PASSAGES

SPRING | SUMMER 2024

I

TODAY IT IS HARD TO FORM AN EVEN PARTLY adequate idea of the extent of the devastation suffered by the cities of Germany in the last years of the Second World War, still harder to think about the horrors involved in that devastation. It is true that the strategic bombing surveys published by the Allies, together with the records of the Federal German Statistics Office and other official sources, show that the Royal Air Force alone dropped a million tons of bombs on enemy territory; it is true that of the 131 towns and cities attacked, some only once and some repeatedly, many were almost entirely flattened, that about 600,000 German civilians fell victim to the air raids, and that three and a half million homes were destroyed, while at the end of the war seven and a half million people were left homeless, and there were 31.1 cubic meters of rubble for every person in Cologne and 42.8 cubic meters for every inhabitant of Dresden— but we do not grasp what it all actually meant. The destruction, on a scale without historical precedent, entered the annals of the nation, as it set about rebuilding itself, only in the form of vague generalizations. It seems to have left scarcely a trace of pain behind in the collective consciousness, it has been largely obliterated from the retrospective understanding of those affected, and it never played any appreciable part in the discussion of the internal constitution of our country. As Alexander Kluge later confirmed, it never became an experience capable of public decipherment. 

In the summer of 1943, during a long heat wave, the RAF, supported by the U.S. Eighth Army Air Force, flew a series of raids on Hamburg. The aim of Operation Gomorrah, as it was called, was to destroy the city and reduce it as completely as possible to ashes. In a raid early in the morning of July 27, beginning at one A.M., ten thousand tons of high-explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped on the densely populated residential area east of the Elbe, comprising the districts of Hammerbrook, Hamm-Nord and Hamm-Süd, Billwerder Ausschlag and parts of St. Georg, Eilbek, Barmbek, and Wandsbek. A now familiar sequence of events occurred: first all the doors and windows were torn from their frames and smashed by high-explosive bombs weighing four thousand pounds, then the attic floors of the buildings were ignited by lightweight incendiary mixtures, and at the same time firebombs weighing up to fifteen kilograms fell into the lower stories. Within a few minutes, huge fires were burning all over the target area, which covered some twenty square kilometers, and they merged so rapidly that only a quarter of an hour after the first bombs had dropped the whole airspace was a sea of flames as far as the eye could see. Another five minutes later, at one-twenty A.M., a firestorm of an intensity that no one would ever have thought possible arose. The fire, now rising two thousand meters into the sky, snatched oxygen to itself so violently that the air currents reached hurricane force, resonating like mighty organs with all their stops pulled out at once. The fire burned like this for three hours. At its height, the storm lifted gables and roofs from buildings, flung rafters and entire advertising billboards through the air, tore trees from the ground, and drove human beings before it like living torches. Behind collapsing façades, the flames shot up as high as houses, rolled like a tidal wave through the streets at a speed of over a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour, spun across open squares in strange rhythms like rolling cylinders of fire. The water in some of the canals was ablaze. The glass in the tram car windows melted; stocks of sugar boiled in the bakery cellars. Those who had fled from their air-raid shelters sank, with grotesque contortions, in the thick bubbles thrown up by the melting asphalt. No one knows for certain how many lost their lives that night, or how many went mad before they died. When day broke, the summer dawn could not penetrate the leaden gloom above the city. The smoke had risen to a height of eight thousand meters, where it spread like a vast, anvil-shaped cumulonimbus cloud. A wavering heat, which the bomber pilots said they had felt through the sides of their planes, continued to rise from the smoking, glowing mounds of stone. Residential districts so large that their total street length amounted to two hundred kilometers were utterly destroyed. Horribly disfigured corpses lay everywhere. Bluish little phosphorous flames still flickered around many of them; others had been roasted brown or purple and reduced to a third of their normal size. They lay doubled up in pools of their own melted fat, which had sometimes already congealed. The central death zone was declared off-limits in the next few days. When punishment labor gangs and camp inmates could begin clearing it in August, after the rubble had cooled down, they found people still sitting at tables or up against walls where they had been overcome by monoxide gas. Elsewhere, clumps of flesh and bone or whole heaps of bodies had cooked in the water gushing from bursting boilers. Other victims had been so badly charred and reduced to ashes by the heat, which had risen to a thousand degrees or more, that the remains of families consisting of several people could be carried away in a single laundry basket.

