Anyone Who Utters a Consoling Word Is a Traitor: 48 Stories for Fritz Bauer

by Alexander Kluge, Alta L. Price (Translator)

Overview

A book about bitter fates—both already known and yet to unfold—and the many kinds of organized machinery built to destroy people.

Alexander Kluge’s work has long grappled with the Third Reich and its aftermath, and the extermination of the Jews forms its gravitational center. Kluge is forever reminding us to keep our present catastrophes in perspective—“calibrated”—against this historical monstrosity. Kluge’s newest work is a book about bitter fates, both already known and yet to unfold. Above all, it is about the many kinds of organized machinery built to destroy people. These forty-eight stories of justice and injustice are dedicated to the memory of Fritz Bauer, a determined fighter for justice and district attorney of Hesse during the Auschwitz Trials. “The moment they come into existence, monstrous crimes have a unique ability,” Bauer once said, “to ensure their own repetition.” Kluge takes heed, and in these pages reminds us of the importance of keeping our powers of observation and memory razor sharp.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780857428011
Publisher:	Seagull Books
Publication date:	12/15/2020
Series:	The Seagull Library of German Literature
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	120
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Alexander Kluge is one of the major German fiction writers of the late twentieth century and an important social critic. As a filmmaker, he is credited with the launch of the New German Cinema movement. Alta L. Price runs a publishing consultancy specialized in literature and nonfiction texts on art, architecture, design, and culture. A recipient of the Gutekunst Prize and co-curator of this year’s Festival Neue Literatur in New York, she translates from Italian and German into English and is a member of Cedilla & Co.

Table of Contents

To Live a Decent Day
Vanished into Thin Air, by Some Strange Coincidence, Like a Gas
First Research, Then Kill
A Touch of Liveliness That Surprised Proust
The Most French of All Jews: Jacques Helbronner
Expulsion’s Long Roads
The Daughter Was Very Attached to Her Father
Starting Small: A File Is Prepared
Back Before Anything Had Been Decided for Certain
Forced Sale of a Historic Munitions Factory in Thuringia
A Forced Exchange in Budapest, 1944
The Victims Stood on the Rails of the No. 2 Tram, Waiting
Changing of the Guard: Doing Away with an Obsolete Plan
On the Bureaucratic Tracks
Berlin Childhood around 1937, with Headquarters in Silesia
Spartacus’ Belated Victory
The Impotence of conventional agreements in the face of Kaltenbrunner’s Men
A Certain Kind of Rigid Willpower: Unstoppably Destructive
The Sheep of Rome
Witnesses from Another World
Collusion Suspected upon Homecoming
Overwhelming Emotion as a Form of Defence
Overloaded by Sheer Mass
Calling It a Day by 17:00
The Peculiar Purview of Architects
An Intellectual-Property Violation
Where Empathy Manifests
The Pain of a Perpetrator: The POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER of an SS-Obergruppenführer following Eastern Deployment
A Generous Disposition
Just Barely Escaped
The Unexpected Homecoming of a ‘Full Jewess’
Administered Atrocity
For Administrative Reasons: No Exceptions
As if in Another World, Separated from All the Rest by an Invisible Wall
The Iasi Pogrom
‘Desinteressement’
Regimentation
How Hitler Shines before His Comrades Thanks to His Tactical Approach to the Jewish Question
The Jewish Threat
A Day Trip to Vilnius, 2 September 1941
On the Occasion of a Remark By Joseph Goebbels, ‘Bourgeois Man Must Be Eradicated’
A Miscarriage of Justice
A Jewish Lioness’s Battle for Her Baby
A Counter-Intelligence Officer’s Report from Odessa
Massacre as Reprisal for an Assassination in Odessa
Spaniards without a Fatherland
In Persecutions, Practicality Takes Precedence over Mere Morality
The Golem’s Ability to Find Out the Truth
The Violation of Human Dignity in Ourselves
Dedication

Editorial Reviews

"A short collection of anecdotes, very short forays, and observations, one that highlights the atrocities of the Holocaust but at the same time highlights how we continue to ignore the warning signs, has history taught humans anything? A collection that reads like forty-eight scraps for potential further investigation by Fritz Bauer."

Messenger's Booker