modernity and the holocaust, or, listening to eurydice

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2010 27: 125Theory Culture SocietyJulia Hell

Modernity and the Holocaust, or, Listening to Eurydice

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Modernity and the Holocaust, or,Listening to Eurydice

Julia Hell

Abstract

In this article, I offer a literary-critical reading of Modernity and the

Holocaust, arguing that Bauman’s non-Hobbesian ethics is linked to a form

of Orphic authorship. I contextualize this reading with a study of three liter-

ary authors: W.G. Sebald, Peter Weiss and Janina Bauman, and their respec-

tive versions of this post-Holocaust authorship. At stake is the drama of the

forbidden gaze, the moment when Orpheus turns to look at Eurydice, killing

her a second time. Using Levinas’ ethics and his scenario of recognition,

Bauman re-writes this fateful gaze as a loving gaze, implicitly proposing a

counter-model to the Schmittian gaze – always ready to recognize the

enemy, always ready to kill.

Key words

Janina Bauman j Zygmunt Bauman j Holocaust j Emmanuel

Levinas j Orpheus j Carl Schmitt j W.G. Sebald j Peter Weiss

Arrivals

IN AN interview with the German daily Die Tageszeitung, ZygmuntBauman described his arrival in Leeds in 1971 as an alarming confron-tation with Western industrial decay: ‘When we arrived [in Leeds]

35 years ago, the former center of the industrial revolution with its bourgeoi-sie had decayed into a terribly filthy ghost-town.’ There was ‘[n]o moreindustry’, Bauman told his interviewer, and he recalled the sight of theruined industrial city as ‘anxiety-provoking!’ (2006: 1). About 20 years ear-lier, the narrator of W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (1996) recalled his firstsight of Manchester: ‘I looked out in amazement at the rows of uniformhouses, which seemed the more run-down the closer we got to the citycentre.’ Driving through Moss Side and Hulme, he noticed that ‘there werewhole blocks where the doors and windows were boarded up . . . and wholedistricts where everything had been demolished’. Across this ‘wasteland’,

j Theory, Culture & Society 2010 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, NewDelhi, and Singapore),Vol. 27(6): 125^154DOI: 10.1177/0263276410382026



the narrator continued, ‘[v]iews opened up . . . towards the still immenselyimpressive agglomeration of gigantic Victorian office blocks’. Once thisarea had been ‘the hub of one of the nineteenth-century miracle cities’ butnow it was ‘almost hollow to the core’ (1996: 151). Where Bauman saw aghost town, Sebald (1996: 151) believed he was driving through a ‘necropo-lis’, a city that seemed to have been abandoned by its inhabitants. Comingfrom Poland and West Germany, they witnessed the uneven developmentof 20th-century Europe, not yet aware that Britain’s ruins of industrializa-tion were post-Fordism’s future. What they seemed to be seeing were citiesbelonging not to the world of the living, but the world of the dead.

Strong affinities exist between Sebald and Bauman, between theauthor and theorist of the ruins of modernity and the sociologist. Sebald’stexts invite us to read them as a dialogue with Bauman’s writings on(liquid) modernity, and many Sebald scholars have done so (see e.g.Eaglestone, 2004; Long, 2007). In this article, I propose a radically di¡erentproject. Instead of discussing Bauman’s role for contemporary literatureand literary criticism, I invite readers to think about some of his textsfrom a literary-critical perspective. Seen through this particular lens,Bauman’s texts, especially Modernity and the Holocaust (2000 [1989]) andrelated essays and lectures, emerge as deeply entangled in a cultural imagi-nation that is obsessed with issues of representation, acts of looking, andthe nature of human bonds in the wake of the Holocaust, a cultural imagina-tion that tried to capture these topics by returning to the myth of Orpheusand Eurydice.

But this article will not be solely concerned with Zygmunt Bauman’stexts and their literary dimension. Allow me to add yet another quoteabout arriving in a British city:

Stepney . . . practically doesn’t exist any longer: the filthy old buildings arejust being pulled down. A vast, deserted space, covered with rubble anddebris. It immediately reminded me of theWarsaw ghetto just after the war.

The stranger taken aback by the sight of Western poverty and ‘all thiswilderness’ is Janina Bauman, who visited her husband in London in1958. The quote is taken from the second of her autobiographical novels,A Dream of Belonging: My Years in Postwar Poland (1988: 138). JaninaBauman concludes her diary entry by moving from Poland’s past to its pre-sent, defending her country despite all of its shortcomings.

Janina Bauman had seen the ruins of Warsaw and theWarsaw ghetto,from which she escaped with her mother and sisters, with her own eyes.Emerging from shelter after the surrender of Warsaw in 1939, she saw‘a dead town, ruined and burned to the ground’ (1988: 34); when she lefther hiding place in the countryside and returned to Warsaw in 1944, shefound a ‘stony desert’ and, crying, walked through ‘a land covered withrubble’ (1988: 249). And in 1946, she participated in clearing up therubble of Warsaw’s ghetto. Had W.E.B. Du Bois arrived in Warsaw just a

126 Theory, Culture & Society 27(6)



few months earlier, he might have seen Janina Bauman among the peoplewho ‘were rebuilding the city with an enthusiasm that was simplyunbelievable’ (Du Bois, 1996: 471). A new and better life, Janina Baumanbelieved at the time, ‘was springing up from the ruins of the past’(Bauman, 1988: 16).

Janina Bauman’s perception of Stepney as Warsaw takes the readerfrom the present to the past, from modernity’s world to its underworld, orwhat she called the inferno of the Warsaw ghetto. The passage also con-denses in a single image the famous thesis that Zygmunt Bauman developedin Modernity and the Holocaust: that the story of modernity cannot betold without that of the Holocaust. In this article, I will focus on one partic-ular aspect of Bauman’s argument, his concern with the fate of moralityunder conditions of (fascist) modernity. As mentioned above, I want todraw attention to the literary dimension of Bauman’s text. More specifically,I will read the ways in which he theorizes morality (and later his politics ofethics) with Levinas as a move that translates a particular literary trope,the trope of Orpheus and Eurydice, into theory. This move does nothappen in a void. As I will show in some detail, the Orphic trope is ubiqui-tously present in post-fascist culture, often in its Dantean version ^ justrecall Primo Levi’s Se questo e un uomo (1963 [1947]), with its comparisonof Auschwitz to Dante’s Inferno.1 There is thus more at stake than the evo-cation of a metaphor ^ Auschwitz as inferno.The story of the poet descend-ing to the underworld to rescue his beloved often touches the very heart ofthe (re-)constitution of post-Holocaust authorship. And in Modernity andthe Holocaust, I contend, Bauman writes his own version of this Orphicauthorship. To make this argument, I will ¢rst explore the work of theGerman-British authorW.G. Sebald, and that of the German-Swedish pain-ter, author and playwright, Peter Weiss, and then turn to Janina Bauman’snovels and what I will call her post-Orphic authorship. In particular, I willtrace the ways in which these authors appropriate and revise the Orphictale, sometimes, but not always, focusing on the moment of danger, onOrpheus’ backward glance.

Virgil, Ovid and the Drama of the GazeLet me briefly recall the ways in which Virgil and Ovid told Orpheus’ jour-ney to the underworld, in particular the pronounced scopic dimension oftheir tales. With striking attention to detail, they privilege acts of lookingand imagine the contours of a world that has never been seen by theliving. In his Georgics, Virgil tells the story as a conflict between reasonand passion. After having entered the realm of Pluto and Proserpina, kingand queen of orcus, Orpheus begins to sing, attracting a multitude of ‘insub-stantial shades’ that surface from the ‘depths of Erebus’ (Virgil, 1982: 140).These ‘phantoms of lightness’ are kept captive in this ‘gloomy grove ofterror’, which Virgil maps with his usual precision, pointing out ‘sluggish,

Hell ^ Modernity and the Holocaust, or, Listening to Eurydice 127



hateful pools’ and the rivers Cocytus and, of course, Styx, which must becrossed to enter the world of the dead (1982: 140).2

Orpheus’ song restores Eurydice to him ^ love triumphs over death.But then passion overrules reason. Eurydice, now no longer cold, followsOrpheus, but, of course, he does not heed Proserpina’s command.‘[C]oming back into the world above’, Orpheus is overcome by ‘sudden mad-ness’ and stops (Virgil, 1982: 141): ‘And on the very brink of light, alas,/Forgetful, yielding in his will, looked back/At his own Eurydice’ (1982:141; italics added). This is the famous second look that kills Eurydice andforces her to return ‘[n]ow cold . . . in the Stygian barque’ (1982: 141).Virgil describes the moment from Eurydice’s perspective:

‘Orpheus,’ she cried, ‘we are ruined, you and I!What utter madness is this? See, once againThe cruel Fates are calling me back and darknessFalls on my swimming eyes. Goodbye for ever.I am borne away wrapped in an endless night,Stretching to you, no longer yours, these hands,These helpless hands.’ (1982: 141)

With this supplicating gesture, Eurydice disappears a second time ^and now Virgil abruptly introduces Orpheus’ perspective, heightening thedrama of the moment: ‘suddenly/out of his sight,/like smoke in thin air,/Vanished away’; and then, just as abruptly, he switches back again toEurydice and her dying gaze: ‘unable any more/To see him as he vainlygrasped at shadows’ (1982: 141).