Air Commodore E. J. Kingston-McCloughry, commenting on the terrible and deeply disturbing sight of the apparently aimless wanderings of millions of homeless people amidst this monstrous destruction, makes it clear how close to extinction many of them really were in the ruined cities at the end of the war. No one knew where the homeless stayed, although lights among the ruins after dark showed where they had moved in. This is the necropolis of a foreign, mysterious people, torn from its civil existence and its history, thrown back to the evolutionary stage of nomadic gatherers. Let us therefore imagine “the charred ruins of the city, a dark and jagged silhouette far away beyond the allotments, towering above the railway embankment,” and in front of them a landscape of low mounds of rubble the color of cement, with great clouds of dry, red-brick dust drifting over the lifeless surroundings, a single human figure poking about in the detritus, a tram stop in the middle of nowhere, people emerging suddenly and, as Böll writes, apparently out of nowhere, as if they had sprung from the gray scree, “invisibly, inaudibly … out of this void … ghosts whose path and whose goal could not be perceived: figures burdened with parcels and sacks, crates and cartons.” Let us go back with them to the city where they live, down streets where moraines of rubble reach up to the second floors of the burnt-out façades. We see people who have lit small fires in the open (as if they were in the jungle, writes Nossack), and are cooking their food or boiling up their laundry on those fires. We see stovepipes emerging from the remains of walls, smoke slowly dispersing, an old woman in a headscarf with a coal shovel in her hand. The Fatherland must have looked something like that in 1945. Stig Dagerman describes the lives of the cave dwellers in a city in the Ruhr: the unappetizing meals they concocted from dirty, wrinkled vegetables and dubious scraps of meat, the cold and hunger that reigned in those underground caverns, the evil fumes, the water that always stood on the cellar floors, the coughing children and their battered and sodden shoes. Dagerman describes schoolrooms in which the broken windowpanes were replaced by school slates, and where it was so dark that the children could not read the textbooks in front of them.

W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction

II

If then nature makes nothing without some end in view, nothing to no purpose, it must be that nature has made all of them for the sake of man. This means that it is according to nature that even the art of war, since hunting is a part of it, should in a sense be a way of acquiring property; and that it must be used both against wild beasts and against such men as are by nature intended to be ruled over but refuse; for that is the kind of warfare which is by nature just.

Aristotle, Politics

III

The people shall hear, and be afraid:
Sorrow shall take hold on the inhabitants of Palestina.
Then the dukes of Edom shall be amazed;
The mighty men of Moab, trembling shall take hold upon them;
All the inhabitants of Canaan shall melt away.
Fear and dread shall fall upon them:
By the greatness of thine arm they shall be as still as a stone;
Till thy people pass over, O Lord,
Till the people pass over, which thou hast purchased.
Thou shalt bring them in, and plant them in the mountain of thine inheritance,
In the place, O Lord, which thou hast made for thee to dwell in,
In the Sanctuary, O Lord, which thy hands have established.
The Lord shall reign for ever and ever.

THE KING JAMES BIBLE, Exodus 15:14-16

IV

Return from the War

Moses, Eleazar the priest, and all the leaders of the congregation went to meet them outside the camp. Moses became angry with the officers of the army, the commanders of thousands and the commanders of hundreds, who had come from service in the war. Moses said to them, “Have you allowed all the women to live? These women here, on Balaam’s advice, made the Israelites act treacherously against the Lord in the affair of Peor, so that the plague came among the congregation of the Lord. Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves. Camp outside the camp seven days; whoever of you has killed any person or touched a corpse, purify yourselves and your captives on the third and on the seventh day. You shall purify every garment, every article of skin, everything made of goats’ hair, and every article of wood.”

THE NEW REVISED STANDARD VERSION, Numbers 31.13-20

V

When you draw near to a town to fight against it, offer it terms of peace. If it accepts your terms of peace and surrenders to you, then all the people in it shall serve you at forced labor. If it does not submit to you peacefully, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the Lord your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword. You may, however, take as your booty the women, the children, livestock, and everything else in the town, all its spoil. You may enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you. Thus you shall treat all the towns that are very far from you, which are not towns of the nations here. But as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive.

NRSV, Deuteronomy 20:10-15

VI

The will to preservation, and that always means the will to enhance life and its lastingness, works essentially against decline and sees deficiency and powerlessness in what lasts only a short while.

