Kristallnacht at Seventy-five
[ by Charles Cameron — of fire and light ]
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Since Zen tweeted a link to my own Armistice Day, Veterans Day post from last year and posted his own The Vietnam War at Fifty today, I’d going to skip back a day or two in my own calendar this time, and commemorate the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht, which fell on the night of November 9/10, 1938.
I believe this is a photo of the Hannover synagogue burning:
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I don’t know how we even begin to think about this.
George Steiner famously said “We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning” — and also observed, “The world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason” — and Adorno: “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric”.
Contemplating that photo of the burning of the Hannover synagogue, then, I am thrown back on a story told of the rabbi — a disciple of Rabbi Gershon — who came to visit the Baal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidic Judaism, and to whom that great master first revealed his spiritual station:
In the night the rabbi found no sleep. It seemed to him as if here and now the wonder of the far and the wonder of the near must flow together. In the middle of the night the command came to him, soundless and without form. He arose and went. Then he was already in the other chamber and saw: The chamber was filled with flames up to the height of a man. They rose dull and sombre, as if they were consuming something heavy, hidden. No smoke ascended from the fire, and all the furniture remained uninjured. But in the middle of the fire stood the master with uplifted forehead and closed eyes.
The rabbi saw further that a division had taken place in the fire which gave birth to a light, and the light was like a ceiling over the flames. The light was twofold. Underneath it was bluish and belonged to the fire, but above the light was white and unmoving and extended from around the head of the master unto the walls. The bluish light was the throne of the white, the white rested on it as on a throne. The colours of the bluish light changed incessantly, at times to black and at times to a red wave. But the light above never changed, it always remained white. . Now the bluish light became wholly fire, and the fire’s consuming became its consuming. But the white light that rested on it did not consume and had no community with the flame.
The rabbi saw that the head of the master stood entirely in the white light. The flames which leaped upward on the body of the master turned to light, and every little while the amount of light increased. At last all the fire became light. The blue light began to penetrate into the white, but every wave that penetrated itself became white and unchanging. The rabbi saw that the master stood entirely in white light. But over his head there rested a hidden light that was free of all earthly aspects and only in secret revealed to the beholder.
It was thus that the Baal Shem Tov become known to the wider world.
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If I might draw the moral here, suiting my tale (quoted from Martin Buber‘s The Legend of the Baal-Shem) to the occasion — there is fire that destroys, and there is light indestructible.
We choose, always we choose.
November 11th, 2013 at 11:06 pm
Hi Charles,
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It is interesting that murderousness is often signaled beforehand by vandalism.
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If one did not know the real nature of the Nazi regime after the passage of the Nuremburg Laws and the Night of the Long Knives it is hard to argue that the Nazis left any doubt after Kristallnacht. The Third Reich openly bared it’s teeth to the world like a vicious dog on a chain.
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The spirit of antisemitism is rising again in Europe, with Islamists, Fascists, and radical Leftists all agreeing on at least one thing, their hatred of Jews ( sometimes lightly masked in papers like The Guardian as “anti-zionism”)
November 12th, 2013 at 5:20 am
These issues have a long tail. Was only two weeks ago that Retired Army Col. Earl S. Browning died. He was the intelligence officer who fervently and strongly, but fruitlessly, objected to the employment of Klaus Barbie, the butcher of Lyon, as paid informant immediately after the war. He was hidden in a safe house for thee years and then given false papers and exfiltrated to Bolivia. He was tried, finally, in 1987 and the US involvement kept as quiet as possible. WashPo / TelegraphUK
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And as of last weekend news broke of the Gurlitt ‘hoard’ of 1,406 paintings in Munich — a complicated story of dispossession, deamonization, acquisition and concealment by many (possibly including the fabled US ‘Monuments Men’) that shadows the entire length of an horrific century in Germany. Spieglel’s English coverage. (Ironically Cornelius Gurlitt’s ‘the hoarder’s’ grandfather, Cornelius Gurlitt, 1850-1938, made proposals for new international rules to improve the protection of art and cultural property during war in a secretive 1915 conference of German and Austro-Hungarian political and military leaders). This story is moving so fast that it is only as of this evening that the German’s, in a joint announcement by the Finance Ministry, Culture Ministry and Bavarian Government, announced that any information would be released. Of the 1,406 works at least 380 of the works came from German museums legally under the ‘Degenerate Art,’ Entartete Kunst, Law of 1938 and were not ‘looted’ and 590,approximately 1/3rd. of the hoard,have been determined to have a ‘dubious origin.’ The unveiling begins with a ‘teaser’ list of 25 posted on the ‘Lost Art‘ database site.
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To give you an idea of the magnitude of the Gurlitt hoard; Paul Rosenberg, the leading French dealer of the day, claimed close to 700 works of art at war’s end.
November 12th, 2013 at 7:42 pm
Thanks, Michael.
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As I think I told you, I’ve been reading Noah Charney’s Stealing the Mystic Lamb, which references the 1907 Hague Regulations, art 27:
I gather that current international understandings include specific reference to non-international armed conflicts — something to consider in reference to depredations in Bamiyan, Timbuktu etc.
November 12th, 2013 at 9:59 pm
These questions arose during and after the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Bosnian War. There was no question at the time that the Serbs were deliberately targeting sites of specific cultural import to the Croats which included the destruction, or potential destruction, of buildings, manuscript and other materials from the period when the area had been under the control of Venice. That and the various tribunal settlements afterwards provided momentum for the passage of the 1999 protocol on ‘universal jurisdiction’ for conduct of belligerents in non-international conflicts.
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However, as with all such rules, there are questions of applicability to non signatories and the vexed questions of ‘arrest warrants,’ ‘universal jurisdiction’ et. al. which are not acceptable to some, particularly certain major states where international treaties and other agreements are not ‘self executing’ and have yet to be the subject of the necessary implementing legislation by the national legislature.
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In general this is a subject area where much that is published does not pay heed to praxis and the useful maxim, “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.”
November 12th, 2013 at 10:35 pm
For one example, the ‘UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property’, dated Nov. 17, 1970 to which the US was a signatory, only came into effect in US domestic law in January 1983. However as a matter of practice it has only been since June 4th 2008 that major US institutions retrospectively apply the 1970 date.
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This has lead to their being a whole class of objects whose undocumented export may, potentially, have been illegal but whose import into the US certainly was valid and which, prior to 2008, could be acquired by a US institution. Should US institutions return such to their countries of origin when they are demanded? Opinions and practice differ.