Writing in the shadow of Virgil, Ovid re-imagined the story in BookX of his Metamorphoses, focusing on the power of love.That is, he romanti-cized Virgil’s version in the Georgics, reinforced by the latter’s revision ofthe tale in the Aeneid. In this imperial epic, Virgil retells the story ofAeneas’ encounter with Dido, his former lover, in the underworld, opposingAeneas’ love for the queen of Carthage, who killed herself in an act of loveand rage, to his imperial mission and patriotic duty. Ovid did not careabout imperial missions, but focused on the desperate poet offering hisown death to the queen of the underworld: ‘Let her be with me, eitherabove, alive, or else accept me here and rejoice in the death of us both. Letme remain with her’ (Ovid, 1994: 196). Having lost Eurydice, Orpheuswill ‘celebrate love, the adversary of death’ in his songs (Ovid, 1994: 199).

The different renditions of the myth in the Georgics and Book X ofthe Metamorphoses have one thing in common: they describe the momentof the fatal second gaze, omitting the first gaze, the moment whenOrpheus recognizes Eurydice among the shades. They differ in their waysof narrating. In the Georgics, Virgil accentuates the drama of the moment,the sudden madness, by the very structure of his narrative and ^ as wehave seen ^ by narrating it from Eurydice’s view, lingering on her failingvision. In contrast, Ovid depicts the moment of Eurydice’s dying a second




death from Orpheus’ perspective. He turns, ‘and there she was, but slippingbackward, away and down’ (1994: 196). Orpheus tries to take hold of her,but she vanishes, speaking ‘but only one word: ‘‘Farewell,’’ which he barelyheard’ (1994: 196). Moreover, and again in contrast to Virgil, Ovid writesabout yet another act of looking: the moment when he is reunited with hislover in death. Both times, we, the readers, are made to ‘see’ Eurydice fromOrpheus’ perspective.

We tend to focus on the drama of the second gaze, on the moment whenEurydice is suspended between death and life. Yet both Virgil and Ovid tellthe story of the first gaze, the encounter in the underworld and Orpheus’ rec-ognition of his lover’s face. In the Aeneid, Virgil writes this moment, con-densing first and second gaze in a miniature drama of great intensity.Lingering on Aeneas’ sight, Virgil, the realist, depicts with great care theway the object is seen: Aeneas, looking at the shades assembled on theFields of Mourning, discerns Dido’s ‘dim form in the dark as one who sees,/Early in the month, or thinks to have seen, the moon/Rising throughcloud, all dim’ (1983: 175). Moved to tears, he begs her: ‘Do not leave mysight’ (1983: 176). Dido, resisting his plea and ‘savagely glaring back’, turns(1983: 176). And with this turn, her gaze changes, and so does the woman:‘But she had turned/With gaze fixed to the ground as he spoke on,/Her faceno more affected than if she were/Immobile granite’, leaving Aeneas to ‘gazeafter her in tears’ (1983: 176).What then do we see in this scene? An act ofrecognition, a refusal to look and the dying of a gaze. And then, at the end,Aeneas’ longing gaze at a departing form that refuses to meet his eyes.

In Book XI, Ovid did something similar, retrospectively narrating themoment of recognition and yet again romanticizing Virgil’s story of loveagainst duty. In this section, Ovid first depicts Orpheus’ cruel death at thehands of ‘wild’ barbarian women (1994: 216). A gruesome tale of stonesthrown and a head severed, the story ends on a Romantic note: Orpheusreturns to the underworld, and, beholding ‘Eurydice’s dear face’ at lastwalks with her ‘side by side through the blessed fields’ (1994: 218). Heretoo Ovid elaborates on Orpheus’ searching gaze and the scene of recognition:‘The shade, free now to flee to the land of shades below, could recognizethose landscapes it passed through before, as it searched through all thoseashen faces for Eurydice’s dear face ^ which he at last beholds’ (1994: 218).Taking Eurydice in his ‘eager and airy arms’, Orpheus walks with her‘through the blessed fields’. And then Ovid’s grand finale, the backwardgaze that does not make her disappear: ‘He leads a step ahead and looksback again and again to see how each time she follows him still’ (1994:218). Let us imagine that Eurydice returned his loving gaze.

Most Orpheus adaptations focus on the drama of the second forbiddengaze at her ‘dear face’ that kills Eurydice a second time. In the work ofPeter Weiss, W.G. Sebald and Janina Bauman, this moment of danger ^which inspired Klee’s painting, the Angelus Novus, and Benjamin’s ‘Angelof History’ ^ plays a crucial role. But we will encounter other momentsand different emphases.




Manchester ^ Auschwitz ^ Lodz: Journeys to the UnderworldSebald’s memory texts consist of densely layered palimpsests, frequentlyopening the world of the living onto the world of the dead. And these textsare driven by a relentless scopic desire.3 Like Janina Bauman’s view ofStepney/Warsaw, Sebald’s palimpsests open the texts toward modernity’sunderworld. However, Sebald’s palimpsestic passages are not exactly of thesame kind as those of Janina Bauman, who directly thematized the sponta-neous superimposition of her war-time memories onto the sight of contem-porary Stepney. Less directly, Sebald often creates these palimpsestic layersof space, time and meaning through the unusually dense intertextuality ofhis novels.

Few authors put as much emphasis on the visual as Sebald did. I haveargued elsewhere that this focus on the visual makes Sebald’s narrators his-torians of an Orphic kind (Hell, 2004a). The narrator’s scopic desire andthe creation of densely layered palimpsests also characterize TheEmigrants, where Sebald’s narrator follows his recent acquaintance, MaxFerber, a German exile and painter, on his tours through the city.4 Ferbertakes the narrator to the dilapidated docks of what was once the world’s larg-est inland port, telling the imperial history of this ‘manufacturing metropo-lis’, which arose in the 19th century, reached its heights in the 1930s, andthen died in the 1950s along with the empire that gave birth to it (Sebald,1996: 166). Sebald then narrates Ferber’s arrival in the city in 1945, recallingFerber’s depiction of a panoramic tableau of a city condensing around itsindustrial core, ‘one solid mass of utter blackness’ (1996: 168). What struckFerber was the countless chimneys and smokestacks, towering over thecity, ‘belching out’ their smoke (1996: 251).

Like Janina Bauman’s view of London as Warsaw, this passage nar-rates a personal act of perception, into which Sebald inscribes hisGeschichtsphilosophie. A post-Adornian who has abandoned any notion ofdialectics, Sebald understands the modernity of industrialization andempire as part of a ‘natural history’ of destruction, culminating in theHolocaust.5 The drawing inserted between the textual description ofFerber’s view of the city as a kind of modern underworld and his re£ectionson its meaning for him functions as a similar palimpsest, its blurrinessblocking any unambiguous reading and conveying a threatening atmospherethat again evokes the image of the city as underworld.

But this is not just any underworld ^ it is Manchester as Auschwitz,the industrial city as extermination camp. Several features of the text sup-port this reading. First, Ferber’s idiosyncratic appropriation of aMancunian phrase: having lived ‘amidst the black facades’ of this ‘birthplaceof industrialization’ for the rest of his life, he served, Ferber tells the narra-tor, ‘under the chimney’ (1996: 287). He had, so to speak, ‘returned home’,Ferber adds, since Manchester, a city of immigrants, had a large Jewishquarter. Upon his arrival in 1966, the narrator finds only a single row ofhouses left in this Jewish quarter and captures his impression of this




desolate part of Manchester with another expression referring to the classi-cal topography of the underworld, that is, the ‘Elysian fields’ (1996: 232).Second, and more significantly, in the German text, Ferber’s sentenceabout his first sight of Manchester contains an allusion that MichaelHulse’s translation obscures. The original sentence ^ ‘ich [hatte] dasGefˇhl . . . angelangt zu sein am Ort meiner Bestimmung’ [I felt that Ihad arrived at the place of my destiny] ^ resonates with the title of PeterWeiss’s essay about his 1965 visit to Auschwitz, ‘Meine Ortschaft’ or ‘MyPlace’ (Sebald, 1993: 251). Auschwitz, Weiss wrote in 1965, was the‘Ortschaft’, for which he was destined, but which he escaped (1965: 32).

Like Ferber, Weiss and his family had left Nazi Germany in time.6

Returning to West Germany from his Swedish exile to attend theFrankfurt Auschwitz trials,Weiss traveled in 1964 to the site of the formerdeath camp.7 On one level, ‘My Place’ is an epistemological exercise: walkingthrough the camp, Weiss constantly compares what he knows (from hisresearch and the trials) to what he sees. Opening a gap between empiricalknowledge and understanding, the text is characterized by a form of hyper-descriptive writing that describes in minute detail what is seen. On anotherlevel, the text is part of Weiss’s construction of his authorship as ‘emigrant+ Jew’ (Weiss, 1982: 228). A survivor, he arrived at Auschwitz ‘twentyyears too late’ (1965: 34). At the end of his walk, stepping through thedoor of one of the inmates’ barracks,Weiss intuits for a brief moment thepresence of the dead. But then he reminds himself that the survivor whodid not experience their su¡ering will forever be excluded from the commu-nity of the dead.

A few years earlierWeiss had published Fluchtpunkt [Vanishing Point](1966 [1962]), an autobiographical novel whose concluding section narrateda moment of existential crisis in the spring of 1945. Sitting in a dark movietheatre, Weiss found himself confronted with images from Bergen-Belsen:‘On the dazzlingly bright screen I saw the places for which I was destined,’he wrote, ‘the figures to whom I should have belonged’ (1966 [1962]: 219).What he saw on this screen was something that had beenffl up to thismoment, ‘inconceivable’: ‘There in front of us, amongst the mountain ofcorpses, cowered the shapes of utter humiliation’ (1966 [1962]: 220). TheseMuselm�nner, existing in a ‘world of shadows’, are ‘blind to one another’ butstare at him ‘with their immense eyes’ (1966 [1962]: 220).8 ForWeiss, beingthe object of the victims’gaze raises existential questions: did he, the survivor,belong to the murderers and henchmen, or did he belong to those whostared at him and whom he had betrayed? ‘[I]n the face of these indelibleimages’, Weiss’s narrator also begins to question art (1966 [1962]: 220):‘Where was the Styx’, he asks, ‘where the Inferno, where was Orpheus inhis underworld, surrounded by the rippling trills of £utes?’ (1966 [1962]:220). And then, answering his own question, the narrator concludes: theseimages reduced ‘the great visions of art’ to dust (1966 [1962]: 220).

