SYMPOSIUM
Unified Gennany:
Stabilizing Influence or Threat?
Introdudion
Igor Webb:
Ladies and gentlemen, I welcome you on behalf of the
President and the Board of Trustees of Adelphi University to this impor–
tant conference on the implications of the reunification of Germany
both for those within the country and those outside it. This conference
aptly poses some of the large questions that the University hopes to ad–
dress next year, when it celebrates its centennial. The theme for the cen–
tennial is titled a little grandiloquently,
Beyond the Twilight oj Reason:
Rethinking the Western Tradition Jor the Twenty-first Century.
I hope we
can entice you back to Adelphi University for some of the events and
symposia we have planned. Clearly, the modern history of Germany,
with all of its hopes and tragedies, is a fertile ground for an explanation
of the questions the centennial theme suggests. Today's conference in a
sense could be said to launch Adelphi University's centennial reflections.
I hope you will allow me some personal observations on the topic
of today's conference, by way of introduction. I was born in Slovakia in
1941. I returned there for the first time after the war in 1978 and wrote
a book about that return,
Against Capitulation.
A passage from it might
help to set the stage for today's discussion, namely my reactions to a visit
to Terezin on a beautiful day, not unlike today but in November:
It
has been written of the Holocaust that the unspeakable renders you
appropriately and blessedly speechless, since only silence is equal to
your impossibly contradictory, besmirched emotions, and your awe.
Silence, however, is also incommunicable and opaque, which is why
the same writer who perceives its inadequacy winds up composing
sentences nevertheless. In this respect it is a terrible disadvantage that
you write after the fact. Remembrance can yield skill but dulls horror
and much else. Still I remember my dislike at being at Terezin as
Editor's Note: This conference took place on April 1 and 2, 1995 at Adelphi
University. It was made possible with grants from the Austrian Cultural Council,
the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the
New York Council for the Humanities.