On the contrary, for the inception of our history, for the Greeks, decline was unique, momentary, laudable, and great. Clearly, we have to distinguish here between decline while entering into something unique, and perishing while clinging fast to the ordinary. What is imperishable in the inception does not consist in the longest possible duration of its consequences nor in the furthest possible extension and breadth of its effects, but in the rarity and singularity of each varied return of what is originary within it. Hence we cannot experience the inception through mere historiological familiarity with what was before, but only in realizing what essentially came to be known at the inception itself. 

Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts

VII

All world- improvers and world-citizens stand for fellaheen ideals, whether they know it or not. Their success means the historical abdication of the nation in favour, not of everlasting peace, but of another nation. World-peace is always a one-sided resolve. The Pax Romana had for the later soldier-emperors and Germanic band-kings only the one practical significance that it made a formless population of a hundred millions a mere object for the will-to-power of small warrior-groups. This peace cost the peaceful sacrifices beside which the losses of Cannae seem vanishingly small. The Babylonian, Chinese, Indian, Egyptian worlds pass from one conqueror’s hands to another’s, and it is their own blood that pays for the contest. That is their — peace. When in 1401 the Mongols conquered Mesopotamia, they built a victory memorial out of the skulls of a hundred thousand inhabitants of Baghdad, which had not defended itself. From the intellectual point of view, no doubt, the extinction of the nations puts a fellaheen-world above history, civilized at last and forever. But in the realm of facts it reverts to a state of nature, in which it alternates between long submissiveness and brief angers that for all the bloodshed – world-peace never diminishes that — alter nothing. Of old they shed their blood for themselves; now they must shed it for others, often enough for the mere entertainment of others — that is the difference.  A resolute leader who collects ten thousand adventurers about him can do as he pleases. Were the whole world a single Imperium, it would thereby become merely the maximum conceivable field for the exploits of such conquering heroes.

“Lever doodt als Sklav (better dead than slave)” is an old Frisian peasant-saying. The reverse has been the choice of every Late Civilization, and every Late Civilization has had to experience how much that choice costs it.

Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

VIII

“Oh, what an impoverished Jew this arrogant Israeli is! Yes, they are the authentic ones, the Yehoshuas and the Ozes, and tell me, I ask them, what are Saul Alinsky and David Riesman and Meyer Schapiro and Leonard Bernstein and Bella Abzug and Paul Goodman and Allen Ginsberg, and on and on and on and on? Who do they think they are, these provincial nobodies! Jailers! This is their great Jewish achievement—to make Jews into jailers and jet-bomber pilots! And just suppose they were to succeed, suppose they were to win and have their way and every Arab in Nablus and every Arab in Hebron and every Arab in the Galilee and in Gaza, suppose every Arab in the world, were to disappear courtesy of the Jewish nuclear bomb, what would they have here fifty years from now? A noisy little state of no importance whatsoever.” 

Philip Roth, Operation Shylock

IX

“God himself is dead,” it says in a Lutheran hymn, expressing an awareness that the human, the finite, the fragile, the weak, the negative are themselves a moment of the divine, that they are within God himself, that finitude, negativity, otherness are not outside of God and do not, as otherness, hinder unity with God. | Otherness, the negative, is known to be a moment of the divine nature itself. This involves the highest idea of spirit. In this way what is external and negative is converted into the internal. On the one hand, the meaning attached to death is that through death the human element is stripped away and the divine glory comes into view once more—death is a stripping away of the human, the negative. But at the same time death itself is this negative, the furthest extreme to which humanity as natural existence is exposed; God himself is [involved in] this. 

Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion

X

The items Sextus cites are as follows:

(a) An excerpt from Zeno’s Conversations on sexual intercourse with one’s boy-friend. In M xI, but not in PH III, this is followed by a further excerpt on the same topic, presumably also from Conversations.
(b) An extract from an unnamed work of Zeno to the effect that (as Sextus puts it) there was nothing terrible in Oedipus having sex with his mother Jocasta.
(c) An extract from Chrysippus’ Republic on incest.
(d) A quotation from Chrysippus’ On Justice introduced to prove that the Stoics approved of eating people—’not only the dead [as M xI puts it|, but our own flesh, if ever a part of the body should happen to be cut off’.
(e) The longest quotation in the set, from a discussion in Chrysippus’ On Appropriate Action on the burial of parents, which also suggests using their flesh—and our own limbs if amputated—as food, provided it is edible.

Malcolm Schofield, The Stoic Idea of the City

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FALL | WINTER 2023