In the early 1960s, Weiss made this traumatic confrontationwith filmic images from the camps the core of the reconstruction of his




post-Holocaust authorship.9 In Vanishing Point, Weiss’s relation to theOrphic myth is ambiguous: on the one hand, he writes about the camp asa realm of shadows and works with a scopic scenario that foregrounds actsof looking and alludes to (cinematic) voyeurism. Yet this is a voyeuristicscenario, where the gaze is turned back at the spectator. On the otherhand, Weiss angrily dismisses the poet’s art; his descent into the world ofthe dead belongs to an artistic tradition, o¡ensive in its desire to please(think of all the Orphic operas) or in its morbid celebration of a neo-Romantic aesthetics of death (think of Rilke’s sonnets).

Weiss did not turn to the myth of the poet who kills his beloved by hisgaze. Instead, he turned to Dante’s rewriting of the myth, secularizing theDivina Commedia as T.S. Eliot had done before him in his Wasteland,albeit from a radically different political position. Marx likened the worldof capitalist labor to Dante’s inferno and Weiss came to understandAuschwitz as inextricably linked to capitalism, arguing in his Auschwitzplay, The Investigation [Die Ermittlung] (1998 [1965]), for the continuitybetween fascist and post-fascist capitalism.10 For Weiss, his entry onto theGerman cultural scene in the context of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trialsbecomes a time of intense transferential readings of Dante, the exile andsurvivor. In the wake of his so-called ‘DC-Project’,Weiss’s writing was char-acterized by an unusually strong emphasis on the visual, on the sight andgaze of/at the other (C.Weiss, 2003: 124).11

‘Meine Ortschaft’ is Weiss’s Dantean journey into the underworld.What is missing in this early text ^ the figure of Beatrice ^ is part of thevarious drafts of Weiss’s posthumously published play Inferno (2003),and a central feature of his play about the Auschwitz trials,The Investigation (1998). In his poetological reflections, ‘Vorˇbung zumdreiteiligen Drama divina commedia’ [Preliminary Exercises] (1968a[1965]) and ‘Gespr�ch ˇber Dante’ [Conversation about Dante] (1968b[1965]), the poet’s beloved emerges as a densely overdetermined figure. InWeiss scholarship, his remark about the connection between Dante’sBeatrice, Lili Tofler, one of the main characters in The Investigation,and his own childhood friend Lucie Weisgerber, who died inTheresienstadt, is well known.12 In both essays,Weiss puts Dante and hisaestheticization of Beatrice center stage. Thus ‘Preliminary Exercises’ dra-matically concludes with the display of Beatrice’s dead body. In this essay,Weiss replaces Dante’s guide Virgil with the painter Giotto, staging a dia-logue between painter and writer, and creating a stark contrast between theartists. Dante is ‘icily controlled’, while Giotto celebrates passion of a partic-ular kind: ‘somber sensuality’ (1968a [1965]: 129 and 128). When Weissrecalls the camp images shown at the Frankfurt trials, Giotto disappearsfrom the text. Again, the inferno of the camps threatens to reduce the pain-ter’s images to dust. At the very moment when Giotto vanishes, a centralpoetological concept appears ^ Dante’s ‘concrete description’ (1968a [1965]:159). It is now Dante, the writer, who takes on the production of images.And, as mentioned above, the very ¢rst image that Dante produces at the




very end of the ‘Preliminary Exercises’ is the bloody corpse of Beatricewhom he left behind.

In ‘Conversation about Dante’,Weiss asks: ‘Who is Beatrice for me?’(1968b [1965]: 154). Again thematizing the guilt of the survivor-as-artist, hetells their story: he was driven into exile, while Beatrice remained in thecity. He knows that she died, but not how and where. Like Dante, he contin-ued celebrating the beloved woman long after her death. Unlike Dante, he isunable to celebrate Beatrice as ‘embodiment of divine truth’ (1968b [1965]:167).The Holocaust radically separates him and his artistic production fromDante and his theo-political aesthetic: ‘a Dante of our times can seeBeatrice only as a dead woman’ (1968b [1965]: 167). Weiss, the post-Holocaust author, will not praise Beatrice’s beauty, turning her into an alle-gory of theology and redemption. He will display her mutilated body, con-fronting his German post-fascist audience with the reality of genocide.

He does this in Inferno and in The Investigation. In the first play,Beatrice is the object of Dante’s search and the reason for his return to thecity of Dis, from which he was expelled. This search takes the now-familiarform of a walk through urban territory, the city of Dis, where all traces ofthe past have been erased. During Dante’s first halting monologue, Weisscontrasts the idealized image of Beatrice in the poet’s art with the realityof another image, hovering in the background of the stage: ‘the nakedbody of a woman/soiled . . . the head shaved/the mouth the eyes wideopen’ (2003: 32^3). In canto eight, Dante learns what happened to Beatricein the city of Dis and Inferno again invokes an image of her mutilatedbody, opening the gap between Dante’s artistic practice and the reality ofgenocide.

At this point of the play, Beatrice’s story comes to an end, and the playbegins to focus on Dante’s own past, touching repeatedly on the exile’sguilt.13 Rejecting the city’s literary prize, Dante’s last lines in Weiss’sInferno are: ‘Ich sage mich/fˇr immer/von euch los’ [I am severing my tieswith you forever] (2003: 120).14 Yet Weiss did not sever his connectionswith Germany ^ East or West ^ and he did accept one of the FederalRepublic’s most prestigious literary prizes, Hamburg’s Lessing Prize, in1965. The acceptance speech, ‘Laokoon oder �ber die Grenzen der Sprache’[Laocoon or About the Limits of Language; 1968c (1965)] represents a per-formative act, with which Weiss claims narrative authority in front of apost-fascist German audience. The survivor returning to Dis is no longerthe powerless Dante, but an author who publicly asserts his right to speakabout the Nazi past and stages his narrative control over the images fromthe past, images of the victims (he invokes again the images in VanishingPoint) and images of himself as the other.15 This reinvention of authorshiporganized around the author’s gaze and a descriptive mode of writingamounts to a strategy of visual confrontation ^ whose object is often adead woman.

So let us return to Beatrice, to her crucial role in Inferno and TheInvestigation. In both plays,Weiss confronted his audience repeatedly with




the sight of a woman’s dead body. In the latter playWeiss’s main female pro-tagonist, Lili Tofler, again embodies at once Beatrice, Dante’s beloved, andLucie Weisgerber, Weiss’s friend. In Inferno and his poetological essays,Weiss thematized art and reality, repeatedly opposing the idealized imageof Beatrice with the reality of her dead body. The Investigation, sub-titledOratorio in Eleven Cantos, is structured around the voices of witnessesand defendants of the Auschwitz trial.16 In ‘Canto 5: The End of Lili To£er’(1998 [1965]: 197), Weiss directs the audience’s gaze repeatedly at To£erand the moment of her death, thus forcing his post-fascist audience into avisual confrontation with her dead body.17

Weiss’s play thus constructs a space where the voices of the survivorscan be heard; these testimonies are exceedingly precise and detailed, andtheir precision evokes mental images that can be ‘seen’ ^ as if, but only asif, projected onto a screen.The effect is a visual confrontation with the pastthat the audience cannot escape. And with this strategy of visual confronta-tion we return to Orpheus, whomWeiss had dismissed in Vanishing Point.Writing the Orphic story in its Dantean version between 1963 and 1965, hefocused on the figure of Beatrice/Lili/Lucie, putting a strong emphasis onthe visual, on the sight and gaze of/at the other. Paradoxically, with thisnew authorship, asserting control over the gaze and displaying images ofdead or dying women, Orpheus, the poet of the ‘forbidden gaze’, re-entersthe scene of writing.18 For these are Orphic images, images of a poet whosegaze kills his lover a second time by representing her tortured body.

This ‘second killing’ brings us to the question of the ethics of Weiss’spost-Holocaust authorship and his strategy of visual confrontation. Toanswer this question requires paying attention to Weiss’s reflections onsomeone he sees as a kindred artist, the Marquis de Sade, and a return tothe transition from the painter Giotto to the Dante texts. Dante is not theonly model for Weiss’s new scopic authorship and visual mode of writing.In 1963 Weiss reflected on his affinity to what he calls de Sade’s ‘thinkingin images’ (1991 [1963]: 267). How did this thinking manifest itself? DeSade, Weiss wrote, juxtaposed ‘analyzing and philosophical dialogues’ with‘scenarios of bodily excesses’, characterized by the ‘extraordinarily concretedescription of all events’ (1991 [1963]: 267).

In ‘Preliminary Exercises’, de Sade and his representational desiresappear under a different guise. Dante, Weiss wrote in this essay, experi-enced suffering, felt empathy and hatred, while remaining ‘aloof’ (1968a[1965]: 135 and 129). It was his ‘visions of a divine plan’ that allowed himto maintain this distance toward suffering. In contrast, Giotto is de Sade,attracted not by love of the religious kind but ‘bodily love’ (1968a [1965]:129). And Giotto’s artistic practice is that of the French marquis, depictinghumans with a kind of ‘cruelty’ that could be felt ‘in the flesh and blood’(1968a [1965]: 128). At the end of the text, Giotto then suddenly becomesDante and, just as suddenly, the essay’s narrative voice ^ ‘he’ ^ mergeswith the poet. ‘He, Dante Alighieri’ realizes that his attempt to rewrite theAuschwitz trials using Dante’s tripartite structure failed (1968a [1965]: 141).




