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PARTISAN REVIEW
clearly as I am now disliking writing of it. I can call back how I
walked from the place feeling violated, a feeling which makes people
say 'I don't want to talk about it.' I remember how once outside I
was sickened to see people pursuing their innocently ordinary lives,
untouched and oblivious. Upon leaving Terezin it appears that this
ability to go shopping, say, despite everything, amounts to complicity
in all the little outrages which accumulated - and continued to ac–
cumulate - into the unheard crescendo of places like Terezin. The
townsfolk at their daily round threaten your life because you know
that they would rather you die than they, because you would rather
they die than you. There is no leaving Terezin confident that the hu–
man being is a noble savage poisoned by civilization. No. When you
leave Terezin, the daily life outside, the routine of the ordinary per–
son, appears vile. It appears to bear in all its malleable common sense
the seed of all cruelty. Cruelty, says Terezin, is not one human quality
among many in a compound that goes to make up this or that
complex individual and so maybe is not universal, not, in short, really
in you. Rather, it says, cruelty is so indivisible that it can, as it here
has, become stone, brick and mortar, so tangible as to have been given
form here by human beings in that quintessential human creation, a
building. It was as if, by so unansweringly objectifying the evil in
men and women, Terezin - and many places like it - had been built
and preserved to disabuse you forever of all the arguments to which
you had clung about the innate goodness of Man and Woman.
Edith Kurzweil:
Thank you, Senior Vice President Webb. I also want
to thank all the people who've made this conference possible: the Aus–
trian Cultural Institute, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the German
Academic Exchange Service, and the New York Council for the Hu–
manities, and, of course, the administration and staff of Adelphi Univer–
sity. Now, I welcome you all and look forward to your participation.
Instead of giving you my own introduction, I will begin by reading the
remarks of Blaga Dimitrova, the poet and former Vice President of Bul–
garia. She planned to join us but unfortunately could not.
Blaga Dimitrova:
The twentieth century's sinister myth is the Berlin
Wall. We scratched our anger on it; the wall carved scars in our souls.
High, solid, cemented with our blood, guarded more than any other
fortress in human history. And one night it suddenly fell - destroyed by
surprise, shouts, drumbeat, dust.
It
i~n't
clear how. It was razed to the
ground.
It
was broken up for souvenirs of our contemporary Golgotha.
I was an eyewitness to that unheard-of euphoria.
And as soon as that dust settled, suddenly, ah! The Wall is gone! And
