution of post-war Germany.[54] Patrick Bahners summed up the problem ten years ago on the occasion of the trial against the former leader of a small German right-wing party, Günter Deckert, under the pithy heading “Objective self-destruction”:[55]

“If Deckert’s [revisionist] ‘view of the Holocaust’ were correct, the Federal Republic would be based on a lie. Every presidential speech, every minute of silence, every history book would be a lie. By denying the murder of the Jews, he denies the legitimacy of the Federal Republic.”

This is what Holocaust researcher Gitta Sereny did with regard to Auschwitz, claiming in an interview with Erica Wagner in the Times:[56]

“Auschwitz was not a ‘death camp.’”

The German edition of her book The German Trauma states:[57]

“that Auschwitz, despite its symbolic function, is not primarily an extermination camp for Jews and therefore absolutely not a case in which to study extermination policy.”

This is how The Fragile Foundation[58] of coexistence between Jews and non-Jews looks like, as Salomon Korn called it. He is Michel Friedman’s successor as Vice President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany and, as an architect, in charge of Jewish memorials in Germany (Gedenkstättenbeauftragter). In contrast to his eternally irreconcilable predecessor, he believes that “normality” between Germans and Jews will only be possible in another fifty years. Demographic studies, however, show that by then ethnic Germans will have long been a small minority in their own country.

Germany is increasingly being covered with a network of Jewish memorials and monuments, inspired by the saying that remembrance is the secret of redemption.

Roland Kany, the reviewer of an encyclopedia titled Memory and Remembrance,[59] points out:[60]

“Kabbalistic traditions are behind the tremendous words of the Baal Shem Tov: ‘Memory is the secret of redemption’.”

Daniel Krochmalnik tells us what the formula actually means:[61]

“The desire to forget prolongs exile, the secret of redemption is called remembrance.”

This means in the spirit of Hasidism:

“The soul is imprisoned in the body and enslaved to material needs; it has forgotten its heavenly home. As long as it does not remember who it is, and does not realize that it is in exile here, it cannot be redeemed. […] He who does not know that he is in a foreign land, that he is alienated from himself, has no longing for his homeland and lives the dull life of the Kaffirs. […] For us Jews, [remembrance] means gathering as many spiritual sparks as possible from that destroyed world in order to ignite the flame of tradition.”

He does not understand what the Hasidic word could mean to non-Jews.

Michael Brenner, who teaches “Jewish History and Culture” at the University of Munich, stated:[62]

“The sparser the remnants of Europe’s once vibrant Jewish culture become, the stronger the continent’s virtual Jewish landscape grows. Some parts of Europe have already become one big landscape of museums and nostalgia.”

On the other hand, Brenner insists that anyone who, like German historian Prof. Ernst Nolte, still speaks today of a “Judeocentric” interpretation of history and a “negative Germanocentric paradigm” needs a psychologist more than a panegyrist.[63]

But then, a Jewish psychologist has thankfully taken it upon himself to examine the different Jewish mentality: Ofer Grosbard, a secular Israeli from a German-Lithuanian-Jewish family, started from the various stages of child development and related them to today’s Israel as a whole, which is going through a maturing process just like a growing child. When he puts Israel “on the couch” in order to bring peace to the Middle East, he is obviously not counting on the “therapeutic resistance” of those in power. Nevertheless, the book contains a number of valuable insights that should more or less also apply to Diaspora Jews, as Israeli President Moshe Katzav stated to members of the community during his visit to Germany in December 2002:[64]

“Your homeland is Israel.”

Grosbard thus found:

“We Jews find it very difficult to think about and understand the role we played in the old hatred towards us, and the feelings we trigger in others.”[65]

“Let us now consider the relationship between the Jews and the God they have created.[66] We must not forget that the whole beautiful idea exists only in the minds of the Jewish people. From that moment in the life of the patriarch Abraham, they have been living a story which they themselves have told.”[67]

“But the Jewish people had a compensation for all the suffering that God had brought upon them.[68] They perceived the blows of fate as a sign of love, a sign of God’s desire to discipline them. […] It is no wonder that such an inner experience becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The other peoples need only assume the role that the Jews have assigned to them and try to hurt them. This will make the Jews feel confirmed that they are mistreated by everyone because they are God’s beloved children. […] But we must not forget that everything we are talking about takes place in only one place, namely in the imagination of the Jewish people, which God invented along with the whole of history. The Jewish people have projected their inner experiences outwards. All that remains for them to do is to live the story they have been told. Thus it reconstructs its inner historical experiences as a people and relives them again and again.”[69]

“We suppress the fact that our entire existence is a sham, that we are living on borrowed time, that our dream will disappear with us, that our real weakness will come to light and that this will be our end.”[70]

“The problem is our chronic thought disorder, which stems from our existential fear, which is fueled by terrorism. We adopt a defensive posture and close our eyes to reality. […] We as a nation have a paranoid personality and are unable to relate normally to others.”[71]

“A paranoid person will never feel safe. He will always provoke the opposite in those around him. […] There is another thing that is difficult and almost impossible for a paranoid: showing understanding towards others.”[72]

Antonia Grunenberg draws attention to another peculiarity of Jewish thinking:[73]

“In the context of Jewish exegesis, the idea that guilt can be overcome is inconceivable. Guilt remains. The guilt-ridden person makes a new beginning in it and with it; under no circumstances, however, can guilt be ‘overcome’.”

And German journalist Günther Gillessen pointed out:[74]

“The difference in the understanding of history shows what an imposition it is for one side to allow ‘normalization’ to happen, and for the other to be chained from generation to generation to a guilt that they cannot consider their own. Neither side should overburden the other at this point.”

However, Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt said as early as 1946:[75]

“Morally speaking, it is just as wrong to feel guilty without having done anything in particular as it is to feel guiltless when one has actually committed something. I have always considered it the epitome of moral confusion that in post-war Germany those who were completely free of guilt assured each other and the whole world how guilty they felt.”

And Heinrich Blücher, a communist, her partner and later husband, wrote to her in the same year:[76]

“As I have already told you, the whole question of guilt serves only as Christian hypocritical chatter, among the victors in order to serve themselves better, and among the vanquished in order to be able to continue to concern themselves exclusively with themselves. (Even if only for the purpose of self-enlightenment). In both cases, guilt serves to destroy responsibility.”

And with regard to the post-war images of camp inmates, i.e. the Muselmänner, Hannah Arendt stated:[77]

“It is not unimportant to realize that all photographs of concentration camps are misleading insofar as they show camps in their final stage, at the moment of the invasion of the Allied troops. […] what seemed so outrageous to the Allies and constitutes the horror of the films, namely people emaciated to skeletons, was not typical of the German concentration camps; […] the condition of the camps was a consequence of the events of the war in the final months. […]”

With regard to Auschwitz, as we have seen, it is a question of objective versus subjective observation. Generally speaking, Amos de Shalit, then director of the Weizman Institute, said years ago that people are usually convinced of their own, meaning subjective, opinion after education, research and their own thinking. This is also the case in the exact sciences, however:[78]

“Mathematics can provide us with the absolute and definitive proof that we are wrong despite our very own convictions. The perception of the limits of man has forced me to be modest.”

After all, two times two is four in every country, as Arnold Schönberg once stated.[79] Lise Meitner, the Jewish researcher involved in the discovery of nuclear fission, was also convinced:[80]

“In my view, this is precisely the great value of scientific education, that we must learn to have respect for the truth, regardless of whether or not it agrees with our wishes or preconceived ideas.”

Objectivity, meaning matter-of-factliness or appropriateness to the object of observation, recognition of an extra-subjective reality, and recognition of logic, meaning the laws of thought. Anyone who rejects all this is acting like a dyslexic who rejects grammar, spelling and syntax because he cannot cope with them – or like a color-blind road user who rejects traffic lights because he cannot distinguish the signals. Objectivity means enlightenment! It is extremely strange that Jews, who have achieved and continue to achieve extraordinary things in a wide variety of fields, allow themselves to be shackled in relation to Auschwitz, the so-called Holocaust or the question of war guilt. The rupture of these shackles must have increasingly fatal consequences as time goes on.

The following quote from Gershon Greenberg may illustrate the speculations to which “Holocaust theology” can lead:[81]

“Even from the graves, Jewish bones will overcome: The chemical material manufactured from Jewish bones and skin contains power greater than that of the atom bomb. In each little piece of soap[82] there are a hundred Jews of sorrow. Someday the pieces will explode and rip the world apart. Against such a metaphysical power there is no protection.”

Alan M. Dershowitz, the American-Jewish lawyer, Harvard professor and publicist, reports as follows about his friend, in his opinion a brilliant and creative thinker:[83]

“My friend Robert Novick argues that the Holocaust makes it possible to contemplate, without welcoming, the destruction of the human species as a ‘satisfying close’ to the history of our epoch.”

For the religious philosopher and trained rabbi Jacob Taubes, who saw himself as an “apocalypticist from below”, such a “spiritual investment” in the existing world was also unthinkable, because his thinking was based on the victims of history.[84] Taubes had no sympathy for the one who holds down the chaos that presses from below:[85]

“That is not my worldview, that is not my experience. I can imagine myself as an apocalyptic: let it perish. I have no spiritual investment in the world as it is.”

In the Talmud, after a year and a half of deliberation, the wisest of the rabbis come to the conclusion:[86]

“There can be no doubt that it would be better if the world of our conscious reality did not exist. There can be no doubt that the end of humanity, its re-dissolution into the boundless, is the more desirable goal.”

According to the rabbinic interpretation of the tractate Bereshit[87] Rabbah 9:4, the world was not created all at once by the hand of God. Rather, Genesis was preceded by 26 attempts, all of which failed. At the 27th attempt, God exclaimed:[88]

“Hopefully this one will now stand.”

We have quoted some Jewish “philosophers” here. After two and a half millennia of philosophical history, this discipline seems to have returned to its origins in mankind’s childhood, to magic and superstition.

Scholem wrote:[89]

“One can say that the metaphysical stage of the science of Judaism has something frightening about it. Spirits wander about in the desert, separated from their bodies and stripped bare. They dwell near the realms of the living and look longingly at their past world. How they long to walk there too, how tired they are of wandering for generations and long to rest. Many are weary of ridicule and, repulsed by the gates of life and the gates of death alike, yearn for both, if only they could be freed from the intermediate stage, from that special hell in which the Jew described by Heinrich Heine finds himself. But wherever they turn, a curse has weighed on them for generations, like a kind of spell or spell that must be broken in order to die and live at the same time: Fragments of an oppressive and dangerous past cling to them. Debris from the past lies scattered around, and even those monsters have their own evocative language. The Jew wants to free himself from himself, and the science of Judaism is the funeral ceremony for him, something like a liberation from the yoke that weighs on him.”

Professor Konrad Löw pointed out the shocking perpetuation of collective-enemy images in Israel, and saw this as an atavistic relapse:[90]

“Every German has […] the right to defend himself against the attacks of an archaic tribal morality.”

Incidentally, it was in poor taste when the Hungarian-Jewish director George Tabori, knowing that the German word for “joke” is “Witz,” pointed out:[91]

“The shortest German joke is AuschWitz”

But only he was allowed to say that. These kinds of jokes are punishable with prison terms in Germany and many other “Western” countries.

Endnotes