However, there is more at stake in this brief passage than the inabilityto translate Dante’s theological frame into a secular one. And what is atstake concerns again the ethics of the post-Holocaust aesthetic that centerson the image of Beatrice and her death ‘in our world’ ^ Beatrice whom,Weiss repeats, he betrayed. If we pay close attention to Weiss’s choice ofwords in the following sentences, we find again traces of Orpheus. By cele-brating the dead Beatrice in his art,Weiss writes, he/Dante only celebratedhimself ^ after having ‘turned away from her’ (Weiss, 1968a [1965]: 141).The original German expression (er hatte sich von ihr abgewandt) impliesa bodily moving away, that is, a movement that also involves the act of look-ing away.19 At this point in the text, we start to wonder whether we aremoving on the terrain of Dante or Ovid and Virgil. He ‘left her’, Weisswrites, ‘where she was’ ^ words that resonate with the moment whenOrpheus abandons Eurydice, leaving her in the world of the dead (1968a[1965]: 141). But then Weiss re-enters Dantean territory, writing of prayerand (false) hopes for redemption, before ¢nishing the sentence by evokingin the reader’s mind the image of a dying woman and her wounded, bleed-ing body (1968b [1965]: 141).

At the core of this passage is the transformation of Beatrice’s imagefrom Dante’s theological aesthetics into Weiss’s Orphic post-Holocaust art,from disembodied allegory into the image of her abandoned, dying body.Thus the very first image that this post-Dantean author’s artistic imagina-tion engenders is the image of a dying woman. And it rewrites Orpheus’act of abandonment. Yet, instead of turning his eyes away from Beatrice/Eurydice, the post-Holocaust author’s gaze becomes fixed on her bloodiedbody ^ and so does ours.

This moment describes the return of the Orphic gaze ^ a moment thatWeiss repeats obsessively throughout these texts. By focusing on this partic-ular moment with Giotto’s Sadean images that are as cruel as the crueltythey depict,Weiss takes an enormous ethical risk, of being accused of aes-theticizing, exploiting or even sensationalizing suffering.20 It is a risk he iswilling to take, but only because he believes in what he calls Dante’s ‘capac-ity for love’ (Weiss, 1968b [1965]: 158).This is love as political ethics, involv-ing the poet’s spontaneous ‘sympathy for human e¡orts to make life morebearable’ (1968b [1965]: 158).21 WhatWeiss reads in Dante’s poem is a phi-losophy akin to his own Marxist existentialism, centered on the ‘necessityto choose, to make a decision’ (1968b [1965]: 159). In his conversationabout Dante, Weiss approached the tension between empathy and the pro-duction of images from yet another angle. Dante, secure in his knowledgethat ‘redemption’ exists, follows his path through hell, representing su¡eringwhile keeping the emotional distance that this aesthetic practice requires.Yet at times Dante’s distance falters and the poet faints, ‘closing his eyes’(1968b [1965]: 145). This is Weiss’s rejoinder to Adorno’s (often misunder-stood) dictum about the writing of poetry after Auschwitz. ‘This seeminglyinconceivable [event]’, Weiss wrote in the same essay, ‘has to be described




as precisely as possible’ (1968b [1965]: 147). Not to look at the images of suf-fering is not an option ^ neither for the author nor his audience.22

Sebald thought of Weiss as an author guarding the memory of thedead, defining his predecessor’s entire oeuvre, his paintings and literarytexts, as a visit to the dead. This was, Sebald thought, a profoundly ethicalproject whose ‘reconstruction[s] of the concrete hour of suffering’ wereborn of ‘Mitleidenschaft’ or a ‘passionate suffering-with’ (2003a: 130).Weiss’s ‘depictions of the most horrendous crimes, at times culminating inscenarios of the doom of a barbarian civilization’, Sebald argued, involvedthe experience of pain on the part of the artistic subject ^ ultimately leadingto the latter’s death (2003a: 130). Yet Sebald also problematizes Weiss’sethics of authorship. ForWeiss’s art of passionate suffering-with, he pointedout, exhibited at times a kind of ‘morbid . . . interest’ or even ‘sadomasochis-tic preoccupation’ (2003a: 136 and 146).

I understand Sebald as a post-Weissian author, a non-Jewish Germanauthor who ^ profoundly aware of this difference ^ reinvented a Weissianpoetics of memory and suffering. Like most genuine reinventions, Sebald’sproduces significant deviations from the model. First, Sebald’s post-Weissian poetics involved a mimetic proximity to the Jewish characters.23

Second, in Sebald’s work,Weiss’s Marxism becomes a metaphysical historiacalamitatum.24 Third, Sebald avoidsWeiss’s ‘morbidity’, forgoing images ofdeath and su¡ering when writing directly about the victims of theHolocaust.25 Sebald understands Weiss’s fascination with Dante’s DivinaCommedia. Weiss, he wrote, was attracted by the Dantean model’s eschato-logical history because of the ‘metaphysical dimension’of the Nazis’ genocide(something that he calls ‘non-instrumental evil’ was involved in the progres-sion from capitalist ‘using-up of labor’ to the ‘perversion of the fascist con-centration camps’ [2003a: 145]). In an age that has left all hope inredemption behind, Sebald argued, cultural production remains foreverlinked to this historia calamitatum (2003a: 146). In this spirit, Sebalddepicts Manchester in The Emigrants as Auschwitz; at the end of thenovel, the journey through the underworld takes him from Manchester toLodz, the ‘Polish Manchester’, and then fascist Litzmannstadt (1996: 235).Returning a second time to Manchester, the narrator renews his acquain-tance with Ferber, who leaves him his mother’s manuscript. Having readthis account of Jewish life in Germany in the voice of a woman, the narra-tor decides to travel to Kissingen, searching for traces of the former syna-gogue and exploring the town’s neglected Jewish cemetery, where he ¢nallydiscovers a gravestone dedicated to Lily Lanzberg, the author of the manu-script. Upon his arrival in Manchester he hears that Ferber has fallen ill,visits him in a hospital, and then makes his way through the derelict quar-ters of Hulme to the Midland Hotel.

The hotel is in an advanced state of dilapidation, and the narrator set-tles in on the fifth floor in a kind of ‘glass pulpit above the abyss’ (Sebald,1996: 352). Entering this hotel ‘on the brink of ruin’, the narrator writes,felt like arriving in a Polish town (1996: 233 and 350). Sitting above the




abyss, he recalls an exhibition of photographs about the Litzmanstadt ghettowhich he saw in 1989, and the text ends with him being confronted by thegaze of a young woman. She belongs to a group of women who are shownworking at a loom:

The light falls on them from the window in the background, so I cannotmake out their eyes clearly, but I sense that all three of them are lookingacross at me, since I am standing on the very spot where . . . the accountantstood with his camera. The young woman in the middle is blond. . . .Theweaver to her left has inclined her head a little to one side, whilst thewoman on the right is looking at me with so steady and relentless a gazethat I cannot meet it for long. (1996: 237)

The narrator names the three women: they are the Fates, ‘the daughters ofnight, with spindle, scissors and thread’ ^ a deadly threat to the one lookingat them (1996: 237). I propose to read this scene in the Orphic context.Recall Eurydice’s lament: ‘See, once again/The cruel Fates are calling meback and darkness/Falls on my swimming eyes.’ After Eurydice’s seconddeath, the Fates are left and Orpheus’ gaze discerns them behind the vanish-ing outlines of his lover.

Again, the English translation elides allusions to an intertext of greatimportance in this section. The hotel’s ‘glass pulpit above the abyss[Abgrund]’ refers to Georg Luka¤ cs’ notorious polemic against the theoristsof the Frankfurt School, ‘Grand Hotel ‘‘Abgrund’’ ’ [Grand Hotel ‘Abyss’].Written in 1933, the essay analyzes the disintegration of bourgeois ideology‘into the ideology of despair’ (1984 [1933]: 183). Attributing this ‘process ofdecline’ to the moment when the crisis of capitalism reaches its stage of ‘bar-barism’, Luka¤ cs argues that this process will not ‘automatically’ positionEurope’s intelligentsia on the side of the proletariat (1984 [1933]: 183). Onthe contrary, he writes, ‘on the path from the separation from the bourgeoi-sie to the arrival at the side of the proletariat there are many . . .way stations’(1984 [1933]: 183). Luka¤ cs then elaborates on his metaphor of the intelligent-sia’s (revolutionary) path:

And these way stations are furnished in such a way that they capture a largepart of the intelligentsia ^ in a state of chronic despair, at the edge of theabyss . . . no longer willing to continue along the path. Or better: the intelli-gentsia still performs the gesture of continuing to move along this radicalpath; it even has the ^ often honest ^ impression that it is moving in a rad-ical direction. But objectively, it is moving . . . in circles. (1984 [1933]: 183;italics added)

Sebald rewrites this path as a journey through the underworld ^ and, as inWeiss, this underworld is the (post-)fascist present. At the end of the jour-ney, the Fates are waiting ^ for the authorial subject and this world ‘calmly’drifting toward decay (1996: 263). Having arrived at the Midland Hotel,Sebald’s narrator is witness to the end of an inexorable process of decay.26




Contrasting the Frankfurt School’s false radical gesture with theorganic intellectual’s authentic revolutionary stance, Luka¤ cs offered achoice: the ‘plunge into the abyss of despair’ or the ‘leap’ into the ‘camp ofthe revolutionary proletariat’ and a ‘future filled with light’ (1984 [1933]:188). Sebald did not opt for Luka¤ cs’ shining path; he chose the Midlandand the gesture of standing-still. In fact, he makes this position the veryfoundation of his authorship.27 As we have seen, this is a very particularmoment of standing-still: the moment when Orpheus’ gaze has lostEurydice from sight and his eyes are resting on the Fates. Since one ofthem returns his gaze, the act of killing Eurydice is followed by the threatof Orpheus’ own death. Engaging with Luka¤ cs’ ¢erce polemic, Sebald thusinsists on the ‘radical gesture’, leaving his narrator in a state of chronicdespair, at the edge of the abyss ^ an Orphic ¢gure suspended in grief andready to die.28

A few concluding remarks before I gather the fragments of the Orphicstory in Janina Bauman’s writing. Sebald chose not to include the photo-graph from the Lodz ghetto, but instead has the narrator evoke in the read-er’s mind a shadowy picture of three women who are no longer alive.Motivated by a desire to restore dignity to the victims, Sebald’s viseogra-phies frequently evoke such haunting and sometimes beautiful images ofwomen ^ just think of the photograph which is or is not Austerlitz’smother. These black and white photographs are an integral part of hismemory-project, their ‘gray zones’ readable as ‘the territory that is locatedbetween death and life’ (Itkin, forthcoming). But they might also under-mine this memory-project. For if Weiss, with his morbid, if not sadomas-ochistic, reveling in images of atrocities risks robbing the victims of theirdignity, then Sebald, with his beautiful images, risks a kind of elegiacHolocaust kitsch.29

‘. . . On the Brink of Life’: Janina Bauman’sPost-Orphic AuthorshipSo what are the traces of the Orphic story in Janina Bauman’s writing?And, more intriguingly, is there something we could call Orphic authorshipin this woman author’s texts? I will begin with a cursory look at theOrphic/Dantean traces in Janina and Zygmunt Bauman’s autobiographicaltexts and statements. Anyone familiar with Zygmunt Bauman’s life andwork knows that he started thinking about the modernity of the Holocaust,about anti-Semitism and the ethics of the other, when Janina Baumanbroke her silence about surviving in Nazi-occupied Poland, writing herfirst autobiographical text, Beyond These Walls: Escaping the WarsawGhetto (2006 [1986]). This is the touching story of an emotional and intel-lectual bond so strong that the word ‘muse’ does not entirely captureJanina Bauman’s role. Nor does it let us imagine the work of connectinglife experience to the Orphic myth, whose fragments surface in some oftheir texts. Janina Bauman explicitly mentions this literary trope only




a single time, when she describes taking the subway on her journey toLondon’s ‘wilderness’ in 1958: ‘We traveled back on the tube ^ somethingof an Orpheus in the underworld’ (1988: 136). A kind of amused after-thought, the line speaks of ‘we’ and ‘Orpheus’, intriguingly leavingEurydice’s shade out of sight.

Her allusion to Dante/Orpheus in Beyond These Walls is more indi-rect. Bauman was a survivor who expected to die. She talked about thismoment in a striking passage in which she used the trope of the inferno:‘Time stopped, life seemed to be coming to an end, we could only pray tobe swallowed up by the inferno quickly and painlessly’ (2006 [1986]: 33).Narrating the German storming of Warsaw in 1939, Bauman frames theepisode as a descent into ‘the space of that dark, stagnant time’ (2006[1986]: 33). Once in that space, she was ‘taken by the hand and led throughthe underground labyrinth up to a deserted ground-floor shop’ (2006[1986]: 33):

I was suddenly dazzled by tremendous light, deafened by a mixture of weirdsounds. . . . An immense wall of flame stood in front of the shop’s brokenwindow. . . .We stood in perfect emptiness, Artek and I, out of the humanworld, on the brink of life. . . .We did not utter a word. Just stayed thereenthralled by the flames, for hours and hours, or maybe for a few secondsonly, I do not know. Then we kissed, the first kiss of my life and his. Andthe last ^ we believed. (2006 [1986]: 33; italics added)

The descent into hell, the loving couple, the woman being led through thisdark space, the experience of being on the brink of life ^ all these bits andpieces of the story resonate loudly with the Orphic myth.The jarring succes-sion of two sentences ^ ‘We just waited to die’ and ‘So we were all alive’(2006 [1986]: 33 and 34) ^ in the following paragraph capture the depth ofthis experience of being on the brink of death.

Janina Bauman survived this inferno and moved to the ghetto, cross-ing the divide that separated this new hell from ‘the ‘‘Aryan’’ side’ and leav-ing Artek behind (2006 [1986]: 47). The section on the Warsaw ghettouprising contains a similar scene. Again, we find her hidden in a cellar‘idly waiting for death’ (2006 [1986]: 204). Yet this experience has an evenmore traumatic effect, utterly shattering her memories of the days: ‘what Ireally saw and heard and what was told later, I honestly cannot say’ (2006[1986]: 206). Bauman knows that her mother and aunt led her ‘throughsmoldering ruins, along dark passages, up and down mountains of rubble’back to the relative safety of an ‘unfamiliar cellar’ where she spent weeks,sick and semi-conscious as ‘darkness descended on [her]’ (2006 [1986]:206^7).

Zygmunt Bauman takes up the trope of inferno in his acceptancespeech for the European Amalfi Prize (in 2000), referring to Janina’stime in the ghetto as ‘the inner circle of the man-made inferno’ (2000[1989]: 208). Two years later, Zygmunt Baumann spells out the Orphic




myth’s topography in an interview, concluding his brief autobiographicalaccount about his service in the Polish Army with the following sentences:‘That’s how it was. I was in Poland during the Warsaw uprising, my regi-ment was on one side of the river, Janina on the other’ (2002: 113). ToZygmunt Bauman’s terse summary of the situation in 1945 JaninaBauman then added: ‘We didn’t know each other then. All the same Iprayed to him: please takeWarsaw’ (2002: 113).

Let me gather the bits and pieces of the Orphic story that have sur-faced so far: with respect to the Orphic topography, we have the frequentuse of the inferno on the one hand; on the other hand, we have a river divid-ing the almost-dead from the living.That is, Janina Bauman’s story situatesEurydice in hell. And then we have the different figurations of Eurydice ^the woman being led from the inferno by her mother and aunt or thewoman waiting to be rescued ^ the Orphic topography of love and death,the underworld of the ghetto, the river dividing world and underworld, andthe woman, who was doomed to die, the man who might or might not saveher.What I want to draw attention to is the fact that Janina Bauman takeshold of particular moments in Eurydice’s story: the moment of dangerwhen Eurydice is about to die, the moment of being about-to-be rescued,the moment of being rescued.

The Baumans’ brief exchange about having been located on the oppo-site shores of the river in 1944 touches on one of the most sensitive topicssurrounding the Warsaw ghetto uprising, that is, whether the Red Armyand the Polish Army should have come to the help of the insurgents.Janina Bauman herself writes about this conflict in her second novel,A Dream of Belonging (1988), which begins with two characters, Tom andHelena, whose story includes again the Orphic topography of world andunderworld divided by the river Styx.30 Janina Bauman (who stated in theinterview that the Nazis made her ‘a Jew in the ghetto’ [2002: 114]), endedher story with the couple’s separation and the young woman’s return toWarsaw. When the couple reaches the house of Tom’s parents, his motherasks Helena to leave. She is not an anti-Semite, Bauman writes, but some-one who wants to ‘keep away from [ Jewish survivors] and not let the eviltaint [her] own tidy life’ (1988: 14). In the new Poland ‘Jews who have sur-vived the hell of the Holocaust’, Bauman suddenly understood, ‘are somehowsoiled, marked with su¡ering’ ^ and therefore ‘unwelcome’ (1988: 13^14).The story ends with the ‘unwanted stranger’ (1988: 15) returning toWarsaw, Bauman’s wording heavy with reference to the inferno:‘Struggling to overcome a wave of terror, she plunged back into the darkforest on her lonely way home’ (1988: 13). The story’s climactic moment ^Helena’s return to the city in darkness ^ again creates a ¢gure ‘on the verybrink of light’, on the threshold between life and death (Virgil, 1982: 141;italics added).31

Janina Bauman thus writes her autobiographical novels aboutEurydice, the survivor ^ Eurydice, who on the brink of life escaped from adeath she was convinced would be her fate ^ saved by the Red Army.




But what about Bauman’s reflections on her post-Holocaust authorship?Let’s consider again her slightly amused observation: ‘We traveled back onthe tube ^ something of an Orpheus in the underworld’ (1988: 136). Is thisnothing but a clever throw-away line, or does it reveal something abouther? The line speaks of we and Orpheus, intriguingly leaving Eurydice’sshade present, but out of sight. It is Janina Bauman, the author, whospeaks these lines ^ and about whom these lines speak. Or put differently,this is Eurydice who has become Orpheus, the poet. Elsewhere, Baumanwrites about her manuscript, the ‘exercise books and loose sheets’ whichshe will turn into her autobiography (2006 [1986]: 261). Barely recoveringfrom her traumatized state, she decides to hide her manuscript in an apart-ment inWarsaw. Beyond these Walls ends her story of survival on a trium-phant note when she recovers the manuscript ‘under the rubble of a half-ruined home’ (2006 [1986]: 261).

More intriguing yet is the small preface with which she openedA Dream of Belonging, Bauman’s Mandarins de la Varsovie, written inLeeds in 1987. Listen to her voice: ‘I look back puzzled, trying to under-stand’ (1988: n.p.).What she seeks to understand is her life, but also the sto-ryteller, the woman she once was and who is now the object of her gaze:‘I look at the storyteller from the distance of my present age’ (1988: n.p.).And then she concludes with one of the most beautiful and intelligent linesever written by a woman about her authorship: ‘She is a puzzle, thatwoman, to me. She has brought me here. Let her account for that’ (1988:n.p.). When I read these sentences what I hear is the confident and confi-dently self-authorized voice of a woman writer working with an establishedauthorial position: she ^ Orpheus ^ looks back at the woman who she oncewas ^ Eurydice ^ and their encounter will produce her text. With thesefew terse sentences, Bauman rethinks Simone de Beauvoir’s (1989 [1949])radical feminist thesis that one is not born a woman, but becomes one.She rethinks this insight by tracing a subject-in-process, operating at thedivide between subject and object and what counts as the particularity ofbeing a woman and the universality of being a man: one becomes womanby the gaze of the other and by assuming the gaze; by speaking in thevoice of the other and making it one’s own. Once a ‘career woman’ in com-munist Poland and a ‘housewife’ in her new place of exile (1988: 144), sheis now ‘writing in earnest’ (1988: 8). She ^ a subject that no longer obeysour notions of what is feminine and what is masculine.32

Doing so, she does not stand on firm terrain ^ England and the housein Leeds is her ‘home’, but she does not ‘belong’ to a single place (1988:285).This is Orpheus, the exile, embedded in her dense network of relation-ships that are defined by love: ‘to belong means to love and be loved’(2006: 285). We might be tempted to subsume this statement under thefacile rubric of feminine essentialism, advocating a politics of ethics basedon female virtues. It is indeed a politics of ethics, but in my opinion it iscloser to the political ethics that de Beauvoir had in mind in her 1950sessay on de Sade. In ‘Must We Burn Sade?’ she observed that de Sade




echoes today, because he chose cruelty instead of indifference (1972 [1951,1952]: 60); and because of his focus on the cruelty of ‘nature’ with hisemphasis on ‘the selfishness, tyranny and crime in sexuality’ (1972 [1951,1952]: 43). To assert the evilness of (human) nature, however, is nothingnew. Hobbes immediately comes to mind. What set de Sade aside fromthis tradition of negative anthropology is his implicit call for an ethicalchoice. Man, in de Sade’s writing, is not ‘nature’: ‘Once man is created’, deBeauvoir quotes de Sade, ‘he is no longer dependent upon nature’ (1972[1951, 1952]: 44). Moral decisions are his to make.33

What is intriguing is where this reading of de Sade’s ethics takes her: deSade was cursed by a kind of ‘autism’ preventing him from ‘being genuinelyawareof the realityof theother person’ (1972 [1951,1952]: 25). His contributionis not somemetaphysical concept of ‘nature’, but his analysis of the logic of hissociety, a bourgeois society of separated individuals living under the veil ofvirtue.34DeBeauvoir’sdensereadingofdeSade’spolitics^withall itscontradic-tions ^ leadsher to assess his signi¢cancewith an eye towardherownpolitics ofethics.The real lesson to be drawn from de Sade is the following: ‘If ever wehope to transcend the separateness of individuals’, de Beauvoir wrote, withNazism and Stalinism inmind, ‘we do so only on condition that we be aware ofits existence’ (1972 [1951,1952]: 61). If wedon’t then‘promises of happiness andjustice conceal theworstdangers’ (1972 [1951,1952]: 61):

Sade drained to the dregs the moment of selfishness, in justice, and misery,and he insisted upon its truth. The supreme value of his testimony is thefact that it disturbs us. It forces us to re-examine thoroughly the basic prob-lem which haunts our age in different forms: the true relation betweenman and man. (1972 [1951, 1952]: 61; italics added)

Written at the beginning of the 1950s, we can safely assume that deBeauvoir believed the solution to be the creation of a new society, whichwould in turn create the conditions of possibility for love as the definingfeature of the relation between man and man, not ‘cruel and voracious’nature (1972 [1951, 1952]: 44). And this new society would change the rela-tions between man and woman. My hunch is that Janina Bauman, aformer communist, sympathized with de Beauvoir’s political vision whenshe wrote her Dream of Belonging. But I might be wrong.

The Ethics of the Backward GlanceZygmunt Bauman does not seem to be too taken with de Sade. He is defi-nitely not fond of Hobbes and his concept of human nature as inherentlyaggressive. Indeed, his entire program of a new politics of ethics is anti-Hobbesian at its core. Bauman also does not subscribe to the idea thatmorality is socially produced. To these views, he opposes his Levinasianapproach, founded on the idea of an ethical predisposition toward the




other.The ethico-political project which drivesModernity and the Holocaust(2000 [1989])is inextricably tied to the Orphic trope.

Reading Bauman’s preface to Modernity and the Holocaust andthe sections dealing with a post-Holocaust ethics, I was struck by the rhetor-ical dimension of his writing, the frequent emphasis on acts of looking.Acknowledging his debt to his ‘life-long friend and companion’,Zygmunt Bauman wrote in his Amalfi Prize Lecture: ‘Winter in theMorning . . .opened my eyes to what we normally refuse to look upon’(2000 [1989]: 208).35 As mentioned above, this opposition between hinsehenand wegsehen, that is, looking at the genocidal fascist past or turning one’sgaze away from it, is part and parcel of the visual imagination of post-Holocaust culture. But should we be content with the categorization of thischoice of words as a more or less generic formula? I don’t think so, espe-cially not if we pay close attention to the book’s preface. Here, Baumanrewrites this moment of the opening-of-his-eyes, this time with a di¡erentvisual metaphor: the transformation of the Holocaust from a ‘picture on thewall’ to a ‘window’, giving him insight into Janina’s world (2000 [1989]: viiand viii). This Wittgensteinian gesture comes with a spatio-temporal map-ping, which returns us to the Orphic topography of Warsaw in 1944, sepa-rating Janina’s world of the dead and dying from his world of the living.Let me quote the opening lines from Bauman’s preface, in which he ¢rstmentions that Janina thanked him ‘for putting up with her protractedabsence during the two years of writing, when she dwelled again in thatworld ‘‘that was not his’’ ’ (2000 [1989]: vii). He then explained Janina’sstriking phrase:

Indeed, I escaped that world of horror and inhumanity, when it reached outto the most remote corners of Europe. And like so many of mycontemporaries, I never tried to explore it after it vanished from earth, leav-ing it to linger in the haunted memory and never-healing scars of thosewhom it bereaved or wounded.

I knew, of course, of the Holocaust. I shared my image of the Holocaustwith so many other people of my own and younger generations: a horriblecrime, visited by the wicked on the innocent. A world split into mad mur-derers and helpless victims, with many others helping the victims whenthey could. . . . In that world murderers murdered because they were madand wicked. . . .Victims went to the slaughter because they were no matchto the powerful . . . enemy. The rest of the world could only watch, bewil-dered and agonized, knowing that only the final victory of the alliedarmies . . . could bring an end to human suffering. (2000 [1989]: vii)

Bauman concludes with the following observation: ‘It dawned on me that Idid not really understand what had happened in that ‘‘world which was notmine’’ ’ (2000 [1989]: vii).

We know the conclusions Bauman drew from this new look back atthe Holocaust: that this era of death and destruction was not a Jewish orGerman affair, a sideline of European history and dark moment located




outside of European modernity. And that it was not a moment in historywhen the civilizing process broke down, leaving sadists in charge. TheHolocaust, he insisted ^ against Elias and with Adorno, Horkheimer andArendt ^ was the ‘horrifying yet legitimate product’ of our modern civiliza-tion and its particular rationality (2000 [1989]: x).

But again, let us pay closer attention to the rhetorical figurations ofthis passage, especially the dividing lines that Bauman draws. First, theworlds of the past: Bauman begins with a world that was Janina’s and nothis. The world that was his is not named as such, but emerges from thedescription of what he refers to as a world that ‘split’ victims from mur-derers. This ‘split’ world also included bystanders, again split between thosewho helped the victims and those ‘who could only watch, bewildered andagonized’. It is here that the author’s text becomes personal, becauseBauman indirectly refers to the Red and Polish armies camped across theriver. It also here that Bauman again introduces a visual dimension, theact of watching the Germans’ attack in bewilderment and agony. I do notpresume to psychoanalyse the author; rather, my aim is to trace the permu-tations of the story of Eurydice and Orpheus in this text. However, I thinkit is safe to assume that Bauman connects the initial refusal to ‘explore[the world of horror and inhumanity] after it vanished’, his refusal to lookthrough the window at Janina’s world, to the first act of looking ^ in bewil-derment and agony.

Working on her book meant ‘div[ing] deep into the past, forgetting mypresent age’, Janina Bauman wrote in her introductory notes to Beyondthese Walls (2006 [1986]: n.p.). More than once, Zygmunt Bauman men-tioned that he had not lived through the Holocaust. And yet his preface toModernity and the Holocaust situates the book rhetorically as an act ofabandoning the position of the bewildered observer, a crossing of the riverto join Janina Bauman in her world. What he discovers on his journeythrough the inferno is love ^ or a new theory of ethics. In this underworldof modernity, Bauman observed, ‘morality may manifest itself in insubordi-nation towards socially upheld principles’ (2000 [1989]: 177). JaninaBauman had written about these small acts of insubordination, andHannah Arendt, reporting from Jerusalem in 1961, wrote about thishuman capacity to tell right from wrong ‘even when all they have to guidethem is their own judgment’ (in Bauman, 2000 [1989]: 177).

Bauman drew the conclusion that this moral capacity to act in a situa-tion where no ‘rules existed for the unprecedented’ (2000 [1989]: 177) ispre-societal, not pre-social in nature ^ to use Bauman’s phrase: ‘Moralbehavior is conceivable only in the context of coexistence, of ‘‘being withothers’’ ’ (2000 [1989]: 179). This behavior requires a transparent field ofvision, or what Bauman calls ‘immediacy of presence’ or ‘what we see inour immediate vicinity with the naked (unassisted) eye’ (2003: 96); it is soli-cited by the sight of the human face. Discarding societal origins of morality,Bauman first turns to Sartre and then Levinas as theorists of ‘the existen-tial condition of ‘‘being with others’’ ’ (2000 [1989]: 182). Why is Bauman




attracted to these models? Is it merely the cogency of Sartre’s and Levinas’sarguments about what it means to be a social being? In other words, is itBauman’s ethico-political project driving Modernity and the Holocaust ^that man is not born unethical, but becomes so ^ that inclines him towardsLevinas’s anti-Hobbesian anthropology? Or is the attraction also that theirmodels of human bonds can easily be imagined with Orpheus andEurydice in mind?

Here is Bauman’s summary of Sartre:

In Sartre, the other turns into alter ego . . . a subject like myself, endowedwith a subjectivity I can think of solely as a replica of the one I know frommy inner experience. . . . Alter ego does what I do; he thinks, he evaluates,he makes projects, and while doing all these he looks at me as I look athim. (2000 [1989]: 180^1)

In Sartre, these acts of looking curtail the subject’s freedom, who has changedfroma‘being formyself’ to a‘being for theother’:

By merely looking at me, the other becomes the limit of my freedom. Henow usurps the right to define me and my ends, thereby sapping my sepa-rateness and autonomy, compromising my identity and my being-at-homein the world. (2000 [1989]: 181)

While attracted to Sartre’s idea of the social conditions of existence,Bauman thinks that this model is still too close to the sociological theoriesof moral action as the effect of external constraint. The Sartrean unease atliving with/under the other’s gaze makes the other an ‘annoyance andburden’ (2000 [1989]: 181). Bauman prefers Levinas’s theory of ‘spontaneousmoral impulses’ (1996: 35), where being with the other produces responsibil-ity, not annoyance. In Levinas, Bauman explains, responsibility ‘is themode of the [other’s] presence, of [the other’s] proximity’ (2000 [1989]:182). More than that, it is the ‘fundamental structure of subjectivity’ (2000[1989]: 183): ‘Becoming responsible is the constitution of me as a subject’(2000 [1989]: 183).

Like Sartre’s being-with-others, Levinas’s understanding of the ‘tiewith the other’ has a strong specular dimension ^ the act of looking at theother’s face ^ which Bauman underscores by quoting Levinas’s text:

I analyze the inter-human relationship as if, in proximity with the Other ^beyond the image I myself make of the other man ^ his face, the expressiveof the Other (and the whole human body is in this sense more or less face),were what ordains me to serve him. (2000 [1989]: 183)

It doesn’t matter whether we know or do not know ‘how to assume’ thisresponsibility. ‘The face’, Levinas writes and Bauman quotes, ‘orders andordains me’ (2000 [1989]: 183).




The trajectory of Bauman’s chapter on ‘a sociological theory of moral-ity’ thus leads him from Hobbes’ postulate of originary hostility and theidea that the state forces us to be moral, to Arendt’s emphasis on thefreedom to act ethically, to Sartre’s recognition of the other ^ or self-as-seen-by-the-other ^ and his unease, to Levinas’s being-for-the-other.This theoretical trajectory culminates in a scopic scenario, the moment oflooking at the other. What is at stake in this scenario becomes clearer oncewe turn our attention to the unbridgeable gap between Levinas’s ethicalgaze and the gaze of the neo-Hobbesian Carl Schmitt. In Schmitt, the sce-nario of confronting the face of the other is a moment of recognition, whenthe subject distinguishes between friend and enemy, this ‘utmost degree ofintensity of a union or separation’ (Schmitt, 2007: 26). That is, Schmittfamously argued, he recognizes ‘the other, the stranger’ as ‘existentiallysomething di¡erent and alien’ (2007: 27), an other who negates ‘die eigeneArt Existenz’ [one’s own form of existence] (2007: 27). In doing so, the sub-ject constitutes itself as the subject of a sovereign political entity, making‘the decision about the critical situation’ or moment of danger (Schmitt,2007: 38). Based on his Catholic version of Hobbes’ negative anthropology,Schmitt argued that the real meaning of the friend^enemy concept residedin the fact that it referred to ‘the real possibility of physical killing’ (2007:33).36 Bauman’s investment in Levinas ^ in a gaze that does not recognizein order to kill ^ runs deep. In Modernity and the Holocaust Baumanappropriates the French philosopher’s ethics to make the case that, in theextreme case of fascist modernity, ‘the universality of human revulsion tomurder’ (Bauman, 1989: 185) is attenuated if not inhibited.37

Let’s return to Levinas’s scenario of seeing the other’s face. As inSchmitt’s case, this is also a moment of recognition, but of a very differentkind: it is the moment when the subject comes into being as it looks at theother’s face and has to confront his/her responsibility. I wondered abovewhy Bauman was attracted to Levinas’s theory of the ethical subject. Thatis, I asked whether his ethico-political project led him to Levinas, orwhether it was the fact that the latter’s models of human bonds somehowconjured the ghosts of Orpheus and Eurydice. As it turns out, the two areinextricably linked. Let me pose this as a question: if, as I argued earlier,we read Bauman’s theorizing in Modernity and the Holocaust in Orphicterms, as joining Janina Bauman on her journey back to the underworldof the Warsaw ghetto, then what is happening to the Orphic gaze in thischapter on ethics? Bauman, I propose, rewrites the drama of the secondgaze, reimagining Orpheus’ gaze, the look that kills as a loving gaze. Put dif-ferently, his search for a non-Hobbesian anthropology and ethics allowshim to re-connect with a story that so obviously fascinated him.

Moreover, Modernity and the Holocaust lays the groundwork forBauman’s construction of his authorship as Orphic, which emerges fullyformed in his polemical treatise on the frailty of human bonds, LiquidLove (2003), in which Bauman examines love without bonds. Witty andhugely entertaining, with its savage attacks on contemporary conceptions




and practices of love, Liquid Love is also a profoundly Romantic book, anostalgic celebration of the deeper bonds eroded by liquid modernity, oftheir ‘gravity’ (2003: 22) and their radical openness toward the future.More significantly, Bauman passionately defends love, rewriting it as an eth-ical commitment on the uncertain ground of modernity. ‘When there aretwo, there is no certainty’, Bauman writes, ‘and when the other is recognizedas the fully fledged ‘‘second,’’ a sovereign second, not a mere extension, oran echo ^ the uncertainty is acknowledged’ (2003: 19).38

Love ^ the recognition of the other as sovereign ^ has no firmerground than anything else. Under the conditions of liquid modernity ‘uncer-tainty is the ground of the moral person’ (2003: 93) ^ in matters of loveand in matters of politics. Arguing his new politics of ethics, Baumanmoves in Liquid Love from Levinas to Kant, pleading to continue thesearch ‘for common humanity and the practice that follows such an assump-tion’ (2003: 156). In ‘Grand Hotel Abgrund’, Luka¤ cs sounded the alarmabout the temptation to settle at the edge of the abyss ^ and we saw Sebaldliteralizing Luka¤ cs’ metaphor, making himself at home in the ruins of‘Hotel Abgrund’ at the end of his journey through the underworld. Luka¤ cs’solution to the shaky grounds of solid modernity was to ‘leap’ across theabyss into the camp of the proletariat. For a while, Peter Weiss followedLuka¤ cs’ advice, fascinated by this decisionist act. Indulging in socialist real-ist kitsch, Luka¤ cs called this leap from a rotting, dying culture into a newlife, a ‘salto vitale into a future filled with light’ (1984 [1933]: 188). This isthen Bauman’s salto vitale: standing on liquid modernity’s ever more uncer-tain ground, he rewrites the pivotal Orphic moment, the moment ofdanger ^ or pace Schmitt, the Ernstfall ^ as the instant when Orpheus rec-ognizes Eurydice, when his loving gaze separates her from all others andrecognizes her as a sovereign ^ as the author of her own story.

AcknowledgementsAs always, I would like to thank my dear colleague and companion, George Steinmetz, forhis comments and suggestions.

Notes1. Or Charlotte Delbo, who wrote in Auschwitz and After: ‘[T]hey think theyhave arrived in Hell/And yet they did not believe in it. / They had no idea youcould take a train to Hell’ (1995: 4). Hannah Arendt, who analyzed the camps inher Origins of Totalitarianism as sites where ‘the process of dying itself’ wasgiven ‘permanence’ (1994 [1950]: 443), used and problematized the ‘image of hell’(1994 [1946]: 198).

2. What Aeneas learns during his sojourn in orcus is the (future) history of theRoman Empire and Feldherr (1999) convincingly connects this topographicalfeat to the empire’s mapping of its world. The sharpest boundary drawn is theone between the Romans (moving west, away from their ‘Oriental’ origins) andDido’s Carthaginians, ‘persistently Oriental’ (Reed, 2007: 73).




3. On this topic, see Alan Itkin’s excellent study ‘ ‘‘Eine Art Eingang zurUnterwelt’’: Katabasis in Austerlitz’, where he argues that ‘Sebald’s texts writethe present as underworld’ (forthcoming). The essay draws on a dissertation inwhich Itkin traces the correspondences between Sebald’s travel narratives and abody of classical literary and historiographical texts (including texts by Homer,Virgil, Livy, among others), focusing on the tropes of nekuia, ekphrasis, andkatabasis.

4. In the German edition, the name is Max Aurach, a character based on the pain-ter Frank Auerbach.

5. On Sebald’s metaphysics, see Huyssen (2003).

6. Weiss’s family left Berlin in 1938. Their journey into exile led from London toSweden, whereWeiss lived until his death in 1982.

7. Weiss was part of a fact-finding delegation headed by the state prosecutor, FritzBauer (see Brink, 1998: 125). Together with Bernd Naumann’s daily reports inthe Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (see Naumann, 1966), the trials brought thereality (and the images) of the Holocaust back intoWest Germany’s public sphere.

8. See Hell (2004b: 26). CompareAgamben’s discussion of the unbearable sight ofthe Muselmann (1999: 50^1).

9. Weiss operates within the framework of the allies’ politics of confrontation. Onthis strategy and its after-effects, see Knoch (2001) and most recently, SolGoldstein (2009).

10. On Marx and Dante seeWheen (2006).Thus the reaction to the play was oftenhostile, raising for Weiss the issue of authorial legitimacy. In other words, howcan he construct a speaking position that authorizes his story about the past?

11. Weiss visited Germany briefly in 1945 as a journalist. His novel,The Shadowof the Body of the Coachman (in Weiss, 1998 [1965]), was hailed as one of the¢rst German nouveaux romans. By the early 1960s, he was integrated into WestGermany’s in£uential literary circle, Gruppe 47. His Marat/Sade (1998 [1965])then brought him international fame as a playwright.

12. Weiss wrote in his notebooks, ‘Bea/Lili hatte einen, der noch versuchte, sierauszukriegen’ (wie ich 1940 versuchte, Lucie aus Theresienstadt herauszubekom-men, mit dem Angebot, sie zu heiraten)’ [Bea/Lili still had someone who tried toget her out (like I tried to get Lucie out of Theresienstadt in 1940 with the offerto marry her)] (1982: 306^7).

13. That is,Weiss’s part in the death of his friend, Lucie; a passage in the unpub-lished drafts about Dante/the author, imagining himself in a mass grave withLucie, hints at the poet’s identification with the dead (Peter-Weiss-Archiv,Akademie der Kˇnste, Berlin, folder 15).

14. When Dante/Weiss finally steps behind the rostrum, having beennamed as the Jewish other becomes the very foundation of his authorship.On Weiss‘s Sartrean conception of Jewish identity, see Heidelberger-Leonhard(1992: 58).

15. What Laokoon tells its German audience is a story of liberation from a traumathat was inflicted on the speaker and the story of the re-appropriation of the lan-guage from which the speaker was ‘expelled’ (Weiss, 1982: 320). For a reading of




Weiss’s speech see Hell (1999). On authorial performance and the confrontationwith camp images, see Hell (2002).

16. Performed simultaneously on 25 stages in West and East Germany on5 October 1965, this documentary drama uses the Divina Commedia as a framingdevice for the voices of the witnesses, taking the audience to the inferno’s verycenter in ‘Canto 11: The Fire Ovens’ (Weiss, 1998 [1965]: 277).

17. ‘I saw the girl laying dead on the floor’ and ‘Over to one side was Lily/with twoholes in her heart’ (1998 [1965]: 208).The latter witness is her lover who survivedher.

18. Heiner Mˇller is one among many who write about Orpheus’ ‘forbidden’ gaze(1997: 230).

19. See Maurice Blanchot’s use of ‘abwenden’ or turning-away in his Heideggerianreading of the myth: for Orpheus to turn the encounter with (or knowledge of)death at the heart of our existence into art, he has to turn away from Eurydice(Blanchot, 1997: 201).

20. On this topic, see Gillian Rose’s insightful remarks about the fascism of rep-resentation (1997: 54).

21. In the �esthetik desWiderstands, his epic on the resistance movement,Weissnarrates these ‘efforts’ with great pathos. At the end, he depicts the execution ofLibertas with clinical precision and narrates the death of Heilmann, the poetamong the resistance fighters, who imagines Libertas’s death in all its horrifyingdetails. The latter’s dying is an Orphic act of love. On this scene, see also Buch(2008).

22. In Germany, post-Holocaust discourses centrally revolve around this basicdichotomy of looking at versus looking away.

23. Sometimes this form of mimesis becomes problematic, collapsing the identi-ties of Jewish character and non-Jewish narrator.

24. According to Sebald,Weiss’s early work lacks any ‘eschatological perspective’,understanding history as a process of destruction that has become permanent, an‘underworld beyond nature’ (2003a: 130^1). Discussing the late Weiss, Sebalddetects an eschatological trace, characterizing the Aesthetics of Resistance as a‘chronicle of martyrdom’ (2003a: 147).

25. In Sebald’s work, there is no representation akin to Weiss’s description ofMuselm�nner in Vanishing Point. The Rings of Saturn, however, does contain aphotograph of the dead of Bergen-Belsen, spread across two pages, without anydiscussion of the photograph in the text (Sebald, 1998: 61). This is a gesture ofvisual confrontation, but one much less violent thanWeiss’s confrontations in hispublished and unpublished Dante material. The photograph of victims of the airraid on Hamburg in Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction is similar(2003b: 28). However, this text describes the victims in graphic detail. See Hell(2004a).

26. As my colleague, Fred Amrine, observed, as British artists once explored theruins of Rome on their Grand Tour, contemplating the lessons of empire, soSebald’s narrator now explores the ruins of the British Empire. Gibbon once opti-mistically declared that Rome’s fate will not be repeated. ‘Barbarism’ will notreturn. In The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn, Sebald traced the past and




present of barbarism in the ruins of European empires. On the imperial dimen-sion of Sebald’s historio-graphies and their anti-Hegelian thrust, see Presner(2007).

27. Writing in the wake of Weiss and Adorno, Sebald tends to lose sight of the lat-ter’s investment in post-Hegelian dialectics. In this he is paradoxically similar tohis opposite, Norbert Elias, who re-asserted the teleology of the civilizing process.Elias’s optimism ^ or simplification ^ is one of Bauman’s main targets.

28. These passages also establish authorship as an overdetermined act of writingunder the ( Jewish) other’s gaze. See Hell (2004b).

29. After all, ‘all other values’, including aesthetic ones, ‘are values only in so faras they serve human dignity and promote its cause’ (Z. Bauman, 2003: 82). OnOrphic ethics and the representation of women after the Holocaust, see GriseldaPollock (2001).

30. As ‘Warsaw lies in ruins’ ( J. Bauman, 1988: 8), the two stroll through thesuburb in which Tom’s family survived the war. Unlike Helena, he did not losehis relatives in the Holocaust, but he lost friends in the uprising. Bauman’s storyrevolves around two con£icts that characterized post-war Poland: between Polesand Russians, and between Jews and non-Jews. On their walk, Tom and Helenaencounter a Russian soldier. For Helena he is part of an army that had‘liberated . . .Poland just in time to save her life’ (1988: 10). Tom rages against‘the damned Bolsheviks’ who had ‘lain in wait on the opposite side of the river . . . -when theWarsaw insurgents were bleeding to death’ (1988: 10).

31. Zygmunt Bauman, who explained in the 2002 interview that he ‘felt [himself]to be Polish’ in 1945 and ‘only recognized [his] Jewishness in 1967’ (2002: 114),theorized the concept of the Jew as stranger in spatial terms, as ‘sitting astridean embattled barricade’ (1988: 10). In Modernity and the Holocaust, he writes:‘he is neither here nor there, he belongs neither inside nor outside. This thorn inthe body of modern society is directed against the kernel of the modern project;transparency, clarity, rationality’ (2000 [1989]: 116). This topography organizedaround a divide also captures the survivor, this being on the dividing line betweenlife and death, the experience of which is so hard to bear for Janina Bauman’scompatriots.

32. This is one of the moments when the object (or the Other) becomes subject.See de Beauvoir (1989: 139^40).

33. That de Sade then paradoxically recommends the ‘imitation of Nature’ and its‘spirit of destruction’ is something de Beauvoir (1972: 45 and 44) sets out toexplain, but is not of interest to us here.

34. De Sade understood ‘that the ideology of his time was merely the expressionof an economic system and that a concrete transformation of this system wouldput an end to the humbug of bourgeois morality’ (de Beauvoir, 1972: 48). Here,de Beauvoir edges close to Adorno’s reading of de Sade in terms of instrumentalrationality.

35. Janina Bauman’s book Beyond TheseWalls (2006 [1986]) was first publishedunder the titleWinter in the Morning.

36. Schmitt later counted himself among the existentialists: ‘Die einzige konkreteKategorie des Existentialismus habe ich gefunden: Freund und Feind’ [I found




the only concrete category of existentialism: friend and enemy] (1991: 199). LikeSartre, Schmitt theorized his friend^enemy concept in closer proximity toHegel’s master^slave chapter (where risking death is the price of recognition).How deep Schmitt’s Hobbesianism ran comes across on the last pages ofGlossarium, where he snidely refers to Hannah Arendt’s concept of a new begin-ning: ‘Mit jedem neugeborenen Kind wird eine neue Welt geboren. Um GottesWillen, dann ist ja jedes neugeborene Kind ein Aggressor!’ [With every newbornchild a new world is born. Oh my god, then every newborn child is an aggressor!](1991: 320).

37. While Hobbes figures on the margins in Modernity and the Holocaust,Bauman begins his discussion of ethics and politics under the conditions ofliquid modernity in Alone Again with Hobbes, structuring the text as a rebuttalof the philosopher’s ‘Homo homini lupus’ (1996: 1).

38. Listen to Bauman’s definition of love, of what it does: ‘wrenching an otherfrom ‘‘all the world’’, and through that act remoulding ‘‘an’’ other into the ‘‘quitedefinite someone’’, someone with a mouth to listen to, someone with whom to con-verse so that something may happen’ (1996: 20).

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Julia Hell is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University ofMichigan. Her current research focuses on scenarios of imperial ruingazing, from the Napoleonic era to the Third Reich. She is the co-editor ofRuins of Modernity (2009) and author of Post-Fascist Fantasies:Psychoanalysis, History, and the Literature of East Germany (1997). She isalso executive editor of The Germanic Review, where she recently published‘Katechon: Carl Schmitt’s Imperial Theology and the Ruins of the Future’(2009). [email: [email protected]]




modernity and the holocaust, or, listening to eurydice

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